Toast

by Nigel Slater

  Everything has stopped. The room is silent. He has gone. I stand up and pull my left sock up, which has ruckled down to my ankle. I walk through the hall and then through the kitchen. Past the garage I can see him in his greenhouse. He has got a pale pink begonia on the wooden slats and is pressing the soil tenderly down around the stem. He puts it back and picks up another, this time red. My father touches a bud with his thumb and forefinger, and then a flower, pulling the petals back softly, like he is calming a sparrow with a broken wing. His face is scarlet, puffed. There are tears running down it.

  Scrambled Egg

  ‘Just try it,’ pleaded my father, holding out a plate of particularly yellow scrambled egg. ‘You won’t taste the eggs, I promise.’

  He had become cunning of late; a promised pancake had turned out to be an omelette, some slices of hard-boiled egg had been slipped into a salad sandwich and, in a moment of spectacular deceit, he had attempted to hide the yolk of a fried egg under a mound of baked beans.

  I was having none of it. Every morsel of food was inspected both on the plate and again on the fork for signs of the dreaded oeuf. No lettuce leaf or bridge roll was left unchecked, no salad dressing went unsniffed, every sandwich was prised apart. The more wily he became, the more untrusting I learned to be. At one point I used to sit on the kitchen counter talking to him as he made supper, just to check that no new-laid wonder found its way on to my plate.

  I promised I’d give it a go. He didn’t leave the room. I sniffed the golden slop suspiciously. It did, sure enough, smell of cheese. The colour was deep and rich, like that of a crocus, and it had a clear moat of yellow fat round it, which looked the same as the fat which came out of one of his less successful attempts at cheese on toast. A timid forkful proved edible. A second went down easy enough and soon I had finished the lot. I am not sure who was happiest.

  As the weeks went by my scrambled suppers became less manageable. By the fourth week, the egg had become detectable; by the sixth, the cheese was barely noticeable. But by this time my father had seen enough empty plates to know I could be trusted to eat up my supper without him peering over my shoulder. Sad, then, that I couldn’t trust him not to gradually cut down on the cheese. Even sadder, then, that I started feeding it to the dog.

  He would come home early all the time now. Only an hour or so after I got in from school he would appear and make me something to eat. Then he would leave the house in a whirlwind of aftershave and freshly ironed shirt, leaving me alone again, eating at the table. His cheeks had got more colour recently. His hair glistened with Brylcreem scooped from a red plastic pot and his face and neck scrubbed up as pink as a pork chop.

  American Hard Gums

  In the normal course of events my father and Mrs Potter never would have met. He didn’t inhabit a world where women wore Crimplene. He had never come across a woman who did her housework with her hair in rollers. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know any women who did their own housework, let alone other people’s. They got to know one another through the raffles and whist drives they organised for a local disabled group. ‘It nearly did my back in doing the waltz with Mr Guthrie,’ Joan Potter announced one evening after a wheelchair dance in the function room of the Battle of Britain pub. ‘I thought I was going to slip another bleedin’ disc.’

  She wore her hair in a tight perm like a First Division footballer. Her eyes were small and twinkling, like espresso coffee. Her mouth was as tight as a walnut and carried above it the faintest of moustaches. Yet she was strangely attractive and, dressed up for the evening, her hair done in softer curls, she was undeniably sexy. Especially to a man twenty years older and gagging for it.

  It all started normally enough when my father’s secretary, a pretty, moonfaced girl called Barbara, asked if he could help with a local charity with which her mother Joan Potter was involved. It took just a few weeks from buying the occasional raffle ticket to find him assisting in the fortnightly charity-raising events. (Say what you like about Joan Potter, she made a small fortune for the disabled.) Whenever he attended a beetle drive or coffee evening, Joan would be there. He passed the end of her street anyway, so why not drop her off afterwards. He knew the area well enough, though only because it was less than a mile from his factory. He didn’t know anyone who actually lived in the maze of council estates and high-rise blocks. No one who might drink a pint of ‘mild’ at the Battle of Britain. No one who would care to spend an afternoon in the bingo hall. But, as he said, he passed the end of her street anyway.

