Pratt a Manger

by David Nobbs

  There were letters for and against Henry in the Radio Times and the newspapers. Hilary felt just a little uneasy.

  In another edition he told his audience that houses where no proper cooking was done felt and smelt dead. ‘It’s a joy to enter a house with the smell of fried onions or an honest soup,’ he said. ‘The whole house develops vitality and joy. Don’t be lazy. Cooking is fun. I’d rather you cooked and enjoyed it than watched me do it.’

  Hilary and the BBC felt just a little uneasy about this. The producer, Laurence Pangbourne, told Henry that ‘the powers that be’ wanted to warn Henry not to give the viewers hostages to fortune by telling them they shouldn’t be watching.

  ‘I think I know what I’m doing,’ he said.

  In another edition he fulminated against factory farming. ‘Nobody has any right to condemn anyone else for cruelty to animals until they give up eating battery chickens,’ he roared, almost out of control with what his fans called passion and his detractors called self-righteousness.

  A BBC memo congratulated him on his passion and commitment, but warned him not to return to the subject too often. There were mutterings from the powerful farming lobby and the food industry.

  ‘Your craven memo almost encourages me to repeat myself,’ he replied, ‘but, sadly, I can’t. People who repeat themselves are bores. Also, I am only too well aware that people who repeat themselves are bores, which is why you have only almost encouraged me to repeat myself, despite your craven memo.’

  Another controversial outburst was about the need for people to be taught how to eat. It was no use chefs creating imaginative dishes if their customers weren’t adventurous too. It was a wasted effort for a chef to create subtle masterpieces if people wolfed them down in seven minutes while discussing the sales figures for China and Japan. It was fatuous for a chef to create complex dishes out of disparate ingredients if people put seven different ingredients on their fork at once and pitched them all into their mouths like farmers forking hay.

  Hilary ventured a word of warning.

  ‘Darling, I think you should be careful not to insult your audience too much,’ she said.

  ‘Darling, I think I know what I’m doing after all these years,’ was Henry’s reply.

  Hilary realised with a shudder that it was becoming difficult to venture any kind of criticism of Henry.

  When she accused him of being more irritable than he used to be, he brushed it off as the effect of tiredness.

  ‘Then don’t take on so much,’ she warned him again.

  It made no difference. He accepted every invitation to speak, and remembered most of them. He loved having an audience.

  Hooray, It’s Henry said the poster at Dalton College.

  Henry stood, on the very stage where he had done his act as the headmaster, forty-nine years before, and talked with vast enthusiasm about food. He amused the boys with his tales of his time at Dalton – the bullying, the snobbery. He told them that he had been nick-named Oiky. ‘Never look down on people because of their background,’ he said. ‘Because of their character, possibly; because of their background, no.’

  He told them about Lampo Davey, who covered hard-boiled eggs with bottled mayonnaise and bits of anchovies and thought himself sophisticated, and about Tosser Pilkington-Brick, who ate drinking chocolate, in powder form, with a spoon.

  *

  Hooray, It’s Henry said a poster at Thurmarsh Grammar School for boys.

  Henry stood in the very assembly hall where, when the headmaster, Mr E. F. Crowther had told the boys that, in the battle to rebuild the nation after the war, there would ‘once again be Thurmarshians in the van’, thirteen-year-old Henry had whispered ‘the bread van’.

  He didn’t tell this story about the bread van. He didn’t tell the boys that here he had been known as Snobby. He suddenly found that he had become tired of telling jokes against himself.

  Afterwards, as he walked towards his Porsche, he heard a loud sniff.

  Never forget where you came from, it said.

  It caught him unprepared, and unsettled him. He came out in goose-pimples; he looked round the badly-lit car park, felt the cool northern breeze, and had a disturbing sensation of having changed so much that he didn’t belong here any more.

  He drove out of Thurmarsh as fast as he could. He never wanted to see the place again. He was pleased to get to the characterless comfort of his hotel room, double glazed against aeroplanes, traffic, charm and sniffs.

