Scene and heard

Some of you may wonder how these could possibly be linked. But you will know from your own secret thoughts, that memories can take our minds on wild tangents. And so it was with me.

I moved in with Jan a couple of weeks ago. She had inherited a mattress which was somewhere in age between considerably older than 15 years and post civil war. It was brutal. I realised after I replaced it with my wonderful 2 year old but good as new firm memory foam model, that I shouldn’t have dumped the thing. I missed an opportunity. I should have donated it to the American torture camp program. Suspected bad people could have been confined to it for 22-23 hours per day. I tell, you, they would have broken even if strong enough to withstand water boarding. And there’s not a convention in the world that would call it torture or consider it illegal!

I was convinced that this was the worst mattress I had ever slept on until my memory dredged up a long forgotten number that I slept on a few times in my Aunt and Uncles place as a pre-teen. It was old, but suited me well enough. Until one day, my Uncle’s Mother stayed over. She was a lovely lady with a truly enormous belly. The next time I slept on the bed, there was an indentation in the middle which directly corresponded to her girth, and which I had to curve my body around for fear of falling in. At the time, I always slept on my front, and this really wasn’t conducive to sleeping in semi craters.

How my mind took me from this to Swedes, which are known in the US as rutabagas, even I’m not willing to guess at, other than both were awful memories. At my Primary School (for US readers, this goes from ages 4 or 5 up to 11), the school dinners were also torture (maybe this memory is linked to Jan’s old mattress and not my uncle’s?). And we had to finish every bite, because “children are starving in Biafra”. The swede was boiled down into a mush, which was somewhat lumpy and watery – remarkably similar in texture to what they called mashed potatoes, which were so traumatic for me that I couldn’t eat mashed potatoes again for 30 years – but with a strong flavour I will never forget but couldn’t begin to describe.

I believe I blogged once before about a moment indelibly etched in my memory. The headmistress of the school, who we all thought was incredibly old, had an enormous gap between her two front teeth. One day, I was sitting in the front of the lunch room, and she decided to speak, or rather shout at all of the kids. I watched in horror as a huge gob of her spit landed in the middle of my mashed potato and slowly disappeared into it, and my usual laboured eating of this dreadful stuff became an exercise of trepidatious picking around the edges.

When she asked me why I wasn’t eating, my young (9 or 10 year old) mind understood that telling her I couldn’t eat my mashed potato because she spat in it could only end badly for me. So when all the other children went out to play, I went into her office to finish my lunch. And I continued nibbling until a dinner lady came in and took pity on me. And no, in case you are wondering, this is not the reason I couldn’t eat mashed potatoes for 30 years. Even without the Miss Kohn spittle incident, these were quite disgusting enough to have left their mark on me.