Memories of my mother

I’m under way with a fish pie. This time we’re having some smoked haddock. It’s an unusual pie. It’s shortcrust pastry top & bottom. The filling consists of the poached smoked haddock in a very thick cheese sauce. When I put the filling in, I will make two wells, one for each raw egg, I scatter some parsley on top of the eggs, then cover the pie with the second piece of pastry. I do a similar sort of pie using rashers of back bacon. I’m looking forward to it. I can’t help wondering if I wouldn’t be wise to make some more liquid cheese sauce to serve with it as it may be a bit dry. I’m telling myself it will be okay as it is. After all, this is a pie I’ve made before & not noted the need for any extra sauce.

Meanwhile the sun is shining. My washing is out & drying. Some large, deep purple irises have opened out in the last day or two. Some sage is bursting into bluey purple flower around the base of the magnolia tree. Both the white & the pink azaleas have opened up to join their coral kin.

My thoughts are on my mother at the moment. The novel I’m reading, “Dance of Death” by E. Marston, is set during the First World War. One of the first things that happens is the first successful shooting down of a Zeppelin on a raid over London in 1916. My mother was a child during the First World War. I remember her telling me of hiding under the school desk when the Zeppelins passed overhead. She was in Coventry at the time. Much of her free time was spent knitting socks etc. for the troops at the Front.

It’s strange how rarely you seem to hear mention of Zeppelins in the history of the First World War, & the fear they must have inspired. I suppose they were the first vehicle to bring war to civilians at a distance from the battlefield. Previously, unless you lived in the pathway of the rival armies or lived along the coast where raiding parties might arrive, civilians would have been largely untouched by any war around them. Now we take bombing from the skies as a normal aspect of warfare.

My book, incidentally, is not about the war. It is a murder detective story that just happens to be set at that period. My mind, however, just keeps wandering off to the stories my mother used to tell me in my childhood.