Snapshot: A lovely present for splitting my lip
This was taken on 4 October 2003. My younger brother Christian and I were happily playing with a wooden castle in our lounge. Dad was at work. My heavily pregnant mother was sitting in the kitchen chatting with Nana, both drinking copious amounts of tea.
Christian and I decided to act out the events occurring within the castle, dressing up for the parts. I, the king, was running away from Christian, an invading knight, when I got my leg tangled in my makeshift cape. I flew across the room, splitting my lip on a turret.
Instinctively I ran to the bathroom and applied toilet paper to my bleeding lip, attempting to stem the flow of blood. When Mum arrived, my cupped hands were already filling with blood. It didn’t take long before we were having a family outing to the local hospital, 20 miles away, with Dad summoned from work to join us.
I should have been put under general anaesthetic but Mum was now in the early stages of labour. They hurriedly found a plastic surgeon who sewed up my war wound. The needle irritated me as it got in the way of my Where’s Wally? book. I was out in an hour or two. By the time we got home it was late and my parents were shattered. I was happy because they had bought me a new toy, a reward for my bravery.
I woke with a start early the next morning. Downstairs, people were talking in hushed voices. After waking Christian, the two of us, aged six and four and completely unarmed, crept downstairs to fight the burglars who we assumed had come to steal our beloved toys. But, to our surprise, when we burst into the lounge we found our nan, grandad and next-door neighbour. Nan sat us down, made us hot chocolate and informed us that Mum was in hospital.
A few hours later, my exhausted parents returned home with a little alien – my new baby sister. I was overjoyed. She quickly became part of our games. She always wanted to be a knight too, a warrior like her brothers.
I still carry a scar from that day. A pale streak slicing through my lips that doctors told me will never fade. But I wear it as a badge of honour. A war wound that makes me the knight I wanted to be.
Luke Scales
Playlist: Mum’s surprise farewell yodel
I Want to be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart by Rosalie Allen (a yodelling song, 1952)
“I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart / I want to learn to rope and ride”
Mum was fabulous. I know everyone says that, but in our case it was true. She had eight children (I was number five) and had a fantastic sense of humour. Although victim to occasional short bouts of depression, she was extremely good company and enjoyed nothing more than a good laugh.
It came as a massive shock when Mum died – only weeks before, she had sung this song, her famous party piece, at her 80th birthday celebration and appeared to be in rude health.
For her funeral, we picked her favourite hymns for the church and I Want to be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart, for the crematorium. None of us knew who had sung it originally, but after contacting Radio Merseyside, they kindly found a copy and my brother Mark picked it up and took it straight to the funeral directors.
After a very moving church service, my siblings and I got into the funeral cars and made our way to the crematorium. After a few minutes of silence, I asked Mark if he had listened to the cassette tape before he gave it to the funeral directors, but he hadn’t. To lighten the mood, we made a few jokes about hoping there hadn’t been a mix up with the tape as we didn’t want Black Sabbath or Iron Maiden blaring out at the crucial moment.
The service at the crematorium went as well as could be expected. As the final song began, we got to our feet and stood in respectful silence, “I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart …” Rosalie Allen sang. Mark and I caught each other’s eye – it was a relief to know that we had the right song. And then the singer began to yodel!
We looked at each other again, stunned and confused – Mum had never yodelled! “Yodelayee, yodelayee hoo,” the song went on, louder.
It is hard to explain what happened next; shock, turned to smiles, followed by an explosion of laughter. As we left the benches, most of the congregation were doubled up and in tears of laughter, including the funeral directors and the parish priest.
If we had known about the yodelling, we would never have played it. I turned and looked back as the curtains closed and knew without a doubt – Mum would have loved it.
Margaret Smallbone (nee Stokey)
We love to eat: My grandmother’s wurst goulash
Ingredients
Serves 7+ (with seconds)
Two packets of frankfurters and an assortment of other cured sausages, spicy or smoked – the more mysterious the better
A bag of potatoes
A generous amount of paprika
A good squeeze of tomato puree
Slice the meats into thick coins, cut the largest into halves or quarters and place in a very large saucepan. Peel and roughly dice the potatoes and add to the pan until there is an equal mix of sausages and potatoes, then fill with water to cover about two thirds of the contents. Vigorously shake in the paprika and add the tomato puree and stir through. Heat until bubbling, then move to a low heat and cover for up to an hour, until the potato has softened, causing the sauce to thicken.
Serve with green beans, if only for colour, and bread for mopping up. Save enough to reheat for dinner the next day, as wurst goulash always tastes best when the potato has gone very mushy and all the flavours of the sausages have sunk in.
Our dad’s parents came over to England from Germany in 1938, some of the few lucky ones in their Jewish families to escape the Holocaust. I always assumed that my grandmother brought this recipe with her and that it hinted at some distant Hungarian family connection, given its name and heavy reliance on paprika, which seemed romantic and exciting to me, growing up in Oxford.
However, my parents have recently suggested it was a recipe my grandmother created herself, as a tasty cheap dish when they had little money. Either way, it is one of the important links for us to our German Jewish grandparents, whose different culture to the one we were being brought up in was mainly revealed to us through the food my grandmother cooked – chicken soup with matzo balls, chopped liver with gherkins and, of course, wurst goulash, foreign to us in name as well as taste.
The foreign nature of the goulash always took on another dimension on family holidays abroad, as every country has its own version of cured sausages, so it is easy to make away from home.
Regardless of how hot the climate, we would often wake from a siesta to find the apartment filled with the sweet, spicy scent of the goulash, after our dad, who can rarely rest, had spent his afternoon buying the ingredients from supermarket deli counters and chatting to the locals.
Rachel Levy
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