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Friday afternoon
the eggs tight in their speckled fragile promise,
the flour the sugar clump in their crumpled paper bags,
squelchy butter hovers at liquid point on the mantelpiece, ready.
Whirling grinding whisk fluffing the eggs to a bubbling gold,
worn wooden spoon squashing and pressing the sugarbutter mixture
to a cream,
sift in a flour cloud, tipple in a spoon of egg bubbles,
cut the mix with the scarred old spoon, back and to,
flour flump, eggs, flour flump, eggs,
while the kitchen warms with the gentle gas hiss from the expecting
oven.
I fidget, anxious.
Leave me some Mummy leave me some.
She dollops the creamy spoonfuls in the shallow tins, levels the
tops,
slides the trays clanking on the shelves.
Don't use it all, leave some for me to lick. But take out the sultanas.
I don't like sultanas with their hidden gritty stones.
Elated, I peer over the gaping walls of the warm mixing bowl
oozing creamy dollops of promise, plunge in my fingers, feeling
the sugar
not quite dissolved like runny sand I scoop in wet fistfuls on Traeth
Bychan beach
and dribble through my fingers to feel the teasing cold against
the summer warmth.
Hugging the sliding childwide bowl, I perch on Mummy's knee.
She starts a story, the one with the marmalade cat and me,
licks the top half of the spoon herself, gives me the bottom half.
I tongue it smooth with rapid urgent movements, then set to with
this huge tool
to scoop the grainy sweetness to my sucking mouth,
dissolving the sweet cream in my saliva, crunching sugar crystals
in my gappy teeth,
wiping up the last granular fragments with disconsolate fingers,
Make me some more Mummy make some more, knowing she won't.
What has become of me?
I peer through the pinhole of memory to a black and white photograph
and the pretty child who is smiling out at me
is slowly running her gentle tongue
on the steel edge
of a sharp
knife.
Gwyneth Roberts
January 2003
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