Toast

The story of a boy’s hunger

Nigel Slater

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2003

This edition published by Fourth Estate 2010

Copyright © Nigel Slater 2003

Nigel Slater asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9781841154718

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007386871

Version: 2019-04-19

Praise
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

‘An ingenious and touching treat’

Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year

‘Toast follows a recipe – boyhood blues without bitterness – that looks simple yet is actually hard to pull off. Slater manages it’

Guardian

‘Delightful…singular and original’

Evening Standard

‘The genius of his food writing comes from an obvious belief that food and happiness share the same organ in the brain’

LYNNE TRUSS, Sunday Times

‘A banquet of unlikely delectations…England’s answer to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential’

Daily Telegraph

‘Proves he can write mouth-wateringly about families and life too: I gobbled it up’

Daily Telegraph Books of the Year

Dedication

For Digger, Magrath and Poppywith love

In memory of Elvie 1902–2002

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Toast 1

Christmas Cake

Bread-and-Butter Pudding

Sherry Trifle

The Cookbook

The Lunch Box

Jam Tarts

Spaghetti Bolognese

Arctic Roll

Pancakes

Flapjack

Percy Salt

Sweets, Ices, Rock and Politics

Rice Pudding

Butterscotch Flavour Angel Delight

Mashed Potato

Tinned Ham

Space Dust

Bombay Duck

Blackcurrant Pie

Grilled Grapefruit

Cheese and Pineapple

Apples

Cream Soda

Setlers

Sunday Roast

Heinz Sponge Pudding

Crisps, Ketchup and a Few Other Unmentionables

Senior Service

Jelly 1

Jelly 2

Lemon Drops

Milk

Peas

Ice Cream

Cold Lamb and Gravy Skin

Apple Crumble

Sherbet Fountains

Radishes

Tinned Fruit

Lamb Chop

Tapioca

Treacle Tart

Crumpets

Bubblegum

Porridge

The Day the Gardener Came

Hot Chocolate 1

Hot Chocolate 2

Milk Skin

Jammie Dodgers

Peach Flan

Mince Pies 1

Mince Pies 2

The Night Just Before Christmas

Marshmallows

Fried Eggs

Cheese on Toast

Cheese-and-Onion Crisps

Fray Bentos Steak & Kidney Pie

Smoked Haddock

Birthday Cake

Bed

Fairy Drops

Tinned Raspberries

Scrambled Egg

American Hard Gums

Spinach

Smoke

Players No. 6 (Tipped)

Tinned Beans and Sausage

Banana Custard

Strawberries and Cream

The Dead Dog

Bourbon Biscuits

Garibaldis

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Salade Tiède

The Day She Darned Dad’s Socks

Bluebird Milk Chocolate Toffees

Victoria Sandwich

Ham

Boiled Ham and Parsley Sauce

Green Beans

‘Go and Play’

Lemon Meringue Pie

Salad Cream, Mushroom Ketchup and Other Delights

Coffee and Walnut Cake

Candyfloss

The Man in the Woods

Walnut Whip 1

The Hostess Trolley

Walnut Whip 2

Happy Families

Rabbit

Damson Jam

Tears

Toast 2

The Wedding Cake

Duckling à l’orange

Fillet and Rump

Prawn Cocktail

Peach Melba

Pickled Walnuts

Sweeties

The Two of Us

Another Funeral

Apple Pie and a Wake-up Call

A Sniff of Basil

Irish Stew

Black Forest Gâteau

Seafood Cocktail

La Steak Diane

Cold Roast Beef

The Wimpy Bar

Pommes Dauphinoise

The Bistro

Toast 3

Acknowledgement

About the Author

Also by Nigel Slater

About the Publisher

Toast 1

My mother is scraping a piece of burned toast out of the kitchen window, a crease of annoyance across her forehead. This is not an occasional occurrence, a once-in-a-while hiccup in a busy mother’s day. My mother burns the toast as surely as the sun rises each morning. In fact, I doubt if she has ever made a round of toast in her life that failed to fill the kitchen with plumes of throat-catching smoke. I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it.

It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. People’s failings, even major ones such as when they make you wear short trousers to school, fall into insignificance as your teeth break through the rough, toasted crust and sink into the doughy cushion of white bread underneath. Once the warm, salty butter has hit your tongue, you are smitten. Putty in their hands.

Christmas Cake

Mum never was much of a cook. Meals arrived on the table as much by happy accident as by domestic science. She was a chops-and-peas sort of a cook, occasionally going so far as to make a rice pudding, exasperated by the highs and lows of a temperamental cream-and-black Aga and a finicky little son. She found it all a bit of an ordeal, and wished she could have left the cooking, like the washing, ironing and dusting, to Mrs P., her ‘woman what does’.

Once a year there were Christmas puddings and cakes to be made. They were made with neither love nor joy. They simply had to be done. ‘I suppose I had better DO THE CAKE,’ she would sigh. The food mixer – she was not the sort of woman to use her hands – was an ancient, heavy Kenwood that lived in a deep, secret hole in the kitchen work surface. My father had, in a rare moment of do-it-yourselfery, fitted a heavy industrial spring under the mixer so that when you lifted the lid to the cupboard the mixer slowly rose like a corpse from a coffin. All of which was slightly too much for my mother, my father’s quaint Heath Robinson craftsmanship taking her by surprise every year, the huge mixer bouncing up like a jack-in-the-box and making her clap her hands to her chest. ‘Oh heck!’ she would gasp. It was the nearest my mother ever got to swearing.

She never quite got the hang of the mixer. I can picture her now, desperately trying to harness her wayward Kenwood, bits of cake mixture flying out of the bowl like something from an I Love Lucy sketch. The cake recipe was written in green biro on a piece of blue Basildon Bond and was kept, crisply folded into four, in the spineless Aga Cookbook that lived for the rest of the year in the bowl of the mixer. The awkward, though ingenious, mixer cupboard was impossible to clean properly, and in among the layers of flour and icing sugar lived tiny black flour weevils. I was the only one who could see them darting around. None of which, I suppose, mattered if you were making Christmas pudding, with its gritty currants and hours of boiling. But this was cake.

Cooks know to butter and line the cake tins before they start the creaming and beating. My mother would remember just before she put the final spoonful of brandy into the cake mixture, then take half an hour to find them. They always turned up in a drawer, rusty and full of fluff. Then there was the annual scrabble to find the brown paper, the scissors, the string. However much she hated making the cake we both loved the sound of the raw cake mixture falling into the tin. ‘Shhh, listen to the cake mixture,’ she would say, and the two of us would listen to the slow plop of the dollops of fruit and butter and sugar falling into the paper-lined cake tin. The kitchen would be warmer than usual and my mother would have that I’ve-just-baked-a-cake glow. ‘Oh, put the gram on, will you, dear? Put some carols on,’ she would say as she put the cake in the top oven of the Aga. Carols or not, it always sank in the middle. The embarrassing hollow, sometimes as deep as your fist, having to be filled in with marzipan.

Forget scented candles and freshly brewed coffee. Every home should smell of baking Christmas cake. That, and warm freshly ironed tea towels hanging on the rail in front of the Aga. It was a pity we had Auntie Fanny living with us. Her incontinence could take the edge off the smell of a chicken curry, let alone a baking cake. No matter how many mince pies were being made, or pine logs burning in the grate, or how many orange-and-clove pomanders my mother had made, there was always the faintest whiff of Auntie Fanny.

Warm sweet fruit, a cake in the oven, woodsmoke, warm ironing, hot retriever curled up by the Aga, mince pies, Mum’s 4711. Every child’s Christmas memories should smell like that. Mine did. It is a pity that there was always a passing breeze of ammonia.

Cake holds a family together. I really believed it did. My father was a different man when there was cake in the house. Warm. The sort of man I wanted to hug rather than shy away from. If he had a plate of cake in his hand I knew it would be all right to climb up on to his lap. There was something about the way my mother put a cake on the table that made me feel that all was well. Safe. Secure. Unshakeable. Even when she got to the point where she carried her Ventolin inhaler in her left hand all the time. Unshakeable. Even when she and my father used to go for long walks, walking ahead of me and talking in hushed tones and he would come back with tears in his eyes.