  Around the corner from Joan’s house was a sweet shop that sold pear drops, Parkinson’s Fruit Thins and things called American Hard Gums. As their name implied, they took some chewing. The colours were muted reds, greens and whites and reminded me of the lights we put on the tree at Christmas. My father adored them above all other sweets and would travel miles to get them. ‘I haven’t seen these for years,’ he beamed one day, coming back to the car after dropping Mrs Potter off, clutching a small white paper bag of sweets. ‘Try one, go on.’

  The gritty sugar coating scratched across the enamel of my teeth. I chewed and I chewed. You could barely make a dent in them. My one and only Hard Gum lasted all the way home.

  I started to notice just how often he would have a new white paper bag of gums on the dashboard of the Humber. The sweets became as much of a fixture of the car as the Shell map of Great Britain in the map pocket and the driving gloves in the glovebox. As much a fixture of the car as one Mrs Joan Potter.

  Spinach

  Stevie, my brother’s new girlfriend, was everything in the kitchen my mother was not. When she came over for the evening she would always cook something for my brother. She cooked greens that shone emerald on the plate. Mother’s greens had been the colours of an army surplus store. Stevie boiled ham hocks and grilled haddock; she flash-fried liver so it was rose pink in the middle and roasted potatoes so that they had crunchy outsides and fluffy white flesh within. She made steak and casseroles, jam tarts whose pastry crumbled tenderly when you picked them up, and velvety yellow custard in bowls so deep you could lose a small pet in it.

  Stevie could get me to eat anything. Anything except eggs. It took her just one try to get me to like the spinach that I had sworn I would never let pass my lips. Once I had seen the way she sliced a lamb chop so as to get both pink meat and crispy fat on her fork at once, and how she ate it quickly, while the fat was still hot and wobbly and the meat juicy, it made me see the chop in a different light. From then on I couldn’t have eaten it faster had it had Cadbury’s embossed on it.

  It is five past six on a Tuesday and my brother is due home. Stevie is sitting by the fire, brushing her hair, her legs curled under her. She is sorting letters into chronological order in her porcupine-quill writing case. She has kept every letter she has ever received, even the ones from her parents when she was at boarding school. Letters still in their envelopes, opened neatly with a letter-opener. I want to keep mine like this too, except no one has ever written me a letter.

  She finishes brushing her hair and starts to do mine, which frankly could do with a cut. She runs the Mason and Pearson through my hair, making it curl at the ends. I think it makes me look like Brian Jones of the Stones.

  Smoke

  We only use a couple of pans now; the non-stick milk pan for warming up tinned tomatoes to go on toast, the old frying pan for cooking a bit of bacon on a Sunday morning. If you move any of the others tiny silverfish dart out from underneath. Last weekend there was a woodlouse in the roasting tin. Since Mum’s gone the dishcloth always smells.

  It seemed like we used to live on lamb chops, peas and boiled potatoes, but now I long to taste those chops again, Mum’s boiled gammon too and the lumpy sauce she used to make with dried parsley. We haven’t had fish – she used to fry it and serve it with Jif lemon – since last December. Cadbury’s MiniRolls have replaced her pancakes and baked apples. I never thought it would be possible to get bored of Cadbury’s MiniRolls.


  Last night I came home to find the kitchen full of smoke. There was bacon under the grill and it had caught fire. I don’t know where Dad was. We still ate it, charred and shattered with tinned tomatoes that he forgot to heat up. My father looks tired and as if he is on the point of saying something important, but never does. If it wasn’t for the bread and butter this would be the worst meal I’ve had since Mum died. Not only that, my school pullover smells of grease and smoke.

  Dad brought Mrs Potter to the house today. She smiled at me and said we both looked as if we needed fattening up.

