The taste of childhood

I’M SUDDENLY reminded of my mother sitting on the back step of our house in Atherton, Lancashire, scrubbing the new potatoes that my father has just dug up from his vegetable patch.

I’m aware of it because, like him, I’ve just dug up the first of our potato harvest and My Good Lady, with brush in hand, and bowl of water before her, is ready to scrub away in preparation for our dinner.

And very good they turn out to be, too, although the quantity is a tad disappointing – but maybe I’m just jumping the gun and harvesting them a bit too soon; I’ll leave the rest for another week or two, give them a chance to fill out a bit more.

I’ve been thinking about my father quite a lot lately; each time I pass the mirror I almost catch a glimpse of him in my own reflection.

I’m aware of how much like him I’m becoming. Of course, when he was my age now, he was, to me, an old man.

And talking to Den this evening, at our last-Monday-of-month dinner, I’m reminded of my father again, when Den describes his attempts at farming. “It’s a twenty-four hour a day job,” he says, “seven days a week.”

My father was a farm boy, but he turned his back on the life, and went his own way.

Yet I think he had some soil in his blood, like all of his family before him. I remember the fruit and vegetables he used to grow in his own plot – wonderful. Flavours and textures that no shop-bought veg could hope to have.

And when I bite into my own home-grown spuds, suddenly the years fly away back to my childhood, and the taste I enjoyed then.

It’s like they say, what goes around comes around.