Toast (15 page)

Clayford worked neither as a house nor a home. To see ‘the view' you had to go into the scullery or the dining room, which was only used at Christmas and was kept permanently just above freezing. My father said this was to make the Christmas cactus flower on time.

The layout was absurd and embarrassing. I had to walk through my father's bedroom to get to mine, an awkward low-ceilinged room with a view of the road on one side. He could hear every breath I took, every page I turned, every rustle of my sheets. Masturbating without him hearing became an art in itself. The bathroom sat directly above the kitchen. I lost count of how many times we sat around the dinner table in silence, listening to my father and his spectacular flatulence in the room above. I smirked at every fart. ‘Giggle and I'll send you up to bed,' Joan would threaten as I glared down intently at my liver and mash.

Brilliant-white Snowcem partly hid the fact that the house was a mishmash of seventeenth-century cottage and 1920s new money. Joan was never happier than when she had spent the day with the paint bucket, hiding the speckles of black mould that showed through when the damp
weather came. ‘People might think it's dirt.' And she did win the moss war, devilling out every bit of fluffy green lichen from the garden walls with the handle of an old spoon. I suspect my father rather liked his moss. ‘It gets on my nerves,' she would say. I seem to remember almost everything getting on her nerves.

Friday morning was when she polished the copper and brass. The reproduction copper warming pan that hung behind the fireplace, the horseshoes that framed the grate and the brass fire-stand with its shovel, coal tongues and hearth brush that we were forbidden to use. Most prized were the crocodile nutcrackers that wouldn't crack a Malteser let alone a Brazil nut. To this day I won't have a copper pan in the house. I can still see her sitting there in her lemon nylon housecoat, rubbing away at her bloody brass crocodile.

My father had taken to growing his own food. There had always been the fruit trees, the green and golden gages, the Victoria and Drooper plums that were so bent they had to be held up with an uneven pile of bricks, and the apple trees that never let us down, but he started growing vegetables too, everything from onions to tobacco, broad beans to sweetcorn. He was good at it too, showering us with more fruit and vegetables than we knew what to do with. We took to salting beans. First, you slice the beans with a tiny, sharp knife – which Joan could do almost as fast as she could count the notes in a wage packet – then you layered them in an old, square-shouldered sweetie jar with
salt. As the winter wore on, the salt coroded the lid, so badly that rivulets of poisonous black juice would run down into the snowy white beans. ‘Don't be so daft,' she would snap as I turned my nose up at the stained vegetables, ‘they just need a good rinse.'

New School. The scariest words in a child's world. Scarier still when your rise to secondary school coincides with a move across country, at one swoop reducing the chances of knowing at least one kid from your junior school to zero.

We had driven past the Chantry at least a dozen times since we moved to Knightwick. Half timbered, half hidden by trees, ancient and unthreatening. As the summer holidays wore on I almost looked forward to going to a school a tenth of the size of Woodfield, with creaking floorboards and vast chimneys. It would be like being in a Malcolm Saville book. The morning I left for the school bus, neat in my new black blazer, short trousers and squeaky new shoes, I was more excited than scared. School looked a distinctly better option than staying at home.

It wasn't. The Chantry we had admired was now the local junior school, the main school had moved to fields across the road; a newly built 1960s glass and brick affair, where the classrooms were painted ‘experimental' dark
blues and greens and the corridors had squeaky chequered vinyl floors. Squeaky new floors for squeaky new shoes. In modern terms it was intimate, a mere three hundred pupils, with a swimming pool, vegetable garden and playing fields that went to the horizon. But when you are expecting your school bus to turn left and it turns right it also turns your world upside down.

At the Chantry you either lived on a farm or your parents worked on one. If not, then there was one next door. At weekends you mucked out stables, fed the lambs or went pheasant-beating, depending on the time of year. During the holidays you helped get in the strawberries, beans, potatoes or hops. Even I got a job picking blackcurrants, till Dad found out I was working with gypsies and put a stop to it. The best lesson was rural science with Charles Ritson, in a room that smelled of potting compost. The worst was woodwork with the vile Mr Oakley, who slapped your fingers with a metal ruler if your plane went in a wonky line. To this day my stomach flips over if I smell newly planed wood.