  When he got home the next day, exhausted after his drive down the crowded M1, and still shaken by his experience, he wanted to talk to Hilary about these things. Suddenly he realised with a shudder that it was becoming difficult to talk to her about his innermost feelings at all.

  On Monday, 1 April, 2002, Prince Charles, upset with the BBC because their newsreader hadn’t worn a black tie to announce the death of the Queen Mother, filmed a poignant tribute to his grandmother on ITV; Israeli soldiers in an armoured personnel carrier opened fire on international peace campaigners in the West Bank; the National Union of Teachers threatened a thirty-five hour week if their workload wasn’t cut; and, in the Café Henry, a former fag offered jobs to the two men for whom he had fagged all those years ago.

  If not all the pleasure he got from this was entirely out of the goodness of his heart, if he felt a certain smug satisfaction at the turn of events, well, only a very rigid moralist would blame him.

  Lampo looked smaller, tauter, tighter. Older, which wasn’t surprising. Defeated, which was.

  ‘I want to offer you a job, Lampo,’ he said, as soon as Lampo was seated on the opposite side of his ever more cluttered desk.

  ‘Is this an April fool?’

  ‘No! I wouldn’t do that to you. Besides, it’s three minutes past twelve and April fools end at noon.’

  ‘I’m seventy, Henry. You don’t get offered jobs in your seventies.’

  ‘Age is nothing to do with it in this organisation,’ said Henry. ‘It’s my business and I can do what I like.’

  ‘What do you want me to do? I can’t cook. Denzil did all the cooking.’

  He sighed.

  ‘Miss him terribly still?’

  ‘Terribly. More each day. The longer I don’t see him, the more I miss him. A day without him is easy, a week difficult, a month distressing, a year almost unbearable. Don’t let anyone fob you off with that nonsense of time healing. I even miss his biscuit tins. I even miss his snores. He was never … fastidious, and it irritated me. I couldn’t care less now. If only, Henry.’

  ‘Mr If Only Missed the Bus.’

  ‘What??’

  ‘One of my teachers, Miss Candy, had a fund of minatory saws.’

  ‘Priceless. I know what you mean, of course. Guilt corrodes. But I can’t help it. I go through life and relive the last years quite differently. I can’t help it.’

  ‘You need a boyfriend.’

  ‘At my age? Pull the other one.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I can’t even pull this one. I’m a husk, Henry.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘What is this job, anyway?’

  ‘Manager of the South Kensington Café Henry. It’s perfect for you, Lampo. You’re so South Ken.’

  ‘I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or not.’

  ‘Don’t sit at home moping. Get out. Meet some nice young man.’

  ‘What nice young man would be interested in me?’

  ‘Meet some nice old man, then. Will you do it?’

  Lampo thought long and hard.

  ‘Do you know?’ he said at last, sounding very surprised. ‘I will.’

  ‘Nigel!’ he said, some twenty minutes later. ‘Good to see you.’

  Tosser looked wary. He always did when Henry called him Nigel.

  ‘I want to offer you a job, Nigel.’

  ‘What sort of job?’ said Nigel cautiously.

  ‘I want to expand. Open more Cafés. Go nationwide.’

  ‘Why?’<
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  ‘I’m a businessman. That’s what businessmen do. You know that. Anyway, that’s my decision.’

  ‘Where do I come in?’

  ‘I want you to find sites, buildings that might be suitable for conversion. I want you to negotiate on my behalf to buy those sites.’

  ‘I’ve never done anything like that. I don’t know about sites and buildings.’

  ‘It’s all about what it will cost and how much we can make out of the site. It’s all about money. Food’s my area of expertise. Money’s yours.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Loyalty, Nigel, and perhaps a belief that you have never been fully stretched, if I may say so, never quite fulfilled your full potential.’

  ‘I see. I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment or not.’

  ‘It is and it isn’t. You look a bit soft, Nigel, a little puddingy in your retirement, if you don’t mind my saying that. You need to get off your arse and face a challenge. It’ll be good for you.’

