Toast

by Nigel Slater

  This week we have picked about twenty radishes, long, thin ones with white tips and fuchsia-pink skins, the insides as crisp and white as baby’s teeth. I am still not sure if I like them or not but Dad seems to. He sort of wells up when I give them to him. ‘Go on, eat them then,’ I plead.

  ‘Later.’

  When we found the radishes in the fridge a week later, shrivelled, bendy, their leaves yellow, I am not sure who was more upset, Josh or me. Dad hadn’t really been in the house much, and I forgot to tell Mum they were there. After that I didn’t really pick any more. I told Josh he could have them all but he didn’t seem to want them either.

  Having people to do both the garden and the housework was unusual round our way. Most of our neighbours either mowed their back lawns and dug their vegetable patches, though some had wild gardens, rough lawn with overgrown brambles and purple loosestrife at the far end. Front gardens, on the other hand, were always tidy and smart. An orderly mix of heather, conifers and privet hedges. The Marks & Spencer’s grey suit of gardens. In summer, white alyssum was kept in pert balls and gentian-blue lobelia trailed gently along the edge of immaculate lawns no bigger than a duvet. Purple aubrietia was pruned into neat nests that cascaded from rockery walls. A dog turd would have been cleaned up before it was barely cold.

  No one in our road was unemployed, save gruff old Mr Manley, who was as old as God and looked rather like Monet, and Mr Saunders, who had hurt his leg at work and now spent his day practising the clarinet. Few, if any, of the women worked. Everyone had children of more or less the same age but the parents all seemed so old, with everyone in their forties and fifties. There were no babies, no single mothers, no young, childless couples. No blacks, no homosexuals, no foreigners. The only pets were our Labrador, Mr Manley’s black Scottie and a few assorted guinea pigs and hamsters. I think the Butlers had a tabby cat. Neat, calm, polite, distant, with only the children ever setting foot in one another’s houses.

  One day I came in cold and wet through. My short trousers stuck to my legs and my socks had worked their way down to my ankles. My feet squidged in my sandals as I walked. Josh grabbed his towel. ‘You’re soaked,’ he laughed. ‘Come on, let’s get you into some dry clothes.’ He followed me upstairs and he pulled my T-shirt up over my head, then slid my shorts and little white Y-front pants down. He rubbed me all over with the towel, growling like a tiger, tickling me till I couldn’t stop laughing. Josh dried my arms, making me hold them high above my head, and then my legs, which were shivering and covered in little white pimples. He dried my thighs and then held my cold, wet dick in his right hand, stroking it dry with his towel, tenderly, protectively, like he was holding a frightened mouse.

  Tinned Fruit

  We lived in a world of tinned fruit. There were tinned peaches for high days and holidays, fruit cocktail for everyday and tinned pears for my father who said they were better than fresh. There were apricots and segments of mandarin oranges that turned up in orange jelly and, once, figs, which nobody really liked. On one occasion we tried mango but my father said it tasted fishy. I wasn’t allowed to try. ‘You won’t like it.’

  The highlight was not the peaches that we ate when someone special came to tea, but the diced delights of fruit cocktail. Grey cubes of grainy pear, semi-cubes of peach, ridged chunks of pineapple and, best of all, lipstick-red maraschino cherries all floating in a divinely sweet syrup. We ate it from red Pyrex dishes, the fruit poking up like a multicoloured rockery in a pool of Ideal milk.

  ‘If you really want to, dear,’ was my mother’s answer for anything I wanted to do that she would rather I didn’t. This was her stock answer to my question: Can I make a fruit sundae? By make I meant assemble. My fruit sundae was a gloriously over-the-top mess of strawberry ice cream, tinned fruit cocktail, maraschino cherries and any nuts I could lay my hands on. I always saved a cherry for the centre. Believe me when I tell you it was the envy of all who set eyes upon it.

  Lamb Chop

  Sometimes I would come home at lunchtime to find my mother in her bedroom, curtains drawn. If I listened at the crack in the door I could hear her breathing, slow, peaceful breaths with a slight rasp coming from somewhere deep in her chest. On those days Mum, Mrs Poole, who knows who, would set out something for my lunch: ham salad; cold roast pork with pickled walnuts and crackling; a Birds Eye Chicken Pie ready to go into the oven; cold roast beef and salad. I didn’t enquire about the provenance of these meals. They just appeared and I ate them and that was that.

