Toast (5 page)

There was a brief time when I was the coolest kid at school. My brother had bought
Rubber Soul
and I listened to it, lights low, when he was out for the evening with his girlfriend who had long blonde hair and eyes so heavy with mascara she looked like a panda. I learned every word by heart. Only about two kids at school had even heard of it, and I knew every single word. Not even my brother, who knew everything, knew all the words. He thought ‘Michelle' was crap. I thought it was brilliant. Little did I know my brother was far too busy shagging old panda eyes in the back of his Hillman Imp to learn the words to
Rubber Soul.

It was about this time my father bought a grapefruit knife. It was heavily serrated with a blade that curved like a children's slide. Just think, we were so sophisticated, so glamorous, so cool we actually had a special knife to cut our grapefruits. I didn't know anyone else who even had grapefruits.

The first time we ate grilled grapefruit was something of a performance. We had all heard about them, though none of us knew anyone who had actually had one, so
we had to guess how they were done. My father shook a thick layer of granulated sugar over the halved fruit, of course they were all yellow in those days, and got the grill hot.

Getting the grill hot was a bit like ‘getting the car out', that peculiar ritual of revving the car up in the garage about half an hour before we went anywhere. ‘No, I'll finish packing, you get the car out,' my mother would say. Nowadays, they would take less trouble over starting up a space shuttle. The grill hot, or at least as hot as it ever got, we all stood and watched the sugar melting, most of which slid off the top, down the sides and started to burn in the bottom of the grill pan.

In the panic to find the oven gloves, my father tried to pull the grapefruits out with his bare hands, his eyes watering from the molten sugar. He had even bought special grapefruit spoons with serrated edges. We pulled the loose segments out of their shells, crunching through the half-melted, half-granular sugar. It was very hot and very cold, very sweet and very sour all at once. ‘Is this how they're supposed to be,' said someone, not entirely kindly, and we all went rather quiet. But I just thought how utterly cool I was to have eaten grilled grapefruit. I boasted about it to everyone at school the next day in much the same way as someone might boast about getting their first shag.

We rarely had visitors who stayed to eat. We had never even been to, let alone given, a dinner party, despite having a dining table that could seat twelve. But there were friends who would appear now and again, usually couples so similar as to be indistinguishable from one another. They had names like Ray or Eunice. All the men wore ties and cardigans. The women wore twinsets. The sort of women who talked about their ‘dailies' and would never leave the house without a brooch. I do remember them all laughing a lot, but I never understood what about. Everyone was taller than me. It was as if I wasn't there.

It was my job to pass around the room with the food. Oh God, the food. ‘Now, dear, you make certain that everyone gets a cheese football, won't you?' my mother would say. Our place in local society seemed not to depend on whether we had a double garage (we had) or which golf club my father belonged to (he didn't). It was more a question of whether you had Huntley & Palmer's Cheese Footballs or not.

The pièce de résistance was a grapefruit spiked with cocktail sticks holding cubes of cheese and pineapple. The preparation was always a bit of a performance: draining the syrup from the tinned pineapple, cutting the Cracker Barrel into even-sized chunks, finding the cocktail sticks that would usually end up at the back of the
gadget drawer covered in a dusting of flour. I hated doing it.

Few things could embarrass a would-be chef quite as much as having to hold out a whole grapefruit speared with cubes of Cheddar and tinned pineapple on cocktail sticks to men in cardigans.

The worst of it was that everyone thought I had done the food. ‘He wants to be a chef,' my father would say, as I held up the spiked grapefruit to the Masonic Worshipful Master's wife, who had a tight perm and lips like a cat's bottom. When it came to offering the dreaded grapefruit to everyone else, I would throw my head in the air and flay my nostrils in disapproval. ‘Don't pull a face like that,' my father once snapped, ‘you look like Kenneth Williams.' But I had to let everyone know my disdain for my parents' catering arrangements. After all, if I had done the food, they would have had prunes wrapped in bacon.

