Family Fortunes: My father’s little brown envelope

My weekends as a child were made instantly better when my dad would come home on Friday with the little brown envelope containing his pay.

He worked in a local garage. I can see him now in his white overalls, and still smell the oil off him from the machines. It was like we all breathed a big sigh of relief when he came in the door and handed his pay over to my mam.

There were electricity bills to pay with it, of course, and other boring stuff that we seven children had no interest in. But what the pay packet meant to us was food heaven.

Meals in our house got much better at weekends as a direct result of that envelope.

The pay packet meant a Friday night dinner from the chipper, a Saturday night fry-up and the many and varied delights of Sunday roast – the only time all week when we were allowed a gigantic bottle of Coke with our dinner.

Bliss.

Then, as the money dwindled, we were back to normal meals during the week: boring meat and two veg, horrible Findus crispy pancakes, or maybe just beans on toast by the time Thursday came.

That flash of brown paper in my mam’s hand cheered us all up after a week dreaming of soft eggs, rashers and fried bread.

I tell my children about the little brown envelope, and they can’t get their heads around it. We’re not loaded but they don’t really get any dinners they hate and they wouldn’t know a Findus Crispy pancake if you waved a box in front of them.

Sometimes I end up making a couple of different dinners to appease certain fussier tastes. Anyway, two of my teenagers are vegetarian, so rashers don’t appeal.

But I can’t have a Full Irish without thinking of that envelope and the passport to food nirvana contained within.

Mary, Rathfarnham, Co Dublin

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