Where Did It All Go Right?

by Andrew Collins

  The Collins family feared no God, but Sundays were still sacred. Half a tinned peach with cream and a dob of jam became ‘peach melba’ on Sundays. (And ‘Paul Melba’ in my TV-centric mind.5)

  For the rest of the week, Mum had foolishly allowed herself to get into a routine of one ‘tea’ for us, and a separate ‘tea’ for them (dished up when Dad came home from work). This would have been more of a drag for her if cooking our tea involved anything more time-consuming than heating something up out of a tin and serving it with chips or a slice of toast. (I’ve checked and neither pasta nor rice were invented until about 1986.)

  Still, at least we ate real chips, crinkle-cut by hand in the kitchen. None of your frozen factory fries, there was hard graft in our chips. Since ‘the freezer’ in those days meant a tiny compartment at the top of the fridge (one packet of burgers, a mousse and an ice tray and it was full up), Mum made chips from potatoes, peeling them with her metal knives and everything. Before the McCain mutiny, she, like every mother from Winsford Way to Winsford in Somerset, diced with the apparent possibility of a chip pan fire every other day, noisily reheating matured cooking oil in a spitting, fizzing cauldron of scalding death (wet tea towel, right?). Let us not then dismiss Seventies chips as either an easy option for her, or a processed food for us (they were neither spry, crisp nor dry, but they had at least come from the good earth originally).

  What do I smell? …

  I know a lot more about nutrition now than I cared to know then (and more than most parents care to know now), so when I see other people’s offspring behaving in an irritable, listless or hyperactive manner I immediately think: bad diet, overdose of aspartame, not enough vitamins. But can they really be eating as calamitous a diet as I did? (By which I mean me and every other kid of my age: Generation E120.6)

  Eating habits in the UK were transformed in the Eighties and Nineties, and as a result, consumers have become ever more demanding. In the Seventies – and you try telling this to those pesky kids of today – there were no diet versions of all the processed foods. If you wanted to lose weight (and luckily no-one did, except the Slimcea girl), you simply ate less. There were no salad bars, or bottles of mineral water, or vegetarian options. Not in Northampton anyway. (I’m not 100 per cent sure Hawaiian pizzas have reached there yet.)

  But choice only makes you anxious. Ask anyone with 200 television channels. We had it relatively easy. The market was still super, not yet hyper or mega or even mini. The breadth and selection of processed rubbish may have been expanding exponentially throughout the decade that taste forgot, but the only fast food to which we had regular access was fish and chips. And until Mr Cadbury invented ‘fun-size’ Milky Ways, the notion of having multiple chocolate bars in the house was a Willy Wonka fantasy. Perhaps, through all that Corona and cochineal we still ate better than our own kids do today. We ate as badly as we could, but within the means available.

  I may well be retro-fantasising, but wasn’t there simply more meat in the burgers then? After all, pre-McDonald’s, mechanical recovery was less sophisticated, demand was lower, production was less pressurised and rocket science was still largely the province of NASA, not Asda.

  The important thing is this: I ate whatever I wanted for the entire duration of my childhood – except perhaps for that single sordid escargot we had forced upon us by cultural bullies as the climax to a middle school French trip in June 1978. I was what I ate. But believe me I loved my food. The description of mealtime in my diaries is always lovingly inscribed: ‘I had a smashing tea, it was the best tea I’ve ever had’ (24 February 1973); ‘lovely tea: cheese sandwiches, pork pie and crisps and fruit cake for afters’ (21 September 1975); ‘lovely dinner and lovely tea’ (12 September 1976); ‘Mum made a really fun flan! eg. flan and real strawberries everywhere + jelly + cream’ (27 June 1980). Lovely!

  Whether crap food was better or worse then, I still managed to thrive on it. I was, as we have seen, rarely ill. I was in fact literally full of beans. I was neither especially irritable nor clinically hyperactive. There was no noticeable deficit in my attention. Perhaps it was all that fresh air. No, really. Perhaps it’s because there were no computer games to keep me indoors, soaking up radiation, making me violent and frustrated. I mainlined colourful processed rubbish and lived.