  Players No. 6 (Tipped)

  I am not sure quite when Mrs Potter started as our cleaner. I only know that she did. Every day except Wednesdays I would come home at lunchtime to the warm dough smell of fresh ironing and a cooked meal. There was a coldness to Mrs Potter, a distance, as if she didn’t quite approve of me, but her cooking was a dream come true. Bits of steak with grilled tomatoes and home-made chips as long as my fingers; pork chops with the kidney left in and apple rings done in the frying pan; slices of gammon with pineapple rings and, once, a cherry like the one in Marguerite Patten’s book.

  She would sit there tight-lipped while I ate. Never at the table, always on a chair against the wall, a Players No. 6 in her hand. When she heard my father’s car pull up outside, she would squeeze the lighted tip of her cigarette between her thumb and finger and put it in her apron pocket, then fan the air and pull her skirt straight.

  If I dawdled at the table after lunch, for example, when there was a dreaded PE lesson or when I knew I was going to get bullied in the playground, he would say, ‘Go along now, go and play.’ Mrs Potter seemed shy in my presence, cool and formal. She spoke quietly and reluctantly, yet she and my father never looked away from each other. What came out of their mouths, stiff, crisp, rather correct, was very different from what their eyes were saying. It was as if they had known each for years and had a separate, private language. That language that parents mistakenly, patronisingly think their children cannot comprehend. A language so loud, so painful, so icily clear that it is as if they were plunging a kitchen knife deep into your chest.

  Tinned Beans and Sausage

  My father never made it home to lunch on Wednesdays. It was also Mrs P.’s day off. My lunch was always left in the oven; a clear glass dish beaded with condensation, the contents invariably bean and sausage casserole.

  This was not a rustic earthware pot of haricot beans and garlic-laced saucisse, but an upturned tin of baked beans with chipolata sausages in them, left to warm up and then congeal in the slow oven of the Aga. It was a sad sight to come home to. Three thin skinless bangers in a mess of brown beans, a thin skin lying over the top like a shroud. Made with love it could have looked like a Robert Freson photograph, a warming peasant lunch in a much loved and battered casserole handed down through the family. Instead, it looked like an unflushed lavatory.

  Yet there was something I looked forward to about this meal. Opening the leaden door of the Aga, the scary blast from the hot oven, lifting out the dish by the tiny glass handles you could barely feel through thick oven gloves. It was as near as I had got to cooking since the haddock episode.

  One day I came home to an empty oven. My father had forgotten. The dog, who hated being left alone, had peed on the kitchen floor. I found an opened packet of Ritz crackers, sat and ate them, salty tears streaming down my face. It wasn’t that I even liked the tinned beans and sausages. I just liked the idea that someone had remembered to leave me something to eat.

  Banana Custard

  Quite the best thing about my brother’s new girlfriend was her ability to make a decent banana custard. In fact, it was better than decent, it was sublime: warm, sweet, creamy, soothing and with just the right ratio of Bird’s custard to bananas. Stevie knew not only to make the sauce thick enough to hold the bananas in suspension, but how thin to slice the fruit. Too thick and the bananas failed to flavour the custard properly, too thin and they collapsed into the sauce. She always got it right.

  None of us ever quite knew when Adrian was due home. Sometimes it would be on the dot of six, other times it would be nearer eight o’clock. The dessert was always better for an hour on the back of the Aga, a time in which the fruit would steep and slowly flavour the creamy yellow depths. Stevie would start boiling the milk and mixing the custard powder and granulated sugar at about six o’clock. She would pour the foaming milk on to the dry mix and stir slowly, the sauce becoming heavier by the second. She would slice the bananas over the custard, letting each piece drop down and sink into the depths of the dish so they had no time to brown. Then she would cover the bowl with tinfoil and lift it over the hotplate to the back of the Aga. There it would stay until my brother came home.