School friends were exactly that. Once you got on the bus home you never saw them till next morning. Dad and Joan loved the peace and quiet, the fact that you had to drive three miles to get the
Telegraph
or four for a loaf of bread. It didn't seem to bother them that come the summer holidays I saw no one but them for an entire six weeks. And it wasn't like they wanted me there. ‘Go and play', ‘Go and walk in the woods', ‘Go and clean your rabbit out',
‘Go and find something to do'. What they really meant was ‘Just GO'.

Knightwick wasn't much of a village: a post office with lavender at the gate, an old pub with beams and horse brasses, and a quaint church, but that was it really. If you crossed the river by the little bridge, you came to the butcher's shop in a pretty red-brick cottage with roses around its door and the doctor's house whose striped lawns sloped down to the river. Each summer there was a fête in the field – the usual jars of bramble jelly and buttercream-filled sponge cakes, plants in pots and goldfish in bowls. If you wanted more of a spectacle you could drive to the Madresfield Show, which we did. The cottages that speckled the steep hill up to Clayford had hollyhocks in the garden and were charming enough, but hardly what you would call ‘chocolate box'. The only stir in six long summers was when a group of hippies took up residence in a cottage hidden in the woods, but I was forbidden from going up there. ‘You never know what you might get mixed up in,' said my father. Someone from the village said they danced around in the garden, naked.

Joan's lemon meringue pie was one of the most glorious things I had ever put in my mouth: warm, painfully sharp
lemon filling, the most airy pastry imaginable (she used cold lard in place of some of the butter) and a billowing hat of thick, teeth-judderingly sweet meringue. She squeezed the juice of five lemons into the filling, enough to make you close one eye and shudder. The pie was always served warm, so the filling oozed out like a ripe Vacherin.

Joan had picked up the recipe from her youngest daughter Mary. I wanted so much to make it, to have a go, but she kept the method close to her chest. She always seemed to make the vast marshmallowy pie when I wasn't around. ‘You should be getting on with your homework' was all the answer I got when I asked if I could help. When I once asked sweetly for the recipe, she told me she couldn't remember. ‘It just comes into my head once I get started' was all she would say.

I would invent reasons to walk through the kitchen as the secret pie was being made, picking up a single detail each time, counting egg shells or lemon skins in the bin while she was watching
The Persuaders.
I amassed the recipe bit by bit as I sneaked through the kitchen on some trumped-up errand for my father. I spotted the five egg yolks and the lemon juice, the three tablespoons of cornflour and the five of sugar, and the three ounces of butter in the filling. I caught the blind-baking of the pastry case and even clocked the oven temperature (375°F) and the all-important point at which she would catch the whipped egg whites before folding in the sugar. But I never once got the chance to make it.

There were other secrets too. The way she cooked chips twice to get them fluffy and crisp. The intimate details of treacle tart or the essentials of decorating a melon wedge with a slice of orange and a maraschino cherry. But there was plenty I was encouraged to help with: washing up, drying the dishes, ironing tea towels, cleaning out the guinea pig's cage, turning the compost, getting the washing in, making tea, taking the bin out, bringing in the logs. ‘If you were any sort of a lad at all, you'd go and help your father chopping the logs rather than folding tea towels.'

Tomato ketchup has never set foot over our threshold, unlike Burgess's Mushroom Ketchup with which Dad is besotted, especially on bacon and, of course, on his grilled mushrooms. He says it makes them more mushroomy. Salad cream is permitted, in summer and even in the bottle, yet Daddies Sauce is unspoken of and HP Sauce is considered lower than almost anything you can think of, lower even than Camp Coffee. This, from a man who drinks Mateus Rosé.

I am not quite sure on what my father bases his larder snobbery. He prefers Crosse & Blackwell to Heinz (which he thinks is a bit common) except where salad cream is concerned and mustard must always be English and from
Norwich, never French. He bought a jar of mayonnaise once from the food hall in Beatties but said it was too oily. And of course it was French.

Tea is never, ever Typhoo or Brooke Bond. PG Tips is beyond the pale and the monkeys in drag who advertise it haven't helped. Tea in our house is Twinings. Pity he calls it Twinnings as in winnings. Coffee was Maxwell House but is now something called Bird's Mellow, which Joan tried when she found a coupon in
Woman's Journal.
‘Mmmm, it's so smooth,' she cooed, and from then on it'd be Bird's Mellow every time.

