If only it was always so simple. The nomenclature at Castle’s Wine Merchants was more ambitious. Infuriatingly and, no doubt, deliberately confusing. What need was there for such variety? There was nothing complicated about gin which I loathed or whisky and rum which I adored when sugared and watered. But wine! What was the point? It tasted horrible and the vintages were as perplexing as maths. I was enjoined to be proud that my year of birth had been a great year, a puzzling characterisation which didn’t accord with my mother’s account of its hardships. The names were some sort of litany: hock – a vague term which seemed to denote a multitude of German wines, moselle, piesporter, riesling; Yugoslav riesling; claret; burgundy; tokay; port; valdepeñas; sherry; Empire sherry; chianti in a lampshade bottle; coteaux de mascara; rioja (which I assumed meant red). These were the last years of English bottling, limited travel and qualified ignorance. An ignorance sometimes shared by a pompous caste of double-barrelled, bow-tied connoisseurs, hail-fellow-well-met merchants (never mere shopkeepers) and clubman journalists who blithely confused the generic with the specific, kirsch with cherry brandy. They quoted folkloric bores like Mistral, they turned a blind eye to the criminality of the French trade which routinely adulterated its products with vins médecins from the Maghreb, they were often both poacher and gamekeeper, twee and hearty. Bonhomie is a tiresome quality even when sincere, especially when sincere.
Miss Pinnegar, a spinster at the piano, gave dancing lessons in The Assembly Rooms. All towns with genteel ambitions built such rooms in the eighteenth century. These, on the first floor above W. H. Smith, had a roof with a cupola and a modillion cornice. Jumping on the sprung floor was fun but didn’t accord with Miss Pinnegar’s programme of martial daintiness. She thankfully pronounced, unexceptionably, that I was unteachable.
The Bay Tree. Outside, two potted bays and two bay windows. Inside, beyond the shop, was a café, a Saturday treat: vols-au-vent filled with creamy chicken and mushrooms, an éclair to follow. Another treat, this one free: the Southern Electricity Board showroom’s window, horizontally concave in order that passers-by might feast their eyes on three-bar electric fires and the vacuum cleaners of tomorrow without their pleasure being hampered by reflections. I was captivated by the smooth geometry. (This 1930s device was also used by Heal’s on Tottenham Court Road and Fox on London Wall.)
After I bought the tank transporter I went to The Bay Tree to get bridge rolls for my mother. There was a long queue. I was so thrilled by my new acquisition that I had to have a look at it. I unwrapped it impatiently, carelessly, tearing the Wilton’s bag. I took the model out of its yellow box to admire it. Indulgent fellow customers smiled at my childish pride. When I got to the front of the queue I put the tank transporter back in its box and asked the shop assistant to dispose of the torn bag.
W. H. Smith’s staff disapproved of my reading comics, newspapers and magazines with no intention of buying them and were quick to shoo me off the premises. They rarely, however, strayed to the back of the shop where I was able to spend as long as I wished browsing the Wild West Comic Annual, the Buffalo Bill Wild West Annual, the Eagle Annual, the Tiger Annual, Charles Buchan’s Football Annual. After an undisturbed quarter of an hour reading I left the shop to get home for lunch.
I was hardly out on the pavement when a hand roughly grabbed my shoulder. I looked up into a woman’s lipless face. She dragged me back into the shop where she accused me of having stolen the tank transporter from the toy department. She took it from me. I explained that I had bought it in Wilton’s. She hissed her disbelief. Where was the receipt? Where was it … I realised that it must have been in the bag which I had torn, the bag I had asked to be thrown away. She said that no one would believe such a story. I was a liar. I was in serious trouble. The shop’s manager was called. He was a three-piece rodent. I made his day. He couldn’t believe his luck. A child criminal to persecute. What else had I stolen? How often did I steal from his shop? I was evidently a recidivist. He bundled me through a door between bookshelves along an unkempt corridor adorned with lagged pipes to a windowless office the colour of cardboard. I was instructed to write down my name, address and my parents’ phone number. The rodent took the piece of paper and told me to wait. On no account was I to leave this room. I stared miserably at towers of trays full of important papers, vital box files, a hefty typewriter as old-fashioned as a sit-up-and-beg bicycle, some unwashed tea cups. After some minutes the lipless woman opened the door. She didn’t speak, just stared contemptuously at me. It was indignation as much as fear which overcame me. I told her that she had only to telephone Wilton’s to establish the truth. She slammed shut the door. What had happened to my tank transporter? Who was looking after it whilst I was in captivity? Time was surpassed, rendered invalid. How much later was it when the rodent returned to inform me that I had lied about the phone number? It puzzled me that he should reach such a conclusion as a result of there being no reply: perhaps basic intelligence was not among the qualities demanded of a Smith’s manager. My father, I told him, was at work and my mother didn’t get back from school for lunch till 12.20. He told me again that I was a liar and that for want of a parent present he had called the police. Left alone again I burst into tears. Although the door was unlocked I was so numb that escape seemed impossible. How far would I get? Would I be able to make it through the shop unseen? My sobbing was taken as an admission of guilt by my captors when they came back to let me know that the police were on their way. They gloated that it was little wonder I was feeling so sorry for myself when I was in such trouble. The policeman was dull-eyed and torpidly uninterested. He didn’t regard the crime as particularly grave and suggested that if I made a clean breast of it all would be forgotten. But I had committed no crime: I once again went over the events of that miserable morning. This piqued him. If I continued to deny the theft, he threatened me, I would be up before the court, in front of the magistrates and would be taken from my parents and put in a home.
