I would miss: Mary Longmire’s bacon and eggs, her thick soups and steak and kidney puddings; Beryl Lush’s rusks, cooked overnight at the bottom of the Aga beside which Brack lay for warmth; Maureen Slater’s confection which I later came to know as pan bagna; Honor Wigfall’s jugged hare derived from Big-Boned Brigitte’s recipe for lièvre à la royale; The First German Girl’s stuffed cabbage; the prix fixe at l’Hôtel du Louvre; the staff’s equine lunch at l’Hôtel des Voyageurs; the Marine Café’s deep-fried eggs; the Haven Café’s crab sandwiches; bismarck herring with cream and apple followed by Fullers cake at the Lyons’ Corner House in Coventry Street; gratinated chicken risotto in a tiny Italian restaurant in Carlisle Street off Soho Square; my own TV Toastwich (a toasted bacon and tomato sandwich whose ‘recipe’ I had found in TV Times).
I would have missed all of this and more had non-food come to pass. It didn’t. It failed because so much of it sought to replicate past food and was found wanting. Energen rolls were airy bread. Coffeemate tried to emulate cream, no one was fooled. This tastes like apple, that tastes like lamb, here’s a potion to remind you of tomato. So it went on. It was analogous to Linda McCartney’s horrible industrially produced vegetarian products which, many years later, aped horrible industrially produced meat products.
There would be no new foods. There are no new foods. There will be no new foods. There are only rediscovered foods. Save for those from the Midi and the Midi Moins Quart, many of the recipes collected by Mrs David and Jane Grigson throughout France are uncannily akin, in all but name and minor detail, to those in Farmhouse Fare and Secrets of Some Wiltshire Housewives. Lancashire Hotpot is baeckoff, faggots are gayettes and caillettes, ‘A Very Good Supper Dish’ – the recipe is from Mrs F. Roberts of Winterslow, a downland village east of Salisbury – is gratin dauphinois. And so on. Recipes that the English forgot or merely abjured in the collective conviction that what came from elsewhere was necessarily superior.
Even if it meant sharing it with the boche, France, a nationalistic nation of 50 million people of whom 55 million were resistants, retained a bloated pride in its kitchen, or kitchens: the cooking of, say, the Artois has little in common with that of the Béarn, nor that of the Dauphiné with Brittany’s, the first I became familiar with. Brigitte, the first French person I met, was a gourmande from Vannes. She was indeed, as they used to say, a big-boned girl, employed in an indefinable capacity in exchange for accommodation and English Conversation by Edwina Neck at the shabby genteel house she was renting in the Woodford Valley, i.e. the Avon valley north of Salisbury. Stonehenge was a few miles away. Brigitte compared it unfavourably with Carnac. There’s some justice in that comparison. But Brigitte was simply expressing the prejudice of a Breton supremacist. As for English cooking! She sighed, shook her head. And salad cream – it was nothing short of barbaric. She got on with making an educative vinaigrette: ‘On fait le mélange …’ She uttered this mantra so often that my father was thereafter unshakable in his belief that a vinaigrette should be called un mélange. She cooked savoury pancakes with cheese and scraps of ham and conjured delicious soups from whatever was cheap or scroungeable. There was no money to spare.
Like her friends Mona Godsmark, Dorry Musto, Peta Carmalt and Honor Wigfall, Edwina Neck was a single parent. None of these hardy unpretentious women was particularly concerned to keep up appearances. Rather they wanted to lead a life of the material standard they would have enjoyed had they not been war widows or divorcees or the mother of an illegit (an ugly contemporary usage).
They were powerful characters, middle or upper middle class by birth, intelligent, outspoken, defiantly untwee, mostly deficient in formal education, mostly unqualified for anything other than the housewifery which had lately eluded them. Despite the presence off-stage of well-heeled and often fairly grand relations they were perennially on their uppers. Occasionally there was talk of a man friend but these men friends were invisible men, maybe unpresentable. Peta Carmalt, a radio producer, had more than one man friend and led a fast life – I knew this because she wore plaid trousers and her home was a Maida Vale flat, and flats, especially in Maida Vale (how did I know this?), still retained the dodgy etiquette attached to them sixty or seventy years previously: I had never seen a flat and was uncertain about what such a thing looked like and what the nature of its particular iniquities might be. What was a fatherless son? My appetite for Maida Vale’s exoticism would not be sated for many years. More usually Mona, Dorry et al. tended neither to own property nor to have a sufficiently reliable income to rent. They relied on friends, on hard-sought, surprised distant relations. They moved around a lot, taking live-in jobs or ones that at least provided accommodation and maybe an education for the children.
Edwina Neck was employed as matron at a school where boys who could pass neither the eleven plus to a grammar school nor common entrance to a public school were sent by middle-class parents anxious to spare themselves the ignominy of having a son at a secondary modern. Such establishments, founded entirely in fearful snobbery, abounded in the Fifties and Sixties. In Salisbury there were St Probus (uniform: magenta and grey) and, almost adjacent, the confusingly named Modern School (red and green). Nearby were Hurn Court, Embley Park, Stanbridge Earls. Her next job was at a genuine public school, albeit one for boys who couldn’t get into the public school of their parents’ choice. She was jocularly, ungallantly but correctly said to owe this position to having been the headmaster’s ‘groundsheet’ when he was an army officer.
