Toast Read online

  ‘Dear’, when used in connection with money, was one of the expressions for which my mother would lower her voice, just as she did when she found someone ‘rather coarse’ or when someone had ‘trodden in something’. ‘Have you trodden in something’ was my mother’s discreet way of asking if you had farted. No surprise then that while Mr Salt called most of his customers ‘love’ he would always, always call my mother Mrs Slater.

  Sweets, Ices, Rock and Politics

  It would be wrong to say we were wealthy. ‘Comfortably off’ might be nearer the mark, though without the implied smugness. There were tinned peaches and salmon on the shopping list but Mum still checked Percy Salt’s delivery scrupulously, running her finger down the list and ticking things off with a blue biro. Dad took cuttings and planted seeds – yellow snapdragons, nemesia the colour of boiled sweets, and those daisy-faced mesembryanthemums that only opened up when the sun shone – because it was cheaper than buying ready-grown bedding plants. Needless to say I had no more pocket money than any of my school friends.

  I bought the odd book, annuals mostly, a few singles, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ or Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Only Want To Be With You’, and once, a stick insect, but most of my pocket money went on sweets. Buying sweets, chocolate, even ice cream was shot through with more politics than an eight-year-old should have had to contend with. Sweets could put a label round a child’s neck in much the same way as a particular choice of newspaper could to an adult. For a boy certain things were off-limits. Fry’s Chocolate Creams and Old English Spangles were considered adult territory; Love Hearts and Fab ice creams were for girls. Parma Violets were for old ladies and barley sugars were what your parents bought you for long car journeys. Cones filled with marshmallow and coated in chocolate were considered naff by pretty much everyone, though I secretly liked them, and no one over six would be seen dead with a flying saucer. Sherbet Fountains were supposed to be strictly girly material, an idea which even then I refused to buy into. Milky Ways were what parents bought for their kids, which gave them a sort of goody-goody note as did Jacob’s Orange Clubs. Selection boxes were what you were given at Christmas by the sort of people who weren’t relatives but who nevertheless you called Auntie.

  We never really bought the penny chews that Mr Dixon had loose on the counter, though I did nick the odd liquorice chew, the ones that came in blue-and-white striped paper, when his back was turned. Dad’s favourites were Callard & Bowser’s Butterscotch, which came in thin packs like cigarettes, and Pascall’s oblong Fruit Bonbons with gooey centres. He also loved peanut brittle, which he ate by the barful. Mine were sweet cigarettes, which may not have given me lung cancer but made up for it with fillings. At Christmas, Dad bought himself metal trays of Brazil nut toffee with their own little hammer from Thorntons, while I got more cigarettes, this time made of chocolate wrapped in paper which went soggy when you put it in your mouth. Dad said they were expensive. Mum only ate sweeties that came in round tins, old-fashioned things like lemon drops and fruit pastilles with a faint dusting of icing sugar or those chewy blackcurrant gums that came in a flat white-and-purple rectangular tin.

  Boys’ stuff, by which I mean gobstoppers, Milky Bars and Rolos, never really hit the spot for me. I spent most of my money on sweets that made your tongue sore: acid drops, sherbet lemons, chocolate limes and roll after roll of Refreshers. The price for which was mouth ulcers the size of shirt buttons, and on which I would put salt-and-vinegar crisps to see just how much pain I could stand.

  Holidays meant sticks of rock, pink or humbug-striped with red letters running through it. I never ate mine till I had kept it for at least six months in the fruit bowl. By which time it had gone soft and chewy, like mint-flavoured toffee.

  Your choice of ice cream depended more on who was buying. Mum would get me a cornet with a rectangle of vanilla ice cream wrapped in white paper. It was an ice fraught with danger. You had to peel off the paper and push the block of ice cream down into the cornet while at the same time licking every last, precious drop of vanilla from the paper. For herself, she would get a little block of ice cream wrapped in paper and two wafers, or a choc ice in foil. The best bit was the crackly chocolate which was so thin that it would shatter and fall off into her lap in jagged pieces. At the cinema or the pantomime we always had tubs, though my father invariably complained about the price and having to queue for so long that the second half had started before he got back to his seat.