What time was it? I asked. Twenty to one. I implored him to phone my mother.
A quarter of an hour later she arrived, followed within minutes by Mr Kidwell, Wilton’s proprietor, in his reassuring mustard doeskin waistcoat. My mother’s fury was magnificent. The rodent cowered. The lipless woman’s face was white. There was talk of legal action, of wrongful imprisonment, of bullying, of people unfit for their job. Of course all that happened was that she cancelled the newspaper and magazine order and transferred it to Gilbert’s. And she persuaded virtually everyone she knew to do the same. I would, for months after, walk into the shop, smile courteously at the lipless woman, daring her to challenge me, knowing she feared me. And I would read comics safe from disturbance.
NO FOOD, FUTURE FOOD
The paper was battledress brown; thick, matt, absorbent, coarse woodpulp. Touching it made me shiver, the way that felt and flour did. My ration book was liberally stamped. The rubber stamp, the jobsworth’s tool of choice, was emblematic of those slow post-war years: everything had to be stamped or franked or cancelled. In Mr Batten’s shop across Harnham Bridge I would be handed the horrible book so that I, to whom it was issued, might enjoy the important responsibility of passing it personally to the ancient grocer. He stamped with the deliberation of a surgeon or horologist. I enjoyed the ritual as much as I enjoyed my allotted portion of ham, which seemed to me sufficient. I didn’t want for ham, didn’t knowingly want for anything. Rationing was normal. It did not occur to me that there might once have existed a time without rationing. We were already New Elizabethans by the time rationing was finally repealed in the summer of 1954. Not that it actually came to an end then. Shortages persisted for several years. However, the inadequacies of the English table of the 1950s have been much exaggerated just as its current prowess is much exaggerated.
Nonetheless it is undeniable that privations – six years of war plus a further dozen provoked initially by Stafford Cripps’s smug vegetarian asceticism and subsequently by an agriculture founded in econ
omies of scale – were one of the reasons that many English people lost touch with their indigenous cooking. A culture can be carelessly dissipated with extraordinary haste. Memories that witness better times are eliminated. One generation forgets. A second never knows. England’s cooking was obliterated by a kind of revolution – vandalistic, governmental, philistine, boorish. It was a victim of the same mentality which sanctioned the destruction of thousands of buildings.
When, after quarter of a century’s research, Dorothy Hartley published Food in England in 1954, it was already an historical document, something from a distant era, like cars with mudguards. It quite lacked the allure of Elizabeth David’s early books which, although their influence is retrospectively overestimated, were a further incitement to the English middle classes to break with their dimly recalled past or pasts (whatever they had been).
Nothing, though, dissolved that link so wholly as the promise of the dawn of the advent of future-food, neo-food, spacecraft-food, non-food. A rational, labour-saving regime of pills, gels, capsules, suppositories, injections, drips and powders which would omit gastronomic pleasure. An omission which would hardly be noticed in circumstances where that pleasure was unknown, that is to say much of post-war England. The notion that food might be anything beyond crude fuel was abhorrent to hairshirted creatures such as Cripps and incomprehensible to the downtrodden who were obliged to eat filth in order to live, just about. Food was a resented necessity, a chore to prepare, a chore to consume.
I knew for certain that this ancient form of corporeal succour would soon be replaced by non-food. Plastics were replacing wood; cotton and wool were not needed in the age of terylene, nylon and tergal; open nibs were yesterday’s nibs – today’s nibs were hooded; transistors would soon vanquish valves.