  It’s tempting to nod sagely at the sentiment in the slightly wordy chorus of that excellent Faces song ‘Ooh La La’:

  ‘I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.’ But do you really? I’m inclined to say the opposite. I’m rather glad that I went about my childhood business in total nutritional innocence, food unlabelled, E-numbers undisclosed. Quite honestly, it didn’t seem to do me any harm. Except perhaps foul up my teeth and give me asthma. (Do you like the ‘perhaps’?)

  Back to that Pam Ayres poem:

  If I’d known I was paving the way

  To cavities, caps and decay,

  The murder of fillin’s,

  Injections and drillin’s,

  I’d have thrown all me sherbet away

  Would I really go back and eat my way through boyhood differently? Cast that floury sherbet to the four winds like ashes scattered at sea? I think not. Texan bars7 tasted so good, and a man’s gotta chew what a man’s gotta chew.

  * * *

  The trouble with having grown up in the late Sixties and Seventies is that none of the food and drink is around any more. The custard tarts have changed. Walnut Whips don’t have a walnut inside. Welfare orange has been phased out. Whither Kunzel Cakes? Blobs? Dimples? Freddo bars? Those biscuits with stick men playing different sports on the underside?

  How are we supposed to enjoy a true Proustian rush? When Marcel Proust invented the concept in his novel Remembrance of Things Past the object of his nostalgic reverie was a Madeleine – the light, spongy cake French people dunk in tea (‘I raised to my lips a spoonful of the cake … a shudder ran through my whole body and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place’). This wasn’t some vague memory of a cake, it was the cake itself that took his protagonist back.

  Of course, Marks & Spencer did their own Madeleine in the Seventies. A typically heavy-handed interpretation, it was a sponge tower with a tablet of apricot-flavoured jelly in the centre, tarred and feathered with adhesive syrup and desiccated coconut. I scoffed a few of those in my time, leaving the jammy bit until last by eating from the bottom up. I’d love to think that eating one now – if only! – would take me back to Saturday teatime.

  A la recherche des gateaux perdus.

  Every generation has its food memories, be it bully beef, sugar sandwiches or Outer Spacers.8 Generation E120 had – albeit briefly – Space Dust, a confectionary fad now remembered to death thanks to the nostalgia industry but still evocative for me. It was 1978 and the craze entered my orbit just as our year were setting off for Normandy in France for the aforementioned snail-eating school trip. Space Dust was the big hit of the ferry crossing. We all bought in bulk at a service station, and proceeded to walk around the decks with our mouths agape and our tongues orange, while the crystals crackled away to nothing.

  It was like having a campfire go out in the back of your mouth, and was only food in the sense that it was taken orally. More akin to eating something out of your chemistry set. (I never had a chemistry set but I knew the drill: stink bombs, crystals, cupboard under the stairs.) However, with all that I know now and didn’t know then, I’d still have to neck some Space Dust if you magicked a packet up and handed me some. As it snapped and crackled and dyed my tongue with foul tartrazine I’d be there, transported back to the ferry (it was called The Dragon) – my first time on a boat and the first member of my immediate family to leave British shores. A momentous occasion marked by a once-in-a-lifetime sweetmeat.

  Food and drink played a small but significant part in this five-day Gallic odyssey, beginning when we reached our destination, le colonie vacances in drizzly Quiberville (it’s not in my current Philips atlas –
although there is a Thiberville in the approximate region; perhaps I misheard the teachers). Le colonie was an unlovely halfway house between school and campsite, with dormitories and washrooms. Anyway, they gave us all a bowl of tea. A bowl. Of tea. Why, was there a cupmakers’ strike? (After all, those French really know how to do industrial action.) I reckoned it was a practical joke this phoney tradition, foisted upon English visitors by the staff of le colonie to throw us on arrival and make us think all tea was drunk this way en France. I mean, isn’t a bowl of tea Chinese? We didn’t argue at the time of course. If they’d fed us bratwurst and Welsh rarebit we’d have accepted it as the French way of things and sung ‘Frère Jacques’.

