Toast

by Nigel Slater

  Breakfast held no fears. The egg incidents seemed from another world. There would be hot toast, salty butter and Rose’s lime marmalade. My father had Robertson’s orange instead and let me send off the labels for golly badges. He only told me off once, when I left a bit of butter in the marmalade jar. Even then he didn’t really seem to mind. He let me climb on his lap more now.

  One day Joan showed me how to make a Victoria sandwich, which she always called sponge. ‘The reason it rises so well is because I use Blue Band Soft margarine,’ she confided as I lined the sponge tins. She let me beat the sugar and marg with the egg beater till it came up in a white fluff; we added large eggs from the farm, one at a time, and then self-raising flour. Joan let me dollop the cake mixture into the buttered tins, and smooth the tops level with the back of a spoon. They didn’t rise quite as much that time, but they tasted the same. We swapped the raspberry jam for apricot, which everyone preferred. ‘You’ll be able to make it yourself next time,’ Dad said as he picked up a slice the size of a small island, the caster sugar falling off on to his waistcoat. I would have too, but from then on the cakes were always baked and ready when I came home from school. Sitting there in the middle layer of the new stack of see-through cake tins, just below the jam tarts and above her perfect apple pie.

  Boiled Ham and Parsley Sauce

  There are smells that define a home. Ours smelled of boiled gammon, parsley sauce and what Joan, in a futile attempt to be middle class, called ‘creamed’ potatoes.

  A smell which, encountered at another time, another place, would bring back every swirl of sitting-room carpet, every piece of knotty-pine kitchen unit, each and every melamine cup and saucer; the creak of the green Parker-Knoll rocking chair and the click of Joan’s knitting needles (I thought I’d do you an Aran sweater for your Christmas box); the scent of Dad’s red and salmon begonias in the greenhouse; the smell of my Matey bubblebath, her Camay soap and his Signal toothpaste. It would bring back Fluff Freeman and his Top Twenty countdown, the stuttering telex printing out the football scores on Grandstand, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and the Epilogue.

  That smell would also bring back the long silences when Joan and I were alone in a room; the long, long summer holidays with no one to play with; doing my homework in the freezing dining room just so I could listen to Sgt Pepper; but most clearly, of the wet-eyed glare my father would shoot at me when I said anything that could be taken, even remotely, as a slight against Joan.

  The gammon came not from the mobile shop but from the butcher at the bottom of the hill. The queues – they were open just three days a week – were almost a social event. You caught up on the local gossip while waiting for your ‘nice bit of silverside’. The meat, particularly the beef, was legendary, with customers driving from as far as Bromyard for their Sunday joint. It was a bloody butcher’s shop, with red splashes up the creamy-yellow flyblown walls, bits of meat on the floor and more flies than you could flick a swat at. When the butcher lifted a piece of sirloin up from his block the air would turn black with bluebottles. Yet it stopped no one. ‘There’s no meat like it for miles,’ they said. ‘I think it’s revolting,’ sniffed Joan the first time, as she closed the car door, her arms folded tight across her chest. ‘He should be closed down.’ Yet my father insisted there was nothing to compare and he was right.

  When we first moved to Clayford the parsley for the sauce came from a jar in the larder, one of the wooden-topped bottles in the spice rack Mum had bought a good seven years before. The cloves were opened only when anyone had toothache, the mixed-spice jar was occupied by allspice berries (not, of course, that anyone actually knew), and the sun had parched the dried chives to the colour of hay, which is no doubt exactly what they tasted of. Even now visitors would marvel at the dark wooden rack with its black-and-gold labels. I think we were all too embarrassed to ask what you were supposed to do with mace.