  My parents disapproved of the ice-cream van, with its pineapple Mivvis and belching smoke. I found the music – wobbly, like a music box running down – faintly sinister, like those clowns with white faces and pointed hats. I think my parents just thought it was common to queue. My favourite was the banana lolly or the chocolate one which tasted like weak cocoa. Mum drew the line at Mr Whippy cornets, which she considered beyond the pale, and 99s were simply vulgar. Heaven knows what she would have said if she had seen me on my way to school, biting off the end and sucking the soft, grainy ice cream through the bottom.

  Rice Pudding

  Mother was desperate to be a homemaker, a woman capable of sewing on a button, darning a sock or icing a fairy cake. In the early evening, sitting under the standard lamp in the lounge, head tilted and the tip of her tongue pinched between her lips, she spent what seemed like hours trying to thread white cotton through the eye of a needle. ‘Let me do it’ was met with a sigh and ‘I’ve nearly done it now’. Try as she might, buttons popped off within a day or two, toes poked through neat but ineffective repairs, icing pooled into the craters in her cakes or, on the rare occasion they rose, ran down the sides in rivulets and stuck the flowery paper cases to the plate.

  Mrs Poole made the beds, fed the winceyette sheets through the ironing machine with its long cotton-covered roller, and would sew a stray button on to my school shirt. Mother made up for this humiliation by making rice pudding. Warm, milky rice. Rice that never thickened the sweet liquid it floated in, so what should have been a creamy spoonful the texture of risotto had to be sipped, like broth. The skin browned and puffed into a black-and-gilt dome. The kitchen smelled like a kitchen should.

  The skin was removed in one perfect scoop and deposited in my father’s bowl. ‘It’s the best bit,’ he used say. Then the round rice was fished up from the depths and divided between us all. Then she would pick up the enamel tin and spoon out the milk. ‘Anyone for jam?’ she would say, passing round the Hartley’s strawberry. I was the only taker, stirring the sweet glop into the milk then regretting it when it stayed in blobs and sank to the bottom of the dish.

  Milky milky rice is considered a failure by rice-pudding aficionados, yet I preferred it to her occasional successes. Warm sweet milk was what a mother should smell of.

  Butterscotch Flavour Angel Delight

  BUTTERSCOTCH FLAVOUR: Sugar, Modified Starch, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Emulsifiers (Propane-1, 2-diol esters of fatty acids, Soya Lecithin), Gelling Agents (Disodium phosphate, Diphosphates), Milk Protein, Lactose, Colours (Plain Caramel, Annatto, Betanin), Whey Powder, Flavourings, Salt.

  Emptying a sachet of Angel Delight into half a pint of milk and whisking it for a minute and a half was as near as my mother ever got to making modern desserts. She remembered which flavour – Strawberry, Butterscotch, Chocolate or Banana – she had served last, and never risked boring us with the same flavour twice in a row. Butterscotch and Banana were the only truly acceptable flavours to us. We ate the others to humour her.

  Butterscotch Angel Delight was magic. Magic in the way that if you stood over it for five minutes you could actually watch the powder and milk thicken into a creamy dessert. Magic in the way it seemed to thicken further once you put it in your mouth. Magic in what seemed like a mean portion in the bowl became almost too much of a good thing in the mouth. Magic in the way that it managed to taste of both sugar and soap at the same time.

  Mashed Potato

  At least twice a week my mother would make mashed potato and pile it in gr
eat, buttery, cloud-like mounds next to boiled gammon or lamb chops. It was the one thing my mother couldn’t get wrong. But then, good mash isn’t about cooking. It’s about the ability to beat lumps out of a cooked potato. Anyone could do that. Except, apparently, a school dinner lady. Mash was the only truly glorious thing Mum ever made.

  There was no moment so perfect as when you squished her mashed potato into warm parsley sauce or hot gravy with your fork. The soft potato pushing up in wavy lines through the gaps between the prongs, curling over on itself, stained with dark drops of gravy. No roast potato stuck to its roasting tin; no crinkle-cut chip; no new potato with chopped mint could ever get the better of a dollop of creamy mash. I looked forward to it like I looked forward to nothing else.

