How old was l, the year I had two birthday cakes? It must have been a special birthday; was I as old as 10? I feel I was younger. Perhaps my mother was exploring cake decorating that year? (Seeking fulfilment through hobbies, like other housewives of her time and place. Until finally she went out and found meaningful work – in an era when middle-class women didn’t. My Dad agonised that people would think he couldn’t support his family. But she was going mad from boredom and lack of purpose.... However, all that came later.)
It took all day, the day before the party. My aunty came to help. The main cake was a halved oval, curved top widening to flat bottom; a hollow tube down the centre. In this they stood a doll – a teenage doll, precursor of Barbie. Her top half was dressed in a pale blue bodice. The cake formed her long blue skirt, fit for a princess at a ball, painstakingly iced in deep pink loops like frills and ribbons, perfectly symmetrical. Mum was so proud of it.
The second cake was almost an afterthought, because she’d invited so many kids – from the neighbourhood, from school, and all my cousins. It was a regular sponge, round, with a flat circle hollowed out at the top. (Did they have special cake tins for these strange shapes?) Into that she poured green jelly, to just below the outer rim. Set, it became a pool of deep green water on which they placed tiny plaster frogs, water lilies with sugary leaves and petals, and several fairy figures. It was a quick and easy job.
How disappointing for Mum that it was the pool which enchanted the children, not the fairy princess. (Well, we were the generation who grew up to be rockers and Women’s Libbers!)
How disappointing for me, now, that I never thought to tell her, while she was still alive, how vividly I have always remembered both of those magical birthday cakes. She was never a cuddly mother, or one I could freely confide in. We were very different women, and by all evidence very different little girls. But ...
There are many ways of expressing love.
Written for Friday Writings 20: A Piece of Cake, at Poets and Storytellers United.
Note: One of those party guests is now the noted Australian novelist, non-fiction writer and sometime poet, Carmel Bird – who wrote, in answer to a birthday invitation I sent her as an adult:
Rosemary
If I come to your party
Will there be a cake
With green jelly
Dark green jelly
Deep pool jelly
For the frogs?
Shall we go into the summerhouse
Underneath the willow
Our smiles revealing
The gaps between our teeth?
Will the butterfly cakes
Filled with the red jelly
And the cream
Leave icing sugar dustings
On our noses?
Are we going to look
For a fairy ring?
Or has there been some alteration to the plans?
My Mum did live to hear Carmel read this at a poetry performance, where Carmel included it especially for her. She was surprised and touched.