Dad and I refuse to eat margarine. Joan will only eat Blue Band Soft, which spreads without tearing the bread. We keep the butter in a yellow butter dish made from thick plastic, which matches exactly the yellow-and-white check table mats in the kitchen. On the rare occasion we eat in the dining room we get out the cork-backed mats with hunting scenes on them. Even a mug of coffee has to have a coaster. God help anyone who puts down a hot drink on the nest of tables.

We are all fond of tinned salmon. Either Princes or John West, which is mashed up with a little vinegar and always served with cucumber slices, again with a little vinegar. Tinned crab is Dad's favourite as are tinned pears. I love the syrup, which is thinner and less cloying than the stuff you get with peaches. We all like tinned apricots more than peaches.

We have always eaten tinned fruit with a tin of Nestlé's
cream, which we call Nessels, as in vessels. Since Joan has been on the scene we have something called Ideal Milk instead, which she calls ‘Evap' and which ruins the fruit. I can tell Dad isn't keen, but he doesn't seem to mind as long as She likes it.

Everything seems to have changed of late. She's really into buttercream at the moment, which she makes with Rayner's vanilla essence, icing sugar and Blue Band Soft. At the weekend we now get Cornish Ice Cream instead of Arctic Roll and Dairy Box instead of Black Magic. I'm not allowed fizzy pop any more. I have to drink Tree Top or Robinson's Lemon Barley Water instead. Joan says that fizzy pop is too expensive.

Dad adores pickled walnuts. I adore the way Joan shudders as he cuts into the browny black blobs. We haven't had tripe for a while. Joan doesn't like the smell. But we do have boiled neck of lamb stew, which smells ten times worse than tripe. But she likes that. So we have it.

Mrs Jones lived in a granny flat next to her daughter's house on Collins Green. It was more of a garden shed actually but comfy enough with its collection of framed photos, china ornaments on crocheted doilies and lone aspidistra. Mrs Jones was dying to the ticking of a grandfather clock. Her daughter made cake. Lemon cake, date
cake, chocolate cake, aniseed cake, cherry cake, walnut cake, round cake, square cake, plain cake, fancy cake. Best of all she made coffee cake, thick, light sponge the colour of milky coffee, with nubbly bits of walnut in and two thick layers of walnut frosting. I would love to say I went to see old Mrs J. every week to cheer up a lonely old lady, but I cannot. I went for the cake.

I made a habit of knocking on Miss Jones's door just to say I was popping in to see her mother. This was, you understand, to let her know I was visiting, not to instigate the delivery of cake and lemonade.

One Tuesday visit had included two slices of particularly wonderful coffee cake, and I figured there would be still be some left the following day. I knocked at the door but it was already open. I called her name, then peered inside. A neat hallway, a kitchen sink, clearly visible, full of cake tins and mixing bowls. Suddenly something hit me from behind and I fell forward on to my hands and knees. Before I could call out a single word two huge paws slipped around my shoulders, two hind legs tucked behind mine, and the smooth chest of Miss Jones's pet Alsatian pushed down on my back. I froze, waiting for his teeth to sink into my neck. Instead, I just felt something cold and wet against the top of my bare leg.

The humping – frantic, breathy, his wet tongue lolloping against my ear – seemed to last for ever. Part of me wanted Miss Jones to come round the corner and rescue me, but another part didn't. I would rather no one, least of all a
sixty-year-old spinster with a tea tray in her hand, witnessed a sex-starved Alsatian pumping away at me like a sailor on leave. Especially when I was wearing short trousers.

I loved that cake dearly, as I do to this day, but never again did I visit that dear old lady or eat coffee and walnut cake to the sound of a ticking grandfather clock.

Joan wants to go on holiday but doesn't fancy Bournemouth. She says it's la-di-da. Dad suggests Tenby but she doesn't fancy that either. I'm not allowed to suggest anywhere.

Joan has talked Dad into going to Blackpool. She has been before and thinks he might like it. I don't like to point out to her that that is rather like thinking he might take to pigeon-fancying or drinking milk stout. As we start the long drive towards our summer holiday on the golden mile the look on my father's face is as sour as the sherbet lemons Joan keeps passing over to him. I think he's embarrassed. At one point there is silence in the car for over two hours. It is broken only because Dad wants to stop to go to the loo. Or, as he puts it, ‘to go and see a man about a dog'.

Blackpool turns out to be fun, but only if you enjoy hearing Scott McKenzie singing ‘If you're going to San…Fran…cisco' blaring from every shop from dawn to dusk.

