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Saturday 22 January 2022

Strange Conversation

Noted down at the time as part of a discussion about how lucky we are to have food.

Me: Grandpa (i.e. my father) said that when he was younger, if you were eating an apple in the street then children would come up to you and ask “Can I have your apple core Mister?”

Daughter aged 5: Why? Weren’t you allowed to eat apples inside?

Me: Yes, but if you ate them inside the children wouldn’t see you eating them.

Daughter: They could have looked in through the window.

50 comments:

  1. Funny! Have you ever heard of the old TV show "Kids Say the Darndest Things" that used to be hosted by Art Linkletter? It was full of stuff like this. (I never saw the show but I read some of his books about it.)

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    1. I think I've seen clips of the programme, and it was just like that.

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  2. Sometimes the reasoning of a five year old is more eacting than one's own.

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    1. I can't imagine why she thought it might have been forbidden to eat apples in the house.

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  4. I read fhis a couple of times; it is still a strange conversation.

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    1. I think it all at cross-purposes, but as said above, I can't imagine why she thought eating apples inside might not be allowed.

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  5. Must be why my late Father used to eat an apple right down to the stalk - Ugh

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    1. Ugh indeed. Pips and everything. But we grew up in a post-war age of plenty.

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    2. F says the pips have an almond flavour. She eats her apples like a horse.... (The pips are probably poisonous or something, it might explain a few weirdities around here.)

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  6. I love the way children think!

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  7. *Can I have your apple core?*

    Children asked this of other children, I had forgotten.
    If it was a girl and you liked her face, you would leave her a biggish bit of the apple on the core.

    Once again Tasker takes us down the Memory Tunnel of childhood.
    There is a Happy Land far, far away.

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    1. I believe my dad meant they were asking for it from him as an adult, but either way it's hard to imagine now that there would be some children in the 30s and 40s for whom even an apple core was a luxury.

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    2. Children would ask the greengrocer, *Any chipped fruit, Mister?*

      My father said there was a fruit shop near the Glasgow Empire Theatre, and people would buy rotten tomatoes to toss at the bad acts. Glaswegians were and are a rough lot.

      When I said the Memory Tunnel I was thinking of the combes in the Cotswolds of Gloucestershire or the sunken leafy roads in Devon.
      They lead to the Happy Lands, the high sunny fields.

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  8. As a kid, I was extremely picky about food that someone else had touched. I would never have asked others for their apple cores (or any other leftovers). But then I was a kid in the 1970s and we did not suffer shortage of food.

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    1. Neither would I in the 50s and 60s. My wife said yuk - just imagine it now, the core covered in someone else's covid-laced saliva. It nearly put me off my food.

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    2. Risking Covid, I might be persuaded to share a Pink Lady with Patricia Arquette, a Honeycrisp with Helena Bonham-Carter, or a Golden Delicious with Claire Goose.
      I think a ripe fig would be the Forbidden Fruit of choice with Irene Jacob, the French-Swiss actress with a Mensa brain.

      The Forbidden Fruit in Genesis was the Magic Mushroom: Adam and Eve were tripping out of their heads just like the kids today on DMT and Ayahuasca.
      *Ye shall be like gods.*

      *Does This Medieval Fresco Show A Hallucinogenic Mushroom in the Garden of Eden?* Emma Betuel 2021. Atlas Obscura.

      The tapestry is in a village 200 miles south of France.
      And those are definitely not apples or my name isn't Timothy Leary.

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    3. Haggerty reminds me of a song a (very slightly famous) friend in Germany composed and sings (he is the leader of our narrow boat trips through England): "From you I want to get a contagious disease" - a song which makes me shudder with disgust :-)

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    4. Promiscuity can be disgusting and so are contagious diseases.

      What is wrong with sharing a piece of fruit with a member of the opposite sex?
      Young couples eat off each other's plates, a habit I never acquired.
      Lovers drink from the same wineglass, a token of their esteem.
      The communion cup is passed around at the Lord's Supper, though the practice was discontinued during the plague.

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    5. I might have misunderstood (in my broken English), Haggerty: I thought that you share a fruit just to risk a disease to get immunised by a lovely lady (that is what those who do not want to be vaccinated preach here in Germany).
      I am not afraid to let Adam bite from the same apple. :-)

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    6. Mr. Haggerty's thought processes are often beyond me, but he is always a gentleman.