When I was eight my mother’s annual attempt at icing the family Christmas cake was handed over to me. ‘I’ve had enough of this lark, dear, you’re old enough now.’ She had started to sit down a lot. I made only marginally less of a mess than she did, but at least I didn’t cover the table, the floor, the dog with icing sugar. To be honest, it was a relief to get it out of her hands. I followed the Slater house style of snowy peaks brought up with the flat of a knife and a red ribbon. Even then I wasn’t one to rock the boat. The idea behind the wave effect of her icing was simply to hide the fact that her attempt at covering the cake in marzipan resembled nothing more than an unmade bed. Folds and lumps, creases and tears. A few patches stuck on with a bit of apricot jam.

I knew I could have probably have flat-iced a cake to perfection, but to have done so would have hurt her feelings. So waves it was. There was also a chipped Father Christmas, complete with a jagged lump of last year’s marzipan round his feet, and the dusty bristle tree with its snowy tips of icing. I drew the line at the fluffy yellow Easter chick.

Baking a cake for your family to share, the stirring of cherries, currants, raisins, peel and brandy, brown sugar, butter, eggs and flour, for me the ultimate symbol of a mother’s love for her husband and kids, was reduced to something that ‘simply has to be done’. Like cleaning the loo or polishing the shoes. My mother knew nothing of putting glycerine in with the sugar to keep the icing soft, so her rock-hard cake was always the butt of jokes for the entire Christmas. My father once set about it with a hammer and chisel from the shed. So the sad, yellowing cake sat round until about the end of February, the dog giving it the occasional lick as he passed, until it was thrown, much to everyone’s relief, on to the lawn for the birds.

Bread-and-Butter Pudding

My mother is buttering bread for England. The vigour with which she slathers soft yellow fat on to thinly sliced white pap is as near as she gets to the pleasure that is cooking for someone you love. Right now she has the bread knife in her hand and nothing can stop her. She always buys unwrapped, unsliced bread, a pale sandwich loaf without much of a crust, and slices it by hand.

My mother’s way of slicing and buttering has both an ease and an awkwardness about it. She has softened the butter on the back of the Aga so that it forms a smooth wave as the butter knife is drawn across it. She spreads the butter on to the cut side of the loaf, then picks up the bread knife and takes off the buttered slice. She puts down the bread knife, picks up the butter knife and again butters the freshly cut side of the loaf. She carries on like this till she has used three-quarters of the loaf. The rest she will use in the morning, for toast.

The strange thing is that none of us really eats much bread and butter. It’s like some ritual of good housekeeping that my mother has to go through. As if her grandmother’s dying words had been ‘always make sure they have enough bread and butter on the table’. No one ever sees what she does with all the slices we don’t eat.

I mention all the leftover bread and butter to Mrs Butler, a kind, gentle woman whose daughter is in my class at school and whose back garden has a pond with newts and goldfish, crowns of rhubarb and rows of potatoes. A house that smells of apple crumble. I visit her daughter Madeleine at lunchtime and we often walk back to school together. Mrs Butler lets me wait while Madeleine finishes her lunch.

‘Well, your mum could make bread-and-butter pudding, apple charlotte, eggy bread, or bread pudding,’ suggests Mrs Butler, ‘or she could turn them into toasted cheese sandwiches.’

I love bread-and-butter pudding. I love its layers of sweet, quivering custard, juicy raisins, and puffed, golden crust. I love the way it sings quietly in the oven; the way it wobbles on the spoon.

You can’t smell a hug. You can’t hear a cuddle. But if you could, I reckon it would smell and sound of warm bread-and-butter pudding.

Sherry Trifle

My father wore old, rust-and-chocolate checked shirts and smelled of sweet briar tobacco and potting compost. A warm and twinkly-eyed man, the sort who would let his son snuggle up with him in an armchair and fall asleep in the folds of his shirt. ‘You’ll have to get off now, my leg’s gone to sleep,’ he would grumble, and turf me off on to the rug. He would pull silly faces at every opportunity, especially when there was a camera or other children around. Sometimes they would make me giggle, but other times, like when he pulled his monkey face, they scared me so much I used to get butterflies in my stomach.

His clothes were old and soft, which made me want to snuggle up to him even more. He hated wearing new. My father always wore old, heavy brogues and would don a tie even in his greenhouse. He read the Telegraph and Reader’s Digest. A crumpets-and-honey sort of a man with a tight little moustache. God, he had a temper though. Sometimes he would go off, ‘crack’, like a shotgun. Like when he once caught me going through my mother’s handbag, looking for barley sugars, or when my mother made a batch of twelve fairy cakes and I ate six in one go.

My father never went to church, but said his prayers nightly kneeling by his bed, his head resting in his hands. He rarely cursed, apart from calling people ‘silly buggers’. I remember he had a series of crushes on singers. First, it was Kathy Kirby, although he once said she was a ‘bit ritzy’, and then Petula Clark. Sometimes he would buy their records and play them on Sundays after I had listened to my one and only record – a scratched forty-five of Tommy Steele singing ‘Little White Bull’. The old man was inordinately fond of his collection of female vocals. You should have seen the tears the day Alma Cogan died.

The greenhouse was my father’s sanctuary. I was never sure whether it smelled of him or he smelled of it. In winter, before he went to bed, he would go out and light the old paraffin stove that kept his precious begonias and tomato plants alive. I remember the dark night the stove blew out and the frost got his begonias. He would spend hours down there. I once caught him in the greenhouse with his dick in his hand. He said he was just ‘going for a pee. It’s good for the plants.’ It was different, bigger than it looked in the bath and he seemed to be having a bit of a struggle getting it back into his trousers.

He had a bit of a thing about sherry trifle. That and his dreaded leftover turkey stew were the only two recipes he ever made. The turkey stew, a Boxing Day trauma for everyone concerned, varied from year to year, but the trifle had rules. He used ready-made Swiss rolls. The sort that come so tightly wrapped in cellophane you can never get them out without denting the sponge. They had to be filled with raspberry jam, never apricot because you couldn’t see the swirl of jam through the glass bowl the way you could with raspberry. There was much giggling over the sherry bottle. What is it about men and booze? They only cook twice a year but it always involves a bottle of something. Next, a tin of peaches with a little of their syrup. He was meticulous about soaking the sponge roll. First the sherry, then the syrup from the peaches tin. Then the jelly. To purists the idea of jelly in trifle is anathema. But to my father it was essential. If my father’s trifle was human it would be a clown. One of those with striped pants and a red nose. He would make bright yellow custard, Bird’s from a tin. This he smoothed over the jelly, taking an almost absurd amount of care not to let the custard run between the Swiss roll slices and the glass. A matter of honour no doubt.

Once it was cold, the custard was covered with whipped cream, glacé cherries and whole, blanched almonds. Never silver balls, which he thought common, or chocolate vermicelli, which he thought made it sickly. Just big fat almonds. He never toasted them, even though it would have made them taste better. In later years my stepmother was to suggest a sprinkling of multicoloured hundreds and thousands. She might as well have suggested changing his daily paper to the Mirror.

The entire Christmas stood or fell according to the noise the trifle made when the first massive, embossed spoon was lifted out. The resulting noise, a sort of squelch-fart, was like a message from God. A silent trifle was a bad omen. The louder the trifle parped, the better Christmas would be. Strangely, Dad’s sister felt the same way about jelly – making it stronger than usual just so it would make a noise that, even at her hundredth birthday tea, would make the old bird giggle.

You wouldn’t think a man who smoked sweet, scented tobacco, grew pink begonias and made softly-softly trifle could be scary. His tempers, his rages, his scoldings scared my mother, my brothers, the gardener, even the sweet milkman who occasionally got the order wrong. Once, when I had been caught not brushing my teeth before going to bed, his glare was so full of fire, his face so red and bloated, his hand raised so high that I pissed in my pyjamas, right there on the landing outside my bedroom. For all his soft shirts and cuddles and trifles I was absolutely terrified of him.

The Cookbook

The bookcase doubled as a drinks cabinet. Or perhaps that should be the other way around. Three glass decanters with silver labels hanging around their necks boasted Brandy, Whisky and Port, though I had never known anything in them, not even at Christmas. Dad’s whisky came from a bottle, Dimple Haig, that he kept in a hidden cupboard at the back of the bookcase where he also kept his Canada Dry and a jar of maraschino cherries for when we all had snowballs at Christmas. The front of the drinks cabinet housed his entire collection of books.