Which I did. Joan permanently looks like she's about to say sorry I brought you here, though she never actually does. Dad spends the entire week looking like he'd rather be somewhere, anywhere, else. ‘They must all be on drugs,' he mutters when a bare-chested guy with long blond hair and orange flares dances along the front pinging a pair of finger-cymbals in people's ears.

I can't remember ever having such a good time. Dad's pissed off with Joan for dragging him to somewhere that sells kiss-me-quick hats and saucy postcards, she's caked in guilt because she knows he's hating every second of it. I'm wondering what it would be like to be stoned and wishing I could have a flowery shirt like every other male in Blackpool. (Except my dad, of course, who is wearing a check shirt, brown brogues, a tie and a sort of waistcoat with a suede front.) ‘Don't be so stupid,' snaps Dad when I ask if I can have a flowery shirt from one of the shops on the front. ‘Everyone will think you're a fairy.'

We have two rooms at a bed and breakfast just off the main drag. ‘It will be quieter here.' There is one room for Joan and another for Dad and me. After dinner (ham salad, tinned peaches and cream), I lie there in the dark wondering if I nag them enough they'll let me have a flowery shirt tomorrow. I must be the only boy in Blackpool to be wearing grey shorts and a school pullover. Dad kneels by his bed and says his prayers as he always does. It amazes me that a man who can be so strict, fierce and cold actually thinks he has a right to speak to God. I thought people
who prayed were gentle, meek and generous like Miss Martineau, the RE teacher at school, who once gave me a lift in the rain, or the giraffe-like Mr Gutteridge who took the daily service at Woodfield and sang hymns louder than I have ever heard anyone sing before or since. How can a man who puts the fear of God into his own child dare to get down on his knees and whisper sweet nothings into his hands? We both snuggle down and Dad puts the bedside light out with a loud click.

An hour later I'm still not asleep. If they won't let me have a paisley-patterned shirt, then I might buy the sea urchin bedside lamp that I saw in the lava lamp shop. I can't quite tell if Dad is still awake, but I guess he must be asleep because he hasn't moved an inch for the last fifteen minutes. The muffled giggles from the next room give way to the sound of not-so-muffled humping. The room is so dark that I can't see Dad, so he certainly can't see me. My hand wanders down the bedclothes and through the fly of my pyjama trousers. The humping gets louder, harder, and I try not to make the sheets rustle.

Next door finishes suddenly. In the unexpected silence that follows, my breathing becomes as piercing and clear as the smell of the little bar of Palmolive soap on the washbasin in the corner. Without warning, and as crisp as a bullet from a gun, Dad snaps, ‘Stop it.'

We have breakfast in a neat room with stiff chairs, the white nets at the windows tied back with coloured ribbons.
Bacon and sausage for Joan and me, a kipper for Dad. I love the toast, which is cold and bendy and comes in a bent silver rack, just like it always does on holiday. The butter is hard and cold too. This is what I call hotel toast, very different from the hot, melting-butter stuff we get at home, but in its way just as good. There are plastic roses on the table in a thick, moulded glass vase. Dad says they are the ones you used to get free with Daz.

He seems more cheerful today, and lets me have my photograph taken with a monkey on my shoulder. He even cracks a joke about not being sure which one of us is which. I make several attempts at talking them into buying me something, anything, that might make me look like a hippie, but I get nowhere. In desperation I spend my pocket money on a small brass bell on a chain and hang it around my neck. We have lunch in a restaurant opposite the beach – battered haddock, chips and peas, followed by ice cream and tinned fruit cocktail. Dad has apple pie and custard. ‘I think we'd better go home tomorrow,' he announces suddenly. ‘I'm worried about leaving the greenhouse so long.'

Dad's usual obsession with people being ‘one of them' had now turned to people being ‘on drugs'. The signs, according to my father, were anyone whose hair touched their collar or who failed to wear socks with their sandals. Though the real clincher was a shoulder bag. By my reckoning this meant pretty much everyone in Blackpool. Except, of course, us.

Late in the afternoon, Joan suddenly appears with a stick of vivid pink candyfloss. ‘He's got to try it, Tony, everyone eats it here.' We take a last embarrassed walk along the front, my father three paces ahead of me, pretending to be nothing to do with the young son trailing behind him. The one in the beige V-neck and tinkling hippie bell, tucking into a vast nest of shocking-pink candyfloss.