Chemists’ boundless researches into algae’s proteins would have boundless ramifications. What had, for half a century, been wishfulness was now, according to excitable magazine articles, making its way from lab to consumer. In the new world just over the horizon there would be no school food, which was an unspoken punishment, a further means devised by adults to torment children. There would be no reeking farms and silos, no animals bred for death, no gristle, no ammoniac fish, no boiled fish, no ointment-pink sausages in Bowyers’ window, no gravy like diarrhoea with a skin on it, no windowless long houses for pigs and chickens, no chickens that tasted of cod liver oil, no tapioca, no flour, no fart-flavoured cabbage, no spotted dick or MNT, no marmalade, no foul turnips, no jaundiced fat lagging round bleeding meat, no mincemeat pies, no Christmas pudding, no dining tables.
There were of course countless foods which I’d miss: I had been privy to gastronomic pleasure. But sacrifices had to be made in the name of irresistible modernity.
I would miss my mother’s cooking.
It was, when I was little, still based specifically in her mother’s cooking, more generally in prewar practice. In pre-Boer War practice: her disintegrating copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management was published in 1888. Farmhouse Fare – A Cookery Book of Country Dishes (third impression) was published by The Farmers Weekly in 1936. Her copy, which cost one shilling, is dated 12 July 1939, seven weeks after she married. Secrets of Some Wiltshire Housewives, published in 1927, also one shilling, was compiled by the novelist, folklorist and fag-hag Edith Olivier who lived at the Daye (dairy) House in the Earl of Pembroke’s park at Wilton. David Herbert described her as ‘a fidgety, dynamic rodent with mulberry coloured hair’. The recipe book quite lacks the bitter whimsy of her fiction. It is an earthy reminder that an essentially peasant culture existed in England well into the twentieth century, thrifty, resourceful, unpampered.
My mother was thrifty and energetic. She salted, simmered and pressed beef tongue. She brined beef – brisket or silverside – till it was saltpetre scarlet, simmered it with dumplings and carrots. A weekly ham hock was delivered by Tom Oke, grocer of Milford Street whose business would be taken over by his nephew from far-off Weymouth, ginger Roy Osmond, who turned out not to have inherited the grocery gene. There were demarcation lines, specialisations. Bacon, ham and Bath chaps were grocer’s victuals rather than butcher’s. Sid the Butcher duly didn’t sell them. The hock was boiled and served with buttered greens and mash: its rind was hung out to fatten Kalu’s quarry. She made steak and kidney pie and steak and kidney pudding. The pastry and the suet crust were her own, ready-made were not yet available: ‘homemade’ was a banal statement of fact not a Luddite boast. Tripe and onions simmered in peppery milk was a dish Grandma Hogg often served when we had Saturday lunch in Shakespeare Avenue; my mother’s version avoided the creamy excess which Grandma, a devotee of all things lactic, including near-rancid farm butter, strove for. Faggots and brawn came from Pritchett’s, they were perhaps beyond Sid the Butcher’s capabilities. Brown trout were fried in butter till their skin was crisp yet their white flesh still moist. Herring roes on toast were sprinkled with paprika (apparently its only use). Crab was a treat. Lobster was a treat for the highest of high days; the gratinated combination of Gruyère, cream, mustard and white wine outdid the flesh. We would eat salmon at suppertime for days on end after my father had caught one: grilled with herb butter or hollandaise, in salad, incorporated in a pie with hard-boiled eggs, mashed and fried as ‘cakes’. Plaice was fried in butter. Battered fish and chips were deep-fried in beef dripping. So were eggs: in seconds slithery viscosity was magically transformed into a frilly rococo gewgaw. These disappeared from her repertoire after the second incident. She already had form as a chip-pan incendiarist when she put several pounds of dripping on to heat and popped out for a sharpener at The Rose and Crown where she fell in with Sid the Butcher on his lunch break: the house, remember, had a thatched roof.
Due to its expense we seldom had steak. When we did it was served with garlic butter. Chicken was a Sunday rarity. Even then the bird was an old boiler, simmered then finished by roasting. After that it provided first meat for a pilaff then stock and soup, with vermicelli. She made scones, drop scones, cheese scones, macaroni cheese, cauliflower cheese, cheese soufflés. The cheese was mousetrap, maybe Gruyère, there was little choice: forty or fifty English cheeses had disappeared since the beginning of the war. Stilton, Gorgonzola and Danish Blue were available but doubtless deemed inappropriate for cooking. She roasted pork with crackling, beef with Yorkshire pudding, and (very rarely) lamb. Veal was beaten to wafer thinness, egged and breadcrumbed. Lamb’s breads were blanched and fried. Lamb’s liver, heart and kidneys were staples, pig’s kidneys too, and pork chops which had an ear of kidney attached to them. At Christmas there was turkey, tooth-scraping cranberry sauce, chipolatas, bacon rolls, loathsome sprouts, loathsome parsnips – all the trimmings, three words that cause the heart to sink. Even though I disliked the flavour of its meat I was disappointed the year that turkey was replaced by a Polish goose from Green’s, a butcher with the only art nouveau frontage in Salisbury. The point being that turkey spelled Christmas and goose didn’t – I was ignorant of how recent a tradition turkey was and obstinately refused to believe my mother. Christmas pudding repulsed me. Mince pies were sheerly foul.
