Close To My Heart (Memoir Contest Entry)

by Alison Hammer Winans

I was ready to take my clothes off after enduring a day of Philadelphia’s oppressive July 2007 heat wave. My shirt clung to my back, while my bra felt like a bridle, bit and saddle all in one, making red welts where it dug into my ribs. Perspiration trickled down from my right armpit, but the left one had not perspired since the surgery. Dumping the groceries in the hot third-floor kitchen, I kicked off my sandals, heading straight to the air-conditioned bedroom where my husband, Tom, greeted me from his computer. I tore off my sweaty outer clothes, then the bra, surely sturdy enough in construction to haul boulders or to be a slingshot hurling weapons of mass destruction. Slipping my silicone breast prosthesis out of my bra, I dropped it, smiling, in Tom’s lap.

He kneaded it absentmindedly like a sleepy kitten suckling, but then fully surfacing from his reading and noticing that I was nearly naked, he jumped up to appreciate my bare flesh. “Mmm, you still have plenty of squeezables,” he murmured, sliding his hands down to my buttocks, too large and saggy in my judgment, just perfect according to him. We kissed, and he stroked the left side of my chest, remembering to be gentle over my thin, pale scar and the ribs unprotected by mammary fat, “Mustn’t forget to give this side some attention.”

I sighed, “I love it when you do this, but I’m too hot to hug.” We laughed; it had been one of our jokes since the hot flashes started. I thought Too Hot to Hug sounded like a book title. He went back to the computer, and standing on tiptoes, I stared at my top half in the small mirror on the wall. My body smiled. One breast an open, droopy eye, while the lack of a breast winked at me, my belly button was the nose and the crease under my little roll of flab was the mouth. I pulled on a tank top and shorts, going without my bra, not minding if Tom saw me lopsided. I wiped the sweat off my prosthesis, stored it in the cardboard box with an inner plastic cradle to maintain its shape, and let my thoughts drift back to the time I acquired my first prosthesis.

* * * * *
We were temporarily living in rural Oklahoma in a new age community east of Tulsa. Ten days or so had elapsed since my surgery on June 4, 2002, when my left breast, along with a tumor the size of a golf ball, was dissected off my chest. I was wearing a pink paper blouse and sitting perched on the exam table in my surgeon’s office with my feet dangling in the air. The doctor pulled out the drain (a plastic tube inserted underneath my skin) and ripped off the small steri-strip bandages, smiling as she said, “You are healing faster than my patients usually do.”

Looking down, I said, “I can’t believe it, it’s so tidy and there aren’t any stitches.”

“They dissolve under the skin. You’re doing great, so you can start your stretching and strengthening exercises. I’ll write a slip for you to get a permanent prosthesis.” I’d been wearing a temporary prosthesis that was like a bag filled with fluffy comforter stuffing. It wasn’t very useful, as it tended to get squashed and misshapen. After hugging someone, imagine saying, “Excuse me while I reshape my boob.” I never did have the guts to say that though.

Because I had no medical insurance, I made an appointment with the American Cancer Society in Tulsa and drove there to be fitted for a donated prosthesis and bra. Two kindly women volunteers in their 70s, with grey hair, glasses and elastic-waist polyester slacks greeted me and took me into a back room with walls of cardboard boxes. They both had their mastectomies in the old days when everyone got the Halstead radical mastectomy, which removed muscles as well as the breast, leaving the chest hollow. Seeing that they were still around doing useful work gave me hope and inspiration. Closing the door, one said, “Okay dear, just strip to your waist.” Although I was forty-eight, I felt as if I was their granddaughter getting my first bra. Gesturing at my solitary breast, she said to her cohort, “Look, hasn’t she been blessed.” I wasn’t sure if I was blessed because my bosom wasn’t too big or because it wasn’t too small, so I just smiled at them. It seemed like a quaint Bible-belt phrase. I dubbed her Miss Blessed.

