Milk

 I have had the story circled abroad that each morning of my childhood I woke to the sound of burnt toast being scraped into the sink and the whirr of the blender mixing dried milk powder with water; the thin bubbling result of which later warmly topped my breakfast cereal. Even after several years, and probably thousands of pounds of therapy, a small part of me requires the telling of my juvenescence to exaggerate its financially-impoverished state. 

A photograph of me and my two older sisters dressed for a party in the early to mid-eighties evidences the uncomfortable truth: we had a receptacle outside the front door for the milkman to clink his bottles into. At some time in my first decade we drank real milk from real cows like all the other families, but I am too ungrateful to remember. No single memory of childhood can sum the whole lot up, as convenient as I have found that motif. The begrudging truth must be that sometimes we had more to eat and drink than at others and that although the rehydrated milk powder certainly featured, sometimes lumpily, it was not the only thing on offer for my first 18 years. 

There was real milk at school of course. Those one-third-of-a-pint cartons which we emptied through a straw at morning break in the canteen. The cartons were white with a largely green pattern or slogan and I remember a vague sense of it being my duty to drink the contents, but feeling very happy to do so. It was fun to open the gable-topped carton and slurp. It was cold and refreshing. Primary school was full of happy, milky memories.  

The pinnacle of remembered breakfasts were those taken at the extendable table in my Aunt’s Hertfordshire home where we had our annual summer holiday. Here I remember real milk, decanted into a heavy ceramic jug, endlessly refilled, to be poured over up to six different kinds of cereal and followed by as many slices of toasted white bread as we desired, topped with real butter and Aunty R’s marmalade. I truly believed that my cousins lived this blessed life all year ‘round and was about as jealous as I could manage on a full stomach.