  One day I came home from school to find my mother sitting there at the kitchen table, her head bent down towards her lap, her eyes closed, her chest heaving slowly and deeply. She had started to do this rather a lot recently. It was as if there was something that she had to concentrate on, something she could only do by closing out the rest of her senses.

  Today the potatoes were grainy and salty, wet but possessed of a dry, almost powdery feel in the mouth. ‘The mash tastes funny, Mummy.’ Quietly and firmly, in a tone heavy with total and utter exasperation, and with a distant rasp after the first word, she said, ‘Nigel…Just eat it.’

  As soon as she went upstairs, I climbed down from the table to scrape the offending spud into the bin. Tucked under the packet that once held the frozen peas was a maroon-and-black packet I had never seen before. In large creamy-white letters were the words Cadbury’s Smash.

  Tinned Ham

  It’s a Saturday in mid-August and we have dragged the picnic table on to the lawn. My mother likes it to sit between the apple trees so she doesn’t have to squint in the sunshine. She is wearing Scholl sandals and a duck-egg blue dress with sprigs of daisies. It has buttons up the front. She and my father bring the food out from the kitchen while I just sit at the table looking at my lap. There’s a bowl of pale lettuce, some slices of beetroot in vinegar, cucumber cut so thin you could read the Bible through it and a sauce boat of Heinz Salad Cream. We must be the only family in Britain to put salad cream in a sauce boat.

  My mother puts a tomato on my plate and cuts it in quarters, then a few giant curls of lettuce, two slices of beetroot and tells me, ‘You don’t have to have salad cream if you don’t want to.’ I know what’s coming. My father is eyeing my plate, searching for the slice of ham that will turn his puny son into a Viking warrior.

  Without a word he stabs his fork into a slice of ham and slaps it on my plate. A hot wave of hate goes through my body. Hate ham, hate him.

  Actually, I rather like ham. What I don’t like is this ham. The sort of ham that comes from an oval green tin and is surrounded by golden-brown jelly. The sort of ham it takes an age to prise from its aluminium coffin. The sort of ham that my father carves very thinly with the same knife he uses for the Sunday roast. Pretty-pink ham, evil jelly.

  It is amazing how long it can take to scrape every morsel of jelly from a slice of cold boiled meat. I spend a good fifteen minutes separating good from bad, pushing the jelly towards the edge of my plate. A scientist exhuming a mummified corpse wouldn’t have been as patient as I am. Meanwhile, my father is glaring at me with a mixture of anger and disgust. Disgust at what I am not quite sure. Could it be the waste of valuable protein or the waste of valuable time? Could it be simply that it looks ungrateful? Perhaps it is the way I am doing it, like someone has put poo on my plate.

  Mother is silent, Father is silently fuming. If he were a cartoon you’d see the smoke coming out of his ears.

  Suddenly, he reaches across the table, picks up my plate with its ham, salad and painstakingly removed jelly and chucks it across the lawn. Mother pulls her lips into a thin, straight line. Ham, beetroot, lettuce and cucumber are spread out on the lawn. I get down from table and run in through the kitchen and upstairs to my bedroom. I close the door, lie face down on the bed and wait.

  Space Dust

  If you opened a sachet of the original Space Dust and poured it into your mouth, the little citrus and chemical beads crackled and hissed like you had put your tongue on a battery. If you poured three packets in at once, it was like putting your tongue on an electric fence. This is probably why they changed the formula.

  Auntie Fanny looks so bored sitting in her chair, the one with the rubber liner for when she wets her long winceyette pants. The ones that come down to her knees. You feel you want to brighten her day. Sometimes I sit and talk to her even though I know she can’t hear a word I am saying. I can say rude words to her like willy and bum and she just smiles at me and hums. Sometimes we swap sweets. She gets my chocolate buttons, I get her Parma Violets. I once gave her a Toffo but it stuck her dentures together. Mum said that sometimes I can be a little thoughtless.

  She looks so bored sitting there, humming to herself. I’m sure Auntie Fanny would enjoy a sachet of Space Dust. Maybe even two. Or even three.