Her sidekick said, “Oh, you’re blessed indeed.” So experienced that she eyeballed me instead of using a tape measure, she continued, “I’d guess you’re a size 4 or 5.” I’ll call her Miss Fit. After some searching she found a size 5. “We don’t have too many that small. Most of the ladies here are bigger.” The beige-pink prosthesis had a plastic “skin” filled with silicone gel, the same goop used in breast implants and gel-filled bras. Miss Blessed folded it and stuffed it into the left pocket of a bra for me to try.

Looking down at my chest and also in the mirror, I thought it looked a tad bigger than the real breast. “I think a size 4 might be better.” There was no size 4, only the random sizes donated by all those big ladies. I pouted a little, and then remembered how lucky I was to be getting a free prosthesis when we had no money and growing debts. “Oh, I don’t mind, I’ll take this one. My left breast was always bigger than the right one anyway, so it’ll be the same as before.”

They tittered. “You look beautiful, dear. Now we need to find you a bra,” said Miss Fit.

I held the prosthesis in my palm—it was convincingly heavy, weighing about a pound—and squeezed it, glad that the silicone would be outside my body and not leaking inside me. “It feels so real and it’s even got a little nipple.” Then I held it by the top corner, letting it hang down, noticing how gravity altered the shape, creating a very convincing bottom curve. “It hangs just like a real breast. I love it.” What did disturb me though was a strong perfume odor impregnating the prosthesis, presumably from the previous owner, and I tried not to think about whether the prosthesis was donated because she died. I hoped she had simply gained weight.

They brought out a ghastly selection of bras, with prominent seams that puckered and pointed tips like in the 1950s, so substantial I understood why bras were called foundation garments. These could even support a house. They explained that mastectomy bras had to provide a lot of coverage to conceal the horizontal scar running from the center of the chest to the underarm, and to hide the prosthesis itself. There were no half cup bras or anything remotely sexy. “Do you have any that look more natural?” Of course they did not. But with my active lifestyle, I needed a bra with a pocket to hold the prosthesis, so that it would not travel and end up under my arm or fall out when I bent over. I picked over the bras and chose the best.

Miss Blessed said, “Now dear, remember to wash your prosthesis with soap and warm water, especially if you’ve been sweating, and when you wear it be careful that you don’t puncture it with a safety pin or jewelry, or the silicone will ooze out.”

Miss Fit produced a sewing pattern and instructions, in case I wanted to add pockets to my own favorite bras. And for an extra bonus, my jolly sisters in survivorship threw in a foam breast form that could be pinned in a swim suit. With my finances in a mess, I gratefully accepted their donations, saving me about $260.

Thanking them, I drove away wearing my new breast, sticking it out proudly when I got home. Tom gave it a quick squeeze saying, “Wow, just like the real thing. This gives new meaning to the phrase ‘putting up a false front.’” We wrapped our arms around each other’s slim bodies, giggling, as I told him about the cheerful volunteers and showed him the ridiculous cast-iron bra. He said, “Okay, where’s that sewing kit?”

When I was diagnosed, we’d been married only fifteen months, and the blessing that I did understand was being able to laugh or cry with him and to be totally accepted no matter what I looked like.

* * * * *
In our bedroom in Philadelphia, I smiled at the funny memories and reflected further on my relationship with my prosthesis and the choices it led me to make. When I had two breasts, I never worried about revealing a small amount of cleavage and did not have to be on guard when bending over. But post-mastectomy, if I bent over while wearing the prosthesis, the bra and its contents gaped away from my skin, and anyone peeking would see one normal breast, smooth contiguous flesh flowing into the cup, and one expanse of shadowy nothingness, a lonely chest wall separated from the fake full cup. Consequently, modest necklines filled my closet, no plunging necklines, no spaghetti strap dresses or halter-neck tops. As it would take a gargantuan stretch of the imagination to call me a fashion queen, these wardrobe limitations did not unduly grieve me. Besides, with all the time I’d spent hanging around ashrams, I was accustomed to dressing rather modestly.

