by Nigel Slater
Bourbon Biscuits
Mrs Potter lived to clean. She said that dirt got on her ‘nerves’. Friends, relatives, neighbours were measured by how often they polished their brass, swept their front step and, above all, by how well they cleaned their windows. No sink went unscrubbed, no table unpolished, no shirt unironed. Even doused in Topaz, the perfume she bought from her daughter’s Avon catalogue, there was a faint undernote of Pledge to her.
Mrs P. enjoyed cleaning the way some people enjoy gardening or do-it-yourselfery. What she was going to clean next was the topic of her every conversation. Cigarette in one hand, melamine mug of Maxwell House in the other, she would list everything she had scrubbed, dusted, tidied or polished that day and then follow it with a list of everything she planned to scrub, dust, tidy or polish tomorrow. She once spent half a day removing the false patina from a much-loved wooden rococo mirror frame in the sitting room. ‘Oh dear,’ said my father, seeing the packet of spent Brillo pads and explaining that it was supposed to be like that. ‘Well, it looked filthy to me.’
Filthy was one of Mrs Potter’s favourite words. Like the ‘revolting’ she used to describe the way I ate biscuits such as Bourbons or custard creams. She pronounced it with a short ‘o’. As in revolver. I was hardly the only child to nibble the top biscuit from a Bourbon cream, then lick off the chocolate filling with long, slow strokes as if it were an ice cream. To me the biscuit was boring, just packaging really; the filling, however, was to be savoured, allowed to melt slowly on the tongue. Mrs Do-it-and-dust-it regarded the habit as ‘disgusting’, but only because it invariably left one with sticky fingers, which could, if a ten-year-old boy was so inclined, be used to sabotage her shining woodwork.
Garibaldis
I have no idea why I have been spending so much time with Mrs Potter’s family. Last week I went to her daughter’s birthday party, and on Saturday I made fairy cakes from Viota cake mix with her middle daughter (she let me spoon the icing on top and arrange the jelly diamonds and hundreds and thousands). Yesterday, I sat at the back of her youngest daughter’s hairdressing business. At least two of Mrs Potter’s daughters have successful hairdressing salons, no wonder her hair always looks like it’s just been ‘done’. Today I’m in the little room behind the net-curtained salon reading Rupert annuals and trying not to breathe in the hydrogen peroxide that wafts in from the shop. It smells like stinkbombs. I don’t know where Dad and Mrs Potter are. And I have absolutely no idea why I am here instead of playing with my friends. If it wasn’t for the tin of biscuits on the table I would demand to go home. And to be honest, there are only three Garibaldis and a pink wafer left now.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
I’m waiting patiently for Warrel to finish his tea. Minnie prises the lid off a tin of Tea Time Assorted and offers it to him. There must be fifty biscuits stacked in neat red cellophane compartments and there is a brief moment when I think she might point the tin at me but she doesn’t. So I sit and watch Warrel munching his way through two Jammie Dodgers, a ginger nut and a milk chocolate wafer. Just as he is taking a swig of his Cremola Foam (and I am secretly hoping he is going to choke) Minnie asks me if Mum had a sewing machine and, if in fact she had, would my dad like to sell it. I honestly don’t know so tell her that I will ask him.
Instead, I ask Mrs Potter who goes off like a rocket, accusing Minnie Blubb of being heartless to ask such a question so soon after Mum’s death. ‘She’s not getting her hands on anything,’ bites a spectacularly animated Mrs P., like Minnie was asking for her wedding ring. For the life of me I cannot quite see what Dad would want with Mum’s sewing machine or why the cleaner is getting so het up about it. It’s not like it’s hers or anything. Come to think of it, I’m not sure Mum even had one.
Two or three days later I come home to find Mrs Potter wearing one of Mum’s aprons. There is no reason on earth why she shouldn’t, but it makes me feel uncomfortable. Especially since her outburst the other day.
It is four-thirty and I’ve just come home from school. I walk upstairs and see Dad’s bedroom door open. Last time I tried to open the door, the morning Mum died, it banged against an oxygen tank that someone had put in the way. I open her wardrobe, and let its four hinged doors slowly unfold.