I played in the garden mostly, away from the road and the big boys with their plastic footballs that stung my legs. ‘I'd rather you played where I can see you,' warned Mother, so that suited me fine. Long borders ran either side of the lawn, white rhododendrons, pink- and saffron-coloured azaleas, purple Michaelmas daisies and, in deepest summer, dahlias, spiky ones as big as a dinner plate, maroon
and white and gaudy yellow. In one corner was an apple tree, not ours, but most of it overhung our garden, so that come late August its fruit fell into the mauve and white phloxes below.

If I stood on tiptoe I could just reach the apples hanging on the lower twigs, flat-topped apples, pale green and rose like Turkish delight, with snow-white flesh that had ripples of pink running through it. They tasted of strawberries but smelled of the scented phlox that grew underneath them. I could reach these apples, unlike the fruit of the three trees in our garden whose branches were, even on tiptoes, just out of reach. I could get to the glue bands my father put round their trunks though, and used to peel off the flies and wasps they trapped, pulling them by their wings until their bodies came apart.

Uncle Reg used to come round once a week, on a Thursday evening, bringing with him a white paper bag of Cadbury's Flakes, Aztecs, Milky Ways, tubes of Rolo, Munchies, Mintolas and Refreshers and thin black-and-white bars of Caramac. A tall handsome man with sunken cheeks, a slightly hooked nose and shaking hands, the whites of his eyes shot with red veins. He wore a long, grey mackintosh and smelled of something that was both sour and sweet.

Over the summer Uncle Reg came less and less often, his bags of sweets getting bigger with each visit. Sometimes he would bring flowers for my mother. Then one day he stopped coming altogether. I heard my mother on the
phone telling someone that he had died. I never saw the lovely Uncle Reg or his sweets again.

There was no limit to how many of next door's apples I was allowed to eat. So I just kept eating them throughout the summer. The largest always fell first, right down through the pink-eyed flowers on their tall stems. At first, I would stretch down into the flowers to pick up the apples until one day I got stung by a wasp hiding in the half-eaten side underneath. Another time there was a maggot jerking its way through the flesh, which I might have missed and eaten if it hadn't been for its tiny dot of a black head. From then on I went in foot first, turning each fruit over with my toe, inspecting for anything that might sting or wriggle.

Nobody tells me anything. They talk in whispers over my head; in hushed tones when I'm sitting drawing my usual pictures of Scottish hills or gluing model planes together. (I'm very good at shading heather and frankly draw nothing else, inspired no doubt by our last holiday, when we drove back from Loch Lomond with a sprig of the stuff tucked in the radiator of the car.)

Friday afternoon is when the pop man comes. During the summer holidays I wait around for him to arrive so that I can get at the dandelion and burdock before my brothers do. The bottles are heavily embossed and have
screw caps that are almost impossible to undo. Favourite: D & B; second favourite: cream soda; least fave is plain lemonade which I leave for everyone else. I think my dad drinks it.

I like dandelion and burdock because it makes me burp really loudly, but the best flavour is actually cream soda. I don't know how they get something clear and pale green to taste creamy but they do.

‘I don't know how you can drink that stuff,' says our daily, Mrs Poole, grimacing like a haddock eating mustard. Mrs Poole has long grey hair tied in a plait round her head. Bits of hair, dry and floaty, splay out at all angles so that her plait looks like a viper in a nest. She is fat with a big bottom, actually a vast, flat bottom that sways as she hoovers the sitting room and seems to have a life of its own. You always knew when Mrs P. had been, the house smelled of lavender polish and stale Hoover bags and there was the faintest whiff of armpits. I don't know what my mother would do without her, even though she does smell of tinned tomato soup.

‘That stuff'll give you wind,' huffs Mrs P.

‘Actually, everything gives me wind.'

‘Like you needed to tell me that. I hear you aburpin' an' ablowin' all the time. If your father was to hear those noises you make he'd ban you from drinking all that pop. Sometimes, I'm surprised you don't go bang.'

‘Well, if I do, then you'll just have to mop me up, won't you.'

Cream soda never seems as cold as the other drinks. The bubbles are softer, and don't get up your nose and make your sinuses burn like dandelion and burdock or orangeade. Cream soda looks as if it is going to taste of lime but is instead rather more fleeting, vanilla perhaps. Whatever flavourings they use it is rather like drinking a sponge cake.

