Recipes for Melissa (6 page)

Easter Biscuits

8 oz self-raising flour

5 oz butter

4 oz sifted castor or icing sugar

1 medium egg

Dash of good vanilla essence… or a touch of cinnamon is nice too.

Preheat oven to 180 and grease baking trays. Sift flour and salt and rub into butter. Add sugar, plus your choice of flavouring, and mix. Add sufficient beaten egg to give a very stiff dough. Knead the dough lightly on a floured board until smooth. Wrap in foil and chill for 30 minutes. Roll out thinly and cut out circular biscuits. Place these on baking trays (not too close as they expand a bit) and prick with a fork. Bake for 12-15 minutes until pale gold.

These are firm favourites, Melissa, and you just have to make them. Why they are called Easter biscuits as opposed to Christmas biscuits or Halloween biscuits, I have not the foggiest. Gran just called them Easter biscuits and so that is what they are (though very happily eaten all year round).

I have my own particular memory of these and I am hoping you will too. For me they conjure up a very strong picture of a red, square biscuit tin which my mother kept on the second shelf of her larder (never the first or third; always the second – note). I guess that is what this book is partly about for me. Sharing and passing on to you things that I want to stay important. Family traditions and family memories. The continuum of stories at the stove, if you like. Generation to generation.

My mother was a very good, basic cook, who was indignant, and quite possibly a little snobbish, about the arrival of packets and freezers and anything which carried a ‘convenience’ tag. True – she came from a generation who had the time and had not yet experienced the chaos of juggling career and family which made mine rather rethink the whole equality battle (that’s a whole chapter, for sure. I’ve started a big section on modern motherhood at the end of the book. I am imagining it may not interest you yet which is why I have set it apart, but I like the idea of leaving my thoughts and tips for when they become relevant to you). Anyway, Mum, bless her, had both the will and the
time
to cook and so cook she certainly did.

These biscuits seemed to be available in our house as I grew up pretty much all the time – although the strict rule was that we had to ask for access to that red, metal tin on the second shelf.

In our home, as I write, you may well remember they are a holiday treat and always gone in a flash.

The photo I have included alongside this recipe is from one of our trips to Cornwall when baking these cookies with you was a given. Insanity, your father always said, to bake when there was a wonderful pastry shop along the seafront and I was supposed to be on holiday. But that was all down to the juggling. The guilt at trying to combine a career with being a halfway decent mother, Melissa, which was not as easy as I had anticipated and there were not as many cookies baked in our house as I would have liked, that’s for sure.

But as you see from the picture, you loved to help me from quite a young age and so it felt like the perfect thing to do on holiday. It made us so very happy – you and me. And your father certainly never complained about helping us to eat everything.

And then there is this other, less pleasant thing I have to tell you. It is not that I want to upset you and I am hoping that you can set it apart from the whole recipes thing. I don’t actually like to link the two at all. The pleasure of the cooking… and this other stuff. But you know I promised honesty in this journal and one of my motives here is to be open and also to try to keep you safe.

It was on this holiday in Cornwall that I found the lump. The truth? I was brushing down flour that I had managed to sift all down my front while baking and as I smoothed down firmly, brush after brush, I felt this knot at the top of my left breast, near the armpit. I thought it was the bra at first and I didn’t want to let you see that I was concerned. As the cookie dough was resting, I went to the bathroom to check properly and there was no mistaking it.

I really don’t know how I had not felt it in the shower before then? A knotty little lump on the surface but which went much deeper in when I had a proper feel around.

Anyway, the point is I was stupid, Melissa. I worried and worried for the rest of the day and then I just sort of pushed it aside – blanked it, if you like – and got on with the holiday. Most stupid of all, I did not go to the doctor immediately when we got back. What I decided to do was to monitor what I assumed was some fluid-filled cyst or the like. I remember convincing myself that if I waited long enough it would surely just ‘resolve’. Go away – like some inflammation.

I ‘monitored’ it for a quite a lot of weeks before I finally accepted that it wasn’t going to go of its own accord and that’s when I took myself to the doctor.

I wonder now, of course, if it could have made any difference if I had acted sooner. Probably not. Let’s hope not. But I am telling you, woman to woman now, the truth because I need to be sure that you would never be so silly yourself, Melissa.

Dad will probably have told you the facts already – that my illness, both in nature and the unlucky speed of spread was extremely rare for someone my age. I do not want to worry you unnecessarily, but with that said you really do need to look after yourself, Melissa. To check yourself properly and often. My understanding is this is not familial, and the last thing I want is to instil paranoia. I don’t know of any other case of breast cancer in a close relative so I refuse to believe you are at increased risk.

But for all that, I have talked to Dad and asked him to press upon you the need to be sensible,
just as all women should
. He will obviously find it difficult – talking about it. So this feels like the right time, as you move properly into full-on adulthood, now to have my own loving, little nag.

Eleanor, as usual, read through her words as the ink dried and wondered if this was too much too soon.

She tried to imagine how it might feel for Melissa skimming the very same page, and suddenly felt the need to touch it. The page. She kept her hand there for several minutes – reluctant to lift it.

Eleanor had allowed herself to cry only once. It was at the appointment when the dreaded word ‘metastatic’ was added to her vocabulary. She had started out shocked but almost aggressively optimistic when the ‘c’ word was first mentioned. A spell of disorientation and then full-on fighting spirit. She was so young, she babbled to Max in the car en route to the clinic as they awaited the results of more tests and scans
. It would be an early diagnosis and it would be fine. Wouldn’t it? And I mean – they could do absolute wonders these days. With reconstruction, people would hardly be able to tell. She had seen this programme where a woman had actually felt she looked better after surgery than before. No. Seriously
.