  Once Dad started to grow rows of parsley plants (‘I could never get the buggers to germinate till Percy Thrower told us to pour boiling water on the seeds’) the Tuesday ham became something of a joy, its sauce suddenly lush and vivid. Despite the calm blip-blop of the ham simmering in its deep pan of water, the last few minutes were always ones of unsuppressed panic. Joan would break out into a sweat beating the butter and hot milk into the potatoes, the accompanying spinach had to go on at the last minute, and the windows would be all fugged up from the ham. The meat had to be lifted from the steaming water and carved, the spinach drained and the sauce warmed up in a non-stick saucepan. Offers of help were always on the tip of my tongue but never actually came out. Instead, I spent five minutes putting the place mats on the table and another five straightening the cutlery. Then I would stand behind the door pretending to do something important. Joan would put the last plate of pink, white and green on the table, sigh audibly and finally take off her apron and throw it over the draining board. I never knew what to say.

  Mushing the sauce into the creamy clouds of potato was as much a treat as the ham itself. Nothing I ate all week came close to that first forkful of pink ham with its little ear of white fat and its green-flecked, creamy slick of potato and sauce.

  Green Beans

  Clayford worked neither as a house nor a home. To see ‘the view’ you had to go into the scullery or the dining room, which was only used at Christmas and was kept permanently just above freezing. My father said this was to make the Christmas cactus flower on time.

  The layout was absurd and embarrassing. I had to walk through my father’s bedroom to get to mine, an awkward low-ceilinged room with a view of the road on one side. He could hear every breath I took, every page I turned, every rustle of my sheets. Masturbating without him hearing became an art in itself. The bathroom sat directly above the kitchen. I lost count of how many times we sat around the dinner table in silence, listening to my father and his spectacular flatulence in the room above. I smirked at every fart. ‘Giggle and I’ll send you up to bed,’ Joan would threaten as I glared down intently at my liver and mash.

  Brilliant-white Snowcem partly hid the fact that the house was a mishmash of seventeenth-century cottage and 1920s new money. Joan was never happier than when she had spent the day with the paint bucket, hiding the speckles of black mould that showed through when the damp weather came. ‘People might think it’s dirt.’ And she did win the moss war, devilling out every bit of fluffy green lichen from the garden walls with the handle of an old spoon. I suspect my father rather liked his moss. ‘It gets on my nerves,’ she would say. I seem to remember almost everything getting on her nerves.

  Friday morning was when she polished the copper and brass. The reproduction copper warming pan that hung behind the fireplace, the horseshoes that framed the grate and the brass fire-stand with its shovel, coal tongues and hearth brush that we were forbidden to use. Most prized were the crocodile nutcrackers that wouldn’t crack a Malteser let alone a Brazil nut. To this day I won’t have a copper pan in the house. I can still see her sitting there in her lemon nylon housecoat, rubbing away at her bloody brass crocodile.

  My father had taken to growing his own food. There had always been the fruit trees, the green and golden gages, the Victoria and Drooper plums that were so bent they had to be held up with an uneven pile of bricks, and the apple trees that never let us down, but he started growing vegetables too, everything from onions to tobacco, broad beans to sweetcorn. He was good at it too, showering us with more fruit and vegetables than we knew what to do with. We took to salting beans. First, you slice the beans with a tiny, sharp knife – which Joan could do almost as fast as she could count the notes in a wage packet – then you layered them in an old, square-shouldered sweetie jar with salt. As the winter wore on, the salt coroded the lid, so badly that rivulets of poisonous black juice would run down into the snowy white beans. ‘Don’t be so daft,’ she would snap as I turned my nose up at the stained vegetables, ‘they just need a good rinse.’

  ‘Go and Play’

  New Scho
ol. The scariest words in a child’s world. Scarier still when your rise to secondary school coincides with a move across country, at one swoop reducing the chances of knowing at least one kid from your junior school to zero.

  We had driven past the Chantry at least a dozen times since we moved to Knightwick. Half timbered, half hidden by trees, ancient and unthreatening. As the summer holidays wore on I almost looked forward to going to a school a tenth of the size of Woodfield, with creaking floorboards and vast chimneys. It would be like being in a Malcolm Saville book. The morning I left for the school bus, neat in my new black blazer, short trousers and squeaky new shoes, I was more excited than scared. School looked a distinctly better option than staying at home.