The family’s somewhat diminutive library had leatherette binding and bore Reader’s Digest or The Folio Society on their spines. Most were in mint condition, and invariably ‘condensed’ or ‘abridged’. Six or so of the books were kept in the cupboard at the back, with the Dimple Haig and a bottle of advocaat; a collection of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, a dog-eared Raymond Chandler, a Philip Roth and a neat pile of National Geographics. There was also a copy of Marguerite Patten’s All Colour Cookbook.

It was a tight fit in between the wall and the back of the bookcase. Dad just opened the door and leaned in to get his whisky; it was more difficult for me to get round there, to wriggle into a position where I could squat in secret and turn the pages of the hidden books. I don’t know how Marguerite Patten would feel knowing that she was kept in the same cupboard as Portnoy’s Complaint, or that I would flip excitedly from one to the other. I hope my father never sells them. ‘For sale, one copy each of Marguerite Patten’s All Colour Cookery and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, first edition, d/w, slightly stained.’

‘I don’t know what you want to look at that for,’ said Mum once, coming home early and catching me gazing at a photograph of Gammon Steaks with Pineapple and Cherries. ‘It’s all very fancy, I can’t imagine who cooks like that.’ There was duck à l’orange and steak-and-kidney pudding, fish pie, beef Wellington and rock cakes, fruit flan and crème caramel. There was page after page of glorious photographs of stuffed eggs, sole with grapes and a crown roast of lamb with peas and baby carrots around the edge, parsley sprigs, radish roses, cucumber curls. Day after day I would squeeze round and pore over the recipes fantasising over Marguerite’s devilled kidneys and Spanish chicken, her prawn cocktail and sausage rolls. Just as I would spend quite a while fantasising over Portnoy’s way with liver.

The Lunch Box

Josh, Mum and Dad’s new gardener, was cool. He had a black motorbike, a Triumph something or other, and used to bring his lunch neatly packed in a tin box. He licked his cigarette papers, tiny things with barely a pinch of tobacco in them, and rolled them into short flat cigarettes while he sat on his bike. Everyone liked Josh, Mum thought he was ‘such a good-looking young man, as bright as a button’, and Dad seemed more happy with him than he had been with the older guys who used to leave almost as soon as they had started. One was fired just because the frost got at Dad’s dahlias.

Unlike the other gardeners, Josh used to let me turn the compost with the long-handled, two-pronged fork that no one else let me touch and empty the mower box on to the heap. He let me weed the front of the borders where we had planted daisy-faced mesembryanthemums that only came out in the sun and balls of alyssum and drifts of pink and white candytuft. I watched the way he tied the clematis up when the string broke once in the wind, and when he used to pee on the compost. ‘Better not tell your dad I do that, it’s my secret way of getting the compost to work,’ he would say, turning as he shook himself and did up his buttons.

My father smiled, beamed almost, when I called plants by their proper names. Antirrhinum instead of snapdragon and Muscari instead of grape hyacinth. He gave a tired but amused little snuffle when I once corrected him about the name of a rose that he had called Pleasure when I knew it was Peace. Josh would take me round the borders, getting me to name as many plants as I could and would tease me when I confused azaleas and rhododendrons. Sometimes he would hoist me up on to his bare shoulders and charge around the garden making airplane noises and pretending to crash into the trees. We played football once, but my saves were so bad that the ball, an orange one belonging to my brothers, kept crashing into the marguerites and knocking them flat.

I liked the way Josh would let me sit and talk to him while he took a strip-wash in the outside toilet and changed back into his motorbike leathers. The way he would let me choose a biscuit – a Bourbon, a ginger nut, even a caramel wafer – from his lunch box and the way he never turned his back on me when he was drying himself with his frayed green-and-white-striped towel.

Jam Tarts

A great deal was made of my being tucked in at night. ‘I’ll come up and tuck you in’ was as near as my mother ever got to playing with me. Tucking me in was her substitute for playing ball, going to the park to play on the slide, being there on sports day, playing hide-and-seek, baking cakes, giving me chocolate kisses, ice cream, toffee apples, making masks and carving Halloween pumpkins. ‘I’ll come up and tuck you in’ was fine. It’s when she forgot that it wasn’t.

Every few weeks my mother and I would make jam tarts. She had small hands with long, delicate fingers. Gentle, like her name, Kathleen, and that of her siblings, Marjorie and Geoffrey. They say there was some Irish blood somewhere, but like my mother’s asthma no one ever spoke of it.

She would weigh the flour, the butter, the bit of lard that made the pastry so crumbly, and let me rub them all together with my fingertips in the big cream mixing bowl. She poured in cold water from a glass and I brought the dough together into a ball. Her hands started work with the rolling pin, then, once the ball of pastry was flat, I would take over, pushing the pastry out into a great thin sheet. We took the steel cookie cutters, rusty, dusty, and cut out rings of pastry and pushed them into the shallow hollows of an even rustier patty tin.

Mother didn’t like cooking. She did this for me. When she met my father she was working as a secretary to the mayor at the town hall and had never made so much as a sandwich. My father’s first marriage had lasted only a matter of months and was never, ever discussed. (By sheer chance, an old acquaintance of my father’s asked my brother if he was from the first or second marriage. Otherwise we would never have known.) She fell pregnant with me fifteen years after my brother Adrian was born and five years after they adopted his schoolfriend John. That’s when the asthma came on. When she was expecting me.

There had to be three different jams in the tarts. Strawberry, blackcurrant and lemon curd. It wasn’t till later I learned that plum, damson and marmalade made the best fillings. I put a couple of spoonfuls of jam into each pastry case, not so much that they would boil over and stick to the tin, but enough that there was more jam than pastry. My father loved a jam tart and would put one in whole and swallow it like a snake devouring a bird’s egg. Despite training as a gunsmith, he now owned a factory where they made parts for Rover cars, a factory that smelled of oil, where the machines were black and stood in pools of oily water. ‘A man was killed in that one there – he got his overall caught in the roller and it pulled him straight through, flat as a pancake,’ my father told me one day as we walked through the black hangar at dusk, its iron roof dripping and the stench of rust around us.

The tarts went in the top oven of the Aga until the edges of the pastry cases turned the pale beige of a Lincoln biscuit and the jam had caramelised around the edges. As the kitchen became hotter and more airless my mother would take her inhaler from the top drawer and take long deep puffs, turning her face away as she did so. Sometimes, she would hold her hand to her chest and close her eyes for a few seconds. A few seconds in which the world seem to stop.

My mother was polite, quietly spoken, but not timid. I once heard her telling off the delivery boy from Percy Salt’s the grocer because there was something on the bill that shouldn’t have been. I never heard her raise her voice. I am not sure she could have done if she wanted to. She certainly never did to me.

One day my father came home from work, and even before he had taken off his coat he grabbed one of our jam tarts from the wire cooling rack. He couldn’t have known they had come from the oven only a minute or two before. His hands flapped, his face turned a deep raspberry red, beads of sweat formed like warts on his brow, he danced a merry dance. As he tried to swallow and his eyes filled with the sort of tears a man can only summon when he has boiling lemon curd stuck to the roof of his mouth, I am sure that I saw the faintest of smiles flicker across my mother’s face.

Spaghetti Bolognese

‘We…are…going to have…spaghetti, no, SPAGHETTI…just try a bit of it. You don’t have to eat it if you DON’T LIKE it.’ Mum is yelling into Auntie Fanny’s ‘good’ ear. Quite why she thinks there is a good one and a bad one is a mystery. Everyone knows the old bat is deaf as a post in both.

Neither Fanny nor Mum has eaten spaghetti before, and come to think of it neither have I. Dad is waiting for the water to boil on the Aga. The sauce is already warm, having been poured from its tin a good half-hour ago and is sitting on the cool plate of the Aga, giving just the occasional blip-blop.

When the water finally boils my father shakes the strands of pasta out of the blue sugar paper that looks for all the world like a great long firework, and stands them in the bubbling water. They splay out like one of those fibre-optic lights we saw at the Ideal Home Exhibition on the BBC. As the water comes back to the boil he tries to push the spikes under the water. ‘They’ll never all go in,’ he snaps, trying to read the packet, which, even when read with bifocals, is in Italian. Some of the brittle sticks break in half and clatter over the hotplate.

