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    Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger
    Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger
    Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger
    Ebook299 pages3 hours

    Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger

    By Nigel Slater

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Toast is Nigel Slater’s truly extraordinary story of a childhood remembered through food. In each chapter, as he takes readers on a tour of the contents of his family’s pantry—rice pudding, tinned ham, cream soda, mince pies, lemon drops, bourbon biscuits—we are transported....

    His mother was a chops-and-peas sort of cook, exasperated by the highs and lows of a temperamental stove, a finicky little son, and the asthma that was to prove fatal. His father was a honey-and-crumpets man with an unpredictable temper. When Nigel’s widowed father takes on a housekeeper with social aspirations and a talent in the kitchen, the following years become a heartbreaking cooking contest for his father’s affections. But as he slowly loses the battle, Nigel finds a new outlet for his culinary talents, and we witness the birth of what was to become a lifelong passion for food.  Nigel’s likes and dislikes, aversions and sweet-toothed weaknesses, form a fascinating backdrop to this exceptionally moving memoir of childhood, adolescence, and sexual awakening.

    A bestseller (more than 300,000 copies sold) and award-winner in the UK, Toast is sure to delight both foodies and memoir readers on this side of the pond—especially those who made such enormous successes of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateOct 6, 2005
    ISBN9781440623455
    Author

    Nigel Slater

    Nigel Slater is a bestselling and award-winning author, journalist and television presenter. He has been the food columnist for the Observer for over thirty years and is one of Britain’s most highly regarded food writers. His memoir Toast won six awards and became a film and stage production. He lives in London.

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    Reviews for Toast

    3.5/5

    356 ratings32 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Really enjoyed this memoir. Slater has a great way of telling stories that engage you.
    • 2/5
      Would of liked it more if the author had not undermined himself at times. Obviously I feel pretty sorry for him and I respect the humour with which he distances himself from what was an awful childhood on the whole, but it was rather repetitive and the sum of the parts did not add up to anything special - and I think handled better it might have. But it whiled away some long train journeys fairly pleasantly, even given the uncomfortable nature of much of it.
    • 2/5
      Actually, I can't recommend this book at all, as the childhood anecdotes are boring, and don't fit together into a narrative.

      However, if you are into childhood (mostly) food anecdotes, do yourself a favour and skip everything after his father's death. The stories of his early experiences in hotel kitchens alternate between disgusting food incidents and too much sex. The tone is completely different from most of the book.
    • 4/5
      Nigel Slater’s memoir told around the meals he shared with his family may be unique in its style and the childhood remembrances of joy at the simple pleasures instilled by food. For anyone of a certain age it will spike the memory, and for those too young to know what people used to eat it will be a history lesson told with real humour. His recollection of the dreaded crates of (often warm) yucky milk that would arrive at school is one I share, only had it been me made to stand at the front of the class until I drank it all, I would have stood there all day rather than even make the attempt. It’s hard to believe we used to consume even half these things, even more difficult to believe a few still exist. Along with stories of how children caught diseases such as measles and mumps (not in the book but when one child caught something, the others sent round to make sure they caught it too so they all got it over and done with) with no talk of vaccinations may sound shocking now, but was a commonplace occurrence then. He tells some of these memories with the innocent callousness only a child can muster; as an adult Slater has said he regretted being so harsh, but I think it’s forgivable as these are childhood recollections not tempered with time and understanding, more real for all that.
    • 4/5
      After having read years ago, I re-read this book as my entry for an Edible Books contest. Though I didn't win the contest (toasted french bread topped with apple butter, crumbled blue cheese, freshly chopped sage) all was at least eaten so I can solace in that. The upside was enjoying a memoir whose subtitle might be a bit misleading. The author was never in danger of going hungry for food but the hunger was indeed one for love and acceptance by his father after the death of his mother at age of nine or so. The look back into one's childhood is always bittersweet but this book is a good example that most of us will find our way if we accept ourselves and that reminder was well worth the second reading.
    • 5/5
      Slater's Toast awoke in me so many past food feelings from my own childhood not just from his sumptuous descriptions of his own past life but because of the proximity our lives shared in the fact that we were raised in towns barely eight miles apart and are within two years of being the same age. The descriptions of past memories of sweets reminded me so much of my childhood, and I think would resonant more with a British audience than American.
      My mother, as his, did not enjoy the preparation of food, and while for Slater that led to a life of exploration in food, for me not so much. This is why I enjoyed this book. Not only is it a tell-all tale of a youth hungering for the love of a father that was only occasionally available but one of a life of exuberance, a life that becomes filled with the joy of finding your niche in life and wallowing in it wholeheartedly. If only we all could find that space in our life.
      Slater normally writes books on cooking, with recipes, so this was a brave soul-searching stab at a new venture that lets us in on why he is so good at what he does.
    • 5/5
      I've seen a couple of Slater's programmes. He's really creepy and disturbing. There's a scene in the book where his father watches him eat ham before losing his temper and throwing Slater's plate across the garden. I know exactly how he feels. I remember watching him spread jam onto a pudding and I just wanted to grab the knife and punch him repeatedly in the head with the handle shouting "Handle your food properly or this is what you get!" And I really am not a violent man at all.