  It wasn’t. The Chantry we had admired was now the local junior school, the main school had moved to fields across the road; a newly built 1960s glass and brick affair, where the classrooms were painted ‘experimental’ dark blues and greens and the corridors had squeaky chequered vinyl floors. Squeaky new floors for squeaky new shoes. In modern terms it was intimate, a mere three hundred pupils, with a swimming pool, vegetable garden and playing fields that went to the horizon. But when you are expecting your school bus to turn left and it turns right it also turns your world upside down.

  At the Chantry you either lived on a farm or your parents worked on one. If not, then there was one next door. At weekends you mucked out stables, fed the lambs or went pheasant-beating, depending on the time of year. During the holidays you helped get in the strawberries, beans, potatoes or hops. Even I got a job picking blackcurrants, till Dad found out I was working with gypsies and put a stop to it. The best lesson was rural science with Charles Ritson, in a room that smelled of potting compost. The worst was woodwork with the vile Mr Oakley, who slapped your fingers with a metal ruler if your plane went in a wonky line. To this day my stomach flips over if I smell newly planed wood.

  School friends were exactly that. Once you got on the bus home you never saw them till next morning. Dad and Joan loved the peace and quiet, the fact that you had to drive three miles to get the Telegraph or four for a loaf of bread. It didn’t seem to bother them that come the summer holidays I saw no one but them for an entire six weeks. And it wasn’t like they wanted me there. ‘Go and play’, ‘Go and walk in the woods’, ‘Go and clean your rabbit out’, ‘Go and find something to do’. What they really meant was ‘Just GO’.

  Knightwick wasn’t much of a village: a post office with lavender at the gate, an old pub with beams and horse brasses, and a quaint church, but that was it really. If you crossed the river by the little bridge, you came to the butcher’s shop in a pretty red-brick cottage with roses around its door and the doctor’s house whose striped lawns sloped down to the river. Each summer there was a fête in the field – the usual jars of bramble jelly and buttercream-filled sponge cakes, plants in pots and goldfish in bowls. If you wanted more of a spectacle you could drive to the Madresfield Show, which we did. The cottages that speckled the steep hill up to Clayford had hollyhocks in the garden and were charming enough, but hardly what you would call ‘chocolate box’. The only stir in six long summers was when a group of hippies took up residence in a cottage hidden in the woods, but I was forbidden from going up there. ‘You never know what you might get mixed up in,’ said my father. Someone from the village said they danced around in the garden, naked.

  Lemon Meringue Pie

  Joan’s lemon meringue pie was one of the most glorious things I had ever put in my mouth: warm, painfully sharp lemon filling, the most airy pastry imaginable (she used cold lard in place of some of the butter) and a billowing hat of thick, teeth-judderingly sweet meringue. She squeezed the juice of five lemons into the filling, enough to make you close one eye and shudder. The pie was always served warm, so the filling oozed out like a ripe Vacherin.

  Joan had picked up the recipe from her youngest daughter Mary. I wanted so much to make it, to have a go, but she kept the method close to her chest. She always seemed to make the vast marshmallowy pie when I wasn’t around. ‘You should be getting on with your homework’ was all the answer I got when I asked if I could help. When I once asked sweetly for the recipe, she told me she couldn’t remember. ‘It just comes into my head once I get started’ was all she would say.

  I would invent reasons to walk through the kitchen as the secret pie was being made, picking up a single detail each time, counting egg shells or lemon skins in the bin while she was watching The Persuaders. I amassed the recipe bit by bit as I sneaked through the kitchen on some trumped-up errand for my father. I spotted the five egg yolks and the lemon juice, the three tablespoons of cornflour and the five of sugar, and the three ounces of butter in the filling. I caught the blind-baking of the pastry case and even clocked the oven temperature (375°F) and the all-important point at which she would catch the whipped egg whites before folding in the sugar. But I never once got the chance to make it.

  There were other secrets too. The way she cooked chips twice to get them fluffy and crisp. The intimate details of treacle tart or the essentials of decorating a melon wedge with a slice of orange and a maraschino cherry. But there was plenty I was encouraged to help with: washing up, drying the dishes, ironing tea towels, cleaning out the guinea pig’s cage, turning the compost, getting the washing in, making tea, taking the bin out, bringing in the logs. ‘If you were any sort of a lad at all, you’d go and help your father chopping the logs rather than folding tea towels.’