‘Will I like it, Daddy?’ I ask, half hoping he’ll change his mind and Mum will cook us all some chops.

‘Just try it,’ he says, a somewhat exasperated tone creeping in to his voice. ‘Just try it.’

‘I think you should put some salt in,’ chirps in Mum.

Auntie Fanny is looking down at her lap. ‘Do I have to have some?’ I think she is going to cry.

‘I think it must be done now,’ says my father twenty minutes later. He drains the slithery lengths of spaghetti in a colander in the sink. Some are escaping through the holes and curling up in the sink like nests of worms. ‘Quick, get the plates, they’re getting away.’

We all sit there staring at our tumbling piles of pasta on our glass Pyrex plates. ‘Oh, Kathleen, I don’t think I can,’ sobs Auntie Fanny, who then picks up a long sticky strand with her fingers and pops it into her mouth from which it hangs all the way down to her lap.

‘No, wait for the sauce, Fanny,’ Mother sighs, and then quite out of character, ‘Come on, Daddy, hurry up.’ Dad spoons the sauce, a slurry of reddy-brown mince that smells ‘foreign’, over the knots and twirls of pasta. Suddenly it all seems so grown-up, so sophisticated.

Mum wraps the strands round her fork, ‘like this, do it like this,’ then shovels it towards Fanny’s wet, pink little lips. Most of the pasta falls down Fanny’s skirt, a little of the sauce gets caught on her bottom lip. She licks it off and shudders. ‘It’s horrible, it’s horrible. He’s trying to poison me,’ she wails. We all know she would have said the same even if it had been the most delectable thing she had ever eaten.

Ignoring Fanny’s little tantrum, I do as Mother bids, twirling the pasta round my fork while shovelling the escaping pieces back on with my spoon. I rather like it, the feel of the softly slippery noodles, the rich sauce which is hot, salty and tastes partly of tomato, partly of Bovril. I wouldn’t mind eating this every day. Unexpectedly, my father takes out a cardboard drum of grated Parmesan cheese and passes it to me to open.

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ asks Mum.

‘It’s grated cheese, Percy Salt said you have to sprinkle it over the top, it doesn’t work if you don’t.’ Now we’re talking. I peel away the piece of paper that is covering the holes and shake the white powder over my sauce. I pass it to my father who does the same. Mum declines as she usually does with anything unusual. There is no point in asking Auntie Fanny, who is by now quietly wetting her pants.

Dad shakes the last of the cheese over his pasta and suddenly everyone goes quiet. I’m looking down but I can see my father out of the corner of my right eye; he has stopped, his fork in mid-air, a short strand of spaghetti hanging loose. His eyes have gone glassy and he puts his fork back down on his plate.

‘Daddy, this cheese smells like sick,’ I tell him.

‘I know it does, son, don’t eat it. I think it must be off.’

We never had spaghetti bolognese or Parmesan cheese again. Or for that matter, ever even talked about it.

Arctic Roll

There were only three of us at school whose house wasn’t joined to the one next door. Number 67 Sandringham Road, always referred to as ‘York House’, had mock-Tudor wooden beams, a double garage of which one half doubled as a garden shed and repository for my brothers’ canoes, and a large and crumbling greenhouse. I was also the only one ever to have tasted Arctic Roll. While my friends made do with the pink, white and brown stripes of a Neapolitan ice-cream brick, my father would bring out this newfangled frozen gourmet dessert. Arctic Roll was a sponge-covered tube of vanilla ice cream, its USP being the wrapping of wet sponge and ring of red jam so thin it could have been drawn on with an architect’s pen.

In Wolverhampton, Arctic Roll was considered to be something of a status symbol. It contained mysteries too. Why, for instance, does the ice cream not melt when the sponge defrosts? How is it possible to spread the jam that thin? How come it was made from sponge cake, jam and ice cream yet managed to taste of cold cardboard? And most importantly, how come cold cardboard tasted so good?

As treats go, this was the big one, bigger even than a Cadbury’s MiniRoll. This wasn’t a holiday or celebration treat like trifle. This was a treat for no obvious occasion. Its appearance had nothing to do with being good, having done well in a school test, having been kind or thoughtful. It was just a treat, served with as much pomp as if it were a roasted swan at a Tudor banquet. I think it was a subtle reminder to the assembled family and friends of how well my father’s business was doing. Whatever, there was no food that received such an ovation in our house. Quite an achievement for something I always thought tasted like a frozen carpet.

Pancakes

Mum never failed to make pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. Light they were, except for the very first one which was always a mess, though for some reason always the best. Mum made thin pancakes, in a battered old frying pan that was black on the outside and smelled of sausages, and we ate them with granulated sugar and Jif lemon. I loved the way the lemon soaked the sugar but never quite dissolved it, so you got the soft pancake, gritty sugar and sharp lemon all at once.

It was the best day of the year really, especially when she got going and they would come out of the pan as fast as we could eat them. Towards the end Mum would let me flip one. I always contrived it so that it landed on the floor, then she would say, ‘That’s enough’, and that would be it till next year.

Flapjack

On crackling winter mornings, with icicles hanging from the drainpipes, Mother would make flapjacks, stirring them in a thick, pitted aluminium pan and leaving them to settle on the back of the Aga. She would use a metal spoon, which acted as an effective alarm clock as it was scraped against the side of the old pan. They were one of the very few treats my mother ever made for us. My father would eat one or two, probably to encourage her rare attempts at home-making. While I would have to be held back from eating the entire tray. It was their chewy, salty sweetness I loved. Anyone who has never put a really large pinch of salt in with the oats, syrup and brown sugar is missing a trick.

Sometimes, she would leave a flapjack out for Josh too, and we would sit on his motorbike and eat them together. One bitterly cold day, I came home to a hall that smelled of warm biscuits. As I opened the kitchen door I smelled smoke and caught my mother tossing a batch of blackened flapjacks into the bin. There was a bit of charred shrapnel clinging to the edge of the tin which I tried unsuccessfully to prise off. Now they were being tipped into the pedal bin, tray and all. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said, shaking her head. There were tears and something along the lines of ‘How could you do that, let the flapjacks burn? You’re hopeless, now there won’t be any for Josh tomorrow,’ and then I remember stomping into the greenhouse and telling my father he should get a new wife. One who didn’t burn everything.

Percy Salt

If you walked along Penn Road past the fish shop and towards the stately pile that is the Royal School for Boys, you came to Percy Salt’s the grocer’s. It was two shops really, a butcher’s on the right and on the left a cool, tiled grocer’s that had sawdust on the floor and where my mother did most of her shopping. It was here she bought the ham that the young assistants in long white aprons would cut to order from the bone; slices of white-freckled tongue for Dad and tins of peaches and thick Nestlé’s cream for us all. This was where we came for streaky bacon, for sardines and, at weekends, for cartons of double cream.

Percy Salt’s was the only place where my mother ran a tab. It was the custom for the better-off clientele, as was having their purchases delivered. This was where I would stand while Mum asked to taste the Cheddar or the Caerphilly and where she would pick up round boxes of Dairylea cheeses for me. Sometimes there would be little foil-wrapped triangles of processed cheese flavoured with tomato, celery (my favourite), mushroom and blue cheese. This was also where we came for butter and kippers, salad cream and honey, eggs and tea.

I loved our visits to Salt’s like nothing else. It was the smell of the shop as much as anything, a smell of smoked bacon and truckles of Cheddar, of tomatoes in summer and ham hocks in winter. At Christmas the windows would light up with clementines in coloured foil, biscuits in tins with stagecoaches on the lids, fresh pineapples, whole peaches in tins, trifle sponges and packets of silver balls and sugared almonds. Mother would buy wooden caskets of Turkish delight and crystallised figs, sugared plums and jars of cherries in brandy. It was here too that she would collect the brandy for the brandy butter, the bottles of Mateus Rosé, the cartons of icing sugar and the chocolate Christmas decorations that we hung on the tree and that I would sneak one by one over the holidays. Never was I happier than in Percy Salt’s at Christmas, even if my mother did once say he was getting ‘terribly dear’.

