Toast

by Nigel Slater

  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.

  Crisps, Ketchup and a Few Other Unmentionables

  I am not certain everything is going well at Dad’s factory. He’s been quiet lately, pensive, distant, coming in tired and late. I heard him use a low, angry voice on the phone the other night. Another night he looked crestfallen when I went into the kitchen to say hello to him. Like I was a nuisance. He hasn’t let me sit on his lap for weeks. ‘Not just now,’ he says.

  He spends a lot of time in deep discussion with my mother and when he laughs it is like he cannot stop, then ends up with tears rolling down his cheeks. After that his mood changes and he lets me climb up on his lap.

  My father and his partner Joe Ward built that business up from nothing, taking over a vast disused munitions factory and turning it into something of a gold mine. He employed about twenty men in the factory, a secretary and a clerk who did ‘the books’. There used to be an air of excitement, a barely hidden pride about how well the business was doing. He seemed to come home weary now, like he had had enough. Two years earlier, he had been investigated by the Inland Revenue for selling scrap metal from the factory, offcuts mostly, for cash. After that there was more bookwork, so much so that he and my mother used to sit for hours in the kitchen, the table barely visible under piles of receipts on wooden spikes and long hardback books with endless columns of figures and swirly, Florentine endpapers. The two of them could be there all evening, my mother on one side of the table, him on the other. Sometimes he would come and take the whisky bottle and two glasses from the bookcase-cum-drinks cabinet.

  I remember one night – they had just started doing ‘the books’ at home – when I saw something on television about President Kennedy being shot. I went in to the kitchen to tell them he was dead and they told me not to make up stories. ‘But it’s true, it’s on the television,’ I pleaded. My father threatened me with a good hiding if I didn’t stop telling tales.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Mum said when she came into the sitting room and saw the news unfolding on the television. She just stood there, her hand clasped to her mouth, gasping, ‘I just can’t believe it.’

  ‘I told you,’ I said, hot and frustrated that they hadn’t believed me.

  Half an hour later my father came in with a packet of crisps. ‘Have these,’ he said. It would be the nearest I would get to an apology. Crisps were frowned upon, rather like baked beans, chips and Love Hearts. Occasionally, he would bring some back from the shops, and I’d open up the crackly bag, poke my fingers right down into the crisps and pull out the bright blue twist of waxed paper that held the salt. Unfurled and shaken into the bag, it was important to get as little of the salt as possible on the crisps. That way, when I had scrunched all the crisps I would have the bonus of finding a thick line of salt at the bottom of the bag to dab up with a wet finger. The salt and the few little crisp crumbs among it were a treat beyond measure, better even than the crisps themselves. This sort of eating wasn’t banned, it was simply disapproved of. That was enough. Crisps – light, salty, golden – were banished for the same reason that baked beans were, and fish and chips in newspaper, mushy peas, evaporated milk and sliced bread in plastic. It wasn’t that such things were considered bad for me, too sweet or full of additives. It wasn’t even because they didn’t stock such things at the local grocer. It was because my parents considered them to be ‘a bit common’. The same way they thought petunias and French marigolds were common. The way they thought flip-flops or girls who didn’t tie their hair back were common. The same way they considered eating the top layer off a Bourbon biscuit and licking the chocolate filling off was common. Quite how they explained away their predilection for tinned mandarin oranges and Kraft cheese slices is a matter for speculation.

  The flip side of their snobbery was that we mostly got to eat good ham, sliced from the bone at Percy Salt’s on Penn Road, and to drink Maxwell House coffee. We bought bread from a proper baker’s, albeit a white sandwich loaf which my mother found easier to slice that the cute cottage loaves with their wayward topnot. Fish came from the fish shop rather than in breadcrumbed sticks (I didn’t taste a fish finger till I was nineteen) and we bought Cadbury’s chocolate MiniRolls rather than a plain Swiss roll. We had Battenberg too, and fresh cream and sponges on Saturdays and sometimes waxed cartons of trifle.