What did impact me was not being able to discard my bra, and this frustrated me endlessly. I matured at university during the nascent women’s liberation movement, when droves of us rebelled against the fashion industry and male ideals of beauty, abandoning our bras, make-up and high heels. Before my mastectomy, I frequently enjoyed the comfort of going braless or, when I did wear a bra it was a minimal support lacy crop-top or some equally flimsy piece of lingerie, quite adequate to give natural support to my good-sized B-cup boobs.

Post-surgery, during the winter when loose jackets and layers of clothes covered up the difference, I got away with going for a hike in the park or even to the store without my prosthetic disguise. In the summer it wasn’t so easy—during the cloying humidity was exactly when I abhorred extra constrictive undergarments. My right breast jiggled when I walked, like breasts are supposed to do, and without a bra stood out a good inch and a half further than my left chest. It was difficult to hide. Usually in my life I’ve chosen comfort, but in this respect I was not willing to sacrifice my appearance for my comfort. It wasn’t that I felt less of a woman because of my loss, (although naturally I was sad to lose a part of my body I always liked); my neurosis has always been that I didn’t want to be different, to stand out and attract attention.

Think about it, have you ever seen a one-breasted woman walking blatantly on Philadelphia City Center streets? Imagine a lone mammary bouncing around, outlined by the clinging fabric of a summer top. Would I be brave enough to be the first one to do it, to be a trendsetter? I wasn’t that bold, but I wish I was. I never believed it when people said, “You could do it. No-one would notice.” But don’t people notice if someone has only one eye, one arm or one leg? Was I the only observant person who could count the number of breasts under a woman’s tank top? Summer was indeed the time when I wished that my remaining boob was like an aspirin on an ironing board.

Tom was reabsorbed in his reading, and I, grateful for our cool bedroom, put on some Ravi Shankar music with Sanskrit chants and lay down on the bed to relax. Drifting into reverie, I recalled the time when I listened to an inspirational tape about getting your life together, and the narrator surprised me by talking about the ways she knew she had recovered from breast cancer. One item on her list was that she no longer stared at other women’s breasts. “Oh good, I’m not the only one who does that,” I thought. But by that standard, I wasn’t yet fully recovered. My eyes were still drawn to other women’s cleavages. I envied women with perky little breasts who didn’t need a bra. I didn’t live as easily in my body as I used to. I couldn’t just throw on a T-shirt and get up and go. Or I could, but I would obsess about what others thought about my lopsided look.

People may wonder why I didn’t have reconstructive surgery to avoid all these issues. Nearly all the post-mastectomy women with whom I’d discussed the topic chose to have it. Periodically when I looked wistfully at other women’s cleavages and ease of dressing, I thought, maybe I could still have reconstruction. But I reminded myself why I made the choice that I did back in 2002.

* * * * *
It was early May, before the summer tick population exploded in the Oklahoma oak forest, so Tom and I were enjoying a walk looking for fauns and baby wild turkeys. As usual I wore my lavender cotton sunhat to protect my bald head. “Tom, y’know the mastectomy is in early June. I need to decide if I want reconstruction.”

“You could still have a spontaneous remission and not lose your breast.”

“Yes, I’m hoping and praying for that. But I need to be prepared for whatever happens. Some women really love their reconstructed breasts, but I looked at photos on the internet and they were funny shapes, blotchy and different sizes.”

“You wouldn’t want to go through the extra trauma to your body and end up with something like that.”

I couldn’t agree with him more. Coming from a world of natural medicine, having chemotherapy and considering surgery already put me in foreign and scary territory. Just having a mastectomy would be asking enough of my body. But I had to be informed of all my options. “I found out that one way of doing reconstruction is with an expander. It stretches the skin of the chest, and then they put saline implants under the skin. It sounds painful, and I wouldn’t want to live with something that’s not me under my skin.”

“It would probably be smaller than this luscious piece of flesh,” he said, slipping his hand up my tee-shirt. We stopped for a quick smooch by a white flowering dogwood tree.

