RACHEL RODDY
Gasfire cookers are not just heavy, they’re awkward. This one was a smooth, white box with nothing for us to hold onto except the sharp bottom edges. It was an ordeal getting it up the stairs to our flat, our inability to cooperate exposed by a kitchen appliance. For two days it sat in the middle of the kitchen, disconnected and in the way. On the third day an authorised man came and for 90 euros talked about the risks of buying secondhand appliances while fitting a new green tube between the Gasfire and the mains. It was alive! As he tested each burner and knob, sending pantomime-villain hisses of gas into the air, he told us it was a model from the late 1960s, one of the last to be made entirely by hand, vintage, therefore much in demand. I took this (along with the fact he had gone ahead and connected it) as reassurance, despite a lingering smell of the gas that could at any moment ignite, explode and kill us. Once he’d gone I opened all the windows, wiped his oily fingerprints from the white enamel, put a pan of water on for pasta and made a slutty sauce of tomatoes, olives, capers and anchovies. Then while one pan trundled and the other spat, I admired my twentieth cooker.
Going right back to the beginning, I have no recollection of the first cooker in my life, or rather my parents’ cooker in their house in a town called Lymington. Mum’s recollection is vague, only that it was an inherited gas cooker with an eye-level canopy grill used for cheese on toast, bacon, and lamb chops. Now I’m a mother myself, the need to understand and label a child’s appetite is familiar, as if to do so is to understand them, therefore protect them. I was ‘never fussy or picky’ rather ‘a good feeder’ and ‘a good little eater’, banging my fists for a baby food called Farex. Dad’s photograph of me in Mum’s arms on a beach in 1973 seems evidence of this, the collar of her white flannel shirt poking over her red