      However, this is a very charming book, funny and at times shocking. He has a way of reversing things or jumping from one subject to another that I admire a lot. Peanuts to penises in a single sentence. I read the Radishes section to the guy who sits next to me at work and he was so disturbed he had to go away for quite a while.

      A fascinating picture of that rather disturbing time in British cooking (which luckily I'm too young to remember) between Rationing and Curry. The spaghetti and parmesan scene is gold dust. But more than that you get a picture of wider British culture with his nouveaux riche parents struggling to look middle class and the generational split in the 60s... and all told through the medium of food.
    • 5/5
      A series of short personal memories, mostly food related. Some are sweet, as Slater remembers his mother's awful cooking with fondness, and after her death, his father's attempts to feed his son and comfort him. Some memories are steeped in anger or anxiety, especially when a new woman entered his father's life, and some food memories deal with his happiness upon starting his culinary career.
      Very intimate and very English, I enjoyed this nearly as much as my previous read from the author, Eating for England.
    • 4/5
      I thought this book was very entertaining. I wish I was more familiar with the British brands and words to relate a bit better. I found it to be quite amusing and I can relate to how certain foods/smells trigger memories rather they be bad or good.
    • 2/5
      While I enjoyed the food part of this memoir, I didn't like the tone. I came to it with no prior knowledge of who Slater is, I picked it up primarily because I needed an audio book, my library had this available, and it was a memoir.

      Slater lost his mum early on, his brother was much older and left home soon after, which left Slater alone with his dad for awhile. Then his dad finds a new woman with whom to share his life, and his son is resentful and angry and bitter about this still. She admittedly sounds like no prize at all, though she's an above-average cook.

      I think this would have worked much better for me if I had read the print version, or if it had been narrated by someone other than the author. He was unable to keep a whiny, aggrieved tone out of his voice when recounting the tribulations of his adolescence. I was unable to keep from rolling my eyes when he complained that no teenaged boys (save him) were ever required to do such onerous chores as tidying their rooms, picking clothes up from the floor & etc.
    • 4/5
      I fell in love with British chef Nigel Slater's beautifully evocative food writing through his cook books, so I was very excited to see his autobiography at my library.

      The book is written chronologically, as a series of essays centered around a various food item or recipe, and it was much more gripping that that description makes it out to be. It was also a lot sadder than I'd expected. What amazed me most was that angry, stifled boy from the cold, stern home had grown into the warm, enthusiastic man of the cook books.
    • 1/5
      I often like food related memoirs, but couldn't get into this one and abandoned it 1/3 of the way through
    • 5/5
      Nigel Slater writes with candour and humour about his childhood and up to the time of his finishing college and his very first venture into the world of employment. Unsurprisingly perhaps it is a food centred memoir, each short episode invariable carrying the title of a dish or ingredient.