“The other method moves a chunk of tissue from the abdomen up to the chest. Look,” I said, as I bunched up the flab of my belly, “If this were made into a boob, I’d have a flat tummy as a bonus.”

Tom always said the right words. “Ali, you’re such a svelte little thing. You don’t have enough fat there to match the other one, so your right side would need breast reduction surgery. Besides, the abdominal surgery would weaken your abdominal muscles and compromise your bad back.”

“You’re right. And the other option uses shoulder tissue, another place I don’t want to weaken. I don’t want to put my body through unnecessary trauma, so reconstruction isn’t for me.” I raised my voice, “But the alternative is to wear a bra and prosthesis all the time, or not wear one and feel like a one-breasted freak. What a hassle! It really pisses me off that women’s bodies have to conform to a certain image.”

“I support whatever you do.”

“I really feel that one surgery is enough.”

“You’re going to be just as beautiful without this lovely squeezable, but I will miss it.” Tom nuzzled me softly. As we held each other, the flock of wild turkeys came up over the hill, a good omen for my decision. Surely I could learn to love myself with only one breast.

* * * * *
As the music came to an end, I stretched out on the bed, pushed the memories aside and groaned at the thought of making dinner in the kitchen that was like a sauna. But it was too hot to get dressed, put the bra on and go out. I still felt that the decision to avoid reconstruction was the right one, appreciating that my prosthetic breast allowed me to hide my asymmetry, to pass in public as a normal two-breasted woman.

When it was placed in a good mastectomy bra, and I finally obtained comfortable ones with molded cups from my fitter in Philadelphia, you would have to give close scrutiny to notice any disparity. I silently chuckled on the occasions when the conversation led me to tell an acquaintance or co-worker, “Yes, I had a mastectomy,” and I saw their eyes dart, almost like a reflex, to scan my chest surreptitiously and then back to my face.

“I wouldn’t have known,” they said, or even funnier, “Well you’re looking really good.” Did that mean they saw the healthy glow in my cheeks, the light in my eyes or were they referring to my attractive bust line? And were they trying to figure out which one was false?

Some women name their prosthetic breasts. Mine is simply my boob. It’ll probably be my lifetime companion, although there may yet be times when I am brave enough to go without my boob in public. Would I say without reservations that I feel affection for my prosthesis? Maybe not, given my ambivalent feelings, but what I know as truth is that my prosthetic breast is, and always will be, close to my heart.

Japan (The beginning of Chapter 1)

by Alison Hammer Winans

When I was four and we lived in Tokyo, I was always happy to be outside, never lonely while surrounded with life unfolding and changing, the incessant whirring of cicadas, white butterflies dancing around the roses and camellias, brown furry caterpillars dropping off the Japanese pear tree, the constant movements of an ant column. I stared cross-eyed at the busy mass of ants, seeing it as a heaving, swirling reddish-brown carpet, then refocusing my eyes, I singled out one or two individuals, following their journeys as they touched feelers with ants coming the other way. Or maybe I was lonely, but was too young then to know it, as I said to one of the ants, “Will you be my pet?”

Sometimes I squatted for what seemed like hours on the shaded soil beside the chapel next to our house, playing with woodlice. With careful fingers I poked the many-legged creatures, heading off their escape and tapping on their bony armoring with twigs, testing how long it would be before they rolled up into a grey ball. And I would pick up the hard little balls, marveling at the tightness of their protection, rolling the crisp dryness around on my palms, not understanding that they curled up in fear. Then I put them down and waited, seeing how long it was before the ball unfolded, and quick legs tried to scurry away, until again my hand corralled the poor creature. It sounds cruel, but at the time I was aware only of curiosity.