Pheasants were hung in the kitchen to the point of putrefaction and filled the room with their odour: The First German Girl said that they reminded her of the halitotic stench in Leipzig’s air raid shelters, ascribable to the wartime lack of dentists. I learnt to assume that the pheasants tasted delicious. The tongue, like any other sensory organ, is not autonomous, is susceptible to outside influence, to appreciating what it is invited to appreciate.
In the last couple of years of the 1950s her cooking changed. The availability of new produce introduced the notion of fashion, of choice, into the English kitchen for the first time since 1939. Her copy of Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food was the first reprint of the first Penguin edition, 1956. That author’s French Country Cooking, a 1959 edition. Plats du Jour by Patience Gray (a woman whom Mrs David detested even more than she detested Peter Mayle) and Primro
se Boyd is of 1957. The latter looks as though it was rarely used, the same goes for The Continental Flavour by Nika Standen Hazelton (‘author of Reminiscence and Ravioli … she loves to travel to different and exotic places’).
Paella! Paella of a sort. Smørrebrød! Daube! Pasta! Zabaglione! Avocado vinaigrette! Snails! Artichokes! Breton onions! From the Breton beret with an onion-strewn bike and a smile who pitched up every year having taken the ferry to Southampton. Chicken kiev! A marvel of ingenuity and engineering. Cooked by her for dinner parties in high heels and reeking of Piguet’s Bandit or, in times of hardship, Ma Griffe. Chicken à la King! A fricassé of chicken, mushrooms and peppers. I sucked up to Barry Still, my French teacher and headmaster, suggesting that it should be called au King. No, he replied, it is an abbreviation of à la façon de King – whoever King was, he added, testily. My parents had invited him to dinner with Honor Wigfall, a widow. He seemed to believe he was being paired off.
I would miss my father’s cooking. The twice-weekly curries ended when the spices from Iraq were finally exhausted. His taste was for anything that he himself had caught or gathered. Eels from the eel trap, pheasants, hares, salmon, trout – but not pike, never pike. They were, according to the footling English classification, coarse fish, in his words ‘hot cotton wool full of needles’: no doubt it is if clumsily cooked. It was not until I had learnt in my late teens how to make quenelles and beurre blanc that he came to enjoy them. Given his habitually obstinate unwillingness to try foods which he had disliked at first taste this was a minor triumph. He had a particular antipathy to lamb’s breads, which I adored. He refused to eat ceps which he reckoned slimy. Field mushrooms were different. At dawn we’d drive over the Ebble, past the Yew Tree and up the long hill to Odstock Woods where we’d park beside a track that led eventually to an isolated (and, most probably, suspicious) house in a bosky clearing. Sometimes the downland fields were so white with mushrooms that they might have been attacked by a hail of golf balls. This was where the sheep who sprang over hurdles in an attempt to lull me to sleep lived. The mushrooms were a prized component of what was not yet called ‘Full English’ which he’d prepare when we returned to the sound of St Thomas’s bells across the misty meadows: pork sausages (not Bowyers), back bacon which he incomprehensibly preferred to streaky and refused to crisp, sauté potatoes, kidneys, fried bread. He enjoyed making dishes from leftovers: bubble and squeak; Sunday night sandwiches of chicken oysters and scraps which were always accompanied by whisky (dilute and sugared for me); shepherd’s pie with meat put through a primitive mincer attached to a kitchen shelf, with Guinness, angostura bitters, Worcester sauce, sweated onions and raw onions. He furrowed the potato top so that when it came out of the oven it looked like heatwave plough. His omelettes were perfectly yellow: it was a point of honour not to let them brown. His everyday breakfast was egg beaten in milk. At weekends he would add a shot of brandy or rum. The latter came in handy at Christmas. He was wedded to tradition but disliked its flavour. So Christmas pudding would be crumbled and immersed in half a bottle of Lamb’s Navy and not set light to.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 24