Mona Godsmark was ‘companion’ to an author. For four Christmases on the trot my parents received an effusively signed copy of Compton Mackenzie’s latest. That particular strain of unreadability ceased when she left his employ in Edinburgh to move back south. She then lived with her son in a succession of ‘private’ hotels.
Now and again one of these women might demonstrate her entrepreneurial ineptitude by helping to set up a language school or taking in PGs (problematic, drunk, broke) or lending a hand at running a restaurant or opening an antiques shop and ending up even more out of pocket than when she had embarked on the misadventure. They sometimes had to do a flit. Gentlefolk? Maybe. But distressed – never! For all their pecuniary worries and their concerns that the covert sources of school fees might dry up they were a spirited bunch who signally disallowed themselves outward signs of despair. Putting a brave face on it was in the grain. The next cloud would be the silvery one. And in the meantime there’s always gin-and-It, Seniors, the races.
Among Honor Wigfall’s many and dispersed friends was an Admiral Purvis whose house was high above Dartmouth near the Britannia Royal Naval College, a place that I might, it was hinted, one day aspire to. His son, a pupil at Clifton College, had, at the age of sixteen, been diagnosed as diabetic. The school was unwilling to have a diabetic boarder, so the family had temporarily moved to Bristol in order that Andrew could complete the last year and a half of his education as a day boy. The Dartmouth house had been let but the tenants would not move in till late September 1952. Honor, forever on the qui vive for a freebie, persuaded the Admiral to lend it to her for the month of August so that it would be looked after.
The party comprised: Honor; Victoria Wigfall (12); Freddy Wigfall (10); Edwina Neck; Jeremy Neck (10); my mother; me (5). There is no game fishing in the Dart estuary. Sea fishing didn’t interest my father. So he had declined Honor’s invitation.
The house had been let more or less unfurnished. It was Edwardian, tall, uncomfortable. Like all armed forces houses, whether owned or rented, it was neglected, shabby, bereft of domestic imagination’s trace. There were two staircases, one for servants, nooks, long built-in cupboards under the eaves, hidden rooms, lofts. It was an ideal playground for children. The other children, however, did not want to play with me. There was after all a five-year age gap between the two boys and me. I was hurt by their shunning me.
‘Do you like me?’ I asked them and asked so often that they taunted me with those words, ‘Do you like me
do you like me do you like me …’ Victoria Wigfall repeatedly sang: ‘Peanut sitting on a railroad track. His heart was all a flutter. Along came a train. Choo choo. Peanut butter!’ She ridiculed me for not knowing what peanut butter was. When I entered a lavatory whose door Freddy Wigfall had failed to lock he dipped his hand into the bowl he was squatting on and hurled a fat turd at me. It missed, splattered on the already grimed wall. My mother was vaguely aware of my misery though not of the precise humiliations I was subjected to (mostly being shut in cupboards): needless to say I had been forcibly instructed by my tormentors not to ‘squit’. It was a relief to walk with her down the steep streets to the quayside where a red-painted World War One mine had been transformed into a collection box in which I put pennies to help dead sailors’ families: every time a glass clinked a sailor died at sea. I suffered an increasingly painful earache. One afternoon my mother rowed me – the only time in my life that she rowed me – to a headland where there were caves, inaccessible save by water. I hoped that Freddy and Jeremy did not get to hear of them, fearing they would exploit their potential as a place to strand me. I hoped too that my father would be proud when he learned that I fished from that boat and, subsequently, from a jetty with a nylon line baited with a worm. No takers. My earache was so bad that I cried through the night to the amused irritation of Freddy and Jeremy. Honor caught the rickety garage’s door frame on the bumper of her car as she reversed out of it, causing the structure to collapse groaning onto the ground and onto the car’s bonnet in a turbid pall of dust and rot. I took solace in the sandy trails through the furze, gorse, heather and pine at Blackpool Sands: this is where the titular character of Masefield’s yarn Jim Davis encounters night-riders wearing bee-skeps. When I complained to my mother about my earache she ignored me, assuming that I had self-pityingly invented a surrogate for my misery. We visited the lagoon at Slapton. We took the ferry to Kingswear. The children tired of tormenting me. The earache was agonising. When, after we had returned home, my mother deigned to take me to Dr Barker he immediately diagnosed an abscess, hence my lifelong partial deafness. Even though I could understand that my mother had been negligent I was shocked by Dr Barker’s accusatory rudeness. I couldn’t bear to see her being admonished with boorish pomposity. (Years later he told me that my hay fever was due to my blowing my nose too vigorously. On my sixteenth birthday his Roman Catholic partner with a naval full-set, Jim Drummond, sent my parents a letter advising them to warn me of the dangers of venereal diseases. When my father suffered a strange growth in his throat Barker said there was nothing to worry about although breathing was obviously impaired. Jim Laing took one look at it, put my father in his E-type,fn1 drove him to Odstock Hospital, administered an anaesthetic and cut out of his throat an accretion of chalk the size of a golf ball. Such obstructions were not uncommon in an area where chalk was ubiquitous and water hard.)