  One day I came home at lunchtime to find my mother had done chops and peas. It was her knee-jerk meal. When she was late back from the shops, her green Beetle with dented left wing still warm on the drive, the chops would be juicy with the thinnest line of pink running through their middle. If she had got started early I might as well be eating the sole of my father’s brown brogues.

  That day the chops were moist and sweet, a thin crust from the frying pan on their edges and fat the colour of amber. There was a bone to chew, tantalisingly browned. Best of all she had done little roast potatoes just for me. OK, so they didn’t have the gorgeous benefit of being cooked round the roast but they were still scrunchy round the edges, fluffy inside and so hot I had to jiggle them round my mouth so they didn’t burn my tongue.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said, rubbing softly at an imaginary stain on the kitchen table, ‘but I think you’re going to have to stay for school dinners. It’s just a bit too much for me at the moment. As soon as I’m better you can come back home again. I’m sorry, lamb chop.’

  It was like she had just taken out a gun and shot me.

  Tapioca

  ‘No thank you,’ I say to the tight-lipped prefect who is ladling great splodges of ivory-grey tapioca into shallow bowls and passing them round the table, ‘I’m full.’ Her eyes narrow and one corner of her mouth turns up. ‘Sorry, you have to eat it, it’s the rules.’ The guy opposite me, who smells like digestive biscuits and I think lives on the council estate I am not allowed to go to, is wolfing his down like it was warm treacle sponge or trifle, or maybe chocolate sponge pudding. But it’s not. This is the most vile thing I have ever put in my mouth, like someone has stirred frogspawn into wallpaper paste. Like porridge with bogeys in it. Like something an old man has hockled up into his hanky.

  When I get home I am going to tell Mum to write a note letting me off this stuff. The stew wasn’t that bad, apart from the swedes which were bitter and something flabby that could have been fat but felt more like a big fat slug. I spread the spittle-coloured glue around my dish right up the sides in the hope I will have to eat less of it. ‘You must show me your bowls before you leave the table,’ says Tight Lips, ‘They must be clean, otherwise you’ll be here all afternoon.’

  Considering we have an outdoor PE lesson this afternoon, staying in the warm, playing with a bowl of rice doesn’t seem such a bad option. At home, going without pudding is a punishment, at school eating it is. Yesterday’s sponge with bright red jam and desiccated coconut wasn’t so bad, neither was the chocolate blancmange with pretend cream and hundreds and thousands on it. But this is disgusting. Everyone has finished and is waiting for me, glaring at me, wanting to go out and play. ‘Oh, hurry up, will you, I’ve got netball practice,’ says Tight Lips. And so, with that I push my bowl and spoon over to the Digestive Biscuit guy and say, ‘You eat it.’ He glances furtively at Little Miss Netball Practice, who nods a mean little nod and the evil stuff was gone quicker than you could sneeze.

  And so that was it. Over the next few weeks Digestive Biscuit boy hoovered up egg-and-bacon flan, tomato flan, liver and cabbage, liver and mashed swede, mince with carrots, mince with boiled marrow, something-I’m-not-quite-sure-of-in-white-sauce, pink blancmange with very thick skin on it, yellow blancmange with very thick skin on it, gravy with a very thick skin on it and chocolate semolina which even he said looked like something that had come out of a baby’s arse.

  Treacle Tart

  Not everything ended
up on Digestive Biscuit boy’s plate. Nothing would have got me to part with jam tart with its thick crumbly pastry and thin layer of raspberry jam, or rhubarb sponge, or for that matter shepherd’s pie, fish pie, cheese pie, cottage pie, faggots, fish and chips, sausage hotpot, Irish stew or anything remotely connected to potatoes. The real treasure, though, was the treacle tart that came in a shallow aluminium tray, its golden layer of breadcrumbs and golden syrup criss-crossed with ribbons of curly pastry with a jug of custard at its side.

