ABSTRACT
The tall narrow twin doors stretched from the low black-beamed ceiling down almost to the largely bare flagged floor. It was the only cupboard in the room – lounge, dining room, sitting room – the only downstairs room, apart from the tiny kitchen known as ‘the scullery’ to my parents. The cupboard doors were painted a dull rough matt black, a utilitarian colour, and a large old-fashioned key hung sloping from the worn fastener – lock would have been far too grand a hyperbole. The cupboard occupied the space between the front window which gave directly on to the main street of the village, and the fireplace. The latter was once the living heart of the Old Forge, as the three-centuries-old sandstone building was eponymously, and rather grandiloquently, known. It was the height of the Second World War, 1943, when I was just three, and the cupboard was – bare, or almost so. On special days a cloth bag was brought down from the top shelf. It normally occupied a space beside another, leather, bag which was never to be touched. The cloth bag contained an assortment of nuts. These – walnuts, peanuts, and hazelnuts harvested in autumn from the local woods – were a rare treat, and a source of plant protein in a period of great stringency and shortage. On rare visits to the seaside, Father would scale the precarious coastal cliffs for eggs from nesting gulls, to be brought down inside his old hat – on his head!