From our partially westernized one-story house, my mother called. I passed the bamboo fence, jumping from stone to stone along the path, stopping briefly on the front step to sit on one of the grey stone lions, as I looked up at her. Her dark brown, naturally curly hair and soft blue homemade dress gave her a wholesome look, while the 50s style accentuated her motherly figure and well-defined ankles. “Come on, Alison, stop dithering. I can’t wait all day for you.” My parents were given a wardrobe of hand-me-down baby clothes embroidered with the initial “A” prior to my birth in 1954, which eliminated their plans to call me Rosemary. Hence I became Alison Mary. They were hard-up Anglican missionaries without the money to buy everything for their first baby. Even if they’d had more money, Japan, a war-torn country, was busy constructing its infrastructure, and the growth of the consumer economy was a few years away.

I patted my steed, whispering in the stone lion’s ear, “You’ll always be here, won’t you?”

My mother sat me down in the genkan, the shoe area, to remove my shoes before washing my dirty hands. Although there were wooden floors instead of tatami, traditional woven straw mats, we nevertheless followed the Japanese custom of wearing slippers inside. “I don’t want everyone tracking in dirt,” my mother said.

It was time for my lesson—she was teaching me, a fast learner, to read and write, because no English was spoken at my Japanese kindergarten. Both my parents took their responsibilities seriously to raise well-disciplined offspring with an academic education, good food and sensible clothes. A physics graduate, my mother put a scientific career on hold to support my father in his endeavors, instead getting a part-time job teaching English at a girls’ high school. I relished my lessons, making rows and rows of loops, patterns and letters, although I wasn’t always well-behaved enough for my mother, and in the solipsistic way of children, always thought I’d committed some transgression when the day came that my lessons ended. Looking back, it was likely due to the slow disintegration of her health.

After my lesson it was suppertime, eaten around the white triangular table in the corner of our roomy kitchen. From my place on the window seat, I waited for my father to come home. Although he had really wanted to be a missionary in China, a plan thwarted by the Cultural Revolution, he learned to speak Japanese fluently, throwing himself into teaching at the seminary on the outskirts of Tokyo, where we lived surrounded by small farms. Between the trees outside the window I saw him wearing a black shirt with his white “dog collar” and baggy grey trousers, racing home in a hurry. Such a busy man he was with all his extra jobs, being chaplain to the embassy, lecturing at the university and preaching in Japanese and American churches. But there was always time to greet his two little girls in a warm hug, “I hope you’ve been good girls today,” and later there would be a bedtime story.

The fifth member of our household was Granny, my maternal grandmother, who lived with us ever since my sister, Liz, was born. Widowed early in life, she was as much at home with a paintbrush and hammer as she was with a kitchen knife, a garden trowel or a baby. Capping all that, she was a retired seamstress whose hands flew making our dresses. Unlike my mother, she was earthy, gregarious and energetic saying, “No peace for the wicked,” as her thin lips turned up in a smile.

“Don’t ever leave,” I said to her.

“I have to go home when you are five, but you’ll come to visit next time you come to England.” There was the vain hope that my fifth birthday would never come. I always wanted to make time stop moving, but I turned five anyway and that was when things started to fall apart. I continued trying to make pets out of wild creatures. Twice I caught a butterfly and took it home, carefully putting it in the glass case that was meant for my Japanese dolls, but although I gave my captive grass, leaves and flowers, it died. After the second attempt I learned that lesson. I pestered garden snails the same way I did woodlice, poking, prodding, picking them up, and watching the slimy helpless body sucking itself into the shell. One day, I took a dozen snails home to my mother saying, “Can we keep them?”

Being a scientist and having grown up with a garden herself, she supported my explorations. “We’ll put them in jam jars with paper over the tops so they can still breathe.” They went in the spare bathroom three or four to a jar, with rubber bands securing the paper lids and overnight they ate through the paper, so that we found them halfway up the wall, behind the toilet, in the sink, even in the spare bedroom and my father’s study. “Oh dear,” said my mother, “I didn’t think about that.” It was a good thing it hadn’t been my idea.

Liz was my enemy, as a younger sibling would be, after giving me only two years and four months to enjoy the privilege of being the only child. Being unable to pronounce my name, she called me “Agon”—one more reason to hate her. We were so rigorously trained that most of the time we did not even think of getting into trouble—but we fought. We used to bite, kick, pinch, punch and scratch, and pull each other’s light brown curly hair. At the age of six when I started biting my nails, Liz, with her long nails, got an advantage in our fights.

