* * * *
Two weeks later at Pat’s house, Edna had been invited for Sunday lunch. Occasionally, they had a family dinner for the three of them. She often felt sad that David could not experience the Sunday dinner times held at her mother’s home.
‘Mother had nine of us to cook for. There was mum and dad, Jim and me, my sister Kate and her husband, Tom. That made six of us and then we had the children. That’s your mum and Kate’s two sons,’ she paused to think, ‘John and Andrew.’
David asked, ‘what did you enjoy the most Grandma? Did you have wine?
‘No, sometimes dad had a bottle of beer. Most of all I remember the room being full of people. Everyone seemed happy. In the very early days we started the meal with Yorkshire pudding, served with gravy and sauce made from fresh mint out of the garden. Funny but as I’m talking about it I can almost smell the mixture of mint sauce and beef gravy and mum’s puddings used to be just perfect. I can hear the edges crunch as you cut into them but the centre melted in your mouth.’
‘Didn’t you have anything else on the plate?’
‘No, the meat and two veg came next. Great mounds of hot food served onto your plate, and you had to eat it all up or you didn’t have any desert.’
Pat came into the room from the kitchen carrying plates full of spaghetti bolognaise. ‘I didn’t do any garlic bread; I know it starts your indigestion mum.’
The meal continued with talk of the Post Office closing. David expertly curled his spaghetti around the fork. He loved Italian food but given the choice he would always choose Chinese. Mum didn’t cook Chinese dishes so they rarely ate it at home. Some times they would bring a take-away back from the supermarket. Its not often we have a joint of meat either he thought.
‘Grandma, can we come to your house for Sunday dinner and have beef and Yorkshire pudding; just like you used to have it, with mint sauce and all.’
‘David!’ his mum looked as though she would have a fit. ‘Don’t be so cheeky. You can’t invite yourself. Take no notice of him.’
Edna thought, it is a long time since I entertained, but then again my ovens low down, its difficult to bend and see in to the back of it nowadays. Looking at Pat she made a suggestion. ‘What about if I come and cook the dinner here one day. Would that be acceptable?’
‘Mum, you don’t need to.’ Pat thought of her own childhood and the lovely dinners they used to have. ‘But if you would let David help,’ she stared at her son with that you’d-better-do-this look, ‘we would love you to cook Sunday dinner.’
‘I can put it in my history project,’ announced David.
‘It’s hardly history David,’ said Pat.
‘It is the way Grandma describes it,’ he said.
They all laughed although David hadn’t really intended it to be a joke.
‘How are we progressing with the project David?’ asked Grandma. She had come to Pat’s house to access the Internet. Over the last few days she had been introduced to the information highway. She loved that phrase. She didn’t fully understand what it meant but her library friends had been very impressed when she used it at the computing class. Mrs Williams her computer partner had been even more impressed when she showed her how to save data in the boxes they called Files. Thanks to David’s help she had become the star of the class.
‘I’ve got too much information Grandma; I’m going to have to get rid of a lot of the pages that we saved. I’m going to delete most of it.’
This is an interesting idea, Edna thought. We have saved lots of things into boxes. Things that we have never actually printed or held and now we don’t want them we are going to delete them. ‘What happens when you delete things David? You know what I mean; the things that didn’t exist in the first place!’
‘Well they did exist; we saved them into a File.’ David smiled, his Grandma understood a lot, but sometimes the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle didn’t fall into place. ‘We could just remove them from our computer altogether, that’s called deleting or if we thought they could be handy one day we could put them into history, that’s called archiving. Like you have archives at museums, you don’t want to lose the information but you don’t want to look at it much either.’
‘Yes, I see what you mean. It sounds like my back bedroom full of things that could come in handy one day. I’ve still got my very first record player under the bed.’
‘That’s it Grandma, the archive is just like your back bedroom. Don’t you sometimes call it a box room? One day you will decide to throw that old record player away. Take it to the tip or sell it. When you do it will be gone forever. You will have deleted it.’
‘Mmm, I shall have to think about this a bit more. Some things stay in my mind even when I’ve thrown them away.’
‘That’s what I’ve learnt from you. When I look up Mint Sauce on the Internet it tells me how to make it and what from, when I say Mint Sauce to you Grandma, you tell me where it used to grow in the garden, what the leaves felt like, how the next door neighbour would keep borrowing some, and so on. You’re marvellous Grandma, your memories better than a computer. You don’t need the record player under the bed you have all the memories that go with it in your head. The music, the parties, the dancing…’
‘The youth club,’ Edna carried on, ‘that first kiss.’ She fell silent thinking about the good times.
David looked at Grandma and his mum, ‘I’m going to call my history project, Grandma’s Memoirs.’
Afterwards, on the way home on the bus, Edna began to consider how she could get rid of lots of the things from her back bedroom. Yes computer skills had certainly made her think in a different way. He’s a good lad David. She would love to cook Sunday dinner for him and his mum.
Golden Surfer Page 4
