"Got any food?"

When I was 5 my mother decided we should become vegetarian. I was excited about this new family policy though sorry to lose the sausages. What happened was that my Irish grandmother had sent my mother a chicken in the post because she thought we didn’t eat properly. My mother rarely talked about her past but when she did it was often strangely unfiltered. I was in my early teens when she elaborated on my grandmother’s package: when it arrived she said, she was in the middle of an acid trip and when she opened it she saw a carcass writhing with maggot infestation. So we became vegetarian for a while.
A year later when we moved to Morocco there was not enough food on hand to be fussy about what we ate. There were men who sold little cups of snails in a spicy broth in the main square, these were delicious. There was a whole area where they sold cooked sheep’s heads, laid out on tables, smelling sickening. We never ate those. My main memory of childhood was being hungry. Back home in England we seemed to have no food that didn’t take 24 hours to cook. In our kitchen cupboard there were jars of dried lentils and beans that needed overnight soaking before hours of cooking. Mum would sometimes make us cheese on toast for breakfast with a sliver of onion on top. It was incredible. Snacks became an almost fetishised fantasy for me. When I went round to my friends’ houses the first thing I would say was ‘Got any food?’ I would eye up their cute packed lunch treats at school like an obsessed dog until they gave me something. It was mildly humiliating but always worth it for the outcome. When we eventually moved in with a father and his three daughters and became a bigger family with normal meals, I would stuff myself and lie under the table groaning with a stomach ache. This went on until my self-denial phase set in after studying the Spartans of Ancient Greece at school. I remember thinking I could never get married as I couldn’t imagine eating in front of anyone I really liked in a normal way. When I did eventually get married, my husband was a marvellous cook and made a series of delicious rich dishes... until I had to confess that my terrible stomach aches were to do with his wonderful preparations.