My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress by Christina McKenna

saucepan was forever on the boil. Endless ‘drops’ of tea were made and potatoes were a staple at lunchtime. Every day during holidays and at weekends I watched a great pot of Golden Wonders or Kerr’s Pinks splutter and fume at noon, the lid bubbling up with furious thrusts and sighing back down again, creating rivulets of steam that burst and sizzled their way across the angry hot plate.
    A good portion of my mother’s day was spent baking and cooking. On the floured surface of the scrubbed table she kneaded and rolled the dough for the daily batches of scones, carrying the floppy triangles to the fired griddle and patting down with her caked ‘masonry’ hands. This job could not be rushed or left, so she’d stand there, palette-knife at the ready, waiting, flipping over, and waiting again, before carrying the swollen farls to the cooling rack. Back and forth, back and forth she’d go, between table and stove, wearing a path, felling the hours, nursing her angst and woe. I wonder now how many miles she travelled between that table and stove in the course of her lifetime, just to give us our daily bread. When finished, she’d take down the goose wing that hung by the mantelshelf, and dust off the excess flour. The griddle was cooled on the floor before being returned to its nail behind the scullery door.
    In the oven of that vast range she roasted red meats and chicken for the Sunday lunch. She also cooked what she commonly referred to as her ‘oven-scone’. This was a mighty currant mountain which raised itself to hot perfection in the tarnished whiskey tray she used as a tin.
    For special occasions such as Christmas and birthdays she baked buns and cakes, and I’d help. Like old-timecook’s assistant Johnny Craddock I always got to do the menial tasks: measuring the flour, breaking the eggs into a bowl and greasing the tin. She would stand there mixing the ingredients with deceptive ease while I knelt on a stool beside her, the better to follow it all. It was all magical to me then: the process of turning the gloopy mixture into a delicious cake amazed me. I thought that mother was a wonder-worker, and in her way I suppose she was.
    The scullery was the source of all this industry and the place I loved to explore. It housed a collection of pots, pans and large bowls, and the hundredweight bag of Early Riser flour which went to bake all those wondrous cakes and scones. It sat on a stool behind the scullery door, its furled top steadily drooping down the more mother baked.
    She didn’t like having us under her feet when she was working in the scullery and she’d send us out to play. Our yard was an area flanked by great whitewashed barns, and it signified freedom and escape from our incommodious dwelling. During summer holidays we’d let our playful imaginations run loose there, or in the triangular garden to the front of the house, and the fields beyond. We’d tumble out of the back door with the aromas of eggs and baking bread in our nostrils – only to be pulled up short by the stench of manure spread on a nearby field. But there were other smells to compensate: sometimes we’d catch the exhilarating fragrance of freshly mown grass.
    That yard was my world. I knew by heart the topography of its landscape: the rise of chopped firewood at its farthest point, which held out the promise of warmth against colder days to come. A row of cowpats from barn door to field where the lazy bluebottles droned in a gauze of summer heat, lighting and straying in a ceaselessdance. I’d hold my nose and watch them, wondering how they could feed on the rotten cakes; all that lifting off and landing seemed to indicate a kind of circumscribed freedom I couldn’t understand.
    The grey Fergie tractor with its striated metal bonnet, like the breastplate of some superior Indian chief, stood to one side of the firewood. A circular saw did double duty: it split wood