The wardrobe smells of Mum. Not her perfume or her lipstick, not her clothes or her Ventolin. Just her. I run my hands down the tight curls of her astrakhan coat, her summer dress with its white pearl buttons and blousy red poppies, her shimmery ballgown. I open the deep drawers in her dressing table and sniff her cardigans, her long evening gloves, her hankies. I open Mum’s jewellery box and pull out her pearl necklace, her cameo brooch and another gold one in the shape of a feather. The one she always wore with her mushroom twinset. Even the quilted lining of the box smells of her.
Halfway along the rail in the wardrobe is her crinkly white petticoat, the one she wore under her ballgown when she and Dad went out for the evening. When he used to wear his black suit with the satin collar and his blue silk cummerbund. When they used to come back so late. I slide the petticoat straps off the wooden hanger that says Ventnor Hotel, Isle of Wight, and run my fingers over the huge swirls of black stitching. It feels like fuzzy felt. I lower it to the floor and step into it then pull the straps up and over my shoulders. The frills at the bottom touch the floor and rustle and swish like they are made of crêpe paper. I take out her favourite shoes, the ones we walked Wolver-hampton for, the ones the colour of a foal. I slip my feet into them but they are too big. I can barely keep them on my feet. I hold Mum’s pearls around my neck but I don’t think she ever wore them with this petticoat.
One by one I touch everything in her wardrobe, the camel coat, the fawn jersey dress, the black woollen suit that always made her look cross, holding them against my face. In the mirror I look so small in Mum’s stuff, and my feet slide around in her shoes when I walk across the room.
I take off her shoes, her white petticoat and put everything back, then I close the wardrobe door and creep back downstairs.
Salade Tiède
On the days Mrs Potter was cleaning at York House she would leave her husband’s lunch between two plates, leaving him only to put it over a pan of water on the stove. Irish stew, chops and peas, ham and parsley sauce were all heated up this way. The method worked well enough, at least it did for a man who liked his meat well done.
Mrs Potter was truly the cleaner from heaven. For the first time since Mrs Muggeridge was fired, every surface in the house sparkled. The red tiled floors in the porch and downstairs loo shone with Cardinal polish, every table and chair was given a weekly treatment with lavender wax as well as a daily one with Pledge. She cleaned places that had never seen a brush or cloth before; the bit between the Aga and the dog basket, the back of the gramophone, the vents of the venetian blinds. A dust bunny didn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance.
As the weeks wore on she started complaining that it was all too much for her. ‘This house is too big for one person, I can’t do everything the way I want it. Could I bring my sister Ethel in to help?’ The way she wanted it was far cleaner than any house deserved to be. Drop a sweet wrapper in the waste-paper basket and it was emptied before you could say humbug. Make a skidmark on the lavatory pan and it was brushed and flushed quicker than you could say shit.
Ethel wore black and smelled of mothballs. A little shrew of a woman, she never spoke when my father was around, not a word. It wasn’t that she was intimidated by him, just completely overawed by the wealthy man for whom she worked and for whom her sister quite obviously had ‘feelings’.
‘He’s like a film star,’ Ethel once said to her sister.
‘It’s best that she comes too,’ Mrs P. told my father, ‘then if “he” says anything I can tell him to ask Ethel. She’ll tell him there’s nothing going on.’ I am not sure my father could imagine Ethel saying anything to anyone. I am not sure he believed she could even speak.
Mrs P. rarely talked about her husband, t
hough I knew he existed. I came home to lunch one day to find the two sisters talking about him. Or at least Joan was talking. I stood outside the kitchen door and listened to her telling Ethel how much she hated going back home to him and how she had, in hushed, ominous tones, other plans. ‘And you’ll never believe what the stupid old bugger did yesterday,’ she cackled. ‘He put his dinner on the cooker without looking to see what it was.’ She could barely speak for laughing, ‘He took the plate off and found he’d steamed himself a nice ham salad.’
The Day She Darned Dad’s Socks
Suddenly everything seemed to be about Mrs Potter. ‘Tidy your room up, will you?’ says Dad and then adds, ‘Mrs Potter will be here and she’s got too much to do as it is.’ Before she turned up on a Monday morning I had to put all my toys away in their wooden chest, straighten my books on their shelves and pick up the clothes that I threw on the floor when I got ready for my bath. Until that point I had never tidied up my room, or any room for that matter. I thought that’s what we had a cleaner for. But this was different. It was like the queen was coming.