She would not share with Melissa how badly the shock had hit her when the consultant explained about spread. And staging. They say that patients hear nothing after the word ‘cancer’ but that was not how it was with Eleanor. Not at all. She heard cancer on the first confirmation of diagnosis and she thought – OK. Shit. But we fight this? Yes? So tell me how we fight this.

It was not until that later appointment, when they had taken chunks and put a wire right into her breast and checked the horrid bits of tissue in their horrid little labs. No. It was not until she heard the words ‘stage four’ and ‘metastatic’; not until they were looking at scan results and talking inexplicably about her liver and her lungs that she stopped listening.

Her doctor had warned her not to turn to the new internet service which he knew she had access to via Max at the university. ‘If you have any questions ask me and not this new world wide web? OK?’ But Eleanor had already been reading up. Anything and everything that she could find. Pamphlets. Features. Research papers. And so while Max listened intently to the consultant, starting to talk treatments and timelines, Eleanor was already in her mind’s eye back at home – among the sticker books and fairy wands; among the biscuit cutters and clouds of icing sugar; staring at her beautiful daughter.

8

MELISSA – 2011

As Sam put the hire car forms into the glove compartment, neither of them mentioned the case – squashed now into the back of the Clio. Much too big for the boot. Melissa took out a guide book and map.

‘If you’d let me get a new sat nav, Mel, we could have added the programme for Cyprus.’

‘I can map read. I hate sat navs.’

Sam was grinning – brighter-eyed from his sleep on the plane.

‘What?’

‘Nothing, Melissa. You are a great map reader. I’m very much looking forward to it.’

She was pleased to see his spirits lifting; feeling more positive now. With the new pink bag and her mother’s journal safely in the boot, she was thinking that perhaps the trip was going to be OK after all. Time for her to deal with the journal and to build bridges also.

Melissa turned to Sam as he suddenly frowned at the new dashboard.

‘So when would you like to do Troodos, Sam?’ Yes. The break could be what they both needed.

‘Hadn’t really thought about it. Don’t mind.’ Sam pulled away, turning down the sun visor and experimenting with the indicators.

Just so long as the pact held. Their agreement after the restaurant was no spiralling into dramatic heart-to-hearts during this holiday. Sam had agreed to give Melissa time out on the proposal and she was thinking the Troodos trip could help them both. A distraction.

The route to their resort further north was, in the event, straightforward. Good signposting and the convenience of driving on the left meant Sam was adjusting more quickly than usual to the unfamiliar car.

Melissa reached out to stroke the back of his neck. ‘Well how about we settle in for a couple of days. Flop. And then do Troodos – say Monday?’

Sam turned to catch her eye, his expression softening.

Cyprus had been his idea from the off. They had each wanted somewhere hot to recharge their batteries after a busy stretch at work. But Cyprus meant Sam could also include a very personal gesture for his Grandfather Edmund. He had died eight months earlier, but in the weeks before his illness had been sharing with both Sam and Melissa his ambitious plans to write an autobiography.

Much as she liked Sam’s grandfather, Melissa had to bite away a smile as he asked how one went about acquiring a literary agent.
And did she think
it would sell well? His autobiography?

Diplomacy aside, the many ensuing conversations about his project became more interesting. The story was to include details of his time serving in the army in Cyprus in the late 1950s. After his grandfather’s death, Sam gained access to the files on his computer. He was very close to his family – Sam – and was very shaken by the story Edmund had wanted to share. He had shown Melissa all the research material and notes and there was one episode in particular – written up in draft form only – which had deeply moved them both.

During the Cyprus troubles of that period, the British Army was deployed to try to put down anti-British insurgents operating in the Troodos mountains. Edmund’s story centred on an early summer’s day when several different British battalions were operating in the same mountain area. On this particular day their boundaries became confused. Edmund never quite got to the bottom of it but the outcome was that one group of British soldiers fired on another and he witnessed a young soldier’s death as a result of this friendly fire.

‘I held him in my arms,’ he wrote. ‘Just a boy. I really had not noticed how young we all were until that very moment.’

Edmund’s notes explained that as a child in school he read a book on the First World War in which observers said soldiers often called for their mothers at the end. He had disapproved of the remark, dismissing it as sentimental. Pacifist propaganda designed to undermine recruitment. An insult to bravery. But in the draft of his story, Edmund’s attitude completely changed.

‘I must tell the truth here and the truth is this. He was just a boy – that lad in the Troodos Mountains. Nineteen tops. And it completely broke my heart because, in those final moments, he was very, very afraid, for all that we tried to do for him. And there is no shame in my telling you this, that he wanted one thing and one thing only in his final moments. Which, indeed, was his mother.’

Melissa became conscious of the discomfort from staring as she turned this line over and over in her head. She blinked several times at the dusty vegetation – just a blur as it raced past the car window.

‘Of course I don’t know where Granddad was stationed and where exactly it all happened,’ Sam was fumbling with the controls to try to find the windscreen wash. ‘But that doesn’t really matter, I guess.’

Edmund had written of his plan, once the book was finished, to revisit Cyprus and lay flowers for the soldier and his family. But that of course had never happened.