Tim Matthias
I remember my father's home-grown vegetables and my mother's home cooking most from my childhood. Both were dreadful.
My father specialised in runner beans that were so sharp they felt like they were cutting your throat and broad beans as hard as bullets, however long you cooked them [and woe betide you if you didn't eat them]. Worst of all was the rhubarb - bitter, purple stems that, despite pounds of sugar, stuck in your throat; me and my sister could almost feel the oxalic acid dissolving our teeth.
We learned not to complain, not after the greenhouse debacle. The tomatoes weren't so bad. Typical Eighties bland, watery ones with thin skins, but at least you could eat them without fear of injury. But Brenda and Susan didn't like them, so the next year Dad turned over the whole huge greenhouse to green peppers. A whole glut arrived seemingly overnight, and, to be fair, they were actually edible, But who honestly likes them?
We couldn't give the peppers away; after a few weeks, people started avoiding us. 'Tell your Dad we don't need any more peppers,' our family and acquaintances would say before fleeing. It was when the milk and post stopped that we knew it was serious. Our parents had made us social pariahs over capsicums.
Perhaps this wouldn't have been so bad had our mother been a good cook or been able to cook at all. But she was never interested in any of that, and the treatments for her mental illness – the electric shock therapy and the drugs had dulled her senses. We lived on salads five or six times a week, even in winter, and even then, she'd sometimes drift off and burn the potatoes.
It wasn't so bad really though; we got a spiraliser and blitzed any vegetable we could find and covered everything in huge dollops of salad cream. We must have been the only family in Port Talbot that went through two bottles of Heinz a week.
Matters came to a head one day when our Auntie came around and said, 'What are you doing eating lettuce, it's snowing outside.'
We just gawped at her - Mum had been going through one of her bad periods, and it was the Christmas holidays. We had forgotten what hot food was.
The next day Auntie came up with a solution. She brought around a pressure cooker, and said, 'anyone can make a stew'. She then threw some onions, carrots and beef steak onto the counter in a piece of paper.
'There's the recipe,' she said, turning to leave and then turning around again. 'I forgot the magic ingredient.' She reached into her bag and produced it, 'An OXO cube,' she announced; and then she was gone.
So we could have hot food at last. The only problem was the temperamental pressure cooker that forever seemed on the verge of exploding. We would have to approach it very carefully, turn off the gas, then run to safety.
I remember my sister, at seven years old, holding my mother back saying, 'You could burn Mummy', when I ran up to the cooker to turn the gas off. I felt like Indiana Jones.
My sisters remember it differently. According to them, I soon forgot my heroic ways and blackmailed them into approaching the dreaded cooker. I would tell their friends that they had been speaking to so and so.
'But that isn't true,' they'd protest.
'It doesn't matter,' I'd reply, pointing at the manic cauldron on top of the stove.
But I soon got my comeuppance.
I had high hopes that we would all learn to cook, me and my sisters. But then they watched a feminist on the TV who said girls shouldn't cook; it left them open to exploitation. Brenda and Susan explained to me solemnly that they weren't taking any chances.
For the next six years I cooked practically every meal. And then I left home, and I never wanted to cook again. The first day of college I slid a Fray Bentos pie and some oven chips into the oven – I never had to cook again. What a relief.