Cabbage and Semolina
Amazon.com Cabbage and Semolina
My review -
This
novella length work is effectively a series of short essays on aspects of life
as a child in 1950s Britain. As I grew up in this era myself, I found lots of
echoes of my own early years. The title refers to school meals in the 1950s
when rationing was still a recent memory, for the adults at least. The
ubiquitous Sunday Tea was exactly the same in my own Manchester household. Why,
I wonder? There are tender reminiscences of grandparents, more robust tellings
of the ways we ‘played out’ and the sort of holidays we had. It’s told with a
warmth and an eye to detail which bring the past back to life. The style is
conversational so I kept wanting to chip in with ‘do you remember…’ details of
my own.
The author
has a keen interest in family history and regrets that her mother-in-law didn’t
write down her own story. With the rise of ebook publishing, it’s so much
easier for these individual reminiscences to be recorded. Documents like
Cabbage and Semolina will become a useful word-of-mouth archive for the future.
Apart from which it’s a really interesting read.
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