Snapshot: My dad cooking the Christmas fry-up
This photograph shows my dad, Sydney Staplehurst, cooking breakfast on Christmas Day 1974. He had a newspaper pitch and Christmas was the only day he had off, so he insisted on preparing the traditional Christmas fry-up.
The photo screams the 1970s. Senior Service, smoking jacket, sideburns and SodaStream. What you can’t see or hear are the jets of flame roaring from the grill or the sound of my mum, Peggy, cursing Dad from the front room over Noddy screaming “It’s Christmas!” on the music centre as the kitchen filled with smoke.
The picture invokes so many memories of a mythical festive era that took in communal pub sessions from 12-2pm, Christmas Top of the Pops, ignoring the Queen, drinking advocaat snowballs, snoring adults sleeping it off until Eric and Ernie and the inevitable paper chains and balloons dropping from the ceiling on to your head come Boxing Day.
Dad was a huge character and the funniest person I have ever known. He worked the stall for 40 years and was much loved by everyone he served or helped in Pimlico, London, where we still live.
I remember us having so many Christmas cards that the front room would look shockingly desolate when they had to come down after New Year. He died in 1988 and we still miss him. I have tried to maintain the festive fry-up tradition, but somehow it never tastes as good. Maybe it’s missing a dash of fag ash!
Colin Staplehurst
Playlist: How Ray Charles gave me the elbow
Hit the Road Jack by Ray Charles
“Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more”
Christmas leave was only a few weeks off and I was on my way to meet my stunning new girlfriend. Life, I thought, couldn’t get much better. It was December 1961, I had spent the previous 18 months on a destroyer, and was very much Jolly Jack Tar, a Jack the lad, as my shipmates would say.
As the train carried me to Portsmouth, I reflected on my good fortune: 19 years old and the world was my oyster. I had met – let’s call her Kate – only a few weeks previously in the Naafi club in Portsmouth. We all called it the “Ponderosa”, such was its resemblance, we fancied, to the ranch in Bonanza, a popular TV series of that time. I don’t know who was responsible for Ponderosa’s location, but it was a stroke of genius – directly opposite the Duchess of Kent barracks, home to the Wrens of Portsmouth. Where there are Wrens, matelots will not be far behind. The place was buzzing.
When I first saw Kate, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here was a gorgeous Wren, in that cool uniform, but wearing the cap badge of a Royal Marine. A “bootneck” Wren! I’d never heard of such a thing.
We seemed to hit it off, in spite of my mates’ hilarity at the situation. “Still knocking about with that ‘bootneck’, then?” they’d ask, before falling about helplessly. (“Bootneck”, by the way, is a nickname for a Royal Marine, deriving, they say, from their habit of cutting the leather from their boot tops and wrapping it around their necks to avoid having their throats cut on sailing ships in the old days). Nice.
Kate met me at the Ponderosa with an elfish smile on her face. No kiss, no hug.
“I’ve got a surprise,” she grinned. “There’s a record on the jukebox especially for you.”
On cue, Ray Charles was belting out “Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more / Hit the road Jack, and don’t you come back no more.”
I got the message – I’d been dumped, stylishly but irrevocably. She waved as she left.
We never met again, but every time I hear Ray Charles I can see her, still 19, blue eyes still smiling beneath that “bootneck” cap badge.
Keith Giles
We love to eat: Grandmama’s rum truffles
Ingredients
Plain chocolate
Double cream
Butter
Chocolate shavings
Lashings of Captain Morgan dark rum
Melt the chocolate, stir in the butter, rum and cream, then leave to chill for an hour. Melt the chocolate shavings a tad, and roll small, perfectly formed truffles in them.
Well, where do I begin? In the early 1970s as my younger brother and I were growing up, we were shipped to my grandmama’s each Christmas Eve, decamping there until after the New Year. My mother and father would make the most of this much anticipated period of peace and goodwill to rent a cottage in the New Forest, walk among the ponies and play Scrabble in front of an open fire.
Grandmama was not a believer in heating of any kind, let alone central heating, and my brother and I would freeze for more than a week, cuddling each other in the double bed in which my grandpapa had died, and wondering if the sheets had been changed since.
The only highlight was Grandmama’s rum truffles. She was terribly myopic and generous with her measures. She would make her famous truffles late on Christmas Eve, and serve them on the side with the presents our parents had dropped off. My mother had been regularly fed with truffles as she was growing up. And so on Christmas morning my younger brother, neither of us yet 10, would get more and more smashed as we consumed four or five, maybe six, 40% proof spirit-laced truffles.
Needless to say, we struggled hopelessly with the Spirograph and the Etch A Sketch and we began to find everything extremely funny; even the smell of cat urine that pervaded the house, as Grandmama played foster parent to any feline lucky or unlucky enough to find its way to her back door.
After lunch, we were soon snoring like sailors in the huge drawing-room armchairs, as Grandmama hooted with laughter at the repeats of The Goon Show on Radio 4.
On the drive home, around 2 January, I would see my mother wink at my father as she casually inquired of us: “How was the Boxing Day hangover, boys?”
Richard Hayton
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