‘Dear’, when used in connection with money, was one of the expressions for which my mother would lower her voice, just as she did when she found someone ‘rather coarse’ or when someone had ‘trodden in something’. ‘Have you trodden in something’ was my mother’s discreet way of asking if you had farted. No surprise then that while Mr Salt called most of his customers ‘love’ he would always, always call my mother Mrs Slater.

Sweets, Ices, Rock and Politics

It would be wrong to say we were wealthy. ‘Comfortably off’ might be nearer the mark, though without the implied smugness. There were tinned peaches and salmon on the shopping list but Mum still checked Percy Salt’s delivery scrupulously, running her finger down the list and ticking things off with a blue biro. Dad took cuttings and planted seeds – yellow snapdragons, nemesia the colour of boiled sweets, and those daisy-faced mesembryanthemums that only opened up when the sun shone – because it was cheaper than buying ready-grown bedding plants. Needless to say I had no more pocket money than any of my school friends.

I bought the odd book, annuals mostly, a few singles, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ or Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Only Want To Be With You’, and once, a stick insect, but most of my pocket money went on sweets. Buying sweets, chocolate, even ice cream was shot through with more politics than an eight-year-old should have had to contend with. Sweets could put a label round a child’s neck in much the same way as a particular choice of newspaper could to an adult. For a boy certain things were off-limits. Fry’s Chocolate Creams and Old English Spangles were considered adult territory; Love Hearts and Fab ice creams were for girls. Parma Violets were for old ladies and barley sugars were what your parents bought you for long car journeys. Cones filled with marshmallow and coated in chocolate were considered naff by pretty much everyone, though I secretly liked them, and no one over six would be seen dead with a flying saucer. Sherbet Fountains were supposed to be strictly girly material, an idea which even then I refused to buy into. Milky Ways were what parents bought for their kids, which gave them a sort of goody-goody note as did Jacob’s Orange Clubs. Selection boxes were what you were given at Christmas by the sort of people who weren’t relatives but who nevertheless you called Auntie.

We never really bought the penny chews that Mr Dixon had loose on the counter, though I did nick the odd liquorice chew, the ones that came in blue-and-white striped paper, when his back was turned. Dad’s favourites were Callard & Bowser’s Butterscotch, which came in thin packs like cigarettes, and Pascall’s oblong Fruit Bonbons with gooey centres. He also loved peanut brittle, which he ate by the barful. Mine were sweet cigarettes, which may not have given me lung cancer but made up for it with fillings. At Christmas, Dad bought himself metal trays of Brazil nut toffee with their own little hammer from Thorntons, while I got more cigarettes, this time made of chocolate wrapped in paper which went soggy when you put it in your mouth. Dad said they were expensive. Mum only ate sweeties that came in round tins, old-fashioned things like lemon drops and fruit pastilles with a faint dusting of icing sugar or those chewy blackcurrant gums that came in a flat white-and-purple rectangular tin.

Boys’ stuff, by which I mean gobstoppers, Milky Bars and Rolos, never really hit the spot for me. I spent most of my money on sweets that made your tongue sore: acid drops, sherbet lemons, chocolate limes and roll after roll of Refreshers. The price for which was mouth ulcers the size of shirt buttons, and on which I would put salt-and-vinegar crisps to see just how much pain I could stand.

Holidays meant sticks of rock, pink or humbug-striped with red letters running through it. I never ate mine till I had kept it for at least six months in the fruit bowl. By which time it had gone soft and chewy, like mint-flavoured toffee.

Your choice of ice cream depended more on who was buying. Mum would get me a cornet with a rectangle of vanilla ice cream wrapped in white paper. It was an ice fraught with danger. You had to peel off the paper and push the block of ice cream down into the cornet while at the same time licking every last, precious drop of vanilla from the paper. For herself, she would get a little block of ice cream wrapped in paper and two wafers, or a choc ice in foil. The best bit was the crackly chocolate which was so thin that it would shatter and fall off into her lap in jagged pieces. At the cinema or the pantomime we always had tubs, though my father invariably complained about the price and having to queue for so long that the second half had started before he got back to his seat.

My parents disapproved of the ice-cream van, with its pineapple Mivvis and belching smoke. I found the music – wobbly, like a music box running down – faintly sinister, like those clowns with white faces and pointed hats. I think my parents just thought it was common to queue. My favourite was the banana lolly or the chocolate one which tasted like weak cocoa. Mum drew the line at Mr Whippy cornets, which she considered beyond the pale, and 99s were simply vulgar. Heaven knows what she would have said if she had seen me on my way to school, biting off the end and sucking the soft, grainy ice cream through the bottom.

Rice Pudding

Mother was desperate to be a homemaker, a woman capable of sewing on a button, darning a sock or icing a fairy cake. In the early evening, sitting under the standard lamp in the lounge, head tilted and the tip of her tongue pinched between her lips, she spent what seemed like hours trying to thread white cotton through the eye of a needle. ‘Let me do it’ was met with a sigh and ‘I’ve nearly done it now’. Try as she might, buttons popped off within a day or two, toes poked through neat but ineffective repairs, icing pooled into the craters in her cakes or, on the rare occasion they rose, ran down the sides in rivulets and stuck the flowery paper cases to the plate.

Mrs Poole made the beds, fed the winceyette sheets through the ironing machine with its long cotton-covered roller, and would sew a stray button on to my school shirt. Mother made up for this humiliation by making rice pudding. Warm, milky rice. Rice that never thickened the sweet liquid it floated in, so what should have been a creamy spoonful the texture of risotto had to be sipped, like broth. The skin browned and puffed into a black-and-gilt dome. The kitchen smelled like a kitchen should.

The skin was removed in one perfect scoop and deposited in my father’s bowl. ‘It’s the best bit,’ he used say. Then the round rice was fished up from the depths and divided between us all. Then she would pick up the enamel tin and spoon out the milk. ‘Anyone for jam?’ she would say, passing round the Hartley’s strawberry. I was the only taker, stirring the sweet glop into the milk then regretting it when it stayed in blobs and sank to the bottom of the dish.

Milky milky rice is considered a failure by rice-pudding aficionados, yet I preferred it to her occasional successes. Warm sweet milk was what a mother should smell of.

Butterscotch Flavour Angel Delight

BUTTERSCOTCH FLAVOUR: Sugar, Modified Starch, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Emulsifiers (Propane-1, 2-diol esters of fatty acids, Soya Lecithin), Gelling Agents (Disodium phosphate, Diphosphates), Milk Protein, Lactose, Colours (Plain Caramel, Annatto, Betanin), Whey Powder, Flavourings, Salt.

Emptying a sachet of Angel Delight into half a pint of milk and whisking it for a minute and a half was as near as my mother ever got to making modern desserts. She remembered which flavour – Strawberry, Butterscotch, Chocolate or Banana – she had served last, and never risked boring us with the same flavour twice in a row. Butterscotch and Banana were the only truly acceptable flavours to us. We ate the others to humour her.

Butterscotch Angel Delight was magic. Magic in the way that if you stood over it for five minutes you could actually watch the powder and milk thicken into a creamy dessert. Magic in the way it seemed to thicken further once you put it in your mouth. Magic in what seemed like a mean portion in the bowl became almost too much of a good thing in the mouth. Magic in the way that it managed to taste of both sugar and soap at the same time.

Mashed Potato

At least twice a week my mother would make mashed potato and pile it in great, buttery, cloud-like mounds next to boiled gammon or lamb chops. It was the one thing my mother couldn’t get wrong. But then, good mash isn’t about cooking. It’s about the ability to beat lumps out of a cooked potato. Anyone could do that. Except, apparently, a school dinner lady. Mash was the only truly glorious thing Mum ever made.

There was no moment so perfect as when you squished her mashed potato into warm parsley sauce or hot gravy with your fork. The soft potato pushing up in wavy lines through the gaps between the prongs, curling over on itself, stained with dark drops of gravy. No roast potato stuck to its roasting tin; no crinkle-cut chip; no new potato with chopped mint could ever get the better of a dollop of creamy mash. I looked forward to it like I looked forward to nothing else.