  For all its golden syrup school treacle tart wasn’t that sweet. It was slightly dry and stuck to your spoon so hard you had to scrape it off your teeth. What appealed was the pastry, not so much the taste but the feel of it. Pale pastry that crumbled in your mouth then coated it with crumbs and fat. Together with the crumbs and syrup, this was the most sublime texture I had ever had in my mouth. Better, even, than Mother’s flapjacks, Father’s trifle. Almost as sublime as toast.

  Crumpets

  ‘Come on, put your shoes on, we’re going for a walk.’

  We never go for a walk.

  Penn Common is a rolling meadow of tall bracken, moss and the odd thicket of birch trees. In spring there are primroses and in autumn mushrooms. Right now there is just a cold east wind and fine needles of rain. My ears are pink. My mother keeps clapping her hands over hers. We never do anything like this.

  I am dawdling twenty feet behind them, catching the odd word here and there. ‘Not in hospital, at home…’ ‘Please, please let me be at home…’, ‘…be able to cope…’, ‘If he was only tougher…’

  My father bends his head. ‘If the worst comes to the worst…’,’…taken into care, it’s not like it used to be.’

  I guess my mother is pregnant, that she doesn’t want to have the baby in hospital and that for some reason it may have to go into care. I rather fancy the idea of a little brother or perhaps a sister.

  We walk on, my face getting so cold and numb I can barely feel my tongue. We keep walking, and now both of them have their heads bent down against the stinging rain. My father puts his arm around my mother. He has never done this before. Perhaps she’s cold. I think they are crying. Not once do they look back at me.

  At home my father tears open a packet of crumpets and toasts them on the Aga. He puts so much butter on them that it runs through the holes and down our arms as we pull at the soft, warm dough with our teeth. We all run our fingers round our plates and lick the stray butter off them. Everyone is so quiet. Both of them have red eyes like white rabbits. I thought everyone was happy when you were having a baby.

  Bubblegum

  Lunch was a turnstile you went through to get your pocket money. ‘Can I get down now?’ was followed by a coy smile, head cocked to my left, my right leg scuffing gently at the black linoleum of the kitchen floor. If this offensive didn’t work, ‘Daddy,’ long pause, ‘haven’t you forgotten something?’ was usually enough to extract a sixpenny piece from his trouser pocket.

  A sixpence meant bubblegum. To be more precise it meant three packets of Beatlecards or two packets of Beatlecards and a Sherbet Fountain. I am not sure if the card photographs of John, Paul, George and Ringo smelled of bubblegum, or if the bubblegum smelled of cardboard. I was never an avid collector and used them as cash at school. What mattered was the flat, rose-pink piece of bubblegum and its smooth surface, the art of unwrapping the thin paper round it and my ability to put the entire sheet of gum in my mouth in one go.

  My ability to fart was matched only by my expertise in blowing ‘Beatlegum’ into pink balloons the size of a tennis ball. Balloons whose only point was to burst and stick to your top lip and right cheek. The day I got the hang of bubble-blowing I raced home armed with three sheets of gum. My mother was sitting on a chair, her right hand clutching her chest and looking down at her lap. I burst in and kneeled down in front of her, taking huge breaths and blowing my bubblegum into a transparent pink globe less than six inches from her face. Her eyes were closed and she had a white lace-edged handkerchief in her left hand.

  My father walked in just as my bubble burst. ‘Sometimes you are so thoughtless. Now leave her in peace,’ he snapped while my mother sat, motionless except for a heaving chest, gasping for breath.

  Porridge

  There were only two breakfast cereals I would eat: Sugar Puffs and Cap’n Crunch. Weetabix, Alpen, Shredded Wheat, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes and Coco Pops all fell at the first post because they needed milk on them. Eating a Shredded Wheat without a soaking of milk is like one of those party games you play when you’re drunk. Sugar Puffs and Cap’n Crunch were quite palatable eaten dry and so that was breakfast. Every single day. It didn’t occur to me that those cereals were only edible without milk because they were so sweet. You can swallow pretty much anything if it comes with a dose of sugar.

  Today Dad makes my breakfast. Hot Ribena and porridge with sugar.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘She’s upstairs, she’s getting up late today.’

