THE PASTRY CUTTERS

“...she was rightly proud of her baking and made everything from scratch….”

My grandmother was born in England just after World War I, the third oldest of 13 children, though only eight lived to adulthood. The family was poor. During the Great Depression, her father worked as a laborer, digging reservoirs, and they moved with him from job site to job site. After he died of tuberculosis when Grandma was 14, she left school to move into the local gentry's manor—"the big house"—and go into service, first as a nanny, then in the kitchen. Early in World War II, when she was 20, she saved her ration books to buy a wedding dress and married my granddad while he was home on leave.

Perhaps because of the hard start to her life, Grandma was tough and critical, had a spiteful tongue and did not tolerate fools. But as the first-born grandchild, I was lucky to bask in her unwavering love and approval. Whether she was gently correcting my grip on my knitting needles or exaggerating my grades to her friends, I could do no wrong.

My sister and I often spent weekends at our grandparents’ tiny home, where Grandma let me help in the kitchen. Decades after working in the big house, she was still rightly proud of her baking and made everything from scratch—Christmas cake and trifles, cheese straws and mince pies—these cutters giving her pastry its extra-fancy scalloped edges. Her patience with me, as I learned to roll dough or cut in butter or separate an egg, was endless.

Sunday afternoons, we’d promenade along Southend pier, her arm tucked in mine, her coat pulled tight, her skirt blowing in the cold wind because “a lady doesn’t wear trousers.” She cared about appearances and was in fact a bit of a snob. One of the great occasions of her life was a garden party at Buckingham Palace, held to thank people for service to the Royal British Legion. While she and hundreds of others waited to be given their poppy brooches by the queen, my granddad did some "pruning" in the royal gardens. Back home, he grew the cuttings, and ever after Grandma happily boasted that her roses came from the palace.

When I was 13, my mom remarried and we moved to Canada. Any sadness Grandma felt was buried beneath her excitement. We were going to live on the other side of the world! She’d rarely left her village, and my aunt had moved only as far as the next street; our going such a distance, to such an unknown place, astonished her.

When she visited the first summer, I helped her put up dozens of jars of jam, standing beside her at the stove crushing black berries with a long wooden spoon, pouring paraffin wax into the jars after they were filled and the jam had cooled. She listened closely as I told her about my new school, the kids I’d met, the difficulty I felt fitting in. Canada was overwhelming, but she was the same as ever, and her constancy rooted me.

She came to see us every couple of years until dementia took hold. Eventually she could no longer care for herself and moved into a home. But even then I knew how proud she was of me, the only member of her family to go to university and run their own business—a bakery! I knew how much it meant when I named my daughter after her. And when I use her pastry cutters, which are among the few things I inherited from her after she died, I know that she’s still guiding my hands.

—Alison Colwell

Grandma Laura Slaughter, age 81, at my cousin’s wedding in 2000.

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Alison Colwell is a writer, mother, domestic-violence survivor and community organizer living on Galiano Island in Canada. Her work has been published in The Humber Literary Review, The Ocotillo Review, Roi Faineant Literary Press, Grist and elsewhere.

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