      It is very well written, and there is much more than humour here, it is at times quite touching and occasionally very moving as we come to understand the losses and the shortcomings in his upbringing, not that he suffered the deprivations of poverty, but possibly something more serious.

      What comes across is the picture of a mildly determined and resourceful young lad who from an early age was passionate about food. This is a delicious gem of a book, as entertaining as it is moving.
    • 4/5
      Nigel Slater's autobiography of his childhood through to his teenage years is an interesting read. He conjures up a vivid depiction of his youth through descriptions of what his mother cooked (badly, from packets) and his stepmother's extravagant three course dinners on which Slater blames his father's heart attack. His adventures with the opposite and same sex are intriguing and I found I wanted to read on when the book finished.
    • 4/5
      Toast:

      This is a fun book that would make a great summer read. It is broken up into short manageable snippets for reading on the go. Basically it is the story of the British chef Nigel Slater told through the story of various foods, starting with his childhood foods (His mother served burnt toast every morning of his childhood, and never go the hang of it). Certain foods (e.g. ketchup) were considered low class and not allowed in the house. His mother passed away when he was 9, leading to many changes including the type of foods served. His father remarried a woman who (although they did not get along) was a good cook. Stories of these transitions are told through the lens of the types of food served, prepared, and the politics associated with them. A good read in general, a great read if you like food!
    • 4/5
      This book is an autobiography telling about Slater's (not very happy) childhood (mother had severe astma and died when he was nine, father eventually remarried but stepmother and -son did not see eye to eye) and adolescence. Very matter-of-factly written, short chapters, never any false sentiment but very touching anyway. It started of as a few columns in a newspaper, but grew into a very nice book indeed. Almost all the memories told here are in some way food-related; but together they form a story about families, love, and the lack of love.
    • 5/5
      Nigel Slater, a famous British food writer and TV chef, recounts his childhood and early adulthood through the medium of, well, a book that will make you hungry enough to want to eat the book itself. I wouldn’t recommend doing this, especially not if you’re reading in Kindle format. What outwardly seems to be a sad and lonely childhood is brought to life by the frequent mention of various staples of the post-war British diet. Slater is almost thirty years older than me, but I was pleasantly surprised at the number of foods that appeared on the plates of both our childhoods; Christmas Cake, Jammie Dodgers, Banana Custard, and the treats spoken of in hushed tones in a passage entitled “Crisps, Ketchup, and a Few Other Unmentionables”.

      On reflection, I’m not sure I expected this to be as good as it was. The combination of a readable, elegant style of writing, a touching memoir and the aforementioned nostalgia has brought the slightly odd man on the TV to life for me. I think a lot of my enjoyment of this book does stem from the common nationality, so I wonder how much readers who didn’t grow up with tinned ham and sherbet fountains might get from it. Having said that, it is very well-written and is deserving of the praise given to it, so definitely worth a read. I’d recommend bringing a snack along with you.
    • 5/5
      I loved this very easy to read. Quite sad in parts and funny in others. He writes of his childhood with his mother (before she died) and her lack of culinary skills with a lot of humour and affection and his father and eventual step mother with frustration and lonliness. Food being a real solice for him throughout. A must read for anyone with the tiniest interest in food.
    • 4/5
      Funny, poignant and sad, Toast is a must-read book for all foodies. Nigel Slater tells the story of his upbringing in the 1960s - complete with intricate descriptions of food dishes he is introduced to throughout along the way.

      Despite the ups and downs of family life, the book is ultimately a celebration of cooking and the joy it brings
    • 4/5
      When I started this book I was delighted to realise that not only was it Nigel Slater talking about food in the beautifully and often humorous way he usually does, but that it was formed in the shape of a memoir of his youth.

      This is a coming of age story of the author, who lost his mother at an early age and then had to compete for his somewhat cold father's affections with a new stepmother, who provided him plenty of competition in the culinary arena of their kitchen.

      This makes for some quite sad reading, but as usual, I also find Nigel Slater's writing quite inspiring as he was spurned on by his desire to please his father as well as to broaden his horizons with regards to food. It is also a story of someone discovering himself sexually and there is a lot of admirable honesty in the author's writing about this aspect of his life.