  ‘I don’t know. This is so unexpected. I find that … you’re right. It is retirement. It’s the idleness. I’ve become rather indecisive. I … oh dear … what shall I say?’

  ‘Of course you’ll have to consider Felicity. After all, she’s frail, ultra-sensitive, squeamish, edgy, picky, not resilient.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just some of the ways you’ve described her. You must love her very much – and you’ll have grown used to being with her all day every day. You may think this will involve too many trips away from home.’

  ‘I’ll do it. Damn it, I’ll do it, Henry.’

  Nigel joined Lampo in the Café, and Henry opened a bottle of his best red wine to celebrate with them. Henry chose the lamb Hilda. He quite expected to hear her sniff at the thought of his eating a dish named after her. He quite expected her to say, ‘What is it? Boned shoulder of lamb stuffed with spotted dick?’ He hoped that she might express her pleasure at the way he’d kept her memory alive, but ghosts didn’t work like that. They didn’t appear when you wanted them.

  He told Lampo and Tosser about Greg’s famed inability to remember acronyms. When Greg brought their food over, Henry asked him, ‘Did you ever have TCP when you were a kid?’ and he replied, ‘Yeah. I had a raincoat made of it. Only left it on a train coming back from watching Spurs, didn’t I, and got beaten by me dad. Spurs got beaten as well, by Chelsea, the bastards.’

  Henry could see that both Lampo and Tosser were uneasy at his making fun of Greg in this way. This irritated him. What business was it of theirs?

  His irritation didn’t last long. He felt full of generosity as he discussed their jobs with them and invited them both to spend a weekend later in the month at The Old Manor House.

  Lampo was quite frank about it, saying that he couldn’t bear the thought of a weekend in an English village. Wellies brought him out in a rash. Cowpats made him depressed. The thought of a visit to a village pub gave him palpitations. ‘You’re right, Henry,’ he said. ‘I’m South Ken through and through. I’m South Kensington Man.’

  Tosser said that he would have loved to go, Felicity looked good in green wellies, but unfortunately it clashed with a family do. Henry had no idea whether this was the truth or an excuse. He felt nowadays that he hardly knew Tosser at all.

  He went up to the bar to open a second bottle. As he was getting it out of the rack, he heard Greg talking to the double act, Little and Often, who had both come into the Café together for once. He heard Greg say, ‘It’s rare to see you both here, gentlemen. We often see Little, but we see very little of Often.’ If Greg was going to start making jokes … and to comedians at that … Comedians liked making jokes to people; they did not like people making jokes to them. Their faces were grim. Greg’s lack of sense irritated Henry.

  He returned to Lampo and Tosser with the second bottle. He felt good. He felt magnanimous. He felt suddenly powerful, the humble fag turned provider to two sad old men.

  After Lampo and Tosser had gone, Henry took a walk. He had come to love being in Soho, and wandering round it, popping into the Groucho or the French House for a glass of wine or an anis, visiting the Coach and Horses, where Jeffrey Bernard had so often not felt well. He counted Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia among his favourite books. He read about great Soho characters like the splendidly named Muriel Belcher, who for many years had ruled the Colony Club with a rod of iron.

  But now he was beginning to walk as if he himself was one of the Soho greats. Henry Pratt, Bohemian, Sohemian, roving Fitzrovian, is, if not exactly unwell, at least swaying slightly. He began to look scornful as he walked past the shady doormen who manned the shady doors of the shady strip-clubs. ‘You are impostors,’ his scornful look implied. ‘I am part of the real Soho. We have style.’

  Perhaps what was wrong with the Ben Pilkington-Brick Mobile Soup Kitchen was that it had too much style. Henry bought a smart cream van, and had stunningly moving pictures of Ben on it. The pictures were of course painted by Ben’s sister Camilla. In the back of the van there were gleaming vats of soup – and it wasn’t just tomato soup or vegetable soup or chicken soup. He was, as he later admitted, losing his sense of simplicity at this stage of his life. A dirty, smelly old man, who has lost all spirit that isn’t methylated, doesn’t want, when he is rudely awakened from sleep, to hear a concerned voice say, ‘Would you like some soup? It’s artichoke and celeriac today.’

