Margaret's letters

My nan's trifle, no contest. She made it every Sunday in a big cut-glass bowl that only came out for trifle and christenings. Sponge fingers, tinned peaches, proper custard she stood over with a wooden spoon, and hundreds and thousands on top that bled their colours into the cream if you didn't eat it fast enough. We always ate it fast enough.

The funny thing is I couldn't tell you what we had for the main course most weeks, but I can see that bowl like it's in front of me. She kept it in the sideboard wrapped in a tea towel, and when she died it came to me. It's in my sideboard now, wrapped in the same sort of tea towel, which I never planned — it just seemed the right way to keep it.

I've made her trifle myself maybe a hundred times. It's never once been as good. I used to think I was missing an ingredient, but I've come round to the idea that the ingredient was her kitchen.

Sandra Whittle, two doors down. We met when I was five because her cat got into our coal shed and we both went in after it. Neither of us got the cat, but we came out friends and stayed that way all through school.

We walked to school together every day for ten years. Rain, snow, everything. Her mum worked mornings so she'd call for me at twenty past eight and we'd take the long way round by the rec if we had anything worth discussing, which we nearly always did. She talked me into my first perm, which was a mistake, and out of at least one boyfriend, which wasn't.

We lost touch in our thirties the way you do — husbands, house moves, Christmas cards getting thinner. Then about ten years ago she found me again, and we had lunch, and within about four minutes we were laughing at the same things we laughed at in 1963. Some friendships just go dormant, like bulbs. That's what I've learned.

Sundays had a shape you could set your watch by. Church for Mum if she could get anyone to come with her, then Dad out on the pavement washing the Ford. He washed that Ford every Sunday of his life, rain or shine. I think he loved it nearly as much as he loved us, and I'd say the order was closer than Mum liked.

Then the roast, then the Light Programme on the wireless while Mum did the dishes and refused all offers of help, which was itself a tradition. And in summer, maybe twice a year, the big one — everyone in the Ford and off to the coast. Sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, a flask, Dad driving like the Queen was watching.

The summer I turned sixteen we did that drive and I had the window down the whole way, smelling the salt come in through the rusty bits. I don't know why that particular trip stayed with me over all the others, but it did. It still does.

At a dance at St Cuthbert's church hall. I want to say 1948, but it might have been the year after — Mum and Dad never agreed on it themselves, so I don't feel too bad.

The story, as it was always told, is that Dad asked her to dance and then discovered halfway through that he couldn't actually dance, not really. He'd learned one step from his sister that afternoon and was hoping the band would cooperate. Mum said she knew by the second song that he was a fraud, and stayed anyway, and that was more or less the pattern for the next forty years.

He walked her home the long way that night, past the gasworks of all places, because it bought him another ten minutes. She teased him about it forever after. When Dad died we found a photograph from around that time in his wallet, soft at the corners from being carried. She never knew he had it.

Your dad trod on my foot at the Locarno in the spring of 1972, and to his credit he's never once denied it. He always says he was pushed. Nobody pushed him.

He offered to buy me a lemonade by way of apology, and I said yes mostly because my shoe was ruined and I wanted to sit down. Then we sat talking until the lights came up, and he missed his last bus, and walked four miles home. He didn't tell me that part until much later — I got it out of his friend Colin at our wedding.

What I remember thinking, that first night, is that he listened. Plenty of lads that age could talk, but Brian actually wanted to know what you thought about things and then remembered it after. He still does it. He'll bring up something I said weeks ago, mid-washing-up, like the conversation never stopped. Fifty years, and the conversation never really has.

You're supposed to say your wedding day, and it was a lovely day, even with the rain and your uncle Ken's speech. But honestly? The morning after you were born.

Not the day itself — the day itself was long, and loud, and I'll spare you the details because you've heard them every birthday. I mean the morning after. It was very early, and the ward was quiet, and you were asleep on me, and the sun came through those big hospital windows all pale and new. Nobody needed anything from me for about an hour. I just looked at you.

I remember thinking, very clearly: right, so this is what all the fuss is about. Everything in my life got quietly rearranged in that hour and I've never wanted it back the old way.

Slow to start, then all engines by eleven. Mum in the kitchen from mid-morning, the smell of the roast working its way up the stairs, Dad out the front with his bucket and chamois. Me and your auntie Carol were supposed to be doing homework, and were in fact reading comics with our homework arranged on top for camouflage.

Dinner was one o'clock sharp, and it was dinner, not lunch — nobody said lunch on our street. Then the wireless, then Dad asleep in his chair pretending to be resting his eyes, then bread and butter and whatever cake there was for tea. And then that Sunday-evening feeling, with the bath and the school clothes laid out, which I can still feel now, aged seventy-one, on certain Sunday evenings in autumn.

It sounds dull, laid out like that. It wasn't. It was safe as houses, and I didn't know it was the good stuff while it was happening. That's the trick of it.

Health first, because at my age you learn not to take that as read. Then your dad, though don't tell him, it'll go to his head. Then you girls, and the fact that you both still ring me for no reason. Plenty of my friends wait by quiet phones. I never have.

My mum had a saying — "count it while it's in front of you." She meant blessings, money, children at the table, all of it. I used to think it was just one of her sayings. Now I catch myself doing it, at Christmas mostly, doing a little count around the table while everyone's talking over each other.

I'm grateful for ordinary weeks. That's the honest answer. A walk, the garden doing something, one of you on the phone, Brian making the tea wrong the same way he's made it wrong for fifty years. You spend your forties wanting remarkable things to happen and your seventies grateful they mostly didn't.

That you stay close. Not close like living-in-each-other's-pockets close — close like the phone rings and nobody has to think of a reason.

I hope the Christmases stay loud. I hope somebody keeps making Nan's trifle after I'm done making it, even though it won't taste right, because it's never tasted right and that's not the point of it. I hope the little ones grow up knowing they come from people who worked hard and laughed a lot and mostly did their best.

And I hope you keep asking each other questions like these. It's a funny thing — you think you know a person forty years, and then a question like this comes along and out falls something you never thought to say. Keep asking. There's more where this came from.