  ‘Mum…Mum…Auntie Fanny’s doing it AGAIN.’

  Bombay Duck

  Not only has my brother got A Hard Day’s Night, a pair of desert boots and a donkey jacket with leather patches on the elbows, he’s even been to an Indian restaurant. It is easy to hate someone like that. He thinks it’s time I experienced the scented delights of chicken biryani and lamb vindaloo and takes me, together with our other brother John, to the Kohinoor, a small flock-wallpapered Indian restaurant tucked behind the rollerdrome in Wolverhampton.

  The restaurant is almost empty and smells of armpits. ‘I’m going to have a Bombay duck and a chicken biryani,’ says Adrian as soon as we’re seated. John goes for the chicken vindaloo, then they start laughing about something called the Ring of Fire, which doesn’t seem to be on my menu. It must one of the ‘specials’. The menu is terrifying, though not half so much as the man in a turban standing at the kitchen doorway, his arms folded in front of him. It is like he is daring us to set foot in the kitchen.

  ‘I can’t manage both, I’ll just have the Bombay duck,’ I say timidly. It sounds exotic, even more so than chicken Madras. Adrian asks me if I know what Bombay duck is and I assure him I do. He and John seem to find something funny. Adrian then orders a biryani for me too, despite my pleading, and insists I will manage both.

  We get a pile of giant crisps as big as a plate and some spicy gunk to dip them in that makes my nose run and my ears sting. They order beers and I drink my first ever shandy. My brothers say it’s only like drinking pop, but even so not to mention it to Dad. The Bombay duck arrives – a wizened bit of grey bark smelling like something that has been dead a very long time. Putrid. ‘It’s not like I had it last time,’ I say rather grandly, without thinking the fib through thoroughly.

  The lone waiter in evening dress brings the biryanis and John’s vindaloo. I am not at all sure about this. The room smells of mildew and beer and the aforementioned armpits and the man on the kitchen door hasn’t smiled once since we arrived. The waiter smells funny too and his suit is shiny round the collar. The chicken is dark and strongly flavoured, browner than I have ever known chicken to be. Adrian tells me not to play with my food and just eat it. ‘Are you sure this chicken’s all right?’ I ask, poking at the hedgehog-coloured meat like it was poisoned.

  ‘Yes, it’s the spices that make it that colour,’ assures John, who seems to know quite a bit about Indian food.

  I gingerly swallow a few mouthfuls. Actually, I probably could eat more but there is something I don’t like about this place. Something sinister, something a little ‘grubby’. Adrian suddenly snaps, ‘You little sod, you’ve hardly eaten anything.’

  A couple of weeks later I gleefully cut a piece out of the Express and Star (usually pronounced in its catchment area as the Expressenstar) and leave it on the kitchen table. It is story about health inspectors finding skinned cats hanging up in the fridges of Indian restaurants.

  Blackcurrant Pie<
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  Mother is upstairs, having forty winks, as she calls her afternoon nap. Adrian is standing in the doorway, smiling and swaying back and forth. His eyes flicker open and closed. He stumbles over to the sofa with its white cotton covers with their sprigs of flowers, stands at the end of it then falls backwards on to the sunken cushions. He lies there on his back, his eyes open then close, then he crosses his hands on his chest like Boris Karloff and goes to sleep.

  Adrian got Hush Puppies this week, slip-ons the colour of a roe deer. The ones with the black elastic patches at the side. They look great with his narrow black knitted tie and his white button-down shirt. Mum has promised to take me shopping to Beau Brummell’s for a button-down shirt for school. She says I can’t have a tie like his because I will never wear it and suede shoes will last all of five minutes with me. She reckons I grazed my new sandals, horrid red-brown ones with diamonds cut into the toes within two days. She says she doesn’t believe me when I tell her that Maxwell Mallin and Peter Francis jumped on them in the playground at lunchtime. Then, after a pause to get her breath, she snaps, ‘It wouldn’t happen if you’d play with the other boys.’ It is one of our rare icy moments. It occurs to me that if she died I would be allowed to wear a black tie to school.