  Some things were quite unmentionable, even in hushed tones. Babycham, sandwich spread, tomato ketchup, bubblegum, HP Sauce and Branston Pickle could never even be discussed let alone eaten. Those chocolate marshmallows with biscuit and jam in the middle that came in red-and-silver foil (and which I could cheerfully have killed for) would never have been allowed past the front porch.

  Senior Service

  Uncle Geoff is wearing his usual tweed jacket, the one that has leather patches on the elbows and smells of Senior Service. He has a tight little moustache, a bit like Adolf Hitler’s, shiny yellow teeth and long, thick fingers.

  My mother and father are out. Uncle is babysitting. He is on the sofa in the sitting room; I’m snuggled up next to him, breathing in his warm smell of tobacco and wool.

  ‘Do you want to play a game?’ he asks. ‘It’s called Find the Sixpence.’

  I close my eyes while Uncle Geoff hides a silver coin. First, I look under the sofa, which we call the settee, then lift each cushion one by one. ‘Cold.’ I lift the yellow-and-black china plant pot, then the Royal Worcester ashtray and the porcelain black girl with her basket of washing. ‘Cold.’ On the window ledge is an old lady with a green dress, a string of balloons in her hand. ‘Is it under here, Uncle? I’m not supposed to touch her.’

  I lift the glass vase with its lone hyacinth, the leather folder that holds the Radio and TV Times. Cold. ‘Is it somewhere on you, Uncle?’ ‘Getting warmer.’ Uncle has tight little pockets on the front of his jacket which will just take a small hand. Cold. I check under his collar and run my fingers down his chequered woollen tie. Uncle Geoff always wears a tie.

  Turn-ups, empty. The folds of his maroon V-neck sweater, empty. The waistband of his trousers, his shoes, empty. I run my hand along the bit of the cushion he’s sitting on. ‘Getting warmer again.’ Uncle’s pockets are gaping wide enough for a hand to slip down but then they tighten around the top of his thighs. I push my hand right down into the depths of his pocket, feeling the line of his thigh. I move my hand round over the top of his leg and wriggle it down the inside where his thighs meet. I can feel the edge of a coin but I can’t quite get at it. The side of my hand is brushing against something long and hard like the handle of a cricket bat. I slide my hand down its length. It is fatter and softer at one end. Suddenly, as my fingers reach the tip, I can feel the sixpence. Uncle is smiling. ‘Warmer, warmer, hot, hot, hot, hot…’

  Jelly 1

  For an eight-year-old boy there is only one true requisite of jelly. And that is that it makes a squelching sound when you dig the spoon deep into its orange depths. A sort of jelly fart. The louder the squelch the better the jelly. Raspberry, orange, lime or strawberry it matters not. The only important thing is the noise. The only way to guarantee the obscenity is to make th
e jelly stronger than usual. This means using twice as many cubes of jelly. Two packets of jelly cubes to one measure of boiling water. Made this way you get a jelly that farts. It doesn’t seem to matter that you then have to eat something that you could play football with.

  Jelly 2

  I was rarely ill, despite looking as if a good gust of wind would blow me away. There were the usual schoolkid illnesses of course; measles (‘stop scratching, you’ll only make it worse’), mumps (‘better to get it now than later on’) and chickenpox (‘don’t pick them, they’ll leave a scar’), but there were few colds and even fewer bouts of flu. There were, however, quite regular occurrences of what my mother christened ‘bilious attacks’. These mysterious, short-term fits consisted of faintness, shivering and extreme nausea. I also went as white as milk and distinctly clammy. My father would barely acknowledge their existence. I suspect he felt they were more the sort of thing a bustled Edwardian lady might suffer when her corset was too tight, but they were real enough.

  These attacks invariably coincided with maths tests, football practice and the first day of term. I cannot honestly say I faked them – even the best amateur dramatist cannot make someone’s skin turn grey, sticky and cold – but it was true that they had a habit of getting me out of things I didn’t want to do. Inevitably, the decision would be made to send me to bed for the day.