One day I came home from school to find my mother sitting there at the kitchen table, her head bent down towards her lap, her eyes closed, her chest heaving slowly and deeply. She had started to do this rather a lot recently. It was as if there was something that she had to concentrate on, something she could only do by closing out the rest of her senses.

Today the potatoes were grainy and salty, wet but possessed of a dry, almost powdery feel in the mouth. ‘The mash tastes funny, Mummy.’ Quietly and firmly, in a tone heavy with total and utter exasperation, and with a distant rasp after the first word, she said, ‘Nigel…Just eat it.’

As soon as she went upstairs, I climbed down from the table to scrape the offending spud into the bin. Tucked under the packet that once held the frozen peas was a maroon-and-black packet I had never seen before. In large creamy-white letters were the words Cadbury’s Smash.

Tinned Ham

It’s a Saturday in mid-August and we have dragged the picnic table on to the lawn. My mother likes it to sit between the apple trees so she doesn’t have to squint in the sunshine. She is wearing Scholl sandals and a duck-egg blue dress with sprigs of daisies. It has buttons up the front. She and my father bring the food out from the kitchen while I just sit at the table looking at my lap. There’s a bowl of pale lettuce, some slices of beetroot in vinegar, cucumber cut so thin you could read the Bible through it and a sauce boat of Heinz Salad Cream. We must be the only family in Britain to put salad cream in a sauce boat.

My mother puts a tomato on my plate and cuts it in quarters, then a few giant curls of lettuce, two slices of beetroot and tells me, ‘You don’t have to have salad cream if you don’t want to.’ I know what’s coming. My father is eyeing my plate, searching for the slice of ham that will turn his puny son into a Viking warrior.

Without a word he stabs his fork into a slice of ham and slaps it on my plate. A hot wave of hate goes through my body. Hate ham, hate him.

Actually, I rather like ham. What I don’t like is this ham. The sort of ham that comes from an oval green tin and is surrounded by golden-brown jelly. The sort of ham it takes an age to prise from its aluminium coffin. The sort of ham that my father carves very thinly with the same knife he uses for the Sunday roast. Pretty-pink ham, evil jelly.

It is amazing how long it can take to scrape every morsel of jelly from a slice of cold boiled meat. I spend a good fifteen minutes separating good from bad, pushing the jelly towards the edge of my plate. A scientist exhuming a mummified corpse wouldn’t have been as patient as I am. Meanwhile, my father is glaring at me with a mixture of anger and disgust. Disgust at what I am not quite sure. Could it be the waste of valuable protein or the waste of valuable time? Could it be simply that it looks ungrateful? Perhaps it is the way I am doing it, like someone has put poo on my plate.

Mother is silent, Father is silently fuming. If he were a cartoon you’d see the smoke coming out of his ears.

Suddenly, he reaches across the table, picks up my plate with its ham, salad and painstakingly removed jelly and chucks it across the lawn. Mother pulls her lips into a thin, straight line. Ham, beetroot, lettuce and cucumber are spread out on the lawn. I get down from table and run in through the kitchen and upstairs to my bedroom. I close the door, lie face down on the bed and wait.

Space Dust

If you opened a sachet of the original Space Dust and poured it into your mouth, the little citrus and chemical beads crackled and hissed like you had put your tongue on a battery. If you poured three packets in at once, it was like putting your tongue on an electric fence. This is probably why they changed the formula.

Auntie Fanny looks so bored sitting in her chair, the one with the rubber liner for when she wets her long winceyette pants. The ones that come down to her knees. You feel you want to brighten her day. Sometimes I sit and talk to her even though I know she can’t hear a word I am saying. I can say rude words to her like willy and bum and she just smiles at me and hums. Sometimes we swap sweets. She gets my chocolate buttons, I get her Parma Violets. I once gave her a Toffo but it stuck her dentures together. Mum said that sometimes I can be a little thoughtless.

She looks so bored sitting there, humming to herself. I’m sure Auntie Fanny would enjoy a sachet of Space Dust. Maybe even two. Or even three.

‘Mum…Mum…Auntie Fanny’s doing it AGAIN.’

Bombay Duck

Not only has my brother got A Hard Day’s Night, a pair of desert boots and a donkey jacket with leather patches on the elbows, he’s even been to an Indian restaurant. It is easy to hate someone like that. He thinks it’s time I experienced the scented delights of chicken biryani and lamb vindaloo and takes me, together with our other brother John, to the Kohinoor, a small flock-wallpapered Indian restaurant tucked behind the rollerdrome in Wolverhampton.

The restaurant is almost empty and smells of armpits. ‘I’m going to have a Bombay duck and a chicken biryani,’ says Adrian as soon as we’re seated. John goes for the chicken vindaloo, then they start laughing about something called the Ring of Fire, which doesn’t seem to be on my menu. It must one of the ‘specials’. The menu is terrifying, though not half so much as the man in a turban standing at the kitchen doorway, his arms folded in front of him. It is like he is daring us to set foot in the kitchen.

‘I can’t manage both, I’ll just have the Bombay duck,’ I say timidly. It sounds exotic, even more so than chicken Madras. Adrian asks me if I know what Bombay duck is and I assure him I do. He and John seem to find something funny. Adrian then orders a biryani for me too, despite my pleading, and insists I will manage both.

We get a pile of giant crisps as big as a plate and some spicy gunk to dip them in that makes my nose run and my ears sting. They order beers and I drink my first ever shandy. My brothers say it’s only like drinking pop, but even so not to mention it to Dad. The Bombay duck arrives – a wizened bit of grey bark smelling like something that has been dead a very long time. Putrid. ‘It’s not like I had it last time,’ I say rather grandly, without thinking the fib through thoroughly.

The lone waiter in evening dress brings the biryanis and John’s vindaloo. I am not at all sure about this. The room smells of mildew and beer and the aforementioned armpits and the man on the kitchen door hasn’t smiled once since we arrived. The waiter smells funny too and his suit is shiny round the collar. The chicken is dark and strongly flavoured, browner than I have ever known chicken to be. Adrian tells me not to play with my food and just eat it. ‘Are you sure this chicken’s all right?’ I ask, poking at the hedgehog-coloured meat like it was poisoned.

‘Yes, it’s the spices that make it that colour,’ assures John, who seems to know quite a bit about Indian food.

I gingerly swallow a few mouthfuls. Actually, I probably could eat more but there is something I don’t like about this place. Something sinister, something a little ‘grubby’. Adrian suddenly snaps, ‘You little sod, you’ve hardly eaten anything.’

A couple of weeks later I gleefully cut a piece out of the Express and Star (usually pronounced in its catchment area as the Expressenstar) and leave it on the kitchen table. It is story about health inspectors finding skinned cats hanging up in the fridges of Indian restaurants.

Blackcurrant Pie

Mother is upstairs, having forty winks, as she calls her afternoon nap. Adrian is standing in the doorway, smiling and swaying back and forth. His eyes flicker open and closed. He stumbles over to the sofa with its white cotton covers with their sprigs of flowers, stands at the end of it then falls backwards on to the sunken cushions. He lies there on his back, his eyes open then close, then he crosses his hands on his chest like Boris Karloff and goes to sleep.

Adrian got Hush Puppies this week, slip-ons the colour of a roe deer. The ones with the black elastic patches at the side. They look great with his narrow black knitted tie and his white button-down shirt. Mum has promised to take me shopping to Beau Brummell’s for a button-down shirt for school. She says I can’t have a tie like his because I will never wear it and suede shoes will last all of five minutes with me. She reckons I grazed my new sandals, horrid red-brown ones with diamonds cut into the toes within two days. She says she doesn’t believe me when I tell her that Maxwell Mallin and Peter Francis jumped on them in the playground at lunchtime. Then, after a pause to get her breath, she snaps, ‘It wouldn’t happen if you’d play with the other boys.’ It is one of our rare icy moments. It occurs to me that if she died I would be allowed to wear a black tie to school.

Josh has come to do the garden but sees my brother asleep and says he has to go back home and will come again on Monday. I follow him out to the drive but he seems distant, cold even. I explain that my brother is a really nice guy but Josh doesn’t want to know, he just revs up and drives off. Distant. ‘I’ll see you then.’

When I come back Adrian is in a different position, and the sofa seems to have mysteriously moved forward a good two feet. The rooms smells of tinned chicken soup and something sour.