  I have no record of the meals we ate with our spurious bols de thé but I remember well the school dinner we had in Dieppe. As a means of getting our hands culturally dirty, we spent the day at a French school, highlight of which was finding out what their dinners were like. ‘Nicer than ours!’ would be the clichéd response, but they weren’t really. I’m afraid I described the food as ‘gob’ in my diary. The dessert was especially curious: a plain yogurt9 which you mixed with sugar. It would have been alright without the yogurt.

  On the Wednesday I bought what I described as a ‘French Cornetto’ from the village, and on a day trip to Paris I ate a rock-hard baguette with cheese and ham by the Seine, though I was too shallow to appreciate the romance of the situation. I did buy a French stick from a market in Dieppe to take home (Je voudrais une baguette s’il vous plais), but my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted Angel Delight and Dream Topping, with perhaps a little sugar mixed in, just to show how European I was.

  It took me three days of regular Northampton eating to remove the taste of that snail though. We were served escargot for our evening meal on the final day – mere hours before a coach ride and a Channel night crossing, more proof that sadists were at work here. ‘They were vomit,’ reads the review in my diary, and they were. But it wasn’t the gristly little knuckle on a pin that tasted so foul and foreign to me, it was the garlic the snails were swimming in. I had never eaten garlic before. I was 13 years old.

  (That’s three brand new taste sensations in the space of a week: a mollusc, a pungent bulb, and a crystalline orange powder of laboratorial origin.)

  It is fair to say that throughout the Seventies (and even into the Eighties) the Collins family enjoyed whatever the opposite of a cosmopolitan diet is. (Monopolitan?) No foreign holidays to broaden our culinary tastes, and Fanny Craddock was not much help.

  Writing of our adventure-free tastes reminds me of the story a music industry friend of mine called Phill used to tell about his infamous dad – a conservative sort – visiting him at his first flat and refusing a cup of tea because Phill only had Earl Grey. ‘I haven’t got time for experiments,’ he said. That should have been the Collins family motto.

  There may have been no rice in our house, but then nor was there any Eastern cuisine to demand it. No curries, not even a packet Vesta with curly crisps, not even super-mild like the stew-with-curry-powder version we very occasionally got at school with sultanas in (school food was always essentially meat in gravy, whatever they chalked up on the board – the first hot meal I ever ate at school was ‘goulash’: meat in gravy). There was no pasta in Mum’s cupboard, unless you over-generously count the wheaten slop in tomato sauce canned by Heinz. Herbs and spices? The white pepper shaker was only there for symmetry.

  I tried my first ever rice while walking home from town with Hayley Mayo,10 Anita Barker and Chris Thompson in the summer of ’78 (about a fortnight after getting back from Quiberville/Thiberville). Chris had bought a one-person Chinese takeaway, which we were invited to share, a decidedly tame dish but no doubt the most exotic thing you could buy on the Wellingborough Road in 1978: sauceless chicken in egg-fried rice. I took a few slickened fingerfuls from the foil tray and it neither converted me to Asian cuisine nor made me sick on the pavement. There were, I decided, easier ways to get at meat.

  Neatly enough, the four of us had been on a double-date to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind at the ABC, in which electrical engineer Roy Neary makes contact with extraterrestrials and is whisked to another galaxy. A similar thing had happened to me: I had eaten my first ever ‘Chinky’ – as you were still allowed to call them in 1978 – and it had transported me to another world.

  I ate my first-ever pasta at my friend Paul Bush’s house, around the same time. (His was the first ever stepdad I’d encountered too. So many firsts.) I was pre-warned. Paul’s mum had asked me if I liked spaghetti and I’d said yes, assuming she meant the real stuff, Heinz, out of a can. She meant this long, white Italian stuff I’d seen only in that clip from The Lady and the Tramp. Now it’s stressful enough eating at someone else’s table, especially when they all sit down together, even on weekdays (strict!). But to be served Spaghetti Bolognese – an Advanced Eating dish at the best of times – when I’d never seen any in 3D before; this was sheer torture.

