On those sundays when he wasn’t working an extra shift to keep up the mortgage payments on a house he’d never expected to own—his mother actually called him a “traitor to the working class” when he announced that he was planning to become a homeowner—my dad, a telegraphist by trade, did the prep work for Sunday dinner. (Dinner, for those unfamiliar with a fading British vernacular, is the meal referred to as lunch in superior circles; break-fast is breakfast both above and below stairs; and the feast known as dinner by those who hunt foxes is known as tea by those who race pigeons.) Within the bounds of a cuisine that pretty much consisted, in British working-class households during the 1950s and ’60s, of meat and two veg followed by “sweet,” or “afters,” in the form of some kind of spongy pudding leaking strawberry jam into a lake of custard, my parents, Denis and Kitty, were excellent cooks. And they both considered the fact that we had enough to eat a direct reflection of the principle of “fair shares for all,” first introduced into British politics in 1945 only to be demolished by repeated blows from an iron handbag four decades later.
The absence of fair shares from my father’s life prior to 1945 had been particularly acute. My paternal grandfather died when Denis was three years old, plunging Florence (“Flo”) Haney into poverty—and into the rougher parts of the East End, like Canning Town—virtually overnight. Three of her four sons were sent to the Alexandra Orphanage, in North London, the fourth to an aunt and uncle who could afford to feed him. For the first few years, my father once recalled, the food at the orphanage was only a marginal improvement on the gruel immortalized by Dickens. “In the early days, when I was a little child, it was bloody awful,” he said. “Just bread and marmalade for breakfast, sometimes cocoa instead, which came in a basin, and you ate it with a spoon. If you were lucky, there’d be some bits of bread in it. And on a plate beside that, there’d be marmalade again, maybe a dab of Marmite, a bit more bread and butter. And that was your breakfast. Unless you were spindly, like I was, in which case you’d be put on the porridge list.”
As the orphanage contingent trickled home at the age of 14 and found employment with the Commercial Cable Company, where their father had worked, life became a bit less desperate for Flo, who, in the wake of a short-lived relationship, was now a mother for the fifth time. Even so, circumstances still made moonlight flits and skimpy meals unavoidable. Food had to be stretched. Senile bread could be rejuvenated by immersion in milk. A slice of fresh bread packed an increased calorific punch when smeared with condensed milk. Or you could daub it with a farthing’s worth of beef dripping and add a dash of salt. Any bread surviving this onslaught of frugality and resourcefulness became bread pudding. Spotted dick (suet pudding spiffed up with a couple of currants) was usually made on a Sunday and then rationed out to provide no-frills teas (that’s dinners, remember) for a week. Saturdays saw Flo pushing the economic envelope with the purchase of eels, bought from the bucket and chopped up still squirming, or, in a very good week, rabbit, bought off the hook and skinned at home.
This was food keyed to subsistence, to survival. In a down-at-heel corner of a dithering empire, it attracted no adjectives. Perversely, however, I came to develop such an affection for this utilitarian fare, which has very little to commend it nutritionally and absolutely nothing to commend it aesthetically, that from an early age I would sometimes actually feel shortchanged when, for instance, my mother handed me a bowl of peaches, sweet wafers, and ice cream. Why? Because what I really wanted at that moment was a slice of spotted dick. Or a wedge of my dad’s take on canary pudding, which was about as simple as afters could get—a deliciously yellow hemisphere of sweet sponge topped with a plop of treacle. Or maybe, instead of dessert, some bread and beef dripping.
My discovery that in some circles an addiction to the lowlier comestibles is viewed as a character deficiency came at the age of 11, when I gained a place at a nearby grammar school. There, I quickly learned that I was being trained, despite my unquestionably plebeian background, to disguise myself as a member of the class (middle) into which a fair proportion of my companions in academic adversity had been born. Never again would I even dream of evincing in public a passion for condensed-milk sandwiches. Never again would I boast of the ecstasy occasioned in my ancestors by the sight of stewed eels encircling an archipelago of severely mashed spuds. My natural selectivity would go unremarked except within the confines of my own social subspecies; circumstances forced me to acknowledge the inadvisability of revealing myself, at an institution chartered by King Edward VI, to be the progeny of East Enders. For that’s a stratum in which I was—and, churlish though it may seem, still am—thoroughly content to be classified.
