Memoir excerpt: Why Sundays are my favourite day

How to roast a chicken, and other lessons from my dad.

Sundays were my favourite day of the week because Dad always made a roast. Beef with fresh horseradish or chicken with homemade bread sauce. Yorkshires that were different each time: risen and perfect or flat little saucers of stodge. I loved them all.

Dad peeled potatoes and chopped veg, then put a chicken in the Aga to roast before walking to the pub for early doors.

I don’t remember if I learned the phone number off by heart. I remember looking it up in the phone book, and I remember calling a lot. I think Dad discouraged it, though I didn’t understand why. Sometimes I had to call on Thursday nights, and generally, I think, on Sundays. Always when I got hungry.

Did I use his proper name when I asked for him? Did it feel funny in my mouth? Did I feel like Bart Simpson, without the prank?

“When you coming home, Dad? The chicken’s ready.”

“Just one more,” he would say, and he’d be half-laughing. Drinking made him so happy. “Stick it in the bottom oven.”

“But I’m hungry,” I’d whine, and he’d promise he wouldn’t be long.

I’d check again on the chicken roasting in the oven. It was perfect. The juices ran clear when I pushed a serving fork into its thigh, that’s how you could tell. I moved it to the bottom of the Aga, eyeing the skin suspiciously, hoping it would stay precisely as juicy as it was right now, that it wouldn’t start to sink.

I’d return to The Simpsons or Lion King on my Megadrive, get sucked into achieving the next digital checkpoint, until my stomach grumbled again and I’d be drawn back to check on the chicken

Stroke the dog, cuddle the cats. Peel a carrot and cut a chunk of mature cheddar. I ate the carrot slowly, between mouthfuls of cheese, picking off the outer layer with my teeth to reveal the pale alien stalk inside. Thin nodules fit into the carrot’s jacket perfectly. I admired the inner workings before crunching it down. The inner was sweeter than the outer carrot, and I felt like a genius for discovering it. Did anybody else in the world know about this?

Eventually, I was too hungry. I couldn’t help myself. I dialled the number again. The pub was full and noisy, a wall of sound.

Dad would sound drunker than the last time as we had the same conversation.

“One more,” he’d say, so I expected him every minute. It didn’t take long to drink a pint, after all. Twenty minutes? Sometimes less.

It got dark, and as I stepped into the bright kitchen, the black windows reflected me, small and juicy, like the chicken. I imagined serial killers closing in. My stomach lurched when I took the kitchen knife from the drawer in preparation for carving. Shudder. I put it back.

I have no idea how long I waited. If it was cold, I’d drape my duvet over the gold oil radiator Dad had put in my room, heat it good and hot, then curl up under it, and drift in and out of sleep.

At some point, the dog would start barking, and the chain across the door would rattle, and I’d run to let my dad in.

“Swoooooo!” he’d call, red-cheeked and beaming and rubbing his hands together as he headed for the pantry. “My head’s fallen off!”

He smelled of cold metal, bringing the outside into the warm kitchen, and we sprung into action. White cabbage coarse-sliced, carrots slathered in honey and butter, the radio playing in the background. Dad took the cloves out the onion, broke bread into the simmering milk and removed the bay leaf. I mashed it all together with a fork like he’d shown me. Dad shook Bisto into the chicken juice, then added the cabbage water. Sometimes he’d glug in a bit of stewed tea from the pot on the back of the Aga.

“Hohohohoho,” he’d say, and we’d beam at each other, excited for the meal we were about to eat.

Gnawing at a juicy drumstick, fingers dripping with gravy, we watched telly – the Last of the Summer Wine or Keeping up Appearances, while the log fire roared, and the dog sleep-chased a ball, and the long hungry hours of waiting were forgotten.

---

📚 Chelsey Flood is the author of award-winning novels Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE. She is currently working on a book for Jessica Kingsley Publishers about the connection between undiagnosed neurodiversity and addiction, as well as her first domestic noir. 📚