The Yellow Kitchen
The first thing I remember is the colour yellow. My mother's kitchen in the old house on Wellfield Road was painted the colour of butter, and the morning sun came through the back window and made the walls glow. I would have been three, maybe four. I was sitting on the cold linoleum floor in a nightgown, and she was at the stove with her back to me, stirring something. Porridge, probably. It was always porridge.
She was humming. I cannot tell you what the song was, I have tried for sixty years to place it, but I can still hear the shape of it. A little falling phrase, like a question she was asking herself. The kettle was on. The radio was on too, but turned down so low it was just a murmur, the way my father liked it in the morning before he had finished his first cigarette.
I remember reaching out to touch the wallpaper beside me. It had small blue flowers on it, and one of them was peeling away at the corner where the wall met the skirting board. I worked my fingernail under the edge and pulled, very slowly, the way a child pulls at a scab. A long strip came away in my hand. I was delighted. I held it up to show her.
She turned and saw the strip of wallpaper, and saw my face, and she did not shout. That is the thing I remember most clearly. She did not shout. She knelt down on the linoleum in her dressing gown and she looked at it for a long time, as if I had brought her a leaf or a feather, something from outside. And then she said, 'Well. That wanted to come off, didn't it.'
She took the strip from me and she folded it once, and she put it in the pocket of her dressing gown. Then she lifted me up and sat me on the counter beside the stove and gave me a wooden spoon to hold, and we finished the porridge together.
I have thought about that morning more times than I can count. My mother was not a soft woman. She had buried a child before me and would bury another after, and the war had made her flinty in ways I only understood much later. But on that morning, in the yellow kitchen, she chose to be gentle with me. I think she chose it on purpose. I think she knew I would remember.
When she died in 1987, I found a small wooden box in the drawer of her bedside table. Inside it were three things: my father's wedding ring, a pressed violet from her own mother's garden, and a folded strip of blue-flowered wallpaper, brittle and brown at the edges, that she had carried with her through four house moves and forty-three years.