“Oh dear. I’m afraid we don’t.”
A few days later, I stumbled into a taxi to Heathrow at six in the morning with my wife, Pam, who had joined me later in the trip. My father, who had risen at four to begin making breakfast for us—watery scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, marmalade (for Pam), Marmite (for me)—waved good-bye from the kitchen window. It was the last time I saw him.
The following May, my wife and I flew to London for my father’s funeral. Pam, determined to wangle us an upgrade to business class on the strength of my bereavement, gave the British Airways ticketing clerk two passports and a sob story. Embarrassed, I immediately shuffled away with the carry-on luggage. (To someone with my social DNA, the mere thought of an upgrade from economy is tantamount to getting ideas above one’s station. In 1995, I was offered a seat in business class at no extra charge on an underbooked flight to Britain and turned it down.) My wife’s entreaties failed—or so I thought until we were summoned forward to a much nicer part of the plane as the great machine began grumbling toward the runway. Once aloft, we speedily revealed our minimal acquaintance with the finer things in life, having to be shown by the flight attendant how to extract a video unit from beneath the armrest. Thus was humiliation added to grief. I was definitely ready for breakfast. Would the reality match the quality promised by the commercials? Well, almost. Everything was edible except the scrambled eggs, which were watery. As watery, in fact, as the scrambled eggs my father had cooked for me that Sunday morning six months earlier. My appetite fled.
During the two days immediately preceding the funeral, Pam and Joy prepared a huge amount of forbiddingly healthful food for the prospective mourners. My brother-in-law scoured the suburbs for reasonably priced stemware. Armed with several bottles of Sancerre, I retreated to my sister’s studio to pen a funeral oration. The wine disappeared, the speech got written, the funeral came and went. Disbelief and desperation grappled with the gratitude I felt for the love my father had always shown me.
The day after the funeral, I forsook the Sancerre, if only temporarily, in favor of a wander through Crystal Palace Park, a constitutional of which, thanks to the wine, I was more in need than my companions in dejection were. It’s an unusual place, containing as it does odds and ends of the landscaping and stonework relating to the enormous glass edifice that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 and burned down in 1936. On its fringe stands the fabled (in England, at any rate) Crystal Palace television-transmitter mast, a structure that quickened the pulse of every communications engineer of my father’s generation. Also in the park is a lake whose banks are infested with statues representing early Victorian paleontology’s best stab at the likely appearance of a number of prehistoric reptiles. Toward the end of my mildly hungover circumnavigation of this improbable environment that blends so very queerly apparitions ancient and modern, I came across a brightly painted van reeking of cheap meat and displaying a menu blackboard headed by the two words that mean more to me when conjoined than any others in the English language—“bacon” and “sandwiches.” In response to my order, the proprietor hauled several ribbons of scrag end of porker from a stainless-steel trough loosely covered with a piece of grubby polythene. Wearing as disproportionately toothy a grin as that of a ravenous tyrannosaur suddenly confronted with a dying pterodactyl, I looked on joyfully as the grill spat and smoked. A moment or two later—it seemed an eternity—I was handed a steaming heap of pig and squashy bread. To sever the rind as surgically as possible and thus prevent it from stretching and snapping and scattering spots of grease several feet in all directions, I bit down very hard. As I did so, a British Airways Concorde whistled overhead, shattering my concentration for a split second during which I felt as nervous as an antisocial caveman surprised by an intruder with a bigger and better club. Instinct then reasserted itself. I chomped on grimly. The park began to empty. Another sandwich, then another. Grief, greed, and the need for another shot of Sancerre achieved perfect equilibrium. It was time to head home for zucchini.
Two years later, I returned to London for a nonfunereal visit with my sister. Time had turned out not to be a great healer, but I was determined to squeeze as much pleasure out of my trip as a continuing sense of loss might allow. Food, of course, would be foundational to this endeavor. Upon my arrival, Joy, guessing quite correctly that green tea and tempeh would not be at the top of my want list for the next few days, announced that a new and reputedly halfway decent café had opened in her neighborhood. Two seconds later, we were on our way.
The café turned out to be so new that the cooking was taking place amid the residual debris of hasty construction. Undeterred by jet lag and the jury-rigged look of the joint, I skimmed the blackboard and promptly sprang at the counter as eagerly as a puppy distracted by offal, ordering two fried eggs, chips, bacon, baked beans, sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms, and fried bread. Plus a cup of tea, no milk, no sugar. This was a gluttonous amount of food for one person—and a most un-British approach to tea. The proprietress barely flinched.
The weather being warm, my sister suggested that we sit outside in the establishment’s “garden,” which turned out to be a square of cement with a pile of wood shavings in one corner, a handful of weeds in the other, and, in the middle, a single plastic table with a bent umbrella. Eden it wasn’t. The food, however, was divine—the eggs radiant, the chips uniformly golden, the bacon pleasingly pink and rimmed with an appropriate amount of fat, the beans properly steeped in their pallid tomato-flavored sauce, the sausages a scintillating shade of brown and speckled with a spot or two of mustard, the tinned skinned tomatoes a study in scarlet, the mushrooms ragged at the edges and oozing dark juices, the fried bread as crisp as a crouton. The tea was as bitter as hops. I was home again. (Joy made do with a couple of chips.)
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