Brown Bread

The smell of bread and baking wakes him. It’s familiar and comforting. He tries to sit up but doesn’t move. Muffled voices crowd his mind. He can’t see them. When he tries to call out, he’s silent.

A cold fear creeps over him as he lies, wherever he lies. He doesn’t know ‘where’ that is. He doesn’t know why he’s there. He doesn’t know…who he is…he doesn’t know how to move, speak, touch, see…images, distorted, disjointed, disoriented, crowd his mind. A snatch of a song…someone’s got it in for me…

He decides to concentrate on the smell of the bread. It reminds him of… Jesus, what? Then the screens come down again and he slides into a warm bath of dreams.

Home, for him, is the smell of baking bread.

In the kitchen of his home the aroma of freshly baked bread wraps itself around him like a warm, fragrant blanket. It rises from the stove cooker in the scullery and from the top of the dresser by the kitchen window where his Mammy has laid out that day’s baking to sit and breathe.

As life passes by with a rhythmic beat, some things mark its inexorable passage. Fresh bread baking, dough rising, slices, warm from the oven and dripping with dollops of melting butter, these keep time for him.

He can discern the sour musk of buttermilk in the egg white glow of the soda bread, studded by raisins and sultanas, carrying their own hum of fruity fermentation.

Beside it his Mammy has set the humble wheaten loaf, the family nutritional furnace, a carefully nurtured and kneaded eruption of coarse wheatmeal flour, the colour of warm coals.

This time when he wakes, he’s wet. He knows he’s wet because it feels like his eyes are steaming up. He isn’t sure if it’s sweat or fever or both. Is he in a bath or tossed into a river, another body discarded, a wasted husk, with less than reverence for his soul’s sacred journey.

He tries to concentrate. He can feel a faint buffeting as though he’s being rolled in a barrel of tripe. A muffled voice penetrates the blur of white noise crackling around his head.

‘If he lives, he’s a miracle but he’ll be scarred to the bone,’ the first voice says. I say ‘the first’ because as wakefulness takes more control and hones his senses he becomes aware of a number of presences.

‘Will you keep your big mouth shut? he’s not dead or a vegetable. He’s in a coma. The poor lad might hear you. Lord knows what sort of suffering horrors he’s endured,’ says voice number two.

‘Excuse me. He’s not the only one…but right enough, he has enough on his plate without having to listen to me wittering on…he was a fine cut of a wee lad too,’ says voice one.

‘It’s always the youngest and the bravest go first…’ voice two, an older voice, trails wistfully. He struggles to smell them, to catch some distinguishing odour. He smells fruitcake…

Here is his mother’s magic, the fruits of her daily alchemic rituals. Her efforts went beyond food to sacred action as she assembles and arranges her instruments, jars, spoons and ingredients on the altar of the kitchen table.

Every morning after she has risen and fed the cats and the children and her husband and packs them all off on their respective paths; to a sun trap patch beneath the garden hedge, to school or to work, she clears the table and begins her preparations.

A jug of buttermilk, covered with a thinning strip of muslin, is fetched from the dry,cool pantry alcove off the kitchen along with half a dozen sand shell coloured hen’s eggs.

A slab of fresh country butter is laid on the table with a tin of salt and a grocer’s bag of white sugar. Next, comes the red and white sack of Odlum’s plain flour and two small tins; one of Bextartar, the other of bread soda. Pride of place in the centre of this assembly is given to the sack of wheatmeal .

The instruments for the operation to follow are then gathered together at hand’s reach on the table. First, the shiny butterscotch brown delph mixing bowl, then a wooden spoon, a teaspoon and an old ceramic handled kitchen knife, yellowed, cracked and curling with age. A wooden rolling pin is kept within reach.

He loves to sit and watch her work on chill, Autumnal evenings when the day’s curtains are drawn early and a spray of rain mist keeps him indoors after school.

She would pour him a glass of cold milk and, for a treat, butter a slice of warm raisin dashed soda bread, which she sprinkles with sugar. She calls it ‘a piece’, saying, ‘sit down there, wee man, and eat yer piece.’

He sits at the end of the kitchen table with only the fading light of the evening sun to illuminate her actions and listens to her sing songs that had caught her fancy like Que Sera, Sera and If I were a Blackbird.

