If we didn't finish our food, Ma wrapped it up or covered it with a dish, put it in the fridge (oh yes we did have one of those) and gave it to us again for the next meal and the next and the next. 'There are children starving in Africa you know!' I used to think, ' well why don't you give them this stuff then?'
One Sunday morning we were faced with a particularly gooey, gluey mass of congealed porridge oats, dry and 'glompy'. If I didn't eat it, then Ian didn't do it. At that stage in our lives, if I were to say 'stick your head in a fire', he would have said, 'sure sis, now?'
There was knock at the front door, oops, she didn't want them to see this little drama unfolding. (Dad was playing bowls, he played bowls every weekend in those days, lucky man.) Ma hurriedly rushed us off to our bedrooms with the bowls and large tablespoons, threatening us not to appear till she called us. Ian immediately ate his up, nearly choking and vomiting, and has never eaten porridge oats since. I set about placing a spoon of the stuff carefully on every shelf of my built in cupboard behind all my clothes, then covering it over with my stuff, till it was hidden forever(or so I thought).
Three days later there was an ant army having a party in my room. They thought it was fiesta time! They were everywhere and, as ants do, were marching round systematically collecting dried clumpy oats and carting it off down the walls and out through a crack in the floorboards. What a mess!
Ma went mad. Screaming and yelling, she threw everything out of the cupboard on to the floor and told me to clean it up, with other choice words thrown in too. Although I was very sad and hurt and ashamed that day, I love this memory and chortle about it every time I retell it to my family, which is often. What a rebel I must have been!