      I really enjoyed reading this. There were times when I would have liked to know a bit more about the food he was learning to prepare, but I suppose for that I'll have to stick to his cook books!
    • 4/5
      I particularly enjoyed this book at the beginning when NIgel was reminiscing about foods from his early childhood that I remember vividly from my own. Very amusing about his Mother and her lack of cooking skills. The book actually became quite sad towards the end and I found it very moving.
    • 5/5
      I've only recently discovered Nigel Slater's cookery programmes on BBC TV and I love them. After acquiring several cookery books of his someone suggested this book. It is a comedy masterpiece and for anybody who grew up in Britain in the 50s and 60s it will be atrip down memory lane as far as food is concerned. The piece on school meals is especially funny and brought back nightmares for me.
    • 3/5
      Sad and funny
    • 4/5
      Subtitled "The story of a boy's hunger," this is the story of a young boy whose mother was (to put it gently) not the greatest cook in the world. As he describes the horrors of the food she made, he manages to highlight the relationship of food to love in our lives.

      While he has always been interested in food and cooking, his father did not allow him in the kitchen, so when his mother dies and father must take over the provision of meals, life becomes even more dire. After dad hires (and later marries) a cook/housekeeper, the food gets better, but life somehow does not. In fact, the family is uprooted and moved halfway across England to establish a more uppity lifestyle to please the 'new mum.'

      Later when he gets old enough to get a job at a pub, and then a posh hotel, he realizes his calling in food prep. His father's death brings everything to a boil, severs the link with bridezilla, and provides Nigel with the impetus to go to cooking school and take up his true vocation.

      I 'read' this one as an audio while preparing our Thanksgiving meal. I loved hearing the British terms for foods --had to go look up a few--and laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes in a few places. It really brings out the role food (and in Britain the role of TOAST) in our lives, and how our relationships with food providers are formed so early in life. An enjoyable read--it's as much a coming of age bio as a food event-- even if you're not a foodie.
    • 4/5
      A poingant tale of a boy growing up in sixties Britain told through his relationship to food. Each episode is ony a few pages long and most are titled by food. Frome thes facets the reader builds up a picture of a difficult child surviving a difficult childhood (his mothers death and his father's subsequent remarriage). Although my life is very different to Nigel Slater's I'm almost exactly his age and spent my first seven years in England, and this book brings back memories of cakes sunk in the middle, tinned mandarins in jelly, tinned fruit and ideal milk, maybe not cuisine but made and eaten with love.
    • 4/5
      This book certainly read quickly (helped by good sectioning). A poignant but whimsical memoir, I thought Nigel drew the perfect line between empathy & self-depreciation. Some parts read a bit like horror (without giving too much away, watch out for Milk).

      As a foreigner currently in UK, it introduces a maze of strange foods, which when mentioned to the right people, elicit contented sighs & faraway looks. I liked it best for it's small adventures.
    • 4/5
      i savored every chapter of this book like another course in a great meal. Slater is a master of imagery....I found myself reading passages aloud to anyone within distance to enjoy his facility with language. Much more than just a book about food, this book is an honest and often sad memoir of Slater's boyhood, using food as a context for the events that shaped his youth. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This book really brought back some childhood memories for me. It was an easy read, and very evocative of the type of food that was around in the 70's.
    • 4/5
      This book was tailormade for the Anglophile foodie in me. I loved how the story grew from each different remembered food.
    • 4/5
      This book is a dark delight. Every chapter starts with a food heading, this seems gimmicky at first, but soon becomes an integral part of the book. The foods evoke the 1960s and 1970s and make the book a real nostalgia feast for me, as I am of the same generation as Nigel Slater.

      Although his mother died when he was eight, and he found his father cold and forbidding, and hated his step-mother, this is no misery memoir. In fact, from a very early age he was as good at giving misery as taking it. I was impressed with the clarity of his description of what it is like to be a child, as we get older we tend to sentimentalise our own childhood, we forget how brutal and unsentimental children and teenagers can be. His description of his feeling of release after the death of his father is a vivid example of this, and contrasts with the theatrical histrionics of his stepmother.

