I hated eggs when I was a child. But my parents thought they would help me grow into a big strong girl, and so they gave me one egg every morning.
They would poach or boil it, and put tomato sauce on the plate. I would take tiny spoonfuls, and try to ignore the taste as I chewed and swallowed. Then I would try big mouthfuls, to get through the meal more quickly, but that gave me an explosion of the foulness, the egginess, the white and yellow repellant smoothness. Sometimes I would be unable to keep it down, and flood the breakfast table with my undigested horror.
My parents would also try egg sandwiches, but the bread was never enough to mask the hateful flavour. It became a battle of sorts, with my parents eyeing me defiantly, daring me to come up with another complaint, another reason to not eat such a healthful foodstuff, or another vomit.
I took to hiding the egg sandwiches behind a large cupboard in the dining room. When my mother was in the kitchen, I would silently rise from the chair, and, keeping my eyes on the door, stuff the vile matter into the narrow gap between wood and wall. Sometimes it wouldn’t all fit, and bits of egg would scatter on the floor, or stick to the painted wall. I would frantically scrape it off and poke it back, pick up the squares of bread and force them behind the cupboard with the dust and cobwebs and dead spiders, as far as I could.
When we were sitting at that dining table one evening, a movement on the wall near the cupboard caught my eye. It was a big, black cockroach, the second most revolting thing in the world after eggs, and it was heading towards the space behind the cupboard. My mother saw it and put down her knife and fork.
“Howard, there’s a huge cockroach on the wall.”
She wrinkled her nose and turned down the corners of her mouth.
“Good Lord, what a beast. I’ll get him.”
And in typical Dad fashion, he got a rolled up newspaper and proceeded to clobber the doomed creature with disproportionate violence.
“Lily, there seems to be something behind this cupboard,” he said.
I sat calmly eating my dinner of boiled vegetables and tinned ham, trying to ignore the inevitable.
Dad heaved the cupboard away from the wall enough to reveal a collection of little squares of sandwiches, the freshest at the top of course, with the layers becoming progressively greener, blacker and less distinguishable as sandwiches the further down the pile. The now thoroughly dead cockroach had obviously grown fat on my generous donations.
I tried, briefly, to lie my way out of the situation by saying I knew nothing about the decaying sandwiches, but my parents ignored me. They didn’t become as angry as I had feared, and in fact, they eased up with the eggs, whether poached, boiled, scrambled, fried or sandwiched, with or without tomato sauce, salt, or anything else.
I can tolerate eating eggs now, but occasionally the smell of hard boiled yolk and egg white takes me back to those breakfasts. My spoon pauses in the air, my stomach lurches, and I quietly put the sulphurous memory back on the plate.
