Toast (14 page)

Suddenly everything seemed to be about Mrs Potter. ‘Tidy your room up, will you?' says Dad and then adds, ‘Mrs Potter will be here and she's got too much to do as it is.' Before she turned up on a Monday morning I had to put all my toys away in their wooden chest, straighten my books on their shelves and pick up the clothes that I threw on the floor when I got ready for my bath. Until that point I had never tidied up my room, or any room for that matter. I thought that's what we had a cleaner for. But this was different. It was like the queen was coming.

Dad always wore a tie to work, even when he used to come back red-faced and smelling of oil. Now, though, he came back to lunch clean and smelling of Old Spice. We had always eaten our lunches together, when he would ask me about school and what I was up to. But he seemed impatient with me now and kept saying things like ‘Hadn't you better get off now, won't you be late back to school?'

Then Dad started coming late for his lunch, so he got home only five minutes or so before I had to leave. He said it was because someone at work wanted to have their lunch early, but I couldn't help thinking it was because he wanted to be with Mrs Potter more than he wanted to be with me.

Mrs Potter had started to be nice to me, often patting
the back of my head and calling me ‘lad'. Her smiles were tight and shallow, but she would always bring the conversation round to me when my father was there. ‘He's growing up so quickly now, isn't he?' and ‘He ate all his peas today.' It was odd the way she talked about me as if I was invisible. One day in April, just before my birthday, I came home at four-thirty to find she was still there, sitting on the floor in the sitting room, her back up against Auntie Fanny's old chair. Even though we'd had it recovered it still smelled of pee. She was darning Dad's socks. Mrs Potter had the contents of my dad's sock drawer spread out on the carpet, every one neatly matched; those she had darned laid out smugly, the others folded into a ball. She must have sewn up the holes in at least twenty pairs.

I made a cheeky comment about it probably being cheaper for Dad to buy new socks than pay her to repair them. ‘We don't all do things for money, young man,' she snapped. ‘As it happens, I'm doing this just because I want to, I won't be getting paid for it. It's not easy for your dad now, you know. There's no one to do these things for him any more.' She licked the end of a piece of cotton, then screwed up her eyes as she tried to thread the end of it into the eye of the needle. ‘I don't like the idea of him walking around with holes in his socks.'

I went up to my room, closed the door and put on ‘Paint it Black' as loud as I dared. What had it got to do with her if my dad had holes in his socks?

‘Get ready, we're going for a ride in the car,' Dad said one Saturday morning in early summer. He said it in that way he had of making something sound quite ordinary when it was obvious it was going to be anything but.

An hour later we were following the signs for Worcester. Dad wasn't saying much, which meant there was definitely something brewing. ‘Are we going to see Auntie Betty?' I asked hopefully, loving every second of that particular aunt's company, especially when she said things like bugger and shit and my father looked at his shoes in embarrassment.

‘Well, yes and no. Do you remember saying how much you would like to live at Betty's house?'

I did, but what I had actually meant was that I wanted to live with Auntie Betty rather than move to Clayford, her whitewashed eighteenth-century cottage in Knightwick.

‘Well, Auntie Betty has decided the house is too big for her and has moved to Hereford and so we've bought Clayford. I wanted it to be a surprise.'

He waxed on about the bluebell woods, the orchard at the top of the garden, the possibility of my having a rabbit. It wasn't until he mentioned that it had been no problem getting me into the local school that I realised Clayford was to be more than a weekend cottage. That isolated, bitterly cold little house was to be our new home.

After a long silence (I didn't know what to say) I asked my first and last question. ‘Will my friends be able to come and stay?'

He reached over and took a new packet of chocolate toffee eclairs out of the glovebox. ‘Why don't you open these up. I know they are your favourites.' Wrong again. My favourites were Bluebird Milk Chocolate Toffees. I liked sucking the white-freckled chocolate, which somehow always seemed slightly stale to me, from the toffees, slowly, deliberately, while covering my tongue and teeth with the smooth, fatty chocolate. Chocolate eclairs worked the other way round, so you had to suck the toffee to get the chocolate.

We must have been within a mile or two of Clayford when he finally broke the heavy, on-the-edge-of-tears silence. ‘You like Joan, don't you?'

I didn't answer.

‘Doesn't she remind you of Mummy?'

