Lockdown Diary — Week 5
Monday
My sister rings to chat. With the kennel business closed there’s little to do, so she’s been tidying up, clearing the memories and debris accumulated since my parents moved in nearly forty years ago. This week she’s been working on the tool-shed, an old room attached to the house, with a split door that once held back cows and horses. She’s pleased with the progress.
For years my mother would complain about the state of the tool shed, simultaneously containing and concealing everything useful amidst rusty junk. My father would half-heartedly tidy up, until some of the walls were visible again.
My father was born in Germany, a few months before the second world war broke out. My grandmother — “Oma”, as I called her in the few years that our lives overlapped — was alone at home, looking after three children. There wasn’t much family support, so my father and his sisters spent their early years without much of anything. They’d go out for hours, gathering sticks and logs in the nearby forests to make a fire. They say that growing up without much prevents you from wasting later, and I guess that followed through into the tool-shed, into which items entered but seldom left.
My father would tell these stories to us over Sunday lunch. He was a great conversation maker and story-teller. They’re fuzzy in my head now, softened by the years and the passing of time.
It was about this time of year, in April 2011, when it became clear that he was dying. I wanted to capture his stories and thoughts, in his own words, before losing them forever. Lying next to each other on the bed, we spoke into a small voice recorder that I’d bought specially, covering the topics: his life, family, the other things that felt important. His preferred recipe for Spätzle, a German egg noodle dish, made from a batter dropped into boiling water. It was my father’s job to prepare it on most Sunday lunches, in place of roast potatoes.
Tuesday
Our neighbours send over a pack of beef mince, which I transform into a ragu, then into a lasagne, in the oven we have but they don’t. We don’t have any sheets, but there’s flour and water and a pasta roller, so far used only by the boys to flatten their Play Doh. It takes a while to clear the coloured remnants before it’s suitable for food production. The thin layers bubble up magnificently in the oven. We cut the remainder into strips and make tagliatelle for ourselves, and wonder why we bothered to buy pasta sheets before.
Wednesday
My Godmother is watching weeks of rain and unsettled conditions from her home in Majorca, a little cottage tucked up against a mountainside that she shares with her husband, cats and a family of goats.
For us, the uninterrupted blue skies continue, aromas of barbeques mixing in the clean air.
We take another walk into the woods in the morning, taking a different path this time, past open fields with sheep and a gathering of crows. A walker stops to point them out. Keen to talk, he describes how the crows gather. The adult birds keep to the perimeter, apparently, leaving the young to meet and pair up, usually for life. A prom of sorts. I read about them later, learning how intelligent and cooperative they are. I had never stopped to think.
Saturday
Our shopping has become a bit more regular now. One of us heads to the farm shop once a week for vegetables and eggs. An orderly queue waits to pass through the shop, a market stall of fruit and vegetables for picking, beneath a corrugated iron roof. I buy a large red cabbage, which reminds me of the one my mother used to make around Christmas time, a Delia Smith recipe full of sweetness and cloves. I chop it up finely, taking up two large casserole dishes, with layers of onions, apples and spices, to simmer slowly in the oven, until the hard leaves soften into the comforting tastes of long ago.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been cooling a beer on Saturday nights ahead of chats with my school friends, whom I’ve known longer than we can believe. We work through a pub quiz together on the Zoom chat and ninety minutes pass by smoothly. Ironically I see them far more regularly now than before.
I remember a school trip we took once, to a remote tip in south-western Wales. A biology trip of limpet hunting and soil samples and Students’ T-Tests. A few of us crept out at night to a field we’d seen earlier, to a path that looked like a badger trail. We waited at least half an hour in silence until one emerged, and we caught a few glimpses in the blackness.
Closing down the house before bed, I look out of the front window to see a large badger gambolling, undisturbed, up the main road.
Sunday
I forgot the red cabbage, which is still in the oven in the morning when we wake up, late. It’s brown, dry and ruined, the aromas passed well over the edge into stale cabbage. A terrible waste, and three onions too.
The new shed is coming in a few days and we’ve done so little to prepare. I pull out some stuff into the sun, endless old paint tins and weed killers that the previous house owners left for us. I remember the day we moved in, to a house that had been left in a hurry. Our first act, to open the box of cleaning products and scrub the dirty kitchen.
I wanted to cook Spätzle today, to my father’s recipe, which I do remember, but we don’t have anything to go with it. It works best alongside roasted meat and lashings of gravy. It is, I’m proud to say, Jesse’s favourite dish in the world, the one thing that will see him early to the table, scooping the little noodles into his mouth, barely stopping for breath.
I was thinking about playing my father’s recordings, of writing it down properly. The recorder still sits in my desk drawer, I know exactly where it is. I’ve never listened to it in the nine years since it was made, in case for whatever reason the recorder didn’t work and the fuzzy memories in my head are the only ones left.
