The visit with my father was preceded by a sojourn with my sister, Joy—an artistic type and sometime vegan who plays the part of patient vegetarian whenever her unrepentantly carnivorous brother drops in—and her husband, who were kind enough to pick me up at Heathrow. Traveling with little luggage other than a funeral suit, I asked to be escorted to the nearest concession offering what Brits of my background regard as a classic “stoke-up.” My sister’s partiality (despite the general refinement of her tastes in food) to any chip (french fry) presenting itself for hasty ingestion made this a more reasonable request than the average purist might expect.
Having received the fix I craved—egg, sausage, bacon, baked beans, fried bread, fried mushrooms, fried tomatoes—I resigned myself to a couple of days of wholesomeness relieved only by solitary excursions to a café near the bookstore where my sister works. Run by a Spanish socialist with a penchant for Che Guevara posters, it’s a spotless hole-in-the-wall sporting a blackboard that speaks my language—pork, pork, and more pork—with, in one instance, an amusingly Continental twist: a bacon sandwich that substitutes ciabatta for Wonderloaf. (This, I think, is about as far as British integration into Europe really needs to go.) Although I was genuinely grateful for the two excellent dinners my sister cooked for me—fresh organic pasta with Swiss chard; moussaka with Puy lentils and eggplant—I was basically looking forward to the culinary monstrosities awaiting me at my father’s apartment. There, I knew, I could safely revert to being the viscerally pork-oriented tot who always found the traditional string of sausages the most alluring element of a Punch & Judy show.
I wasn’t disappointed. Lunch (dinner) on my first day at my father’s was, oddly enough for a Sunday, a childhood midweek standard: sausages with onion gravy (meaning a viscous slurry of lifeless onions and irrigated Bisto), mashed potatoes containing an infusion of butter that even Fernand Point might have found excessive, and the soggy tinned legumes commonly referred to by generations of English schoolchildren as cannonball peas. This deadweight of pork, starch, and distressed chlorophyll was followed by a ready-made treacle pudding disgorged from a plastic tub. The whole repast took my father more than an hour to prepare and cook as he moved at a snail’s pace around his minuscule kitchen. And it tasted just as good to me as it had 40 years earlier, when Denis could put together the very same meal in a matter of minutes. The following day, he produced (on a Monday) the lunch that will always remind me of childhood winter Sundays—chicken injected with a pound of butter, quartered potatoes roasted in the pan juices, carrot slices the size of silver dollars, and tepid broad beans as big as a bulldog’s testicles. Tea (eggs, bacon, baked beans, and a hefty slice of two-day-old bread pudding with a bottom crust the consistency of cardboard) followed barely three hours later. My father then retired for the night, a little more breathless than usual. I sat alone, a little sadder than usual, pondering the prospect of Don’s send-off.
The surge of grief attendant upon this soliloquy was leavened (incongruously, inappropriately, and, for a Brit accustomed to three- to four-year intervals between trips home, perhaps understandably) with sporadic speculation as to what—apart from tea, Sherry, and stout—Don’s widow, Aunt Rose, might be planning for the menu at the wake. Pickled onions, probably. Cocktail sausages, hopefully. A sausage roll or six. Pork pies. A hillock of ham…in which case… piccalilli.
That wasn’t quite how it worked out. After a tearful service in an unheated Anglican church overseen by an annoyingly upbeat lady vicar who was disturbingly forthcoming about her professional unwillingness to second-guess the nature of the afterlife, Don’s remains were borne beneath a magnificent floral arrangement in the form of a dartboard to the City of London Cemetery. By the time we arrived back at Aunt Rose’s, we were all emotionally exhausted and extremely cold. After settling my father, now speechless from fatigue, in an armchair next to his last surviving brother, Ray, I accepted a cup of tea from my cousin Diane. Next, I headed for the kitchen table, which, to my amazement, was groaning with six different kinds of quiche and not much else. Gone were the pickles and pork of yesteryear. I found this most depressing. My sister, on the other hand, was delighted. Her most recent confrontation with East End fare had been at Uncle Dave’s funeral, where, in response to her inquiry as to the availability of something a vegetarian could safely swallow, she was told: “We’ve only got tomatoes. How about tomatoes? You’re sure you don’t want a nice bit of pork pie?”
It quickly became apparent, however, that the kind of vegetable quiche allowed onto the Isle of Dogs bears no resemblance to its buttercup-complexioned cousins from Hampstead.
“Diane,” said Joy, “are any of these meatless?” (My sister had by now discerned that one of the quiches on offer was conspicuously sausage-laden.)
“Oh dear,” said Diane. “We’ve forgotten you again, haven’t we. Let’s have a look. This one. This one looks like cheese only. But you’ll have to pick the bacon bits off the top.”
“Maybe I’ll just have a cup of tea.”
“Milk and sugar?”
“Er, no thanks.”
“What? Nothing?”
“A slice of lemon would be nice if you’ve got any.”
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