  Salad Cream, Mushroom Ketchup and Other Delights

  Tomato ketchup has never set foot over our threshold, unlike Burgess’s Mushroom Ketchup with which Dad is besotted, especially on bacon and, of course, on his grilled mushrooms. He says it makes them more mushroomy. Salad cream is permitted, in summer and even in the bottle, yet Daddies Sauce is unspoken of and HP Sauce is considered lower than almost anything you can think of, lower even than Camp Coffee. This, from a man who drinks Mateus Rosé.

  I am not quite sure on what my father bases his larder snobbery. He prefers Crosse & Blackwell to Heinz (which he thinks is a bit common) except where salad cream is concerned and mustard must always be English and from Norwich, never French. He bought a jar of mayonnaise once from the food hall in Beatties but said it was too oily. And of course it was French.

  Tea is never, ever Typhoo or Brooke Bond. PG Tips is beyond the pale and the monkeys in drag who advertise it haven’t helped. Tea in our house is Twinings. Pity he calls it Twinnings as in winnings. Coffee was Maxwell House but is now something called Bird’s Mellow, which Joan tried when she found a coupon in Woman’s Journal. ‘Mmmm, it’s so smooth,’ she cooed, and from then on it’d be Bird’s Mellow every time.

  Dad and I refuse to eat margarine. Joan will only eat Blue Band Soft, which spreads without tearing the bread. We keep the butter in a yellow butter dish made from thick plastic, which matches exactly the yellow-and-white check table mats in the kitchen. On the rare occasion we eat in the dining room we get out the cork-backed mats with hunting scenes on them. Even a mug of coffee has to have a coaster. God help anyone who puts down a hot drink on the nest of tables.

  We are all fond of tinned salmon. Either Princes or John West, which is mashed up with a little vinegar and always served with cucumber slices, again with a little vinegar. Tinned crab is Dad’s favourite as are tinned pears. I love the syrup, which is thinner and less cloying than the stuff you get with peaches. We all like tinned apricots more than peaches.

  We have always eaten tinned fruit with a tin of Nestlé’s cream, which we call Nessels, as in vessels. Since Joan has been on the scene we have something called Ideal Milk instead, which she calls ‘Evap’ and which ruins the fruit. I can tell Dad isn’t keen, but he doesn’t seem to mind as long as She likes it.

  Everything seems to have changed of late. She’s really into buttercream at the moment, which she makes with Rayner’s vanilla essence, icing sugar and Blue Band Soft. At the weekend we now get Cornish Ice Cream instead of Arctic Roll and
Dairy Box instead of Black Magic. I’m not allowed fizzy pop any more. I have to drink Tree Top or Robinson’s Lemon Barley Water instead. Joan says that fizzy pop is too expensive.

  Dad adores pickled walnuts. I adore the way Joan shudders as he cuts into the browny black blobs. We haven’t had tripe for a while. Joan doesn’t like the smell. But we do have boiled neck of lamb stew, which smells ten times worse than tripe. But she likes that. So we have it.

  Coffee and Walnut Cake

  Mrs Jones lived in a granny flat next to her daughter’s house on Collins Green. It was more of a garden shed actually but comfy enough with its collection of framed photos, china ornaments on crocheted doilies and lone aspidistra. Mrs Jones was dying to the ticking of a grandfather clock. Her daughter made cake. Lemon cake, date cake, chocolate cake, aniseed cake, cherry cake, walnut cake, round cake, square cake, plain cake, fancy cake. Best of all she made coffee cake, thick, light sponge the colour of milky coffee, with nubbly bits of walnut in and two thick layers of walnut frosting. I would love to say I went to see old Mrs J. every week to cheer up a lonely old lady, but I cannot. I went for the cake.

  I made a habit of knocking on Miss Jones’s door just to say I was popping in to see her mother. This was, you understand, to let her know I was visiting, not to instigate the delivery of cake and lemonade.