Where Have I Gone? by Quirke Pauline

Author:Quirke Pauline [Pauline, Quirke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446464083
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2012-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

13

Treats!

WHAT DID I eat when I was a kid? Did I eat too much, or too much of the wrong thing, perhaps? During LighterLife’s group counselling sessions there’s a lot of focus on what sort of food we ate as children, and what sort of eating habits we formed in our early years. As I said before, I sometimes get a bit worn down with all the theories and psychology surrounding the subject of food (Freud egg and chips again) but these are things I’ve had to address whether I liked it or not.

Now, I wasn’t locked in a cupboard with a bit of stale bread as a child, nor was I malnourished, but I was brought up in an era when you bloomin’ well ate what was put in front of you. You didn’t have a choice. I don’t know, maybe it was because of where I came from.

I was an ordinary kid from an ordinary background, and my mum, Hetty, brought Kitty, Sean and me up on a very restricted income. Most of the people around where we lived – Stoke Newington, East London – were like us, so I certainly didn’t feel poor or deprived. In fact, there was a great feeling of community around the area we lived in. Still, people didn’t have a lot of money and they couldn’t afford to waste food. You certainly couldn’t afford to chuck stuff away, that’s for sure. We were also told to eat what we were given at school, which I would have happily chucked in the bin more often than not. I can still see the insipid, over-boiled cabbage congealing on my plate as I sat un enthusiastically at the table in the school dinner hall. A generous helping of that was enough to put me off vegetables for life; in fact I think it did put me off quite a lot of them.

At home, though, money or no money, my mum served up good, wholesome grub. As I’ve said before, we didn’t have foreign holidays or anything like that, but there was always food on the table for my brother, my sister and me. The difference between now and back then is that if you didn’t eat exactly what was put in front of you at lunchtime or at dinnertime, you went hungry. Our house wasn’t filled with sweets and snacks – there was none of that frippery! Mum had a tight budget that she had to stick to and that was that. Maybe that’s what’s been lurking in the recesses of my mind all these years. Eat it all! Eat lots! Finish every last bit on your plate, Pauline! Who knows? Food was a big part of our lives back then, and I suppose it still is for me. Quite aside from my long-term weight problem, I actually love to feed other people. I love to cook, to entertain – and I don’t see anything wrong with that. What do they call those people? Feeders? Well, that’s it, then.

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