
June is a month of roses and, for us, of birthdays. Our youngest daughter left her twenties, Mr A achieved 64, who could ask for more. We celebrated with a sunny weekend in a Yorkshire folly large enough to accommodate three generations. Even with a combined age of 94, these two birthdays cannot compete with Great gran, Gi-gi. The same age as the queen, it’s her turn to celebrate today. I took cake and roses, we had a short walk in the sunshine.
Our neighbour’s a collector, mostly of art deco. She was talking of roses this week. She’s got a lovely garden, but she’s also quite besotted with the red and white English Rose kitchen she keeps in a garden room. It looked familiar, and prompted nostalgia in a child of the late fifties. She began to tell the story of how the kitchens were produced post-war in redeployed aircraft engineering works. The story sounded familiar, ‘I think our family’s cooker might have been English Rose’, I said.
I described its hob. An oblong griddle, warmed by the grill, a round hot plate and a single ‘red-ring’, a fierce element that was slow to glow. I was regularly warned it could be hot even when it wasn’t glowing. I tested it for myself, and lived for a while with parallel blisters across my fingers.
Its oven was small, it struggled with a Sunday roast; its grill burned everything. Toast was scraped each morning. It was tough, survived a minor fire to cross the Pennines in our uprooting. It fed our family into the 1970’s.
Marion doesn’t have the cooker. She’d like one, says they’re hard to find.