Magpie Tales#62

Our hostess, Willow at Willow Manor serves up a hearty breakfast. A real Willow Pattern prompt!

  

Not The Full Picture!

  I sometimes stayed at my Grandma's on Saturday and she would fry eggs for my Sunday breakfast and put them on a blue and white plate she called her willow pattern. The plate had a picture and when she gave me my breakfast she said a poem that told the story of the picture. The eggs covered most of the picture and I would eat the eggs bit by bit so that the things in the picture showed through the cuts I made in the eggs. Then Grandma said, "Don't pick at your breakfast, child!" because how was she to know what I was doing?  I had to remember the picture and the poem, and I had to make my cut-outs in the right order, and after a few breakfasts at Grandma's I got quite good at it. One Sunday I asked her could I have the little pointy knife she called her fruit knife.

  "Goodness, Lucy! What for?"

  "To make smaller holes. Please Gran?" All I wanted was to cut closer to the outlines of the birds, the little ship, the men on the bridge, the willow tree. It wasn't as if I didn't eat the cut out bits. I ate one piece while I worked out where the next hole had to be. Grandma made lovely fried eggs, just fried enough so the yolk wasn't so runny it filled up the holes. If it did I mopped it up with bits of toast so I could see the picture properly.

  Grandma frowned but gave me the knife from her knife drawer and went away to the telephone and when she came back, my eggs looked like a lace hankie with the fence and the apple tree and the temple and everything showing through. Then I ate the egg hankie and the toast and asked Gran what an eating disorder was.

  "I heard you on the phone talking about an eating disorder or something. That was a nice breakfast, Gran."

  "I'm happy to see you finished it. At last."

   After that, Grandma didn't always make fried eggs. Sometimes it was just cornflakes, or sausage and tomatoes on a white plate and all you can do with sausage is eat a little tiddy piece from one end and then a tiddy piece from the other till you get to the middle bit and eat that and that's not much fun, and I could do that at home anyway. When I asked Mum if we could get a plate with the willow pattern for fried eggs she said they were too expensive and too many fried eggs gave you colseterol or something so I put on my sulking face for a bit, which I would never do at Grandma's. Mum wouldn't tell me about eating disorder either and I didn't tell her about cutting holes in the eggs to show the picture.

  But I never forgot Grandma's little poem.