Do You Like Me remained Victoria Wigfall’s taunt until I was ten, when she relented and gave me a copy of Tab Hunter’s Young Love. I thanked her by pouring too much water into a glass of lemon barley water so drenching a colander full of salad leaves in the stuff. She married a French hydrologist who worked on a series of politically murky and ecologically questionable agronomic projects in west Africa.
After Sandhurst Freddy Wigfall was commissioned into the 17th/21st Lancers. His first few years as an officer were typical of that era. Drinking, skiing, riding to hounds, riding in point to points, gambling, field sports. Then, in August 1969, British troops were deployed in Northern Ireland.
Jeremy Neck served an apprenticeship on a local newspaper then worked for Timeform, Horse and Hound and Sporting Life before becoming a racing correspondent for a succession of national papers. He marries into his sport: his wife is the daughter of a knighted trainer.
A European couple die in their bed as a consequence of an arson attack on their villa in the Dakar suburb of Mermoz in June 1971. There is no doubt in the mind of the investigating officer that the crime is linked to the husband’s occluded Francafrique connections and to government ministers taking backhanders. Indeed there is a sour joke that so many pots de vins have been offered that a major irrigation project is oenological, that it’s turning water into wine.
Late November 1971. An off-duty army officer in an unmarked car on the way to Stranraer after a weekend’s grouse shooting near Moniaive is ambushed. Speculation is that he was stopped by what appeared to be a police vehicle. He is taken from his car and shot twice through the head. The execution bears the Provisionals’ hallmark.
A racing journalist writes a sensationalist story in the spring of 1973. It is based on what he has learned from a disaffected stable lad, from an apparently unrelated veterinary source, from a receipt in Portuguese sent him in the post. The story claims that a trainer, whom he does not name, is doping certain of his horses with a performance-enhancing drug synthesised in Brazil for which there is yet no means of detection. A year later he is found dead a couple of hundred yards away from the Lambourn pub where he has had an early evening drink. He has been struck by a vehicle. Not by chance, for it then reversed over him.
The fourth and final part of this entertainment is an account by an evidently damaged, paranoiac, vengeful psychotic of the wrongs done to him as a child on holiday, by three older children, in a house of killing stairs, twenty years previously.
OLD MANOR
Jim Laing – familially and intellectually unrelated to his compatriot namesake Ronnie, aka R. D. – suggested, not entirely frivolously, that there was a national glut of psychiatrists because entry to medical schools was not dependent on manual dexterity. So applicants who had not spent their childhood making models, practising marquetry and macramé, sewing and weaving were admitted even though there was no certainty that they would possess an aptitude for surgery. When they graduated the maladroit had to choose between general practice and psychiatry. Too many chose the latter. The supply of psychiatrists exceeded demand. They were, then, obliged to foment a demand. This meant inventing mental illnesses, novel disorders, detecting previously undiagnosed syndromes in order to create patients.
In the 1970s certain principles of anti-psychiatry were cautiously incorporated into the mainstream of the over-practised discipline. This tentative trickle would, somewhat improbably, be lent momentum by Margaret Thatcher’s successive administrations which were ideologically committed to dismantling institutions (professions, including medicine, trade unions etc.) and being seen to cut public spending (hospitals, tertiary education, social housing). Everything should be rendered accountable to the merciless god The Market.
So psychiatric patients became customers of psychiatry. They were released into society, a chimera which didn’t require financial maintenance. These consumers of Care In The Community whittled their life in squalid B&Bs, spikes, hostels, public libraries, parks, drop-in centres, day centres, shopping malls, churches, McDonald’s (which had presciently just arrived in Britain). A few killed. Some screeched and laughed and trembled and fought and geeked and gurned and scratched and neglected to self-medicate in public. The majority, however, exhibited no such bedlamite tics.
Even Stephen Dorrell’s wantonly inspired decision that Care In The Community should be renamed Spectrum Of Care could not save it. But for all its flaws its unintended consequences were tonic. It helped quash the stigma that attached to mental illness if only by causing us, the so far unafflicted, to measure ourselves against those sufferers on public display, by persuading us that we all have the potential to go that antic route, by suggesting just how close the drop to the abyss lies. It showed what had, since the institutionalisation of madness, been hidden.
Hitherto those deemed mentally ill existed behind high walls where they might be lobotomised, drugged, straitjacketed, subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. They were neither seen nor heard. And they were seldom heard of. Mental illness was as much a taboo as sex. It was a source of disgrace. It brought shame on families. The lack of sympathy affor
ded the mentally ill seemed to derive from the comforting assumption that they had brought it on themselves, that they had actually chosen their quasi-criminal sentience and behavioural anomalies. They were bogeys who, in the night, might infect the sane with their bad madness were they not sectioned.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 25