Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger. Nigel Slater

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СКАЧАТЬ he would buy their records and play them on Sundays after I had listened to my one and only record – a scratched forty-five of Tommy Steele singing ‘Little White Bull’. The old man was inordinately fond of his collection of female vocals. You should have seen the tears the day Alma Cogan died.

      The greenhouse was my father’s sanctuary. I was never sure whether it smelled of him or he smelled of it. In winter, before he went to bed, he would go out and light the old paraffin stove that kept his precious begonias and tomato plants alive. I remember the dark night the stove blew out and the frost got his begonias. He would spend hours down there. I once caught him in the greenhouse with his dick in his hand. He said he was just ‘going for a pee. It’s good for the plants.’ It was different, bigger than it looked in the bath and he seemed to be having a bit of a struggle getting it back into his trousers.

      He had a bit of a thing about sherry trifle. That and his dreaded leftover turkey stew were the only two recipes he ever made. The turkey stew, a Boxing Day trauma for everyone concerned, varied from year to year, but the trifle had rules. He used ready-made Swiss rolls. The sort that come so tightly wrapped in cellophane you can never get them out without denting the sponge. They had to be filled with raspberry jam, never apricot because you couldn’t see the swirl of jam through the glass bowl the way you could with raspberry. There was much giggling over the sherry bottle. What is it about men and booze? They only cook twice a year but it always involves a bottle of something. Next, a tin of peaches with a little of their syrup. He was meticulous about soaking the sponge roll. First the sherry, then the syrup from the peaches tin. Then the jelly. To purists the idea of jelly in trifle is anathema. But to my father it was essential. If my father’s trifle was human it would be a clown. One of those with striped pants and a red nose. He would make bright yellow custard, Bird’s from a tin. This he smoothed over the jelly, taking an almost absurd amount of care not to let the custard run between the Swiss roll slices and the glass. A matter of honour no doubt.

      Once it was cold, the custard was covered with whipped cream, glacé cherries and whole, blanched almonds. Never silver balls, which he thought common, or chocolate vermicelli, which he thought made it sickly. Just big fat almonds. He never toasted them, even though it would have made them taste better. In later years my stepmother was to suggest a sprinkling of multicoloured hundreds and thousands. She might as well have suggested changing his daily paper to the Mirror.

      The entire Christmas stood or fell according to the noise the trifle made when the first massive, embossed spoon was lifted out. The resulting noise, a sort of squelch-fart, was like a message from God. A silent trifle was a bad omen. The louder the trifle parped, the better Christmas would be. Strangely, Dad’s sister felt the same way about jelly – making it stronger than usual just so it would make a noise that, even at her hundredth birthday tea, would make the old bird giggle.

      You wouldn’t think a man who smoked sweet, scented tobacco, grew pink begonias and made softly-softly trifle could be scary. His tempers, his rages, his scoldings scared my mother, my brothers, the gardener, even the sweet milkman who occasionally got the order wrong. Once, when I had been caught not brushing my teeth before going to bed, his glare was so full of fire, his face so red and bloated, his hand raised so high that I pissed in my pyjamas, right there on the landing outside my bedroom. For all his soft shirts and cuddles and trifles I was absolutely terrified of him.

       The Cookbook

      The bookcase doubled as a drinks cabinet. Or perhaps that should be the other way around. Three glass decanters with silver labels hanging around their necks boasted Brandy, Whisky and Port, though I had never known anything in them, not even at Christmas. Dad’s whisky came from a bottle, Dimple Haig, that he kept in a hidden cupboard at the back of the bookcase where he also kept his Canada Dry and a jar of maraschino cherries for when we all had snowballs at Christmas. The front of the drinks cabinet housed his entire collection of books.

      The family’s somewhat diminutive library had leatherette binding and bore Reader’s Digest or The Folio Society on their spines. Most were in mint condition, and invariably ‘condensed’ or ‘abridged’. Six or so of the books were kept in the cupboard at the back, with the Dimple Haig and a bottle of advocaat; a collection of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, a dog-eared Raymond Chandler, a Philip Roth and a neat pile of National Geographics. There was also a copy of Marguerite Patten’s All Colour Cookbook.

      It was a tight fit in between the wall and the back of the bookcase. Dad just opened the door and leaned in to get his whisky; it was more difficult for me to get round there, to wriggle into a position where I could squat in secret and turn the pages of the hidden books. I don’t know how Marguerite Patten would feel knowing that she was kept in the same cupboard as Portnoy’s Complaint, or that I would flip excitedly from one to the other. I hope my father never sells them. ‘For sale, one copy each of Marguerite Patten’s All Colour Cookery and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, first edition, d/w, slightly stained.’

      ‘I don’t know what you want to look at that for,’ said Mum once, coming home early and catching me gazing at a photograph of Gammon Steaks with Pineapple and Cherries. ‘It’s all very fancy, I can’t imagine who cooks like that.’ There was duck à l’orange and steak-and-kidney pudding, fish pie, beef Wellington and rock cakes, fruit flan and crème caramel. There was page after page of glorious photographs of stuffed eggs, sole with grapes and a crown roast of lamb with peas and baby carrots around the edge, parsley sprigs, radish roses, cucumber curls. Day after day I would squeeze round and pore over the recipes fantasising over Marguerite’s devilled kidneys and Spanish chicken, her prawn cocktail and sausage rolls. Just as I would spend quite a while fantasising over Portnoy’s way with liver.

       The Lunch Box

      Josh, Mum and Dad’s new gardener, was cool. He had a black motorbike, a Triumph something or other, and used to bring his lunch neatly packed in a tin box. He licked his cigarette papers, tiny things with barely a pinch of tobacco in them, and rolled them into short flat cigarettes while he sat on his bike. Everyone liked Josh, Mum thought he was ‘such a good-looking young man, as bright as a button’, and Dad seemed more happy with him than he had been with the older guys who used to leave almost as soon as they had started. One was fired just because the frost got at Dad’s dahlias.

      Unlike the other gardeners, Josh used to let me turn the compost with the long-handled, two-pronged fork that no one else let me touch and empty the mower box on to the heap. He let me weed the front of the borders where we had planted daisy-faced mesembryanthemums that only came out in the sun and balls of alyssum and drifts of pink and white candytuft. I watched the way he tied the clematis up when the string broke once in the wind, and when he used to pee on the compost. ‘Better not tell your dad I do that, it’s my secret way of getting the compost to work,’ he would say, turning as he shook himself and did up his buttons.

      My father smiled, beamed almost, when I called plants by their proper names. Antirrhinum instead of snapdragon and Muscari instead of grape hyacinth. He gave a tired but amused little snuffle when I once corrected him about the name of a rose that he had called Pleasure when I knew it was Peace. Josh would take me round the borders, getting me to name as many plants as I could and would tease me when I confused azaleas and rhododendrons. Sometimes he would hoist me up on to his bare shoulders and charge around the garden making airplane noises and pretending to crash into the trees. We played football once, but my saves were so bad that the ball, an orange one belonging to my brothers, kept crashing into the marguerites and knocking them flat.

      I liked the way Josh would let me sit and talk to him while he took a strip-wash СКАЧАТЬ