There’s something ‘treaty’ about being in Grandma’s bed when you’re eight years old. The sheets are crisp and clean and it’s a massive big bed; plus the ceiling is painted pale blue with clouds about a hundred feet above your head. So when your parents are away in America and she says you can sleep in her bed in the day because you’re home sick from school, you’re going to take that offer. You’re going to jump – sniffling and mopey, dragging a box of tissues over the duvet to put next to the Vicks Vaporub on the bedside table – at the chance.
From Grandma’s bed a VHS marathon played out on a 40cm–wide television. Annie, obviously, the 1982 classic with Albert Finney as Daddy Warbucks. The Sound of Music then, because the love of musicals rubbed off on my sister and me and I couldn’t really see the point of a movie if the characters didn’t stop mid-sentence to sing. And then I listened to the gulls on Goat Island in the middle of the harbour and watched the clouds in the ceiling until the sheets turned smelly in my feverish sweating, wriggling dreams. It was night-time when I woke up, disorientated. Grandma had been pressing me to eat all day and I didn’t want anything; not the grilled cheese on toast idea, not the porridge idea, not the plain rice. But French onion soup: ‘Yes, please, Grandma.’
She leaned in, gave me a squeeze and a kiss on the forehead, and then left. I fell back asleep.
Grandma’s version of onion soup (recipe below) involves seven cups of homemade beef stock. She picked up the pick-me-up in The Garrulous Gourmet book she had bought for her sister Jean in 1952, but after years of making the recipe for Woman’s Day and then New Idea, for us, for herself, she improved on it. Introducing extra virgin olive oil with the butter to sauté the sliced onions at the beginning not only increases the health benefits, but also stops the butter burning.
