Family life: my grandparents in Blackpool, Keith Jarrett’s Country and sigara börek – Turkish ‘cigarette pie’
Readers’ favourite photographs, songs and recipesSnapshot: Gran and Grandpa on holiday in Blackpool
This is a photograph of my maternal grandparents, Bertha and Jack Lever. It was taken in the late 1940s in Blackpool. That was where most people from Bolton went for their annual “wakes week” holiday.
I remember being taken there by Grandma and Grandad as a small child. I slept in a made-up bed on their bedroom floor in the boarding house where they stayed. I was their first grandchild, which is probably why I was chosen for this treat.
My grandparents were a really important part of my childhood; they came to live with us after my dad was killed in a car accident when I was nine. Until then, they had kept a corner shop in Little Lever, but sold it to help look after us four children, and to allow our mother to work, and later to qualify as a social worker. Their presence gave us a great sense of security at a traumatic time in our childhood.
Grandma always gave us a hot meal when we came home from school, served with lots of bread and marge to fill us up. Butter was for Sundays.
Grandad worked at the Sandy, a local cotton mill and every Saturday he gave us each a threepenny bit. It was the first time we’d had pocket money and those little brass coins with their 12 sides seemed the prettiest of money.
Grandma was one of three girls in a family of 13 children, and Grandad courted her by following her home and helping her to turn the heavy handle on the mangle. You can imagine how much laundry there was for a family that size. Her brothers mocked him for doing “women’s work”, but his kindness won my grandma’s heart.
Their life wasn’t easy; Grandad was a fitter in the early days of their marriage – a regular job, but not well paid. During the depression of the 30s he was out of work for two years, but Grandma made ends meet with rigid control of the finances.
When he was in work, he would hand her his weekly wage packet and she gave him back spending money. She was always frugal and had a box with four sections where she allocated the money to rent, coal and food, and anything left over was saved for shoe repairs, clothes and special occasions.
For all her carefulness with money, Grandma was a generous woman. When Grandad’s brother Alf and his wife died, leaving three children to bring up, the rest of the family wanted to split them up to be raised by aunts and uncles. But Grandma wouldn’t hear of it. Those children had suffered enough without losing the comfort of their siblings, and she took all three of them into her own home and raised them as her own, along with my mother and her brother.
When I brought along my first child of two months, she glowed with happiness. She loved babies, and my three sons all had the benefit of being rocked to sleep by her, wrapped in her apron, and sung to in her sweet, cracked voice. She had a special lullaby for them: “Be bye, babio / Wrap him up in calico / Send him to Americo / Be bye, babio.”
She died before my daughter was born, but when I first brought my six-week-old baby to visit my mum, I laid her to sleep in a cot in Grandma’s old bedroom. As I stood soothing her to sleep, I felt Grandma standing behind me, peering over my shoulder. The feeling was so intense that I turned to look at her. But, of course, there was nothing for me to see. My baby did sleep peacefully, though.
Now, I, too, have grandchildren and love nothing better than spending the summer holidays camping with them – but we go to Cornwall, not Blackpool.
Mary Macarthur
Playlist: Jazz tune that brings back an entire era
This is a jazz number that was played so many times it became a continual, prolonged soundtrack to scenes of late 70s family life in our house. Imagine children’s bare feet on pilling brown carpet, French windows with an inflection of light coming through each pane, picking out dust and fibres, plus a piano, in the corner where we composed our own, unsophisticated songs, and a wireless. And the house, Rose Cottage, along the main street of a small village, two houses knocked into one.
I knew this track as well as I knew every brown and yellow leaf on our William Morris-pattern sofa – every tear in its upholstery and every mark on our antique furniture was echoed in every tear and statement of the tune.
It was jazz, but not how I have since known jazz; not busy, but a structured play-off between saxophone and piano, tempered by double bass. Then the addition, in places, of Jarrett’s wailing voice, which acts as an extra instrument. It was an immediately recognisable narrative and I now realise that the reason for this was it relayed the regulated, insistent tone of negotiations that constantly play out between adults and children. The saxophone is the child and the piano is the rational adult. The piano, with its replies, is reasoned, balanced and mildly instructional.
This track epitomises an era in my childhood and on a wider scale: it is all about dated furniture, flares, summer ants, the tree house at the end of our garden, the sepia tone of everything, Woody Allen films set in New York, the Beatles. It expressed an overarching innocence and an intrepid freedom.
My father says the 70s were a hedonistic time and “all the lovey-dovey stuff” was from the 1960s. But this song picks up on all things good about an age that cannot be reinvigorated.
Anna Bradley
We love to eat: Sigara börek – ‘cigarette pie’
Ingredients
Spinach – large bag
Feta cheese – two blocks
Oregano and cayenne pepper
Filo pastry – one pack
Wilt the spinach, drain and chop finely. Mix with the cheese and seasonings to make a paste. Take individual sheets of the filo pastry (you may need to cut them in half width-wise: the finished item should be the length of a cigar) and place a couple of teaspoons of the cheese and spinach paste along the edge. Tightly roll the pastry around the filling for the full length of the sheet. Shallow fry in hot oil for a few minutes until golden brown all over. Eat hot.
In the 90s, I lived in Turkey, teaching English as a foreign language. The best part of this was the food – piles of fresh fruit and vegetables at local markets, the sharp white cheese, salty olives and the olive oil-richness of traditional dishes. One of my favourites is börek – a wide range of different kinds of pastries made with filo and filled with meat or cheese. Turkish white cheese is often used to fill crisp deep-fried parcels shaped as long tubes called sigara börek.
One year my parents came over and we visited a holiday resort in the south-west of Turkey. Often on the menu was my favourite, sigara börek, literally translated as “cigarette pie”. From that day, eating cigarette pie has become a family tradition and one that we do every year on Christmas Day. The recipe I use is probably not traditional – but it is very tasty.
Jackie Vural
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