Her other advantage was her “Mummy, Agon’s been mean to me,” little sister crying routine that used to get a certain number of yen docked from my pocket money whenever she used it. So it made economic sense to be friends. We were the only kids living on the seminary campus, besides two aloof Canadian boys (one called me a baby) and one young English boy, so as Granny always said, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” After all Liz was my only sister, and I had to admit that her big eyes, gray-green like mine, halo of corkscrew curls, and the way she carried her pale pink teddy bear everywhere did make her an adorable playmate.

There was plenty to do inside the house; we had dolls, jigsaw puzzles and trains. But the house was becoming a prison, with “Be quiet, don’t do that, stop running around, you’re not doing it right,” and so on. So I escaped to another world through my books or we went outside. Behind the chapel, one of our favorite play spots, we lay on the ground, arms and legs stretched out long, rolling like logs shrieking and giggling down the grassy hill. Beyond that was the sandy field where long grasses grew in the summer and we made secret hiding places. Despite a lack of adult supervision, invisible reins still attached us to the house, reins that stretched as we got older and ventured further. Liz and I roamed the grounds climbing trees and riding our tricycle, with one of us on the seat peddling and the other standing on the platform between the rear wheels.

During the hot, humid growing season, my father in long shorts dug up the bamboo shoots that grew wild in our yard, trying to catch them when the tip just showed above the earth. “Look, you see that? If you let it go, it’ll grow up to my knee by tomorrow and be too tough to eat.” We sat on the back step with the heavy foot-long shoots in our laps to peel off the layers of brown fibrous skin until we got down to the tender yellow flesh. My father cooked them in his creative specialties—sukiyaki and fried rice. This was around the time when he did most of the cooking and said to my godmother, “I have to be mother as well as father to the girls.”

On occasion, we would make the rounds of the seminary students’ accommodations, entering the two-story U-shaped building and going down the long corridors knocking on doors, hoping to scrounge sweet treats from the kind Japanese men. Maybe they said, “Iirashai (welcome),” and seeing our cute little gaijin (foreign) faces, “Doozo, doozo (please come in and make yourself at home).” And they would bring out bean cakes, tangerines, candy, white sugar on white bread. We would sit there politely stuffing our faces, bowing and saying, “Domo arigato,” lapping up the typical Japanese respect for children.

Then we lied to our mother, “Oh, we were just in the field,” as this was during her very restrictive diet phase that she also imposed on us. Her Canadian chiropractor told her to eat protein and starch at separate meals, to avoid white flour, white sugar and milk. In those days when environmental illness, chronic fatigue syndrome and some psychological disorders were not even named, this chiropractor was the only person who helped my mother.

We ate some weird but delicious foods like fresh carrot juice every day at supper, and my father rolled up chicken in fried tofu strips instead of making sandwiches for school lunches. For breakfast, as well as a handful of vitamins and the customary egg, we had wheat germ mixed with vegetable oil—crunchy and nutty, and yogurt. They kept a jar of hard candies on top of the highest cupboard, and doled out one each after lunch and supper. No more. No more puddings, only fruit for dessert. We could not even escape by going out for tea or a birthday party, as the host would have a list of all our restrictions. Liz and I rebelled secretly after getting off the school bus, buying small boxes of caramels with a Disney token in each box, that we ate as we walked up the hill from the village, Nakamachi, back to the seminary. We ended up with a great collection of Disney characters.