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  9. But why would they want the apple core? To feed to their chickens? Or to plant the seeds and hope to eventually have their own apples?

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    1. To eat. I guess it might have been at the time of year when apples weren't in plentiful supply.

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  10. What kind of apple was it? I am rather partial to those Pink Lady apples myself but I don't mind a nice Gala or a Braeburn.

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    1. Would you share a jug of Scrumpy with Sadie Frost?
      You could interview her about her new film, *Quant* for your blog.
      Be careful. Sadie's single again.

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    2. It wouldn't have been any of those varieties in the thirties.

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    3. Thirties? I am so sorry. I never realised you were so ancient.

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    4. i.e. you didn't read it very carefully.

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  11. Dear Tasker, I can follow the thoughts of your grandchild very well:
    if you, as a happy child of our opulent time (in our countries most of us have to eat enough), you cannot imagine that something like an apple once was scarce - the child has only the option to think that it was impolite or indecent to eat an apple in the street (our English teacher at school, a real Lady, told us girls - but not the boys in my class - NOT to lick at an ice cream scone while walking down the street!) and then, if you are an obedient child, I think it is logical to ask whether you weren't allowed to eat them inside. She sees no reason why you should eat it in the road. Makes me think of a Beatles' title "Whydon't we do it in the Road?"

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    1. Well, I'd never have worked that out myself but what you say makes perfect sense.

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    2. I remember school assemblies where we were told that while in uniform our berets were always to be on our heads, not just carried and we were NEVER to be seen eating while walking in the streets if we were in uniform.

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    3. River, as responded to another comment, I'd never eat in the street unless on some kind of outing, and even then I wouldn't walk about eating or drinking. It looks common. Coincidentally, the first part of your post anticipates something I'm just starting to get ready to post, so much so that you had me worried I'd pressed Publish before it was ready.

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  12. I remember in the 70's having to eat my apples very quickly as my Dalmation dog would be heavily drooling for the core.

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  13. I would say what your child said and that's today.

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    1. Putting your comment together with Britta's, it beomes clear that female and male reasoning are different.

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    2. I made that observation of one of my recent posts where the male comments to the said post all came from a different angle to the female ones.

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    3. Yin and Yang - boys, you are different, and I am very happy about that.

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  14. Your grandfather's story is one that strikes a chord and I think I've heard similar stories. I can recall children in the inner city of Liverpool who would beg food from me in the 'Sixties.

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    1. I never knew it when I was growing up, but I never ate anything in the street and still don't except for such as an ice cream on holiday. But I've seen reports of severe poverty in Britain into the seventies and even the eighties.

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  15. Strange conversation, but maybe not as you think about people who have less. In my growing up years, mustard sandwiches were a thing when you had little to eat. Did they want the core to eat, or did they do something else with the core? Spotted you on a mutual friends blog and thought I'd pop in to say hi. It's always fun to meet a new blogger.

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    1. Hi Sandy. Thanks for taking a look at my blog. Yes, they wanted it to eat. Although it's hard to imagine during these days of plenty, there were some families for whom even the core of an apple would be a rare delicacy.

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  16. An astute comment.

    Your post reminds me of an experience I had when visiting SW Germany in 1994. An elderly woman had watched me toss out what looked to her to be a perfectly good fish sandwich. What she didn't know was that the fish had turned making the lunch inedible. I thought how she had likely experienced deprivation in her long life & what I'd done was tantamount to a crime.

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    1. We don't know what hardship is now in the affluent West.

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  17. My father was born in 1903, became an orphan and joined the army in 1920, for food as much as an education. That apple story could be him, unless he asked it for his sisters. He fed them on "coffee sop". No idea how he made coffee, the "sop" was day old bread from the baker. Their other meal was oatmeal every morning, left out by his grandmother. He was the oldest.

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    1. Our parents and grandparents ate all kinds of things we wouldn't touch now. From my childhood I remember bread and dripping, and chitlings.

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  18. Sad to think of hungry children.

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    1. I think it must be the feeling as a parent of being unable to provide that is hard to take, although, of course, in some parts of the world it gets beyond worse.

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    2. You are, of course, right.

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