      The story of an awakening, both personal and sexual and one of the best pieces of autobiographical writing I have read, I hope he writes more.

    Book preview

    Toast - Nigel Slater

    Toast 1

    MY MOTHER IS SCRAPING a piece of burned toast out of the kitchen window, a crease of annoyance across her forehead. This is not an occasional occurrence, a once-in-awhile hiccup in a busy mother’s day. My mother burns the toast as surely as the sun rises each morning. In fact, I doubt if she has ever made a round of toast in her life that failed to fill the kitchen with plumes of throat-catching smoke. I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it.

    It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. People’s failings, even major ones such as when they make you wear short trousers to school, fall into insignificance as your teeth break through the rough, toasted crust and sink into the doughy cushion of white bread underneath. Once the warm, salty butter has hit your tongue, you are smitten. Putty in their hands.

    Christmas Cake

    MUM NEVER WAS much of a cook. Meals arrived on the table as much by happy accident as by domestic science. She was a chops-and-peas sort of a cook, occasionally going so far as to make a rice pudding, exasperated by the highs and lows of a temperamental cream-and-black Aga and a finicky little son. She found it all a bit of an ordeal, and wished she could have left the cooking, like the washing, ironing, and dusting, to Mrs. P., her woman what does.

    Once a year there were Christmas puddings and cakes to be made. They were made with neither love nor joy. They simply had to be done. I suppose I had better DO THE CAKE, she would sigh. The food mixer—she was not the sort of woman to use her hands—was an ancient, heavy Kenwood that lived in a deep, secret hole in the kitchen work surface. My father had, in a rare moment of do-it-yourselfery, fitted a heavy industrial spring under the mixer so that when you lifted the lid to the cupboard the mixer slowly rose like a corpse from a coffin. All of which was slightly too much for my mother, my father’s quaint Heath Robinson craftsmanship taking her by surprise every year, the huge mixer bouncing up like a jack-in-the-box and making her clap her hands to her chest. Oh heck! she would gasp. It was the nearest my mother ever got to swearing.

    She never quite got the hang of the mixer. I can picture her now, desperately trying to harness her wayward Kenwood, bits of cake mixture flying out of the bowl like something from an I Love Lucy sketch. The cake recipe was written in green biro on a piece of blue Basildon Bond and was kept, crisply folded into four, in the spineless Aga Cookbook that lived for the rest of the year in the bowl of the mixer. The awkward, though ingenious, mixer cupboard was impossible to clean properly, and in among the layers of flour and icing sugar lived tiny black flour weevils. I was the only one who could see them darting around. None of which, I suppose, mattered if you were making Christmas pudding, with its gritty currants and hours of boiling. But this was cake.

    Cooks know to butter and line the cake tins before they start the creaming and beating. My mother would remember just before she put the final spoonful of brandy into the cake mixture, then take half an hour to find them. They always turned up in a drawer, rusty and full of fluff. Then there was the annual scrabble to find the brown paper, the scissors, the string. However much she hated making the cake we both loved the sound of the raw cake mixture falling into the tin. Shhh, listen to the cake mixture, she would say, and the two of us would listen to the slow plop of the dollops of fruit and butter and sugar falling into the paper-lined cake tin. The kitchen would be warmer than usual and my mother would have that I’ve-just-baked-a-cake glow. Oh, put the gram on, will you, dear? Put some carols on, she would say as she put the cake in the top oven of the Aga. Carols or not, it always sank in the middle. The embarrassing hollow, sometimes as deep as your fist, having to be filled in with marzipan.

    Forget scented candles and freshly brewed coffee. Every home should smell of baking Christmas cake. That, and warm freshly ironed tea towels hanging on the rail in front of the Aga. It was a pity we had Auntie Fanny living with us. Her incontinence could take the edge off the smell of a chicken curry, let alone a baking cake. No matter how many mince pies were being made, or pine logs burning in the grate, or how many orange-and-clove pomanders my mother had made, there was always the faintest whiff of Auntie Fanny.

