Kit de Waal was involved in a previous iteration of the project I’m working on, which resulted in this collection of short stories and essays.

Food is one of the things we associate most strongly with home. De Waal’s shortest of short stories is a list of the food that she grew up with:

“Sliceable, fry-able, pink and trembly Spam, steak and kidney pies cooked in a tin that opened with an exciting key. Tinned pork in see-through jelly. Red, molten corned-beef hash, sardines – skin, flesh and vertebrae – and six pigs’ trotters in lemony water, the lungs of a chicken, the neck of a lamb. Ribs.”

The list is full of nostalgia, longing, familial happiness; reading it is like being wrapped up in a warm coat:

“And cocoa with sugar and unexpected, unaccountable heart-lifting chocolate shortbread biscuits after a winter’s night shift from a silent father who thought of his children on his long walk home.”

Collected in Common People: An Anthology of Working-class Writers, edited by Kit de Waal, Unbound, 2019