We turned into the long driveway, the fat tyres crunching slowly on the gravel, tumbling yellow roses rubbing against the driver's side of the car. Clayford sat at the top of a one-in-six hill overlooking most of Worcestershire. Two vast lawns, split by a tall yew hedge, sloped lazily down to the drive and to the woods, our woods, beyond. Even freshly painted for its recent sale, the house bore a faintly sad expression, as if it knew it faced the wrong way. Instead of looking out at the rolling fields, hamlets and streams and the Malvern Hills beyond, its six front windows stared
at the garage, albeit a rather quaint one, covered with honeysuckle and clematis montana. Only the tiny scullery overlooked ‘the view'. This was a house probably better to visit than to live in. Auntie Betty had told us that in summer, cars would continually slow up or even stop, their passengers getting out to admire the clipped lawns, the pillows of mauve aubrietia and billowing honeysuckle, and above all ‘the view'. ‘Imagine living here,' they would say, as if having no neighbours, no friends and a septic tank was a good thing.

The house, a good hundred yards away from the drive, stood basking in the sun. It looked different, for once its ragged lawns clipped like those of a bowling green, which had the effect of making the cascading roses and marguerites look curiously out of place, like drunken guests lying around after a party. Now the edges were crisp, sharp as razors. Auntie Betty's windows had always been a bit grubby. We used to joke about them and how she once said she hated cleaning them and did the job ‘once a year whether the buggers needed it or not'. But today they shone like jet in the sunshine. Six deep, black pools glistening like army boots.

She was sitting there in one of the garden chairs, tight lips, tight perm, twenty Embassy and a cigarette lighter in her
lap. ‘Say hello to your Auntie Joan,' my father said quietly, enunciating her new name slowly and firmly.

‘You can call me Auntie Joanie if you want to,' said Mrs Potter. I walked straight past her and round to the kitchen door. ‘I told you,' she snapped at my father.

‘Just give him time, he'll be all right,' said Dad.

There was a cake on the spotless kitchen table. A homemade cake, with a thin line of raspberry jam in the middle, the top dusted with caster sugar. A perfect cake, three inches high and as light as a feather, the criss-cross of the wire cooling rack etched into its soft, golden top. The kitchen smelled of baking and Dreft. Two pairs of my underpants and my school pullover hung on a wooden airer with some tea towels still warm from the iron. Mrs Potter rushed in behind me.

‘Come on, I'll put the kettle on. Why don't we make some toast?'

The mobile shop came on Thursdays. Cool and dark inside, it smelled of boiled ham and links of pork sausage. During the school holidays I would stand on the fold-down step with Auntie Joan watching while the grocer cut thin slices of ham from the bone. No wibbly-wobbly jelly here. Just thin, cool, pink ham, soft as a baby's tummy. We bought tomatoes that smelled warm and herbal; soft-leaved lettuces
and packets of salty butter; Saxa salt and Lion brand ground black pepper in little drums; bottles of Heinz Salad Cream, tinned peaches and Princes tinned crabmeat.

In winter he would come later, just as I got home from school, and I would help bring in bags of sugar and flour, tins of soup, trifle sponges and Ambrosia Creamed Rice, flat boxes of Dairylea triangles, hunks of Cheddar with the muslin on, Cornish wafers, crumpets, Oxo cubes, Pickering's Cherry Pie Filling and bottles of Tree Top orange drink.

The baker arrived on Tuesdays and Fridays and we bought a bloomer or a cottage loaf. He sometimes had six-packs of fairy cakes with coloured buttercream, hundreds and thousands and a blob of vivid red jam on top. I regularly ate three of the six. We kept the ham till Saturday when we had sandwiches with the soft, fresh bread and freshly cut cress on the lawn.

Every meal was now a proper meal. Meat, potatoes and vegetables and usually, but not always, a pudding. In summer we had tinned salmon and cucumber salad, new potatoes and trifle. In winter Joan would get a fug up in the kitchen, boiling a piece of ham and making thick parsley sauce, spinach and mashed potatoes. Then there would be rice pudding or apple pie and custard. Every now and again we would have a mixed grill on oval plates. A little piece of steak, a kidney opened up like a butterfly, a lobe of lamb's liver, tomatoes, black pudding and sometimes a sausage or a chop. Then there were mushrooms, big flat
ones the size of a tea saucer, and of course chips. She would do a stew now and again, thickened with pearl barley and served with mashed swede or parsnips. I liked the broth that surrounded it, and the bland, dead flavours. ‘I'd do it more often if the smell didn't carry through the house like it does,' she would say, beaded lines of condensation running down every window.

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.

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.