Seeing the photo each morning makes me smile as I remember playing with my cousin Ronald. I want his tricycle. I also want his black cowboy hat, the jacket with its sheriff's badge, and the studded black holster with a gun. Recognising my covetous stare, Ronald remains in the saddle of his new red Triang tricycle and aims his gun at me. "Bang!" The caps explode on cue. Looking over his shoulder, he grins, riding past as I watch from under my sunbonnet. Mother wants to take his photo. "Stand together," Mother orders.
Apprehensive at being parted from his tricycle, Ronald looks at me, gun in hand. We stand in the heat, a cowboy and his cousin, fidgeting in the sun. I almost combust with excitement at Auntie Kay's suggestion: "Ronald, let Jacqueline sit on the bike for a photo." Biting his lip, he stands behind me, one hand touching his tricycle possessively. I sit astride the glorious thing. "Smile," Mother instructs. I'm already smiling.
As teenagers, Ronald and I often see each other at the Saturday hop. For one dance, we'll jostle our way on to the floor, twisting and twirling to the sounds of the 60s. Tonight, he's with Sandra, a new girlfriend. Looking sharper than ever, he's wearing a black suit, black shirt and a silver-tipped bootlace neck-tie held in place by a white skull with vacant eyes. "Howdy, partner. Fab neck-tie. Makes you look like a rootin' tootin' cowboy," I laugh, remembering his cowboy outfit.
He introduces Sandra and we chatter happily until the music starts. At the end of the evening, Ronald presses something into my hand. "A present," he grins. Wearing the neck-tie, I blow a kiss in his direction, laughing.
Later, I'm selling records to help finance my move to London and Ronald sifts through my collection. He's learned to play guitar and is in a band. "We've even got bookings," he smiles modestly. "Sandra will have to watch out for the groupies," I joke. His genial expression changes. "Because she's Protestant, Mother objects, but I'm still seeing her."
He hands over the cash for his records, wishing me luck. "We might end up in London, with you," he smiles wryly. We exchange goodbyes and promise to write.
Battling with our own problems, we never write during the next two years.
My two-year-old daughter and I happen to be in Dublin with my terminally ill mother when she hears the news.
"Dead? How can Ronald be bloody dead? He's 22," I rage.
"Last night … on stage … his guitar … electrocuted ... in front of Sandra," Mother weeps.
She demurs at my intention to see Ronald. "I have to say goodbye to him and I don't care what he looks like. He's still Ronald," I reason.
In the mortuary, Ronald is dressed in a shroud. I ignore his bluish appearance. Remembering him dressed in his black suit and shirt, the silver-tipped bootlace necktie with the grinning skull and vacant eyes, I smile. He's still Ronald, my rootin' tootin' cowboy cousin. Jackie Kirby
Sailing by Rod Stewart
"I am sailing, I am sailing/home again 'cross the sea"
Dams, caves, dingoes, the bush, giant snakes, sun and sand so hot you couldn't stand on it or it would burn your bare feet – that was all I'd known for most of my childhood growing up in Central Africa. I hardly put a pair of shoes on between the ages of four and 10. My sisters and I were bought up as bush babies, travelling around the copper belt in Central Africa with our newly divorced mother – my parents separated not long after we arrived in Zambia in 1970. It was a wild, free, sun-bleached childhood.
After years of travelling and adventure, we ended up in Durban, living close to the beach. But after years of idyllic living in the bush in small towns, apartheid South Africa was a bit more dangerous and my mum decided that we'd move back to the UK.
Around Christmas 1975, I remember standing on the balcony of our Durban flat with a transistor radio balanced on the low wall, Rod Stewart's Sailing wafting out, and I remember feeling the heat and tasting the salt of the sea air. "I am sailing, I am sailing, home again, 'cross the sea. I am sailing, stormy waters, to be near you, to be free," in his raspy, anguished tones. It was ominous.
Weeks later, in January, we flew, rather than sailed across the sea, and arrived at a snowy Heathrow airport with no coats.
School, concrete, spaghetti junction – a deprived, poor childhood in urban Birmingham awaited. No more barefoot adventures, no more freedom. It seemed like no more childhood.
Every time I hear that song I want to cry and cry. Sailing represents the end of a magical childhood, and the beginning of a much bleaker, greyer, more austere chapter of my life. Sally Goble
Ingredients
1 packet ready-made pastry (flaky is best)
8 to 10 rashers of thickish, streaky bacon
6 to 8 eggs
3 or 4 largish potatoes, thinly sliced
1 carton of cream – single or double
Line the bottom of a pie dish with bacon and crack the eggs on top of it, spreading them evenly across. Gently layer sliced potatoes over the eggs and cover with a thin layer of cream. Season to taste and top the lot with a pastry lid, pierced in the centre. Bake in a preheated oven – 10 mins at 220C, followed by 20 to 30 mins at 180C – until the potatoes give to a sharp knife. Delicious hot or cold, especially in furtive slices carved off when passing the fridge.
An intelligent, no-nonsense Yorkshire-woman with strong socialist and feminist beliefs, my father's sister Dorothy emigrated to New Zealand as a "£10 pom" to escape 50s Britain, where boys got first look in on every aspect of society. Bright enough to have been a doctor, she'd instead gone into nursing, a career in which she flourished and eventually offered the possibility of a new life in any commonwealth country she liked. Choosing New Zealand over Canada, she told her parents she'd be gone for two years. Fifty years later, she was still there and fiercely proud to be a Kiwi.
My husband and I arrived in New Zealand in time to celebrate Dorothy's 40th wedding anniversary to Dixie – an engineer-cum-sheep farmer she'd met on the six-week sea voyage over. As my father and Dorothy had rarely kept in touch, she was pretty much a stranger to me when we met that first time in July 1995. "She's feisty," my backpacking brother told me. "Whatever you do, don't call her Dot," warned her daughter Rachael. "She detests it."
To everyone's surprise, we found neither to be true. "We don't argue, we debate, don't we?" she said to my husband, standing beside him and drying pots as he washed them. She greatly enjoyed examining our viewpoints and challenging entrenched beliefs – "Now you know that's not true, don't you?" – all with good-humoured affection and, usually, a slab of cake.
She was generous with her time, her experience, her possessions, her home, which we visited as much as we could during our holiday, more often than not sitting with them both at the kitchen table, discussing every aspect of life and eating Dorothy's delicious, home-cooked food, including egg and bacon pie. It was a tasty, satisfying dish from her wartime childhood, which came to stand as a reminder of everything Dorothy meant to us. For some years after she'd make one specially for those precious times we managed to return to her kitchen table, all the way down at the bottom of the world. Alison Mott
We will pay £25 for every Letter to, Playlist, Snapshot or We love to eat we publish. Write to Family Life, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email family@guardian.co.uk. Please include your address and phone number
