David Malouf

And she did the cooking and she did the cleaning and she mostly brought my sister and me up.

And we sometimes went to town with her and sometimes with my mother, but we had been told that you never asked for anything in town to be bought.

There's no point.

There'll be lots of things on counters and lots of things that you might want, but there is no point in asking for them because they were only there for show.

And so I spent a very part of my small boyhood

believing that town was this series of shops which was a bit like the Easter exhibition.

Right, it was a showcase.

It was a showcase, yeah, but nothing was really the same.

That's pretty good.

I wish I'd thought of that with my own kids, I think.

What kind of food did your grandparents eat?

My grandparents ate proper Lebanese food.

I mean, they ate cabbage rolls and they made kibi, which is meat and ground wheat.

They made tabbouleh, what I now know as tabbouleh salad.

They also made proper toss salad.

And they, to my sister and my disgust, they put oil on almost everything.

Oil in those days, olive oil, was something you bought in a small blue bottle at the chemist.

And it was medicinal.

Really?

Yes, and you mostly took it to open your bowels.