Granny's Garden

by Alison Hammer Winans

My maternal grandmother lived in a quiet suburb west of London, where she had a small semi-detached house with a long narrow garden. It was 1965, the year that I and my sister, Liz, also called this house our home. There was the privet hedge and wrought iron gate in the front, and a handkerchief-sized lawn flanked with beds of fuchsias, marigolds, roses and purple daisies. This was where Granny showed me how to squeeze the purple-red fuchsias so that they popped open. Here were the pale pink and white roses that she nurtured with manure, collected with a shovel every time the rag-and-bone man went by with his horse and cart. The outside of the house had, instead of brick, a façade of tiny pebbles stuck into cement like a cake covered with sprinkles. The pebbles beckoned to be picked off, but most of the time I restrained myself, just prying off a few here and there in hidden places. Around the side of the house a paved walk led into the back garden.

Way behind the house, I stood under the branches of the Victoria plum tree surrounded by honey bees and ripe plums like huge swollen raindrops about to fall. I plucked one, heavy with nectar that oozed out and hardened into a blob, rubbed it against my cotton frock and took a bite. The pale amber flesh melted sweetly in my mouth, juice running down my chin. I broke the large plum in half, sharing with Liz, who was on her knees looking for snails amongst the strawberries and rhubarb.

“Cooeee! Where are you scallywags?”

“Come on Liz, Granny’s calling us. We’re supposed to be picking plums. It’s crumble for lunch today.” I was eleven and admittedly rather bossy with my nearly nine-year-old sister. Lunch was always our main meal of the day, but today was Sunday, making it even more special. We filled the colander with dusky mauve fruit, then hugging it to my chest I traipsed back to the house past two of the four apple trees—tart green Bramleys for cooking and fragrant reddish-yellow Coxes for eating—past the small lawn and rockery made with chunks of the concrete air raid shelter that my mother and her parents had to sleep in during the war, when she was only thirteen and the Nazis were dropping bombs on London. My mother never talked about it though. I pestered her to find out that her father worked at the EMI factory before he died of a stroke, and Granny sewed shirts for a department store, and they kept rabbits down at the bottom of the garden to eat when they couldn’t buy meat. For sure the memories of that time were buried, even as tiny star-like flowers cascaded over the rocks, belying the trauma they represented.

Granny, with a cigarette hanging out her mouth and glasses perched on her thin nose, stuck her head out of the French doors asking, “Pick some mint for the potatoes, will you?” I put down the colander, kneeled and stuck my face into the clump of spearmint, breathing deeply, my mouth watering as I thought of new potatoes dripping with butter and the other dish that went with fresh mint—roast leg of lamb with mint sauce.

We burst into the matchbox of a kitchen with our offerings. The aroma of roast chicken and Yorkshire pudding was coming from the oven. Our family was probably the only one in all of England who ate Yorkshire pud with chicken instead of beef. I loved the way that the thin batter, when poured into a hot, greased baking tin and cooked perfectly, would puff up into a brown crispy surface surrounding the soft pancake-like center. We didn’t have expensive roast beef too often, so with our family custom we could eat Yorkshire pud once a week.

*****
Earlier the three of us had gone down the garden to the vegetable patch past the second Bramley apple tree. Granny dug up the tiny new potatoes with paper-thin skin that came off when she scrubbed them. We picked rough-skinned runner beans, carefully avoiding the red blossoms, reaching high to the top of the poles, looking under the leaves to make sure they didn’t hide and grow big and tough. Granny would slice them on a diagonal and boil them lightly, so that they squeaked when I chewed them. Then we gathered our supper salad makings—frilly lettuce, pale orange baby carrots, ruby-like radishes, green onions, beets to be boiled and dressed with vinegar, small firm cardinal-red tomatoes—and raspberries blushing like a glass of claret, to have with cream for dessert.

The raspberry canes grew way down at the bottom of the garden, where Granny’s big compost pile sat under the branches of the Russet apple tree, which had sweet fruit with coarse brownish skins. The shed where the next door neighbor kept chickens was the other side of the fence. I remembered the day when I stole two of Granny’s cigarettes, fags we called them, and hid behind that shed with my friend for our first smoke. They were Woodbine plain, the same at both ends, so we put one end between our lips trying not to make it soggy and then realizing that we had to suck at the same time as holding a lighted match to the other end. The hot harsh smoke made me cough, grabbing at the inside of my throat like a scouring pad, and I didn’t even try to inhale. Neither did my friend. We just let the fags burn down, practiced being cool holding them between our fingers, gesturing and trying not to breathe in the smoke. I never took any more of Granny’s fags, but now I understood why she was always coughing.

