Toast. Nigel Slater
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known.) She fell pregnant with me fifteen years after my brother Adrian was born and five years after they adopted his schoolfriend John. That’s when the asthma came on. When she was expecting me.
There had to be three different jams in the tarts. Strawberry, blackcurrant and lemon curd. It wasn’t till later I learned that plum, damson and marmalade made the best fillings. I put a couple of spoonfuls of jam into each pastry case, not so much that they would boil over and stick to the tin, but enough that there was more jam than pastry. My father loved a jam tart and would put one in whole and swallow it like a snake devouring a bird’s egg. Despite training as a gunsmith, he now owned a factory where they made parts for Rover cars, a factory that smelled of oil, where the machines were black and stood in pools of oily water. ‘A man was killed in that one there – he got his overall caught in the roller and it pulled him straight through, flat as a pancake,’ my father told me one day as we walked through the black hangar at dusk, its iron roof dripping and the stench of rust around us.
The tarts went in the top oven of the Aga until the edges of the pastry cases turned the pale beige of a Lincoln biscuit and the jam had caramelised around the edges. As the kitchen became hotter and more airless my mother would take her inhaler from the top drawer and take long deep puffs, turning her face away as she did so. Sometimes, she would hold her hand to her chest and close her eyes for a few seconds. A few seconds in which the world seem to stop.
My mother was polite, quietly spoken, but not timid. I once heard her telling off the delivery boy from Percy Salt’s the grocer because there was something on the bill that shouldn’t have been. I never heard her raise her voice. I am not sure she could have done if she wanted to. She certainly never did to me.
One day my father came home from work, and even before he had taken off his coat he grabbed one of our jam tarts from the wire cooling rack. He couldn’t have known they had come from the oven only a minute or two before. His hands flapped, his face turned a deep raspberry red, beads of sweat formed like warts on his brow, he danced a merry dance. As he tried to swallow and his eyes filled with the sort of tears a man can only summon when he has boiling lemon curd stuck to the roof of his mouth, I am sure that I saw the faintest of smiles flicker across my mother’s face.
‘We…are…going to have…spaghetti, no, SPAGHETTI…just try a bit of it. You don’t have to eat it if you DON’T LIKE it.’ Mum is yelling into Auntie Fanny’s ‘good’ ear. Quite why she thinks there is a good one and a bad one is a mystery. Everyone knows the old bat is deaf as a post in both.
Neither Fanny nor Mum has eaten spaghetti before, and come to think of it neither have I. Dad is waiting for the water to boil on the Aga. The sauce is already warm, having been poured from its tin a good half-hour ago and is sitting on the cool plate of the Aga, giving just the occasional blip-blop.
When the water finally boils my father shakes the strands of pasta out of the blue sugar paper that looks for all the world like a great long firework, and stands them in the bubbling water. They splay out like one of those fibre-optic lights we saw at the Ideal Home Exhibition on the BBC. As the water comes back to the boil he tries to push the spikes under the water. ‘They’ll never all go in,’ he snaps, trying to read the packet, which, even when read with bifocals, is in Italian. Some of the brittle sticks break in half and clatter over the hotplate.
‘Will I like it, Daddy?’ I ask, half hoping he’ll change his mind and Mum will cook us all some chops.
‘Just try it,’ he says, a somewhat exasperated tone creeping in to his voice. ‘Just try it.’
‘I think you should put some salt in,’ chirps in Mum.
Auntie Fanny is looking down at her lap. ‘Do I have to have some?’ I think she is going to cry.
‘I think it must be done now,’ says my father twenty minutes later. He drains the slithery lengths of spaghetti in a colander in the sink. Some are escaping through the holes and curling up in the sink like nests of worms. ‘Quick, get the plates, they’re getting away.’
We all sit there staring at our tumbling piles of pasta on our glass Pyrex plates. ‘Oh, Kathleen, I don’t think I can,’ sobs Auntie Fanny, who then picks up a long sticky strand with her fingers and pops it into her mouth from which it hangs all the way down to her lap.
‘No, wait for the sauce, Fanny,’ Mother sighs, and then quite out of character, ‘Come on, Daddy, hurry up.’ Dad spoons the sauce, a slurry of reddy-brown mince that smells ‘foreign’, over the knots and twirls of pasta. Suddenly it all seems so grown-up, so sophisticated.
Mum wraps the strands round her fork, ‘like this, do it like this,’ then shovels it towards Fanny’s wet, pink little lips. Most of the pasta falls down Fanny’s skirt, a little of the sauce gets caught on her bottom lip. She licks it off and shudders. ‘It’s horrible, it’s horrible. He’s trying to poison me,’ she wails. We all know she would have said the same even if it had been the most delectable thing she had ever eaten.
Ignoring Fanny’s little tantrum, I do as Mother bids, twirling the pasta round my fork while shovelling the escaping pieces back on with my spoon. I rather like it, the feel of the softly slippery noodles, the rich sauce which is hot, salty and tastes partly of tomato, partly of Bovril. I wouldn’t mind eating this every day. Unexpectedly, my father takes out a cardboard drum of grated Parmesan cheese and passes it to me to open.
‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ asks Mum.
‘It’s grated cheese, Percy Salt said you have to sprinkle it over the top, it doesn’t work if you don’t.’ Now we’re talking. I peel away the piece of paper that is covering the holes and shake the white powder over my sauce. I pass it to my father who does the same. Mum declines as she usually does with anything unusual. There is no point in asking Auntie Fanny, who is by now quietly wetting her pants.
Dad shakes the last of the cheese over his pasta and suddenly everyone goes quiet. I’m looking down but I can see my father out of the corner of my right eye; he has stopped, his fork in mid-air, a short strand of spaghetti hanging loose. His eyes have gone glassy and he puts his fork back down on his plate.
‘Daddy, this cheese smells like sick,’ I tell him.
‘I know it does, son, don’t eat it. I think it must be off.’
We never had spaghetti bolognese or Parmesan cheese again. Or for that matter, ever even talked about it.
There were only three of us at school whose house wasn’t joined to the one next door. Number 67 Sandringham Road, always referred to as ‘York House’, had mock-Tudor wooden beams, a double garage of which one half doubled as a garden shed and repository for my brothers’ canoes, and a large and crumbling greenhouse. I was also the only one ever to have tasted Arctic Roll. While my friends made do with the pink, white and brown stripes of a Neapolitan ice-cream brick, my father would bring out this newfangled frozen gourmet dessert. Arctic Roll was a sponge-covered tube of vanilla ice cream, its USP being the wrapping of wet sponge and ring of red jam so thin it could have been drawn on with an architect’s pen.
In Wolverhampton, Arctic Roll was considered to be something of a status symbol. It contained mysteries too. Why, for instance, does the ice cream not melt when the sponge defrosts? How is it possible to spread the jam that thin? How come it was made from sponge cake, jam and ice cream yet managed to taste of cold cardboard? And most importantly, how come cold cardboard tasted so good?
As treats go, this was the big one, bigger even than a Cadbury’s MiniRoll. This wasn’t a holiday or celebration treat like trifle. This was a treat for no obvious occasion. Its appearance had nothing to do with being good, having done well in a school test, having been