1968
My birthday, ten years old. For the first year in my memory, Mrs D. hasn’t baked a birthday cake. When I come home from school, in the place of my favourite home-made chocolate sponge is a square, shop-bought, fruit cake. She has slathered some icing across the top as a disguise and stuck in ten candles but I recognise it: O’Connor’s Fruit Cake, which we eat often, with the chewy raisins and the plastic red cherries like clown’s noses cut in half.
She is sitting at the table with Gran, half-smoked cigarettes squashed into zigzags in the ashtray in front of her. I suppose she hasn’t baked because she hasn’t the heart for it.
That’s what she says about everything these days. Some mornings she hasn’t the heart to get out of bed. When she is up, she doesn’t bustle and boss, but stays h
