Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger. Nigel Slater
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Mother would make flapjacks, stirring them in a thick, pitted aluminium pan and leaving them to settle on the back of the Aga. She would use a metal spoon, which acted as an effective alarm clock as it was scraped against the side of the old pan. They were one of the very few treats my mother ever made for us. My father would eat one or two, probably to encourage her rare attempts at home-making. While I would have to be held back from eating the entire tray. It was their chewy, salty sweetness I loved. Anyone who has never put a really large pinch of salt in with the oats, syrup and brown sugar is missing a trick.
Sometimes, she would leave a flapjack out for Josh too, and we would sit on his motorbike and eat them together. One bitterly cold day, I came home to a hall that smelled of warm biscuits. As I opened the kitchen door I smelled smoke and caught my mother tossing a batch of blackened flapjacks into the bin. There was a bit of charred shrapnel clinging to the edge of the tin which I tried unsuccessfully to prise off. Now they were being tipped into the pedal bin, tray and all. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said, shaking her head. There were tears and something along the lines of ‘How could you do that, let the flapjacks burn? You’re hopeless, now there won’t be any for Josh tomorrow,’ and then I remember stomping into the greenhouse and telling my father he should get a new wife. One who didn’t burn everything.
If you walked along Penn Road past the fish shop and towards the stately pile that is the Royal School for Boys, you came to Percy Salt’s the grocer’s. It was two shops really, a butcher’s on the right and on the left a cool, tiled grocer’s that had sawdust on the floor and where my mother did most of her shopping. It was here she bought the ham that the young assistants in long white aprons would cut to order from the bone; slices of white-freckled tongue for Dad and tins of peaches and thick Nestlé’s cream for us all. This was where we came for streaky bacon, for sardines and, at weekends, for cartons of double cream.
Percy Salt’s was the only place where my mother ran a tab. It was the custom for the better-off clientele, as was having their purchases delivered. This was where I would stand while Mum asked to taste the Cheddar or the Caerphilly and where she would pick up round boxes of Dairylea cheeses for me. Sometimes there would be little foil-wrapped triangles of processed cheese flavoured with tomato, celery (my favourite), mushroom and blue cheese. This was also where we came for butter and kippers, salad cream and honey, eggs and tea.
I loved our visits to Salt’s like nothing else. It was the smell of the shop as much as anything, a smell of smoked bacon and truckles of Cheddar, of tomatoes in summer and ham hocks in winter. At Christmas the windows would light up with clementines in coloured foil, biscuits in tins with stagecoaches on the lids, fresh pineapples, whole peaches in tins, trifle sponges and packets of silver balls and sugared almonds. Mother would buy wooden caskets of Turkish delight and crystallised figs, sugared plums and jars of cherries in brandy. It was here too that she would collect the brandy for the brandy butter, the bottles of Mateus Rosé, the cartons of icing sugar and the chocolate Christmas decorations that we hung on the tree and that I would sneak one by one over the holidays. Never was I happier than in Percy Salt’s at Christmas, even if my mother did once say he was getting ‘terribly dear’.
‘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