His mind wanders. Or should that be ‘strays’? He feels engulfed in a daydream. Surrounded by a liquid warmth that dulls his senses. So he cannot move when he desires, or speak or shout. He has no sight. He’s aware his eyes are open. Vague noises: the rustle of starched cloth, the tinny clank of bedpans or dishes, the slosh of water filling a glass. He can feel the soft breath of damp air when a window is opened or a door slams. Footsteps; some loud, hard and resolute, some shuffling, without direction. Voices, muffled and indistinct, some loud, some whispered. He opens his mouth to speak but he can hear no sound except a faint echo in a far recess…

Outside the evening gloom encroaches slowly on the garden and the rain beats a sombre tattoo on the window. Inside is warm and safe and smells of fresh baked bread and the salty treacle of melting butter.

Evening time is the time he loves best. The house has the cosy warmth of brushed cotton bedsheets that when combined with the aromatic blend of dry, country turf burning in the stove and the ambrosial scent of his Mammy’s baking, creates an indelible imprint of home in his mind that he can store in the recesses of memory when comfort, serenity and love are needed and he can recall them.

In these memories nothing has a time, just a place in the picture. So the pictures on the walls include a picture of Pope John XX111 alongside US President John F. Kennedy and Daddy’s framed version of Yeats’ poem, The Lake Isle of Inisfree.

A statue of the Virgin Mary as she appeared at the shrine at Knock stands in a bed of blue satin, encased in a gold painted frame over the kitchen door. The Blessed Virgin shares pride of place with St Martin de Porres, an ascetic Brazilian monk, to whom his Mammy has a particular devotion as Martin was the name of her husband.

In these memories the kitchen walls are always painted blue while the free standing dresser, painted two shades of green with the plates and the cups and the drawer of cutlery on the left and allsorts on the right side, stand inside the door to the back garden.

This dresser has six doors and two drawers. In the middle behind one big drop down door are shelves of tins of beans and boxes of marrowfat peas and supplies of dried herbs, spices like allspice, cloves and white pepper as well as all his mother’s baking magic; baking soda, bread soda, Bextartar, colourings, vanilla essence and packets of raisins and sultanas and all those things that go into the Christmas cake mix like cherries, maraschino, green and red glace , mixed fruit peels and almonds, flaked, chipped and whole as well as coconut, chipped and dessicated.

The two doors above house the dinner plates, saucers, side plates, dessert plates and cereal bowls for every day use while the teacups hang from hooks and the glasses stand ready for action and easy access. The best tableware is on display in the front room in a glass fronted cabinet.

Below the main drop down desk style door and work place, the delph and glass mixing bowls and oven ready Pyrex bowls in different sizes are stacked behind two knee height doors alongside the steel cooking pots, frying pans, steamer, aluminium colander and wire sieve.

The kitchen floor is covered with linoleum in a woodcut diamond pattern. He imagines it is three dimensional when he stares at it long enough.

In those autumn evenings as he sat at the kitchen table, his sugared ‘piece’ in hand, he listens to his mother’s gently absent minded crooning, ‘que sera, sera…whatever will be, will be…the future’s not mine to see,… que sera, sera…’

A noise, louder than the muffled rustling he has become accustomed to, shatters his reverie. Its thunderous rumble reverberates through his frame and where he lies. Screams, groans and the crash of shattered masonry follow. Then barked orders, shouted with the authority of fear and command.

A voice to his left says, ‘that was a close one. I think we took a hit…’

Another says, ‘Jesus, I’m bleeding. I think I’m hit.’ He sounds surprised.

In his bed, awake and conscious, he thinks, ‘or is this my nightmare?’ He strains to feel but all he can do is drift again…

You could set your watch by mammy, he thinks. Her day’s work of washing and hanging out the clothes on the line in the garden; making the beds and dusting, baking and gardening over, she walks to the local shop to stock up on essentials for the tea and a visit to a neighbour for a wee cup of tea in her hand and a chat . By four o’clock she is ready to bake again and this is the time he loves best.