    Warm sweet fruit, a cake in the oven, woodsmoke, warm ironing, hot retriever curled up by the Aga, mince pies, Mum’s 4711. Every child’s Christmas memories should smell like that. Mine did. It is a pity that there was always a passing breeze of ammonia.

    Cake holds a family together. I really believed it did. My father was a different man when there was cake in the house. Warm. The sort of man I wanted to hug rather than shy away from. If he had a plate of cake in his hand I knew it would be all right to climb up onto his lap. There was something about the way my mother put a cake on the table that made me feel that all was well. Safe. Secure. Unshakable. Even when she got to the point where she carried her Ventolin inhaler in her left hand all the time. Unshakable. Even when she and my father used to go for long walks, walking ahead of me and talking in hushed tones and he would come back with tears in his eyes.

    When I was eight my mother’s annual attempt at icing the family Christmas cake was handed over to me. I’ve had enough of this lark, dear, you’re old enough now. She had started to sit down a lot. I made only marginally less of a mess than she did, but at least I didn’t cover the table, the floor, the dog with icing sugar. To be honest, it was a relief to get it out of her hands. I followed the Slater house style of snowy peaks brought up with the flat of a knife and a red ribbon. Even then I wasn’t one to rock the boat. The idea behind the wave effect of her icing was simply to hide the fact that her attempt at covering the cake in marzipan resembled nothing more than an unmade bed. Folds and lumps, creases and tears. A few patches stuck on with a bit of apricot jam.

    I knew I could have probably have flat-iced a cake to perfection, but to have done so would have hurt her feelings. So waves it was. There was also a chipped Father Christmas, complete with a jagged lump of last year’s marzipan around his feet, and the dusty bristle tree with its snowy tips of icing. I drew the line at the fluffy yellow Easter chick.

    Baking a cake for your family to share, the stirring of cherries, currants, raisins, peel and brandy, brown sugar, butter, eggs, and flour, for me the ultimate symbol of a mother’s love for her husband and kids, was reduced to something that simply has to be done. Like cleaning the loo or polishing the shoes. My mother knew nothing of putting glycerine in with the sugar to keep the icing soft, so her rock-hard cake was always the butt of jokes for the entire Christmas. My father once set about it with a hammer and chisel from the shed. So the sad, yellowing cake sat around until about the end of February, the dog giving it the occasional lick as he passed, until it was thrown, much to everyone’s relief, onto the lawn for the birds.

    Bread-and-Butter Pudding

    MY MOTHER IS buttering bread for England. The vigor with which she slathers soft yellow fat onto thinly sliced white pap is as near as she gets to the pleasure that is cooking for someone you love. Right now she has the bread knife in her hand and nothing can stop her. She always buys unwrapped, unsliced bread, a pale sandwich loaf without much of a crust, and slices it by hand.

    My mother’s way of slicing and buttering has both an ease and an awkwardness about it. She has softened the butter on the back of the Aga so that it forms a smooth wave as the butter knife is drawn across it. She spreads the butter onto the cut side of the loaf, then picks up the bread knife and takes off the buttered slice. She puts down the bread knife, picks up the butter knife, and again butters the freshly cut side of the loaf. She carries on like this till she has used three-quarters of the loaf. The rest she will use in the morning, for toast.

    The strange thing is that none of us really eats much bread and butter. It’s like some ritual of good housekeeping that my mother has to go through. As if her grandmother’s dying words had been always make sure they have enough bread and butter on the table. No one ever sees what she does with all the slices we don’t eat.

    I mention all the leftover bread and butter to Mrs. Butler, a kind, gentle woman whose daughter is in my class at school and whose back garden has a pond with newts and goldfish, crowns of rhubarb, and rows of potatoes. A house that smells of apple crumble. I visit her daughter Madeleine at lunchtime and we often walk back to school together. Mrs. Butler lets me wait while Madeleine finishes her lunch.