  ‘I don’t see why, because they’re down and out, they should only be offered something basic,’ Henry told Hilary.

  ‘Because they can only cope with the basic?’ she suggested.

  Gradually, without his admitting it, the soups became more appropriate.

  The van trundled round Central London, night after night, stopping at various points, where Henry hoped that, in time, small crowds of the homeless would gather. A few did, but not as many as he had expected. He had failed to realise the extent to which time was no longer a factor in their lives. They recognised light and darkness, but didn’t necessarily even think of them as day and night. They were just the light bit of their eternity, and the dark bit of their eternity. The concept of an hour was beyond them. They might still know the meaning of the word, but it was of no practical value.

  Some of them couldn’t drink the soup. Some could drink it, but couldn’t keep it down. Some of them burnt themselves. Some, unused to the flavours of real food, described it as ‘muck’. Some of them were so shaky with drink that they spilt most of it. Some were so shaky without drink that they spilt most of it. Some of them swore at being woken up. One or two grew violent. Henry was scalded by a mug of soup hurled at him.

  The project was just about the first element in Henry’s life as a celebrity chef to attract any press criticism. It was criticised as being cosmetic, and done for publicity. Camilla’s paintings didn’t help in this regard. There were rumblings suggesting that he was not sincere. Since sincerity cannot be measured, allegations of insincerity are hard to counter.

  Henry couldn’t go on, night after night, delivering soup, while still working by day. Within a fortnight he was utterly exhausted. He needed to find volunteers.

  He soon realised that he would have to pay his volunteers. There was danger in the work. There were complications over insurance. There were complications over health and safety. Two London boroughs insisted that his volunteers had protective clothing against possible attack. Henry found himself designing anti-soup masks.

  His van was too conspicuous. It attracted drunks who weren’t homeless. It became a target for yobbos. Never mind anti-soup masks – soon they would need riot shields.

  To carry on with the project for ever was impossible, but unless he carried on for ever it was of no value, so he aborted it and gave increased money to the charities for the homeless, just as Hilary had suggested in the first place.

  She didn’t say, ‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ She wasn’t like that. But her eyes said it. They couldn’t help it. They were too truthful.

 
Henry didn’t say, ‘You were right, darling.’ He wasn’t like that. But his eyes said it. They were no good at concealment.

  Their silence created one more barrier between them, and the ending of the project brought more criticism and more allegations of insincerity. Everything he did was public property now. ‘Henry in the Soup’ was just one of many headlines. The criticism was regretful rather than cruel, but it was an intimation of what was to come.

  Hilary didn’t say anything, but Cousin Hilda did.

  Putting on airs. Getting carried away. Having ideas. I don’t know, said her sniff.

  Henry answered his critics fervently and honestly, saying to them what he couldn’t say to Hilary. He admitted his mistakes. He expressed deep sorrow and regret. He said that he had been too eager to build a worthy memorial for Ben, who would not have wanted a memorial at all. Ben’s life was his memorial. Henry had done it all wrong.

  On the whole, the public gave him the benefit of the doubt, and his programmes and books continued to succeed, perhaps all the more so because of the publicity.

  The publication of The Pratt Diet was a major event in the book world. It was described as ‘his latest bestseller’ on the jacket, which struck Henry as ridiculous, though he didn’t complain, and the boast became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as boasts sadly do in the twenty-first century.

  At the back of the book there were detailed suggestions for dietary programmes. Day 8, lunch, 5oz pork fillet with toasted apricots, etcetera etcetera. It was not written with any scientific method whatsoever. It was just Henry’s idea of a balanced diet. It was delicious, so people enjoyed it, and the portions were on the small side, so people tended to lose a bit of weight. However, the portions were sufficiently large not to cause any real discomfort.

  A lot of the people who bought the book never cooked a single thing from it. They just read the suggestions in bed and slavered at the thought of them. Cooking, in an irritating phrase that was about to run through the language like a virus, was the new sex and, as with sex, people dreamt of it far more than they actually did it.