If she bakes a sponge cake there’ll be a chance to swipe his finger along the inside of big mixing bowl after she empties its contents into the baking tin. The creamy, sugary mix pasted to the bowl is the prize for being there with her as she flours, kneads and rolls . Sometimes it’s Madeira cake or ‘coloured cake’ as he calls it; a mesmerising kaleidoscope of colours, flavours and pungent, sweet aromas, cherry pink, chocolate brown and vanilla, a pale, delicate yellow.

Other times it’s coffee cake and the bottle of Irel, a liquid chicory flavouring that gives the sponge and its creamy sandwich filler a rich, treacly coffee brown colour and taste.

Everyday she bakes an apple tart when there are good cooking apples available from the tree in the garden at the back of the house. She laces it with cinnamon and dashes it with cloves and then seals and paints it with country butter yellow egg yolk and coats it with white grain and castor sugar. He thinks his head will explode with the pleasure of swimming in the warm, sensory swirl of baking apples.

A putrid stench. He hasn’t realised he couldn’t smell until the acrid odour of steaming urine assails his nostrils. Then he feels his whole face fill with a symphony of smells: sweaty socks, body odour, boiled cabbage, turgid faeces, disinfectant and bleach and a fetid reek of decay…the smell of cordite and exploded high calibre ordnance and the sweet, nauseating reek of burning flesh…

All these rush into his brain, filling him up. Now he can hear and smell. He tries to combine both in his sensory deprived limbo. But his efforts are confused and pointless. Everything drains away again like waste from a sink. He struggles to hold on to something.

‘Here comes the shit,’ he thinks. Is that a door opening? Are those the footsteps of a man or a woman? As soon as he can discern a movement he tries to concentrate on it to give it an attendant odour. But nothing stands still long enough to give it an identity. He feels tired and lost.

They are tying a rope to a branch of an old, gnarled blackthorn tree that stands on a ditch up the lane behind his house. It’s mid-afternoon and a fine summer’s day.

The tree casts its big, curly shadow over the stream that skirts the field beyond the hedge. On their side, the lane runs behind the squat row of houses.

The object of their adventure is the nest of wasps that have made their home in the dry, porous clay of the embankment just below the tree. Their mission, should they choose to accept it, as they’d declare solemnly to each other, is to swing from the embankment and kick the wasps’ nest on the inswinging return. In the way of things he takes first turn while Hughie, his best friend, looks on.

Nothing happens on the first swing. The wasps go about their business, apparently unperturbed, hovering and buzzing in and out of the tiny wasp sized holes they’ve dug into the embankment.

Hughie, taller and heavier than he and with shoes three sizes bigger, swings and hits the bank with a dull shudder. In his panic to escape he releases the rope and leaps to his feet, dancing a bizarre dance by kicking his legs out while brushing them frantically with his arms. They can see more wasps have come out to investigate the disturbance.

Taking the rope, he swings again. His feet, like diving bomber planes, rain death and destruction on the wasps. He imagines their tiny dwellings collapse and implode, crushing their numbers with sudden, terrifying death. The impressions of his feet are plainly visible in the embankment.

Releasing the rope, he knows there’s no escape. At least two wasps got off their chocks to swoop and harry the enemy. A sharp protruding stone splits his shin as the wasps sting deep and bitter into the soft flesh behind his knee .

Tears well up in his eyes and flow fast like the blood staining his socks. He turns and runs.

There it is again, he thinks; the smell of baking bread and apple tart with cinnamon and maybe fairy cakes with icing cream and hundreds of thousands.

He hears a confusion of sounds. Somewhere close by a voice says, ‘nurse, I think yer man’s awake again…’ Running footsteps, raised voices, orders, ‘get a doctor…get a defib…’ He ignores them as they’ve ignored him.

He ran to the door as fast as his injuries would allow and his young legs could carry him. Now he’s banging on it and the welling tears burst their floodgates. He wants the comfort of his mammy, a sugared piece, a plaster and a wee hug to wipe the fear away…

‘Mammy, mammy…let me in,’ he wails. Then the door swings open and he’s enveloped in the pungent comfort of home baking and suffused by a brilliant living light. He’s home.

In an hour Daddy will be home. Homework will be discussed and examined. And as Tommy plays Scott Joplin on Teatime with Tommy, they’ll devour the day’s labours and dissect the day’s events.