  Mum never gets up late. Must be something to do with her being pregnant. Don’t know why no one has told me about it yet. I mean, this is going to make a big difference to my life. Having a brother or sister could turn my world upside down. Especially if I don’t like them.

  I don’t want porridge. You can’t eat it because it’s so hot. Then you can’t eat it because it’s so cold. The difference between the two is barely three minutes. When you catch porridge at the right moment it is like being wrapped in a cashmere blanket. A food so comforting and soul-warming you imagine there is no problem on earth it could not solve. And then, when you are halfway through the bowl, it cools. The last two or three spoonfuls make me gag. If I put enough sugar on it I can just about get it down, though one day I swear the whole lot will come back up through my nose.

  My father interferes with what I eat more than anyone else. The rule is simple: for breakfast I have dry cereal and Tree Top orange squash. Yet he makes me eat this pap called porridge and insists I have a glass of Ribena. Then he tries to get me to drink tea. Nothing, but nothing will get me to drink tea. Even with sugar in it.

  Every time my dad feeds me he goes quiet, thoughtful, distant even. This big man bites his bottom lip and gazes intently at my skinny arms and spindly legs. He watches, silently, at the way I pick at my food, pushing it round the plate when I don’t like it. Pulling a face. My father’s disappointment in his youngest son is so obvious you could put it on a plate and eat it.

  The Day the Gardener Came

  The one man to whom I wasn’t a disappointment was Josh. I loved every moment he was around and would stand at his side as he cleaned the pond of its green duckweed, tugged dandelions from the lawn and snipped the deadheads off Dad’s prized dahlias. He didn’t do the lawn. Mowing the lawn in wide, green stripes was Dad’s job, marching up and down its great length with the smell of oil and cut grass trailing behind him. The gardening equivalent of carving the turkey. It said, ‘I’m in charge.’

  Where my father was cold, Josh was warm. Where Dad would tell me to get down, Josh would pick me up. He would sit me on his lap, bounce me on his shoulders, and sit and talk to me in the garage long after he had finished tying up the honeysuckle or raking the leaves from the lawn. Sometimes I would paint pictures for him, my much practised wishy-washy watercolours of heather-covered hills and window ledges with potted plants on them. He would put them away carefully in his empty lunch box, like they were fragile, ancient parchments and take them home.

  If I walked in when Josh was getting changed he’d instantly stop and talk to me, sometimes wearing nothing at all. He started bringing magazines, the two of us straddling the wide seat of his motorbike, him sitting behind me with his arms hugged around me, slowly turning the pages for me. He said it was probably best not to tell anyone about the magazines.

  One day I ran into Mum and Dad’s bedroom to ask Dad if I could go out and play. Dad hadn’t got any clothes on and got cross and told me to knock on the door next time. I tol
d him that Josh never minded when I saw him naked. Mum and Dad glanced across at one another, then Dad looked back down at the floor.

  The following week I ran home from school to see Josh as usual. His motorbike wasn’t there, and in the garden was a wiry old man bending over the rose beds, a wheelbarrow full of weeds at his side. ‘Who are you?’ I demanded, glaring at him, my bottom lip starting to quiver.

  ‘Be away with you,’ he snapped. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

  Hot Chocolate 1

  Nine years old and I still cannot swim without a rubber ring. There are four of us, all boys, who occupy the nonswimmers’ end of the pool each Wednesday afternoon. As if this isn’t humiliation enough, the rubber rings are pink and yellow.

  The changing rooms are an ordeal. Mr Staley allows us barely five minutes to get dried and back into our white pants, grey shirts and black trousers. We are allowed to put our ties on in the coach. The changing cubicles are freezing and so crowded it is impossible to dry yourself thoroughly. We all dry one another’s backs. Even though there is no room to stretch a towel I brace myself for the crack of a wet one being flicked at my matchstick legs. Sometimes you get your pants thrown out on to the wet deck, necessitating a mad, naked dash to retrieve them. We flick each other’s cold, wet ears, wring our sodden trunks in one another’s shoes, make grabs at each other’s cocks. On the bus back our wet hair drips down our backs, and the carpet-covered seats make us itch all the way home.