Oddly, some of my most vivid memories of the food I enjoyed when very young relate not to meals I devoured in my own home but to those dished up during ritual Saturday visits to my maternal grandparents and my aunt Jackie, who lived in a cavernous house in the northeast London borough of Redbridge. A major source of warmth for the entire building was the stove, from which my grandmother would triumphantly extract glistening platefuls of kippers, mackerel, and impossibly yellow haddock—or, every other week or so, supremely portly bangers (sausages). The customary accompaniment to this steaming cascade was outsize slices of white bread (fondly referred to as doorsteps) slathered with margarine, along with multiple mugs of murderously hot and tooth-dissolvingly sweet tea necessitating numerous trips to the outside lavatory.
An occasional highlight of these excursions to Redbridge was the narrative with which my sister and I were regaled during the afternoon by my grandfather, Harry Augustus Bush, a veteran of both world wars, sometime cavalryman and twice-torpedoed sailor. In between puffs on a Cuban cigar and sips of 80-proof rum, he’d give us a guided tour of a half century of hard times. For example & as a boy growing up in Limehouse, one of the poorest parts of the East End, he often scavenged family meals from the gutter when the street markets closed. Between the wars, he’d worked at a variety of jobs that my sister and I found bewilderingly unlikely—tap dancer, journeyman butcher, ship’s steward, docker.
At about six o’clock, we’d take a break from the story of our grandfather’s journey through conflict and its absences. The time had come to focus on food, whose arrival would be announced on what I called banger weekends by a crescendo of sizzling and popping signifying that the next hour would be spent disposing of sausage after sausage after sausage—the Englishman’s favorite form of pork. My grandmother would scoop the tubby tubes, as plump as the pig they came from and perfectly browned, straight from her enormous frying pan onto superheated plates. We’d hack at them while they were still almost too hot to eat, still shimmering with the lard in which they’d been cooked. The savory sauce we used as a condiment mixed splendidly with the golden yolk of the accompanying eggs. Relishing every last speck of grease, we mopped up the resulting runniness with yet more doorsteps. And then we’d have more doorsteps, this time painted with the supersalty yeast extract called Marmite, a substance guaranteed to disgust anyone who didn’t acquire a taste for it within a few weeks of leaving the womb. (An American acquaintance of mine who once made the mistake of sampling a mere dot of the stuff pulled a face indicative of terminal perplexity, tried hard not to gag, and yelped, “This isn’t food. It can’t be. It just can’t be.”)
At the end of a day at Harry’s, my parents usually had a tough time dragging me out to our third-hand car for the ride home—particularly on wintry sausage nights, when I’d be begging for one last warming banger as my father, cursing the cold beneath his breath, scraped the ice from the windshield with a copy of the Evening Standard and then struggled for a few tense minutes with the conveyance’s refractory ignition. I’d remind myself that next Saturday night would be fish night, alright in its own way, and that two Saturdays from now I’d once again sit down to the best food, the very best food, in the world.
In November 1998, I visited my father for what I realized, the moment I set down my suitcase and embraced him, would be the last time. (He and my mum had divorced in the late ’70s.) Dad was all skin and dry bones, suffering from a serious lung disease, and the effort of eating left him prostrate for an hour. His half-brother, Don—bus driver, accomplished darts player, lifelong East Ender—had passed away two days earlier.