  Being sick meant four things: hot Ribena, tinned soup, Marmite soldiers and jelly. It was worth a batch of measles to be brought a bowl of Rowntree’s blackcurrant jelly on a tray every mealtime. Sometimes Mum would make lime or lemon instead. She used to make it so weak that it only just set, which meant I could suck it through my teeth, the really wibbly wobbly ones slipping off the spoon and down the front of my pyjamas. Jelly was my panacea. It even got me back from one of the worst cases of mumps the doctor said he had ever seen. My father said I looked like Frankenstein’s monster.

  I cannot say I didn’t enjoy being poorly. The sick bucket with its thin layer of evil-smelling disinfectant was never far from my bed, but it was a small price to pay for all the attention, the fact that I didn’t have to go to school and the licence to sit in bed all day reading books. Being sick allowed me to reread the ‘Narnia’ books, Swallows and Amazons and all my Malcolm Savilles. The small inconvenience of having a thermometer shoved under my tongue every hour was nothing compared to the joy of snuggling under the yellow candlewick and floating into the land of Narnia.

  The worst bit of being ill was being expected to eat tinned soup. Any sensible parent would have boiled up a bowl of jolly-red cream of tomato. The colour alone would have made a poorly boy feel better. Mine tried to woo me back to health with something that bore an uncanny resemblance to what was coming out of either end of me at the time: cream of chicken, cream of vegetable or, in a spectacularly thoughtless moment, oxtail.

  Lemon Drops

  My mother’s mother ended up in Shifnal. A neat, pale blue ward in a hospital that took people whose relatives could no longer cope. There was nothing sinister about it – I remember it being rather pretty, with a rose garden dotted with watery-blue delphiniums the colour of my grandmother’s eyes, and elderly women sitting peacefully in wheelchairs, wearing soft pink- or baby blue-coloured cardigans. My mother used to drive me there to see her once a week. Grandmother would sit there smiling, her wispy white hair so thin you could see the freckles on her head, smiling and nodding at everything we said. Even at eight years old I knew she was away with the fairies and would not last long.

  Grandmother kept a round tin of lemon drops at her bedside. The sort with a tight lid with pictures of fruit on it. I longed for those sweets. I wanted her to open the tin and offer me one of her golden bon-bons. I wanted to dither over which square sweetie to choose. I dreamed of licking the thin layer of fine icing sugar from them and running my tongue over the little ridges on each side. I longed to dab a wet finger at the loose icing sugar in the bottom and would stare for hours at the golden tin, trying to avoid the plastic beaker next to it. The one with her teeth in.

  Our trips to Shifnal, to sit for an hour or two talking to this woman who just smiled and nodded, became more frequent. My mother would pick me up after school two or three times a week, so that while all my classmates played football, I sat in a hospital ward holding the frail, knobbly hands of an old woman who kept her teeth in a mug.

  Towards the end, my mother would disappear for ages talking to the ward sister. I knew Grandmother was dying. She would just sit there, smiling and nodding, humming to herself and staring out at the daffodils, pretending not to see the little boy prising the lid off a dying woman’s lemon drops.

  Milk

  My first glass of milk, in truth just two mouthfuls, had ended with my being violently sick over my new sandals. There had been odd attempts to encourage me to try it again, but none had succeeded in getting me to do more than dip my finger in it and shudder. If it looked as if I might be pushed further, a mock heave usually brought the matter to a close. At break times Miss Poole, our mild-mannered, grey-skinned, grey-clothed form teacher allowed any unopened bottles of the compulsory school milk to go to the first to finish.

