Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 49

Much as I am enjoying the discussion, I can’t help noticing that in this picture of domestic bliss, something smells fishy. And it’s not fish. Much as I am prepared to believe that Granny cooked almost every meal for her family from basic ingredients and slaved over the stove more than I ever will, surely even morally upstanding people Back Then used to skip the home baking and indulge in a little corner-shop Battenberg or Victoria sponge every so often? Surely they too occasionally cried ‘Oh to hell with these bloody domestic chores’ and gathered around the wireless instead? Granny thinks about this for a moment. I wait for a confession.

‘Well,’ she says at last, ‘it was a little of both, I suppose, but only where you couldn’t make things yourself. You’d never have thought of buying a cake, for instance, and I always made sure there were home-made sweet treats the kids could eat. But we’d buy butteries (the Scottish equivalent of croissant – in other words as much fat as science will allow you to squeeze into a pastry before it explodes – and possibly even a little bit more delicious) from the bakery, and bread was usually bought, but that was it.’