    Well, your mum could make bread-and-butter pudding, apple charlotte, eggy bread, or bread pudding, suggests Mrs. Butler, or she could turn them into toasted cheese sandwiches.

    I love bread-and-butter pudding. I love its layers of sweet, quivering custard, juicy raisins, and puffed, golden crust. I love the way it sings quietly in the oven; the way it wobbles on the spoon.

    You can’t smell a hug. You can’t hear a cuddle. But if you could, I reckon it would smell and sound of warm bread-and-butter pudding.

    Sherry Trifle

    MY FATHER WORE old, rust-and-chocolate checked shirts and smelled of sweetbriar tobacco and potting compost. A warm and twinkly-eyed man, the sort who would let his son snuggle up with him in an armchair and fall asleep in the folds of his shirt. You’ll have to get off now, my leg’s gone to sleep, he would grumble, and turf me off onto the rug. He would pull silly faces at every opportunity, especially when there was a camera or other children around. Sometimes they would make me giggle, but other times, like when he pulled his monkey face, they scared me so much I used to get butterflies in my stomach.

    His clothes were old and soft, which made me want to snuggle up to him even more. He hated wearing new. My father always wore old, heavy brogues and would don a tie even in his greenhouse. He read the Telegraph and Reader’s Digest. A crumpets-and-honey sort of a man with a tight little moustache. God, he had a temper though. Sometimes he would go off, crack, like a shotgun. Like when he once caught me going through my mother’s handbag, looking for barley sugars, or when my mother made a batch of twelve fairy cakes and I ate six in one go.

    My father never went to church, but said his prayers nightly kneeling by his bed, his head resting in his hands. He rarely cursed, apart from calling people silly buggers. I remember he had a series of crushes on singers. First, it was Kathy Kirby, although he once said she was a bit ritzy, and then Petula Clark. Sometimes he would buy their records and play them on Sundays after I had listened to my one and only record—a scratched forty-five of Tommy Steele singing Little White Bull. The old man was inordinately fond of his collection of female vocals. You should have seen the tears the day Alma Cogan died.

    The greenhouse was my father’s sanctuary. I was never sure whether it smelled of him or he smelled of it. In winter, before he went to bed, he would go out and light the old paraffin stove that kept his precious begonias and tomato plants alive. I remember the dark night the stove blew out and the frost got his begonias. He would spend hours down there. I once caught him in the greenhouse with his dick in his hand. He said he was just going for a pee. It’s good for the plants. It was different, bigger than it looked in the bath and he seemed to be having a bit of a struggle getting it back into his trousers.

    He had a bit of a thing about sherry trifle. That and his dreaded leftover turkey stew were the only two recipes he ever made. The turkey stew, a Boxing Day trauma for everyone concerned, varied from year to year, but the trifle had rules. He used ready-made Swiss rolls. The sort that come so tightly wrapped in cellophane you can never get them out without denting the sponge. They had to be filled with raspberry jam, never apricot because you couldn’t see the swirl of jam through the glass bowl the way you could with raspberry. There was much giggling over the sherry bottle. What is it about men and booze? They only cook twice a year but it always involves a bottle of something. Next, a tin of peaches with a little of their syrup. He was meticulous about soaking the sponge roll. First the sherry, then the syrup from the peaches tin. Then the jelly. To purists the idea of jelly in trifle is anathema. But to my father it was essential. If my father’s trifle was human it would be a clown. One of those with striped pants and a red nose. He would make bright yellow custard, Bird’s from a tin. This he smoothed over the jelly, taking an almost absurd amount of care not to let the custard run between the Swiss roll slices and the glass. A matter of honor no doubt.

    Once it was cold, the custard was covered with whipped cream, glacé cherries, and whole, blanched almonds. Never silver balls, which he thought common, or chocolate vermicelli, which he thought made it sickly. Just big fat almonds. He never toasted them, even though it would have made them taste better. In later years my stepmother was to suggest a sprinkling of multicolored hundreds and thousands. She might as well have suggested changing his daily paper to the Mirror.