Dad always wore a tie to work, even when he used to come back red-faced and smelling of oil. Now, though, he came back to lunch clean and smelling of Old Spice. We had always eaten our lunches together, when he would ask me about school and what I was up to. But he seemed impatient with me now and kept saying things like ‘Hadn’t you better get off now, won’t you be late back to school?’
Then Dad started coming late for his lunch, so he got home only five minutes or so before I had to leave. He said it was because someone at work wanted to have their lunch early, but I couldn’t help thinking it was because he wanted to be with Mrs Potter more than he wanted to be with me.
Mrs Potter had started to be nice to me, often patting the back of my head and calling me ‘lad’. Her smiles were tight and shallow, but she would always bring the conversation round to me when my father was there. ‘He’s growing up so quickly now, isn’t he?’ and ‘He ate all his peas today.’ It was odd the way she talked about me as if I was invisible. One day in April, just before my birthday, I came home at four-thirty to find she was still there, sitting on the floor in the sitting room, her back up against Auntie Fanny’s old chair. Even though we’d had it recovered it still smelled of pee. She was darning Dad’s socks. Mrs Potter had the contents of my dad’s sock drawer spread out on the carpet, every one neatly matched; those she had darned laid out smugly, the others folded into a ball. She must have sewn up the holes in at least twenty pairs.
I made a cheeky comment about it probably being cheaper for Dad to buy new socks than pay her to repair them. ‘We don’t all do things for money, young man,’ she snapped. ‘As it happens, I’m doing this just because I want to, I won’t be getting paid for it. It’s not easy for your dad now, you know. There’s no one to do these things for him any more.’ She licked the end of a piece of cotton, then screwed up her eyes as she tried to thread the end of it into the eye of the needle. ‘I don’t like the idea of him walking around with holes in his socks.’
I went up to my room, closed the door and put on ‘Paint it Black’ as loud as I dared. What had it got to do with her if my dad had holes in his socks?
Bluebird Milk Chocolate Toffees
‘Get ready, we’re going for a ride in the car,’ Dad said one Saturday morning in early summer. He said it in that way he had of making something sound quite ordinary when it was obvious it was going to be anything but.
An hour later we were following the signs for Worcester. Dad wasn’t saying much, which meant there was definitely something brewing. ‘Are we going to see Auntie Betty?’ I asked hopefully, loving every second of that particular aunt’s company, especially when she said things like bugger and shit and my father looked at his shoes in embarrassment.
‘Well, yes and no. Do you remember saying how much you would like to live at Betty’s house?’
I did, but what I had actually meant was that I wanted to live with Auntie Betty rather than move to Clayford, her whitewashed eighteenth-century cottage in Knightwick.
‘Well, Auntie Betty has decided the house is too big for her and has moved to Hereford and so we’ve bought Clayford. I wanted it to be a surprise.’
He waxed on about the bluebell woods, the orchard at the top of the garden, the possibility of my having a rabbit. It wasn’t until he mentioned that it had been no problem getting me into the local school that I realised Clayford was to be more than a weekend cottage. That isolated, bitterly cold little house was to be our new home.
After a long silence (I didn’t know what to say) I asked my first and last question. ‘Will my friends be able to come and stay?’
He reached over and took a new packet of chocolate toffee eclairs out of the glovebox. ‘Why don’t you open these up. I know they are your favourites.’ Wrong again. My favourites were Bluebird Milk Chocolate Toffees. I liked sucking the white-freckled chocolate, which somehow always seemed slightly stale to me, from the toffees, slowly, deliberately, while covering my tongue and teeth with the smooth, fatty chocolate. Chocolate eclairs worked the other way round, so you had to suck the toffee to get the chocolate.
We must have been within a mile or two of Clayford when he finally broke the heavy, on-the-edge-of-tears silence. ‘You like Joan, don’t you?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Doesn’t she remind you of Mummy?’