  It is almost impossible to steal a spoonful of custard without leaving a trail of clues behind. Even if a skin hasn’t formed, the tell-tale signs of theft are there for all to see. The broken calm of the yellow surface; the paler yellow showing through the deeper yellow of the skin; the all-too-careful repair. Over the months before they married I perfected my dishonesty, digging into my brother’s dessert time and again while Stevie had a bath.

  It was only when Adrian was extraordinarily late one night and I had returned several times to dip in that I got caught. I hadn’t noiced that I had eaten all but one slice of banana. ‘If you’d eaten them all he would never have noticed,’ said Stevie later, ‘he would have assumed I’d just made custard.’

  Strawberries and Cream

  During the winter months the Masonic ladies’ night became an almost weekly occurrence. Neither sleet nor storm would keep my father, crisp and scrubbed in his white tux and Old Spice, from attending. His small, recently bereaved son became a regular fixture at the various Masonic lodges, the sinister male-only halls with their blacked-out windows that were hastily transformed into venues suitable for female visitors. As regular as the extravagant floral displays that for one night each year were used to hide the urinals in the temporary women’s lavatories.

  I had no idea how honoured I was to be allowed to attend each lodge’s annual parade of wives in their ballgowns. Mrs Wood in claret velveteen, Eunice Everard in bottle-green taffeta, and Minnie Clarke in a suitably plain blue satin number she’d obviously knocked up specially for the occasion. I was unaware of the disapproval among the more conservative members who found a little boy’s attendance at such an occasion inappropriate. I should have spotted it. After all, these were the sort of men who thought a bunch of pale yellow carnations and a spray of asparagus fern were enough to disguise a six-foot porcelain trough and its hearty whiff of urine.

  One early-spring chicken dinner was followed by strawberries and cream. The whipped cream piled high on the mounds of blatantly unripe strawberries found few takers on our table. ‘Hummmph. I knew they wouldn’t be ripe,’ chimed Eunice Everard, her face as sour as the berries that had promised so much on the copperplate menu. Dish after dish was passed down to the greedy little boy who could barely contain his excitement at such a feast. Soon, dishes of green-shouldered fruit were being passed over heads and across rows. ‘I bet you can’t eat them all,’ said some wag.

  Coffee was served and everyone was getting up to leave the room and the little boy was still tucking in. It wasn’t the berries I was relishing. It was the gritty sugar and billowing cream with which the chef had smothered every bowl bar the one reserved for Mr Wood the diabetic.

  The waiters cleared the white cloths and the coffee cups. The bare wooden trestles they had been hiding were stacked in a corner, the room swept of sugar wrappers, ready for the arrival of the band and the dancing ladies. I was left in the middle, a private island of gluttony, stuffing away green strawberries like my life depended on it.

  You can get an awful lot of vomit in a wash-hand basin. Even so, once the deep white sink was full, and the two closets occupied, there was nowhere to turn but the urinal.

  We did the long drive home, me half asleep in the back of the Humber
. The heavy scent of vomit, strawberries and disgust filling the car. My father broke the silence just once. ‘You might have had the intelligence to pull the sink plug out first. Just think of the poor cleaner who’s got to dip their hand in that lot.’

  The Dead Dog

  ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, Mrs Potter phoned and said she can’t find her dog.’

  My father glares at me. ‘When, when did she phone?’ I admit it was earlier that morning and I am sorry that I have forgotten to tell him. ‘You stupid, stupid little fool,’ he says, pacing to and fro across the kitchen floor. Then he gets in the car and drives off.

  Later, he gives me a lecture about not forgetting to pass on important messages and tells me how he had found her dog dead, a group of men standing round it in the doorway of the pub wondering who it belonged to. How it had been hit by a car and how he had to go and break the news to her. Then he tells me it might not have happened if I had told him earlier. I feel thoroughly wretched about it but I can’t see why he’s making such a big deal of it. She’s only the cleaner.