    The entire Christmas stood or fell according to the noise the trifle made when the first massive, embossed spoon was lifted out. The resulting noise, a sort of squelch-fart, was like a message from God. A silent trifle was a bad omen. The louder the trifle parped, the better Christmas would be. Strangely, Dad’s sister felt the same way about jelly—making it stronger than usual just so it would make a noise that, even at her hundredth birthday tea, would make the old bird giggle.

    You wouldn’t think a man who smoked sweet, scented tobacco, grew pink begonias, and made softly-softly trifle could be scary. His tempers, his rages, his scoldings scared my mother, my brothers, the gardener, even the sweet milkman who occasionally got the order wrong. Once, when I had been caught not brushing my teeth before going to bed, his glare was so full of fire, his face so red and bloated, his hand raised so high that I pissed in my pajamas, right there on the landing outside my bedroom. For all his soft shirts and cuddles and trifles I was absolutely terrified of him.

    The Cookbook

    THE BOOKCASE DOUBLED as a drinks cabinet. Or perhaps that should be the other way around. Three glass decanters with silver labels hanging around their necks boasted Brandy, Whisky, and Port, though I had never known anything in them, not even at Christmas. Dad’s whisky came from a bottle, Dimple Haig, that he kept in a hidden cupboard at the back of the bookcase where he also kept his Canada Dry and a jar of maraschino cherries for when we all had snowballs at Christmas. The front of the drinks cabinet housed his entire collection of books.

    The family’s somewhat diminutive library had leatherette bindings and bore Reader’s Digest or The Folio Society on their spines. Most were in mint condition, and invariably condensed or abridged. Six or so of the books were kept in the cupboard at the back, with the Dimple Haig and a bottle of advocaat; a collection of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, a dog-eared Raymond Chandler, a Philip Roth, and a neat pile of National Geographics. There was also a copy of Marguerite Patten’s All Color Cookbook.

    It was a tight fit in between the wall and the back of the bookcase. Dad just opened the door and leaned in to get his whisky; it was more difficult for me to get around there, to wriggle into a position where I could squat in secret and turn the pages of the hidden books. I don’t know how Marguerite Patten would feel knowing that she was kept in the same cupboard as Portnoy’s Complaint, or that I would flip excitedly from one to the other. I hope my father never sells them. "For sale, one copy each of Marguerite Patten’s All Color Cookery and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, first edition, d/w, slightly stained."

    I don’t know what you want to look at that for, said Mum once, coming home early and catching me gazing at a photograph of Gammon Steaks with Pineapple and Cherries. It’s all very fancy, I can’t imagine who cooks like that. There was duck à l’orange and steak-and-kidney pudding, fish pie, beef Wellington and rock cakes, fruit flan and crème caramel. There was page after page of glorious photographs of stuffed eggs, sole with grapes, and a crown roast of lamb with peas and baby carrots around the edge, parsley sprigs, radish roses, cucumber curls. Day after day I would squeeze around and pore over the recipes fantasizing over Marguerite’s deviled kidneys and Spanish chicken, her prawn cocktail and sausage rolls. Just as I would spend quite a while fantasizing over Portnoy’s way with liver.

    The Lunch Box

    JOSH, MUM AND DAD’S NEW GARDENER, was cool. He had a black motorbike, a Triumph something or other, and used to bring his lunch neatly packed in a tin box. He licked his cigarette papers, tiny things with barely a pinch of tobacco in them, and rolled them into short flat cigarettes while he sat on his bike. Everyone liked Josh, Mum thought he was such a good-looking young man, as bright as a button, and Dad seemed more happy with him than he had been with the older guys who used to leave almost as soon as they had started. One was fired just because the frost got at Dad’s dahlias.

    Unlike the other gardeners, Josh used to let me turn the compost with the long-handled, two-pronged fork that no one else let me touch and empty the mower box onto the heap. He let me weed the front of the borders where we had planted daisy-faced mesembryanthemums that only came out in the sun and balls of alyssum and drifts of pink and white

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