Food, as you’ll have gathered by now, was stringently portion-controlled in our family. The one time in the year Mum slightly let go was at Easter, which is probably why it’s still my favourite festival. What she thought would happen if we ate as much as we wanted on a regular basis was never explored, but on Good Friday morning we got two whole hot cross buns each. As for the miracle of Easter Sunday: for you, it may be Jesus rising from the dead, but for me it will always be stuffing my face with chocolate, by permission, all day.
And Easter was where my father got to do his bit for the family chocolate habit. The Germans aren’t renowned for making chocolate as the Swiss and the Belgians are, but eating it is something else; and Easter is a bigger deal over there. For one, their eggs are laid not by a boring bunny, but by a big, fat loony hare, more promiscuous and more profligate.
My father used to visit his mother in Heidelberg every year before Easter, and he’d come back with a suitcase full of chocolate hares, marzipan chickens, ducks carrying baskets, and eggs in every shape and colour. One dreadful year, HM Customs decided to question this vague and otherworldly character with his strong but indefinable accent, and made him open his suitcase. Disaster! Only an international criminal could possibly attempt to enter the British Isles with nothing but socks, underpants, a copy of Meromorphic Functions signed by the author, and 15lb of chocolate. They made him – and it’s amazing he didn’t end up inside, knowing him – open them all to show that they didn’t contain narcotics or TNT. That year, the hunt was shorter than usual, but at least none of the eggs exploded.
My father is a naturally generous soul who loves to give pleasure. He comes from a family of storytellers and a culture of fairytales. And he is really, really good at hiding Easter eggs. So every Easter Sunday morning, the curtains at the back of the house would be ritually closed, and my mother would decoy us into some activity – probably music practice – that prevented us from noticing his absence. Half an hour or so later, he would appear, a little smile on his face, stroking his chin and remarking that there seemed to have been some unusual activity overnight in the garden. We stampeded out, my mother brought a basket, and we dashed round harvesting the treasure, while my father wandered around, staring at nothing in particular and saying things like, “My goodness, what an unusual purple flower in the grass over there!”, and “The crocuses are doing very well, look at that pink one!”, and “Who’d have guessed that a chicken could climb so high up a tree!” I can’t even remember how old I was when I realised he must have hidden them, but it was much later than it ought to have been. And even that didn’t spoil it one bit.
Then my mother took over. She was a mathematician, too, so division came easily to her; but as ever, moral principle was in play. The eggs were put into a communal basket for sharing out, but, with a Quakerly sense of higher justice, she’d calculated that if the basket only went one way, the same person always got to pick first. So her system was to start anywhere and send the eggs round till they got back to base, at which point the first person would take two and send them back the other way. Juvenile visitors to the ritual often took some persuading that it could ever be fair for anybody to get two at once, but by the time she’d used it as an excuse to launch into an extra-curricular maths lesson, they were generally willing to take her word for it.
And then we were allowed to go on eating them till they were gone. My dad, given half a chance, still does a mean Easter hare, and though my mother’s no longer here, I think of her as I divide the spoils by her infallible method; though I’m still not quite convinced it works.