We turned into the long driveway, the fat tyres crunching slowly on the gravel, tumbling yellow roses rubbing against the driver’s side of the car. Clayford sat at the top of a one-in-six hill overlooking most of Worcestershire. Two vast lawns, split by a tall yew hedge, sloped lazily down to the drive and to the woods, our woods, beyond. Even freshly painted for its recent sale, the house bore a faintly sad expression, as if it knew it faced the wrong way. Instead of looking out at the rolling fields, hamlets and streams and the Malvern Hills beyond, its six front windows stared at the garage, albeit a rather quaint one, covered with honeysuckle and clematis montana. Only the tiny scullery overlooked ‘the view’. This was a house probably better to visit than to live in. Auntie Betty had told us that in summer, cars would continually slow up or even stop, their passengers getting out to admire the clipped lawns, the pillows of mauve aubrietia and billowing honeysuckle, and above all ‘the view’. ‘Imagine living here,’ they would say, as if having no neighbours, no friends and a septic tank was a good thing.
The house, a good hundred yards away from the drive, stood basking in the sun. It looked different, for once its ragged lawns clipped like those of a bowling green, which had the effect of making the cascading roses and marguerites look curiously out of place, like drunken guests lying around after a party. Now the edges were crisp, sharp as razors. Auntie Betty’s windows had always been a bit grubby. We used to joke about them and how she once said she hated cleaning them and did the job ‘once a year whether the buggers needed it or not’. But today they shone like jet in the sunshine. Six deep, black pools glistening like army boots.
Victoria Sandwich
She was sitting there in one of the garden chairs, tight lips, tight perm, twenty Embassy and a cigarette lighter in her lap. ‘Say hello to your Auntie Joan,’ my father said quietly, enunciating her new name slowly and firmly.
‘You can call me Auntie Joanie if you want to,’ said Mrs Potter. I walked straight past her and round to the kitchen door. ‘I told you,’ she snapped at my father.
‘Just give him time, he’ll be all right,’ said Dad.
There was a cake on the spotless kitchen table. A homemade cake, with a thin line of raspberry jam in the middle, the top dusted with caster sugar. A perfect cake, three inches high and as light as a feather, the criss-cross of the wire cooling rack etched into its soft, golden top. The kitchen smelled of baking and Dreft. Two pairs of my underpants and my school pullover hung on a wooden airer with some tea towels still warm from the iron. Mrs Potter rushed in behind me.
‘Come on, I’ll put
the kettle on. Why don’t we make some toast?’
Ham
The mobile shop came on Thursdays. Cool and dark inside, it smelled of boiled ham and links of pork sausage. During the school holidays I would stand on the fold-down step with Auntie Joan watching while the grocer cut thin slices of ham from the bone. No wibbly-wobbly jelly here. Just thin, cool, pink ham, soft as a baby’s tummy. We bought tomatoes that smelled warm and herbal; soft-leaved lettuces and packets of salty butter; Saxa salt and Lion brand ground black pepper in little drums; bottles of Heinz Salad Cream, tinned peaches and Princes tinned crabmeat.
In winter he would come later, just as I got home from school, and I would help bring in bags of sugar and flour, tins of soup, trifle sponges and Ambrosia Creamed Rice, flat boxes of Dairylea triangles, hunks of Cheddar with the muslin on, Cornish wafers, crumpets, Oxo cubes, Pickering’s Cherry Pie Filling and bottles of Tree Top orange drink.
The baker arrived on Tuesdays and Fridays and we bought a bloomer or a cottage loaf. He sometimes had six-packs of fairy cakes with coloured buttercream, hundreds and thousands and a blob of vivid red jam on top. I regularly ate three of the six. We kept the ham till Saturday when we had sandwiches with the soft, fresh bread and freshly cut cress on the lawn.
Every meal was now a proper meal. Meat, potatoes and vegetables and usually, but not always, a pudding. In summer we had tinned salmon and cucumber salad, new potatoes and trifle. In winter Joan would get a fug up in the kitchen, boiling a piece of ham and making thick parsley sauce, spinach and mashed potatoes. Then there would be rice pudding or apple pie and custard. Every now and again we would have a mixed grill on oval plates. A little piece of steak, a kidney opened up like a butterfly, a lobe of lamb’s liver, tomatoes, black pudding and sometimes a sausage or a chop. Then there were mushrooms, big flat ones the size of a tea saucer, and of course chips. She would do a stew now and again, thickened with pearl barley and served with mashed swede or parsnips. I liked the broth that surrounded it, and the bland, dead flavours. ‘I’d do it more often if the smell didn’t carry through the house like it does,’ she would say, beaded lines of condensation running down every window.