Nine months ago we returned from Japan to settle in England, so while our parents found jobs and a home, Liz and I stayed with Granny to attend my mother’s old school and finish out the academic year. We had hardly seen our parents during this time, only at Christmas and when they picked us up for boarding school entrance exams and mostly, I had to admit, I didn’t miss them. With my mother being sickly and my father working so hard, Liz and I were used to fending for ourselves, cooking and helping around the house when we had to and providing our own entertainment. Later in July, we would join them in Birmingham to get ready for boarding school. My mother, struggling with an undefined illness, said she could be a better mother if we were only at home during the holidays. I’d been reading all of Enid Blyton’s boarding school books, and they were so much fun with such jolly midnight feasts and high jinks, but I didn’t know what life at Walthamstow Hall was going to be like.

But mucking around in Granny’s garden made me feel so content. I loved doing anything with her, walking to the shops, going swimming, cooking and playing card games like German Whist, Old Maid and Beat Your Neighbor Out of Doors. I liked watching her do her hair, rolling up long strands with a gadget and fastening them with hair grips. She ended up looking like she had little grey sausage rolls above her ears and round the back of her head. She was always thinking of ways to delight us, like picking us up from school laden with bags holding our towels, swimsuits and a picnic of fresh rolls filled with ham and cucumber, peaches and slices of her Victoria sponge cake, for a surprise trip to the pool. Living with her was like being fed ambrosia.

*****
Liz and I set the table for lunch in the back room, putting out cork placemats and cloth napkins, knives on the right with the blade turned in, forks on the left and dessert spoons above with the handle to the right. Granny called me from the kitchen, “Alison, you mix up the custard powder, while I dish up.” I ran out, eager to do one of my favorite jobs. We hardly ate any packet foods, but I adored custard. My mother used to make it for me before she was ill. I sat down on the back step with a mixing bowl containing a heaped tablespoon of Bird’s custard powder, white with a pinkish sheen, a little sugar and enough milk for mixing taken from a pint, the rest of which was heating on the stove. I stirred, pressing out the lumps, dissolving the sugar and marveling at the transformation in color from white to deep egg-yolk yellow.

Meanwhile, Granny was in the kitchen filling the tiny drop-leaf table with food, carving the tender chicken, making sure to prevent fights by giving us equal amounts of golden crispy skin, dishing up bright green beans and minty new potatoes. “Quick, the milk’s coming up to the boil.” I jumped up, set my bowl on the counter and let her pour in the frothy milk, while I diligently stirred the thickening custard. Then the custard, now pale yellow, smooth and creamy, went back in the pan to stay warm. The plum crumble was baking in the oven, and Granny was cutting the Yorkshire pudding into large squares. We begged in unison, “Can I have a corner piece?” Gravy made from a Bisto mix was the final touch, the plates were full, and we were more than ready.

Granny took off her apron, uncovering her pretty flowered dress (she never wore pants). “We’d better say ‘grace’ seeing as it’s Sunday, and I didn’t take you to church. I don’t want to get into trouble with Daddy.” Momentarily I wondered if there had been times when she got into trouble with my father, and what she had done wrong.

As if we were racing in the Derby we chanted, “Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat, thank you for the birds that sing, thank you God for everything. Amen.” Then silence, save for small sounds of knives and forks clattering against the plates. Plum crumble was next, smelling toasty and fruity, drowning in silky custard. I never had any trouble cleaning my plate when I was with Granny. A thought crossed my mind—next month we would leave this oasis. What made leaving bearable was looking forward to visiting Granny for half-term, a long weekend halfway through each school term. I was relying on her to be here until I finished school.

For now, I simply sighed with contentment and a full belly.