  I left almost half of it; I admitted defeat, having done my best to ape the practised spooling and sucking of Paul’s family. What crazy Bohemian people they clearly were. (I hated leaving food on my plate. It was not the done thing. If I did it at home, Mum would say, ‘Your eyes are bigger than your belly,’ scrape my plate on to Dad’s and I would be a pariah.11) I’m sure Paul and his folks worked out that I was a pasta novice.

  It’s a rite of gastronomic passage we must constantly repeat, ordering one thing and getting another.12 So while I cautiously applaud my parents for allowing me to eat exactly what I wanted, it wasn’t exactly preparing me for the world, was it?13

  Here’s a dinner table conversation from March 1983:

  Dad [to Simon]: What’s in fruit cocktail that you don’t like?

  Simon: Fruit.14

  You see, that’s what they were up against. They had created a monster with their non-interventionist food policy. Our relationship with food was broadly emblematic of our relationship with Mum and Dad: based on love, leavened by practicality, and governed by a selective discipline. By and large, we ate when we were told, at the table, with knife and fork, never on our laps in front of the TV, and we cleared our plates. We had a lolly from the ice-cream van only when it was decreed, and two biscuits between meals with a drink of squash, but no more than two. Mum didn’t put the packet out, and we would never help ourselves from the cupboard.

  However, within that rigid framework, we seem to have been the masters of our own diet.

  The Alpine lorry brought with it a tantalising taste of autonomy, just like the Freedom Train imagined by poet Langston Hughes.15 Other lorries had literally come and gone – the coal lorry, the vegetable lorry (made redundant by central heating and cars) – but the Alpine lorry was a signifier of modernisation, not a victim. Alpine, based I understand in Sunderland, made fizzy drinks in hefty, family-size glass bottles (these were anything but fun size; they were serious). They delivered them to your door like ill-health milk, and they took your empties away. It was the mid-Seventies so having screw-cap bottles of pop around the house was ne rigueur (Nan Collins sometimes had a bottle of orange Corona in, but nans do soft things like that). My childhood drink was squash, lemon or orange, with an occasional mania for Ribena (mixed strong and dark in the glass). I was never a milk-drinker – my teeth stand testament to that – but that was because an early experience with the skin that forms on hot milk had put me off it.

  So, our family signed up to the Alpine deal and every week the lorry would bring brightly coloured carbonates – cherryade and limeade being my big faves – which would then ‘live’ behind the kitchen door. (No room in the fridge for these big boys.) It was risky, but we did sometimes sneak a glug of fizzy out of the bottle – a forbidden act twice over (you don’t know where that bottle’s been!) – thus breaking down the walls of parental control.

  It was the Soda Stream that put Alpine out of business, and Mum back in control of pop consumption. She and Dad’s resistance was finally brok
en by the purse-friendly prospect of cheap DIY fizzy drinks (an endless stream in fact), and as if to prove them right we consumed no end of that sickly syrup with metallic-tasting self-carbonated water in it (especially the ‘cola’, which tasted so unlike Coca-Cola it was like discovering a brand new drink). It was of course virtually impossible, with all that clanking and shooshing, to sneak under the radar and make Soda Streams without Mum’s blessing.

  Once, as a much smaller boy, I’d hidden behind the settee (that’s how small) at Nan Collins’s house and eaten a whole packet of Jaffa Cakes. Mind you, these were the first Jaffa Cakes I’d ever seen and I treated them as if they might also be my last. Unbelievably, I was neither physically sick nor physically reprimanded, but I never ate cakes or biscuits without signed permission ever again.

  Kids today (not them again!) don’t eat, they graze. They chew the crud, steadily, round the clock, with an access-all-areas pass to the larder, eating sweets between sweets. It doesn’t spoil their appetite, like our parents always warned us it would (you’ll spoil your dinner), as child hunger doesn’t work the way it used to. Kids don’t work up an appetite, they have a continuous need for sustenance that ebbs and flows but never switches off – which is presumably why parents have stopped trying to control the food. Instead, a running buffet of sweets, crisps and biscuits is laid on, 24 hours a day (cupboard doors will be the next thing to go), and mealtimes involve the blasé moving around of items on a plate until it’s time to get down and return to the games console.