There is the sound of a key in the door and my father pops his head round the door. ‘Adrian’s asleep, Mum’s asleep,’ I say, even though it probably doesn’t need saying. Daddy stares intently at my brother, screwing up his eyes like he is trying to work something out. ‘Hmm,’ he grunts.

On the kitchen table is a large, cardboard box with short sides. A large sandwich loaf, a packet of butter, two bags of white sugar, a bunch of red, blue, white and magenta anemones, a blackcurrant pie, a box of Terry’s All Gold and the Radio and TV Times. My father brings more stuff up out of the boot of the Rover and puts it down on the table, grabs the box of All Gold and takes it back to the car and puts it in the glovebox. He then hands me a box of Mackintosh’s Weekend and tells me to take it upstairs to Mum.

By the time I’m back down – she’s asleep – he’s cut each of us a slice of blackcurrant pie, sliding the thin slices on to glass Pyrex plates. This is the pie I think about all week. The pie I lie in bed and dream about before I go to sleep. The fruit is sharp and sweet, the pastry pale and crumbly, like it is only just about cooked. It has no decoration save a small hole like a navel in the middle. Sometimes it isn’t quite in the centre. I don’t understand this, why would you put it off-centre? I eat my pie slowly, pushing my fork down through the sugar crust and into the purple-blue fruit below.

Someone thumps the huge knocker on the door twice. I can hear Warrel, my best friend. ‘Can Nige come out to play?’ My father pokes his head around the door. ‘Well, can he?’ ‘Nigel can’t come out just now, he isn’t feeling well,’ I say, biting my lip. My father smiles and disappears. Play with my best friend or have second portions of pie? No contest.

I take my second slice of pie into the sitting room. Adrian has disappeared upstairs. I sit on the floor, my back resting against the sofa. It slides back on its castors to its original position. There, where the edge the sofa had been, is a pile of my brother’s warm vomit. But pie is pie and I tuck in regardless.

Grilled Grapefruit

There was a brief time when I was the coolest kid at school. My brother had bought Rubber Soul and I listened to it, lights low, when he was out for the evening with his girlfriend who had long blonde hair and eyes so heavy with mascara she looked like a panda. I learned every word by heart. Only about two kids at school had even heard of it, and I knew every single word. Not even my brother, who knew everything, knew all the words. He thought ‘Michelle’ was crap. I thought it was brilliant. Little did I know my brother was far too busy shagging old panda eyes in the back of his Hillman Imp to learn the words to Rubber Soul.

It was about this time my father bought a grapefruit knife. It was heavily serrated with a blade that curved like a children’s slide. Just think, we were so sophisticated, so glamorous, so cool we actually had a special knife to cut our grapefruits. I didn’t know anyone else who even had grapefruits.

The first time we ate grilled grapefruit was something of a performance. We had all heard about them, though none of us knew anyone who had actually had one, so we had to guess how they were done. My father shook a thick layer of granulated sugar over the halved fruit, of course they were all yellow in those days, and got the grill hot.

Getting the grill hot was a bit like ‘getting the car out’, that peculiar ritual of revving the car up in the garage about half an hour before we went anywhere. ‘No, I’ll finish packing, you get the car out,’ my mother would say. Nowadays, they would take less trouble over starting up a space shuttle. The grill hot, or at least as hot as it ever got, we all stood and watched the sugar melting, most of which slid off the top, down the sides and started to burn in the bottom of the grill pan.

In the panic to find the oven gloves, my father tried to pull the grapefruits out with his bare hands, his eyes watering from the molten sugar. He had even bought special grapefruit spoons with serrated edges. We pulled the loose segments out of their shells, crunching through the half-melted, half-granular sugar. It was very hot and very cold, very sweet and very sour all at once. ‘Is this how they’re supposed to be,’ said someone, not entirely kindly, and we all went rather quiet. But I just thought how utterly cool I was to have eaten grilled grapefruit. I boasted about it to everyone at school the next day in much the same way as someone might boast about getting their first shag.

Cheese and Pineapple

We rarely had visitors who stayed to eat. We had never even been to, let alone given, a dinner party, despite having a dining table that could seat twelve. But there were friends who would appear now and again, usually couples so similar as to be indistinguishable from one another. They had names like Ray or Eunice. All the men wore ties and cardigans. The women wore twinsets. The sort of women who talked about their ‘dailies’ and would never leave the house without a brooch. I do remember them all laughing a lot, but I never understood what about. Everyone was taller than me. It was as if I wasn’t there.

It was my job to pass around the room with the food. Oh God, the food. ‘Now, dear, you make certain that everyone gets a cheese football, won’t you?’ my mother would say. Our place in local society seemed not to depend on whether we had a double garage (we had) or which golf club my father belonged to (he didn’t). It was more a question of whether you had Huntley & Palmer’s Cheese Footballs or not.

The pièce de résistance was a grapefruit spiked with cocktail sticks holding cubes of cheese and pineapple. The preparation was always a bit of a performance: draining the syrup from the tinned pineapple, cutting the Cracker Barrel into even-sized chunks, finding the cocktail sticks that would usually end up at the back of the gadget drawer covered in a dusting of flour. I hated doing it.

Few things could embarrass a would-be chef quite as much as having to hold out a whole grapefruit speared with cubes of Cheddar and tinned pineapple on cocktail sticks to men in cardigans.

The worst of it was that everyone thought I had done the food. ‘He wants to be a chef,’ my father would say, as I held up the spiked grapefruit to the Masonic Worshipful Master’s wife, who had a tight perm and lips like a cat’s bottom. When it came to offering the dreaded grapefruit to everyone else, I would throw my head in the air and flay my nostrils in disapproval. ‘Don’t pull a face like that,’ my father once snapped, ‘you look like Kenneth Williams.’ But I had to let everyone know my disdain for my parents’ catering arrangements. After all, if I had done the food, they would have had prunes wrapped in bacon.

Apples

I played in the garden mostly, away from the road and the big boys with their plastic footballs that stung my legs. ‘I’d rather you played where I can see you,’ warned Mother, so that suited me fine. Long borders ran either side of the lawn, white rhododendrons, pink- and saffron-coloured azaleas, purple Michaelmas daisies and, in deepest summer, dahlias, spiky ones as big as a dinner plate, maroon and white and gaudy yellow. In one corner was an apple tree, not ours, but most of it overhung our garden, so that come late August its fruit fell into the mauve and white phloxes below.

If I stood on tiptoe I could just reach the apples hanging on the lower twigs, flat-topped apples, pale green and rose like Turkish delight, with snow-white flesh that had ripples of pink running through it. They tasted of strawberries but smelled of the scented phlox that grew underneath them. I could reach these apples, unlike the fruit of the three trees in our garden whose branches were, even on tiptoes, just out of reach. I could get to the glue bands my father put round their trunks though, and used to peel off the flies and wasps they trapped, pulling them by their wings until their bodies came apart.

Uncle Reg used to come round once a week, on a Thursday evening, bringing with him a white paper bag of Cadbury’s Flakes, Aztecs, Milky Ways, tubes of Rolo, Munchies, Mintolas and Refreshers and thin black-and-white bars of Caramac. A tall handsome man with sunken cheeks, a slightly hooked nose and shaking hands, the whites of his eyes shot with red veins. He wore a long, grey mackintosh and smelled of something that was both sour and sweet.

Over the summer Uncle Reg came less and less often, his bags of sweets getting bigger with each visit. Sometimes he would bring flowers for my mother. Then one day he stopped coming altogether. I heard my mother on the phone telling someone that he had died. I never saw the lovely Uncle Reg or his sweets again.

There was no limit to how many of next door’s apples I was allowed to eat. So I just kept eating them throughout the summer. The largest always fell first, right down through the pink-eyed flowers on their tall stems. At first, I would stretch down into the flowers to pick up the apples until one day I got stung by a wasp hiding in the half-eaten side underneath. Another time there was a maggot jerking its way through the flesh, which I might have missed and eaten if it hadn’t been for its tiny dot of a black head. From then on I went in foot first, turning each fruit over with my toe, inspecting for anything that might sting or wriggle.

