y father was born in 1919; a celebratory war baby they soon forgot to celebrate.

He was born in Liverpool by the docks. He left school at twelve and worked alongside the men, when there was any work. This was the Great Depression – not only in Britain, but in the USA too, and Liverpool was a major port. Around one-third of working-age Liverpool men were unemployed.

Those days of casual work were all zero-hour contracts – you went down to the docks at dawn and hoped you’d be picked for a day’s paid work, and maybe told to come back tomorrow.

So Dad didn’t grow up with much, not even socks – which guaranteed that for the rest of his life he was one of those unusual men who LOVE being given socks for Christmas. Just plain woollen socks. Much better than lining your boots with newspaper.

Christmas brought another treat too: sherry trifle.

This was thanks to Del Monte Canned Fruit Cocktail – the cocktail name coming from the fact that, in the early days of Del Monte, this fruit mix had alcohol in it.

Dad’s job down at the docks was unloading cargo of every kind (like Eddie, the longshoreman in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge), but the best kind of cargo was foodstuffs, and the best kinds of foodstuffs were things you could slip in a poacher’s pocket and keep for later; that was cans.

So every Christmas his mother made the family sherry trifle. And when Dad married in 1947 rationing was on, but somehow he managed to eat his annual sherry trifle. My mother was working in the Co-op stores at the time, so that might have been where the tins came from.

My parents were obsessed with tinned food. Mrs Winterson still had her War Cupboard in the 1960s, stacked with stuff that would poison us if it was ever to be opened. But it was never to be opened; it was an insurance policy against Communists or Armageddon, whatever came first.

But we did eat tinned fruit – cheaper than fresh – and, until I got a Saturday job working on a fruit and veg stall on the market, tinned fruit was our treat on Sundays – and tinned fruit always went into the sherry trifle.

For me, growing up in the 1960s, sherry trifle meant Christmas. And Dad made it.

YOU NEED

Old cake

Ratafia biscuits. Optional but nice.

Jelly. Make a pint from a jelly block.

Fruit. Large tin of Del Monte Fruit Cocktail.

Custard. Tin of Bird’s Custard.

Double cream (you can use a tin of condensed milk)

Harveys Bristol Cream sherry

Tube of hundreds and thousands

About the old cake: fancy cooks want you to make a sponge specially – and I understand that shop-bought sponge fingers aren’t for everyone. The point about food is that a lot of it used to be left-overs and recycling. Same here. A dry, old cake is just what you want for a trifle because a fresh cake has moisture in it and gets soggy once you pour in the sherry. A dry cake soaks up the sherry and sits firm and content at the bottom of the bowl. So now you know.

METHOD

Get out your best cut-glass bowl from a dusty shelf at the top of the cupboard. Or find one in a charity shop for the right look. Wash it.

Single-layer the old cake in chunky slices on the bottom of the bowl and a little way up the sides as with bread-and-butter pudding – another great pud made from a base of stale left-overs.

Crumble in some ratafia biscuits for an almond taste – you can use fancy Amaretti.

Pour over the sherry – standing back a little, as the fumes from a fresh bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream are quite heady. Leave for 5 minutes to soak in. Do not drink the rest of the bottle until you are desperate.

Pour in the fruit cocktail. One tin or two is up to you.

Pour the liquid jelly over the fruit and sponge and leave in the fridge to set. In our case no fridge was needed as the house was so cold (see ‘Mrs Winterson’s Mince Pies’).

When the jelly is set you can spread the custard in a thick layer on top.

Then, for the true triumph of a sherry trifle, pipe the cream in peaks on top of the custard. (You can just spoon it on if you prefer, but a piping bag was a big part of wartime England and beyond.) This is the moment where a couple of tins of condensed milk can substitute for cream, but I don’t recommend it.

Decorate with hundreds and thousands – these look like mini multicoloured ball bearings.

Put it all back in the fridge and serve when you are ready.

Modern people use fresh or frozen raspberries, make their own custard and usually leave out the jelly. They top it with flaked ­almonds and truly it is a thing of beauty.

But one day you may find yourself with some old cake, a tin of custard, a tin of fruit cocktail, a few cubes of jelly, some sweet sherry and a bit of cream – or maybe even a tin of condensed milk if you are camping. These things happen.

And you will know what to do.

In 2008 my father died – but not before he had spent his last Christmas on earth with me.

If you’ve read my memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be ­Normal? you’ll know something about that last Christmas.

Dad was eighty-nine and too weak to sleep upstairs – I had him on cushions in front of the fire and I was sure he would die that Christmas night. He had stopped eating, except for . . . yes, he wanted a sherry trifle, and not the fancy kind.

I made it for him and we watched Toy Story on TV.

Three days later, back up north, he died.

I think about that time and, without being sentimental, I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past – whether parents, partners or friends – we should try and do that. It won’t be perfect, it will be a compromise, and it doesn’t mean happy families or restored bonds – there is often too much damage, too much sadness – but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness.

I have learned, painfully, over the years that the things I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

So I am glad of that last Christmas with my dad – not because it rewrote the past, but because it rewrote our ending. The story, for all its pain and sometimes horror, did not end tragically; it ended with forgiveness.