Oh for a snapshot of the past.

I do wish that throughout my childhood, teens and early adult years, I and my family had viewed cameras as a means of documenting everyday life, instead of taking endless snaps of cute kids or holiday views.

My mother did take a lot of photos of us, and she valued them all, filling endless albums with them. This is one of my brother, taken in the early 1950s. I have nothing against pictures of my brother – the more the merrier – but what I really value about this photo is the briefest glimpse it gives of the tight-woven linen curtains we had in the front room. Mustard yellow with block patterns in, I think, brown, black and olive green. I am sure they were derived from textiles at the Festival of Britain. They were discarded after a few decades of use, and I don’t even have a scrap of them left, but they were a part of my life.

Likewise, the wallpaper my mother daringly chose for the kitchen, at a time when ceramic walls tiles were strictly for public toilets. The wallpaper featured aubergines, courgettes, sweet peppers, mushrooms, garlic, herbs (or eggplants, zucchini, bell peppers if you are on the wrong side of the sea). Why decorate the kitchen with ingredients for ratatouille? Because, apart from the occasional field mushrooms, and mint and parsley lining the vegetable beds in the garden, none of these were ever seen in our local shops. They might have been found in a few shops in London, but not in my neck of the wood where vegetables meant cabbage, onions, carrots, peas and runner beans. Potatoes were the only starchy accompaniment to every meal, (okay, pastry and dumplings, too), unless someone daringly came up macaroni cheese. Rice was very short and made into milk puddings with a nutmeg skin. Olive oil came in very small bottles from the chemist and was used to un-wax ears.

But my mother had dreams. I don’t think she ever did make ratatouille – how could she, without the necessary ingredients, but she did have a wonderful book called Plats de Jour, which was a significant improvement on the recipe book she brought with her to her marriage. That one (can’t remember the title) was a legacy of the war and had jolly cartoons of ladies with knotted head scarves discussing the delights of whale meat and spam fritters.

Inspired merely by the cover of Plats de Jour, my mother daringly branched out to exotic realms with quiche, spaghetti, goulash, even curry (minced beef and sultanas) and rice.  These didn’t necessarily follow the recipes exactly because it would have been impossible.

Take Patience Gray’s recipe for Risotto aux Fruit de Mer (a bit of fusion cookery going on there with the title at least):

“…requiring 2 dozen mussels, 1 dozen clams, a small lobster and 2 dozen prawns, 2 lbs rice and a small tin of tomato puree.”

I think we must have been able to get hold of some of rice other than pudding rice, but definitely not Arborio or Carnaroli, and maybe we could buy tinned prawns (essential for prawn cocktails for really posh occasions), but we didn’t have a hope in Hell of laying our hands on anything else listed. The local fishmonger sold herrings, cod and smoked haddock (nothing wrong with those – except herrings, which are an abomination), but really the book was just a voyage into an almost imaginary world.

I, too, fell in love with Plats de Jour at a very early age, not because I was interested in continental cookery, but because of the cover. The back cover, showing the same table abandoned when the meal has been finished. Chairs pushed back and… two cats curled up asleep. Even as a toddler, I could never resist cats.

I wish I had photographs of the kitchen in which my first spaghetti Bolognese (fusion cooking again) was made, but I have none. Nor photos of the coal bunker which we pretended was a North Sea Trawler, nor the old defunct gas light in my bedroom, nor the old apple tree under which I camped, pretending to be on Wildcat Island. Alas. They all exist now only in my memory.

Fortunately, my memory is good and an endless source of inspiration. There’s an awful lot of my own childhood in my novel The Unravelling, although not the traumatic parts.