The most forbidden of places was my father's bedside drawer. I had never been told not to go there; I just knew it was out of bounds. A secret place. An ivory-coloured drawer set in a glossy black table, gold handle, its perfect patina interupted only by a ring burned in the top by a hot mug. My mother's, on the other hand, was an open book. A jumble of tissues and hairpins, powder compacts and violet cachous. Home to one of the many Ventolin inhalers tucked discreetly around the house.

His drawer was neat, and smelled of the cortisone cream he smoothed into his hands in the autumn when each year a weird rash would flare up. There were several opened tubes of Setlers, a little blue Masonic book with dashes where some of the words should be and a fat grey-and-maroon packet of Durex. There were several menus from dinners he had been to, often with the signatures of those who attended on the inside and some strange badges that I guessed were something to do with his Masonic uniform.

Setlers were as much a part of my father's DNA as his pipe and his
Daily Telegraph.
The chalky white tablets went everywhere with him; half and quarter packets were in every jacket pocket, including the one in his suede waistcoat, and in the glovebox of the car. Ten times a day he would rub his sternum and tear another strip of wrapper off his indigestion pills. He would nibble them when he drove and when he watched television. I have even known him take one after supper, ‘just in case'. Setlers were my dad's worry beads.

If indigestion presented itself as a side effect of worry, it might also be taken as a symptom for coldness, short temper, impatience and deceit. He suffered all of these, as did we.

The filthiest of Dad's stomach medicines was kaolin and morphine. A thick and creamy white crust that floated on a thin transparent liquid, he called it K et Morph. He would shake the glass bottle for a good two minutes, holding the cork in place with his thumb before he tweaked it out and took a swig, sometimes two, from the bottle. He shuddered as he swallowed during what had become a daily ritual. He always had something disgusting in his mouth, a Setler, a glug of kaolin and morphine, his pipe. When it wasn't one of those it would be Senior Service or a Mannekin. I flinched on the rare occasion he kissed me, even though I wanted him to.

The kitchen at York House is in its usual Sunday chaos. Through the clank of pans, I can hear the crackle and spit of roast beef coming from the Aga. My father is in the greenhouse, doing whatever it is that middle-aged men in greenhouses do. Through the hatch I can see steam, which means Mother is draining the beans. Beads of condensation cover the leaded windows. The odd trickle forms pools on the window ledge.

York House is a solid, half-timbered family house, built for new money, with its warren of utility room, scullery, greenhouse and downstairs lavatory. Fashion has it that multicoloured venetian blinds now hang at the leaded-light windows. The garden is somewhat typical of the time; its neat lawn broken by three apple trees with daffodils at the base of their trunks. A majestic willow hangs over the pond and there is a long and winding path around the back. There are bluebells along there, and here and there clouds of London pride.

Roasts are done in the Aga in the main kitchen, vegetables (beans, peas, carrots) on the cream Belling in the scullery. The output from the hottest of the Aga's two hotplates often disappears at the crucial moment. Sunday lunch is almost guaranteed to bring out a sudden drop in temperature. My father says it has something to do with the hot-water supply.

Right now the scullery is hot enough to melt lead.
Though to be fair most of the heat is being given off by my mother, who finds Sunday lunch a meal too many. Her hatred of it is pure and unhidden. She starts to twitch about it on Saturday afternoon. The beef, the potatoes, the beans, the carrots, the gravy, oh God the gravy. Horseradish sauce may or may not appear. It is my father who looks after the twiddly bits, the mustard, ‘horserubbish' and the Yorkshire pudding – which he makes in an old roasting tin, one huge pudding, which he cuts into podgy squares. He doesn't do the gravy, but I suspect we all wish he would.

He has a thing about carving the roast. It is like he imagines he clubbed the animal to death and dragged it home through the snow like a caveman with a mammoth. Not to carve the Sunday joint would be an admission to not being quite a man.

How this equates with his love of salmon-pink begonias is another matter.