Bradford Lad: Cheese Again!
Mike Coatesworth tells how his enterprising Aunt Chrissie dealt with the problem of the white cheese sandwiches.
I was brought up on porridge for breakfast and dripping and bread for other meals. As a treat there was a cooked dinner on Sundays. I think this diet did me good.
One day my stepmother introduced my brother and me to white cheese and potted meat. The potted meat was okay, but I could never stomach the cheese. I hated it. I scraped it off the bread, opened the back door, then threw it into a neighbour's garden.
Is the cheese nice? my stepmother asked standing in front of me with her hands on her hips, watching as I chewed the cheeseless bread.
I told her that it was very nice. That was a big mistake. She promptly gave me another cheese sandwich.
From then on it was white cheese sandwiches four times a week, and potted meat sandwiches on the other three days. I continued to scrape the cheese from my bread and throw it into the next-door garden. I became adept at ensuring that the back door was open at meal times, and of disposing of the cheese quickly and efficiently. I imagined the cheese piling up day by day, but there were bushes and hedges in the next door garden, and our neighbour didn't do much gardening.
Eventually I got fed up of only having bread and butter for dinner. I told my Aunt Chrissie what had been going on.
She smiled, gave me a hug, ruffled my hair and told me she would take care of the matter.
That night when I came home from school I sat down to a plate of dripping and bread. A huge grin appeared on my features. How had my aunt succeeded in putting a stop to the white cheese sandwiches? I didn't care. I just tucked into the bread and dripping.
Later I did ask Aunt Chrissie how she had persuaded by stepmother to stop serving up cheese sandwiches. My clever Aunt had said that my brother and I were putting on weight, and dairy products were known to do that. We were rapidly becoming too big for our clothes, so money would soon have to be spent on new clothes. Aunt Chrissie had said that it was a well known fact that dripping and bread did not produce the same weight increases as cheese and bread.
From that night on it was dripping sandwiches. We even got extra slices of bread. I'm not sure why my stepmother did this. Perhaps, after listening to my persuasive Aunt Chrissie, she had convinced herself that extra dripping and bread might actually result in weight loss.