  One cold, flat morning in September I moved up a class. My teacher was now to be Mrs Walker, a woman so stern-faced, so unwaveringly strict as to be used as a threat by the other teachers. She was a stout bulldog of a woman, her unwashed hair pressed tight to her head, dressed as always in a knee-length black skirt and grey twinset. As I picked up my pencil case, my set of twenty Caran d’Ache crayons in their flat tin, my English books with their spelling tests and essays entitled ‘An Autumn Day’ and ‘My Ten Favourite Things’, to move up to Mrs Walker’s class, someone whispered, ‘She makes everyone drink their milk.’

  One week later milk had yet to pass my lips. I started offering my small bottle of milk to any girl who would show me her knickers. After getting ripped off a couple of times by girls who failed to keep their part of the bargain, I worried I might have to start paying people to drink my unwanted white stuff.

  ‘Can I have your milk if you don’t want it?’ asked Peter Marshall one morning break. So I said, ‘Show me your dick first,’ and with that set a precedent for the whole term. None of the girls wanted an extra bottle enough to give me a quick flash, but the other boys were queuing up for it and perfectly happy with the deal. I think this was the first time I realised food could be a bargaining tool.

  Nothing prepared me for how ill a bottle of milk could make a boy. Mrs Walker caught me pretending to drink my ration while waiting for someone to finish theirs. ‘Come and stand at the front.’ I put my milk on the desk and walked towards her. ‘No, bring your milk with you. I’ve been watching you for days and now you are going to drink it in front of everyone.’ Uncertain of just how much of the milk game she had seen, I half wondered whether she was going to make the girls show their knickers to the entire class.

  I stood in front of the class, head bent down, my stomach flipping and diving. I worried not about the shame of being caught, but simply that I was going to have to swallow the wretched, wretched milk. Please God, don’t let me have to drink this stuff. He didn’t answer. ‘Drink it all,’ said Mrs Walker, her eyes narrowing like a lizard’s in bright sunlight. I put the straw to my lips and sucked, sticking my tongue over the open end. ‘We will sit here all day until you have finished every drop.’

  It was a warm day, mid-September. The milk had been standing in its crate in the sun for a good hour before she sent Robin Matthews to drag it into the classroom. The tinkle of the bottles and scrape of the metal crate always filled me with fear. I sucked. A great bubble of warm, creamy milk hit my tongue, then filled my mouth. It was like vomiting backwards. I tried to swallow slowly, but my throat closed tight and then something acid, almondy, welled up from my stomach.

  The vomit came so quickly I didn’t have time to move the milk bottle. The straw shot out across the floor, the bottle fell with a clatter and I closed my eyes. Partly to block out
the horror of it all and partly because I always close my eyes when I throw up. The puke spluttered down my green school pullover and on to the floor, it splashed the bottom half of the bookcase with its Conan Doyles and Kiplings, Sylvia Mountsey’s satchel and a marrow on the harvest festival display. At least it missed my bare legs. When I opened my eyes there was milk over the floor, running under the radiator and Mrs Walker’s desk. There was thin, milky-yellow vomit over my shoes and the bottle, whole and unbroken, had rolled under Peter Marshall’s desk. ‘Go and sit down,’ she yelled, ignoring the fact that one of her pupils had just been violently ill down himself. She evidently intended to leave me to stew.

  I skulked towards my chair, surrounded by a sea of shy smirks and dropped heads. I bent down to pick up the stray bottle. I got down on all fours and crouched under the table. As I stretched to reach the bottle, something moving caught my eye. It was a flash of three pairs of green knickers and Peter Marshall’s dick, fully erect and waving back and forth like a child’s flag at a royal walkabout.

  PS Nesquik was my parents’ last-ditch attempt to make me drink milk. Orange, strawberry, chocolate. The only thing that changed was the colour of my puke.

  Peas

  ‘Don’t ever, ever go beyond the compost heap,’ warned Mrs Saunders, who had a house at the top of the road. We did, of course. Not every time, only when she went out. ‘Come on, there’s peas.’ We went down the rows, picking and popping till we had had our fill. We hid the pea pods in our pockets. When they were full, we tucked the spent pods under the plants, hoping that Mrs Saunders wouldn’t see them.