Happiness for me has always meant food, mostly eaten outside. In this busy world, I hope my children can make similar memories

• In our end of year series, writers and public figures remember the place or time when they felt most at home

My childhood home was in South Africa. My parents adored each other and life for my two brothers and me was loving and carefree. Mum was a well-known actor and producer, and my father was a successful businessman. We had a big house in a three-acre garden, complete with huge old trees to climb, a scruffy lawn to play football on, a swimming pool and a tennis court. Today that whole white, privileged, almost colonial life under apartheid is embarrassing to admit to, but my memories are deeply happy.

Christmas fell in midsummer, but we still ate turkey or roast beef, Yorkshire pud and Christmas pudding with brandy butter. My mother went to endless trouble to source brussels sprouts and the best she could do was imported tinned ones, which were unbelievably disgusting.

Prue Leith is a restaurateur, television presenter, cookery writer and novelist. Her two most recent cookery books are Bliss on Toast and Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom

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