I found Don’s departure from this world particularly significant. I had always thought of him as an exceptionally forceful reminder of my father’s side of the family, not least because—unlike the rest of the Haney brothers, who moved to suburbs or to the country just as soon as they could in the years following the war—Don chose to spend his entire life in the East End. He had once had his doubts about the durability of my allegiance to the class of which he was, so very indisputably, a fully paid-up member. His misgivings in this regard may have originated in the fact that I went to university—a family first—and therefore might have come to consider myself a cut above the rest of the clan. In 1981, at his eldest daughter’s engagement party, he came straight to the point and asked me if I thought I was “better than us”—better than his family, his friends, his neighbors. This was one of the saddest questions I have ever been asked. Taking a shaky sip of the few drops of beer I’d managed not to spill from sheer surprise, I gave him the benefit of a very firm “No.” Thus reassured, he bought me another pint. The party continued, and people belted out songs I’d first heard as a hysterically excited five-year-old at jubilantly crowded Christmas parties in Don’s postage stamp of a living room in a tiny terraced house in a section of the East End known as the Isle of Dogs (in a part of the world that’s now known as Docklands and bears little relation to the way it was, to the lives that were lived there, before money moved in).
Frankly, I’ve never had that much fun at parties again. What do I see when I repeat my own memories to myself? Torrents of cigarette smoke, Sherry, and stout. The younger men in navy V-necks, the younger women in gray pencil skirts. The older men enormously beery in ill-fitting two-piece suits, waistbands suspendered to their sternums, constantly brushing fag ash from their crumpled synthetic ties. The older women in voluminous black dresses, trailing their daughters’ hiccuping, half-naked babies and a couple of feet of imitation pearls. A kitchen table crammed with squadrons of cocktail sausages, hulking wedges of Cheddar, precipices of ham, mountains of mince pies, piles of piccalilli, stacks of thick-sliced bread, and a teapot capable of accommodating the Mad Hatter and every last one of his lunatic friends. All this, and infinite kindness. Such were some of the happiest times I knew as the constellations wheeled above the bedlam of my infancy.
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.”
“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.)
The week that followed was my idea of idyllic. Sadness was tempered by the fondest of memories, and my sister and I grew closer than ever. She admitted that it was only recently that she had begun to be able to think of Denis without bursting into tears. I owned up to feeling perpetually waterlogged. She fed me massive quantities of expertly prepared organic food and never complained when I disappeared to dispose of a sausage or two amid the sawdust.
On the Monday on which I departed, we sat down in her cement-floored backyard to a lunch that we had put together as a fairly authoritative re-creation of the teas we had eaten as children on summer Sundays. My sister avoided the meat, of course, but appreciated the historical accuracy of the pile of cold baked ham and the hatbox of a pork pie (with a hard-boiled egg imprisoned at its core) that I had purchased at the supermarket that morning. The fruits of the sty were accompanied by good crisp lettuce, quartered tomatoes, spring onions, cold new potatoes, and dollops of an organic mayonnaise that bore a striking resemblance, both in taste and in texture, to the “salad cream” without which no basic British salad was complete four decades ago. In between bites, I gazed at my sister’s beautiful container garden and conjured the time and the place in which we had first enjoyed meals like this one.
It’s late on a summer Sunday afternoon in rural Essex, circa 1961. I’m looking at a small garden, plus vegetable patch, situated behind a modest semidetached house. There’s a rabbit dozing in its hutch. Butterflies bask on a ramshackle rockery. A hedgehog is tottering through the daffodils. The family cat seems frightfully proud of the sparrow between its teeth. The local crow population is making its habitually raucous return to a stand of enormous elms. The bells of the Anglican churches are sounding for Evensong. (I’m not making any of this up.) In the neighboring gardens, similar sights, similar sounds. Cutlery clinking on cheap china. Teaspoons clonking in mugs full of sweet, milky tea. My sister and I are sitting on our back-door steps next to a tank full of tadpoles. My father is eating his tea in a rush before leaving for a night shift, hunched over his salad in shirt and tie. My mother asks us if we want any more before she starts putting leftovers in the fridge. My sister, daydreaming, says nothing. And I hear myself saying, in a hopeful tone, “Bit more ham, please, Mum.”
And now Joy is asking me, almost inaudibly it seems, if I’d like a bit more to eat before the taxi to the airport arrives. What I’m hearing very clearly is ghosts, ghosts whose vanished voices have momentarily obscured the sounds emanating from what is, supposedly, the real world. Suddenly, the scent of cigar smoke and kippers overwhelms the fragrance of my sister’s lavender. Maybe the healing has begun. I cut myself one last wedge of pork pie.