Shortly after my father, Joseph Anthony Gerard Morrissey, passed away in 2009, I discovered three handwritten diary entries on loose A4 sheets. He had already typed up and published many other entries on a Slovakian website, which is unfortunately no longer online.
I do not know who wrote these pages or how to trace the author,
so I am sharing them here to finish what he started.
If you have any information about these entries or recognise who might have written them,
please get in touch by leaving a message or sending an email.
Enjoy reading.
What's in the Pot?
My partner and I use on our ancient wood-burning range—probably contemporary with our three-hundred-plus-year-old cottage—my long-departed 'aunt's' cooking pot and two skillets, one large and one small. The latter still have their original, detachable teak handles. They are extremely weighty, being made of heavy-gauge cast iron.
At first sight, when I unpacked them from a cardboard box they were far too heavy for, my partner pooh-poohed them. Understandably so, as these utensils are emphatically not for your Aga-owning bourgeois with a compulsory range of colourful, enamelled cast-iron casserole pots. My aunt, if she had known of these expensive kitchen accoutrements, would have heartily despised them.
My partner dismissed them because, apart from being extremely heavy (the large pot and skillet, even without their lids, are a two-handed job), they had an encrusted interior due to four generations of deposits from the soot, smoke, and ash of countless campfires. They were often buried deep in the embers of a dying campfire without their handles—partly to conserve firewood, but much more importantly, so as not to betray the camp to the watching Japanese by building up a fresh fire with its tell-tale plume of smoke.
However, for our ancient wood-burning range, they proved ideal. I showed, much to her surprise, that they were very functional and non-stick by virtue of having been cleaned from first use without detergent—just boiling water, and then, while still hot, the interior smeared with oil. This rendered them non-stick: better than any Chinese-made, Teflon-coated, aluminium frying pan guaranteed to last three years, but not four generations.
It was the sight of these ancient utensils quietly bubbling on the stove that inspired this diary, which is a homage to my aunt's memory and her remarkable life.
My mother's family was born into the Indian Raj and had lived there for generations. I was the last member of the family to be born there, in 1941, up in the hill station of Simla with its incongruous mock-Tudor bungalows and neat English gardens (no shortage of gardeners and water-boys, then or now). It is at the end of a narrow-gauge mountain railway and boasts a convalescence and maternity hospital because its elevation above the hot, teeming, dusty plains far below ensured a quiet, cool peace for the memsahibs, their babies, young children, and convalescing walking wounded. Both my grandmother and mother were born there.
When the Japanese—'Nips', as they were termed in those oh-so-politically-incorrect times—invaded Burma and approached India proper, the women and children of the Raj, including my mother and me, were evacuated by convoy via Cape Town to Britain, as Rommel was then threatening the Suez Canal.