Cream Soda

Nobody tells me anything. They talk in whispers over my head; in hushed tones when I’m sitting drawing my usual pictures of Scottish hills or gluing model planes together. (I’m very good at shading heather and frankly draw nothing else, inspired no doubt by our last holiday, when we drove back from Loch Lomond with a sprig of the stuff tucked in the radiator of the car.)

Friday afternoon is when the pop man comes. During the summer holidays I wait around for him to arrive so that I can get at the dandelion and burdock before my brothers do. The bottles are heavily embossed and have screw caps that are almost impossible to undo. Favourite: D & B; second favourite: cream soda; least fave is plain lemonade which I leave for everyone else. I think my dad drinks it.

I like dandelion and burdock because it makes me burp really loudly, but the best flavour is actually cream soda. I don’t know how they get something clear and pale green to taste creamy but they do.

‘I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,’ says our daily, Mrs Poole, grimacing like a haddock eating mustard. Mrs Poole has long grey hair tied in a plait round her head. Bits of hair, dry and floaty, splay out at all angles so that her plait looks like a viper in a nest. She is fat with a big bottom, actually a vast, flat bottom that sways as she hoovers the sitting room and seems to have a life of its own. You always knew when Mrs P. had been, the house smelled of lavender polish and stale Hoover bags and there was the faintest whiff of armpits. I don’t know what my mother would do without her, even though she does smell of tinned tomato soup.

‘That stuff’ll give you wind,’ huffs Mrs P.

‘Actually, everything gives me wind.’

‘Like you needed to tell me that. I hear you aburpin’ an’ ablowin’ all the time. If your father was to hear those noises you make he’d ban you from drinking all that pop. Sometimes, I’m surprised you don’t go bang.’

‘Well, if I do, then you’ll just have to mop me up, won’t you.’

Cream soda never seems as cold as the other drinks. The bubbles are softer, and don’t get up your nose and make your sinuses burn like dandelion and burdock or orangeade. Cream soda looks as if it is going to taste of lime but is instead rather more fleeting, vanilla perhaps. Whatever flavourings they use it is rather like drinking a sponge cake.

Setlers

The most forbidden of places was my father’s bedside drawer. I had never been told not to go there; I just knew it was out of bounds. A secret place. An ivory-coloured drawer set in a glossy black table, gold handle, its perfect patina interupted only by a ring burned in the top by a hot mug. My mother’s, on the other hand, was an open book. A jumble of tissues and hairpins, powder compacts and violet cachous. Home to one of the many Ventolin inhalers tucked discreetly around the house.

His drawer was neat, and smelled of the cortisone cream he smoothed into his hands in the autumn when each year a weird rash would flare up. There were several opened tubes of Setlers, a little blue Masonic book with dashes where some of the words should be and a fat grey-and-maroon packet of Durex. There were several menus from dinners he had been to, often with the signatures of those who attended on the inside and some strange badges that I guessed were something to do with his Masonic uniform.

Setlers were as much a part of my father’s DNA as his pipe and his Daily Telegraph. The chalky white tablets went everywhere with him; half and quarter packets were in every jacket pocket, including the one in his suede waistcoat, and in the glovebox of the car. Ten times a day he would rub his sternum and tear another strip of wrapper off his indigestion pills. He would nibble them when he drove and when he watched television. I have even known him take one after supper, ‘just in case’. Setlers were my dad’s worry beads.

If indigestion presented itself as a side effect of worry, it might also be taken as a symptom for coldness, short temper, impatience and deceit. He suffered all of these, as did we.

The filthiest of Dad’s stomach medicines was kaolin and morphine. A thick and creamy white crust that floated on a thin transparent liquid, he called it K et Morph. He would shake the glass bottle for a good two minutes, holding the cork in place with his thumb before he tweaked it out and took a swig, sometimes two, from the bottle. He shuddered as he swallowed during what had become a daily ritual. He always had something disgusting in his mouth, a Setler, a glug of kaolin and morphine, his pipe. When it wasn’t one of those it would be Senior Service or a Mannekin. I flinched on the rare occasion he kissed me, even though I wanted him to.

Sunday Roast

The kitchen at York House is in its usual Sunday chaos. Through the clank of pans, I can hear the crackle and spit of roast beef coming from the Aga. My father is in the greenhouse, doing whatever it is that middle-aged men in greenhouses do. Through the hatch I can see steam, which means Mother is draining the beans. Beads of condensation cover the leaded windows. The odd trickle forms pools on the window ledge.

York House is a solid, half-timbered family house, built for new money, with its warren of utility room, scullery, greenhouse and downstairs lavatory. Fashion has it that multicoloured venetian blinds now hang at the leaded-light windows. The garden is somewhat typical of the time; its neat lawn broken by three apple trees with daffodils at the base of their trunks. A majestic willow hangs over the pond and there is a long and winding path around the back. There are bluebells along there, and here and there clouds of London pride.

Roasts are done in the Aga in the main kitchen, vegetables (beans, peas, carrots) on the cream Belling in the scullery. The output from the hottest of the Aga’s two hotplates often disappears at the crucial moment. Sunday lunch is almost guaranteed to bring out a sudden drop in temperature. My father says it has something to do with the hot-water supply.

Right now the scullery is hot enough to melt lead. Though to be fair most of the heat is being given off by my mother, who finds Sunday lunch a meal too many. Her hatred of it is pure and unhidden. She starts to twitch about it on Saturday afternoon. The beef, the potatoes, the beans, the carrots, the gravy, oh God the gravy. Horseradish sauce may or may not appear. It is my father who looks after the twiddly bits, the mustard, ‘horserubbish’ and the Yorkshire pudding – which he makes in an old roasting tin, one huge pudding, which he cuts into podgy squares. He doesn’t do the gravy, but I suspect we all wish he would.

He has a thing about carving the roast. It is like he imagines he clubbed the animal to death and dragged it home through the snow like a caveman with a mammoth. Not to carve the Sunday joint would be an admission to not being quite a man.

How this equates with his love of salmon-pink begonias is another matter.

Heinz Sponge Pudding

Part of the inevitability of Sunday lunch was Heinz Sponge Pudding. I savoured every last crumb, be it raspberry jam, ginger, sultana or chocolate. The last two were what I hoped for when I found the kitchen fugged up with steam and the sound of the tin rattling in its saucepan. The label would fall off and float in the water. I got to learn which one we were having by the smell. Sweet cardboard tinged with chocolate, dried fruit or ginger. To my nose the jam one just smelled of sweet cardboard. There were days when my mother let the pan boil dry and the beloved sultana sponge would burn in its tin. My father would feign nonchalance. It hid his exasperation at having married a woman who couldn’t boil water.

A Heinz Sponge Pudding serves four. Just. If we were six for lunch we got two puddings, which meant seconds. If there were five of us my mother would say, ‘Oh, one’ll do, I won’t have any.’ But she always would.

We always had cream with our sponge pudding. Nestlé’s from a tin, which allowed us to avoid the heartache of watching Mother try to make custard. The cream, so thick you could stand a spoon up in it, was always scooped out of its shallow, white-and-blue tin into the gravy boat and passed round the table. There was a fight, albeit a silent one, to get to the cream jug before Auntie Fanny. Brought up in a family that had never known cream, she was making up for it now, taking almost half the jugful. You could barely see her slice of pudding under it. ‘Are you sure you’ve got enough cream there, Auntie?’ my brother would say, followed by a glaring scowl from my father. He aimed it at Adrian but it was just as much meant for Auntie Fanny.

It was essential to get the cream before Fanny for another reason. She had a hooked beak of a nose. An Edith Sitwell sort of a nose. And on the end of that beak there was a permanent dewdrop of thin, clear snot. I can never remember her without it, apart from a few seconds after she wiped it with her flowery hanky and tucked it up the sleeve of one of her baby-blue or lemon cardigans.

When she got to the cream first, five pairs of eyes would focus intently on the glistening bud at the end of her nose, everyone willing the shining bead not to drop until she passed the cream jug on to someone else. Except me. I prayed that one day it would happen, and wondered what everyone would do if it did. Would we have to open another tin? Would my father cover Auntie’s embarrassment by just stirring it in and slopping it over his pud? I sat there, my fists clenched in my lap, willing, begging it to happen. I would have relished it. Even more so if no one but me had noticed.

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