During the ‘Misery Years’ my friend Wilma and I lived in a series of grim Oxford bedsits. The first was the spare back bedroom of a neurotic divorcee in Blackbird Leys. It had barely separated twin divans, just enough space between these and the walls to walk round in single file, and pink nylon sheets that she changed for us once a week. She monitored our bedtimes, our friends, and our use of both the shower and the washing machine. It was like having another, fussier mother with an obsession for rotas. As a special concession she let us use the dining room as our private sitting room as long as every Sunday we ate lunch together. We took turns each at preparing the lunch. Hers, without any flair or deviation, every other week, was chicken cooked in Campbell’s condensed chicken soup, served with rice, a dish of which she was unjustifiably proud. Memory, mercifully, escapes me about our offerings. Aged 17, our culinary repertoire revolved around beans on toast with cheese melted on top as a gourmet twist, and Swan Vesta curries.
We were extremely thin.
Eventually we left the quasi-home comforts of our slippery, pastel-pink bedroom and moved into a shared house on the Cowley Road. Here we lived with Dave, a trainee merchant banker with Coutts who had the hygiene, and, poor chap, the skin of a warthog, and Mike, a handsome, floppy-haired, posh boy doing Estate Management at the Polytechnic (long before it asserted itself as Oxford Brookes University) in preparation for inheriting the family pile in Suffolk. Mike had a braying, blonde girlfriend called Imogen. Dave didn’t.
The flat was conveniently situated above an ‘offie’ and boasted a roof terrace, or at least aforementioned off licence’s roof coated with asphalt which smelled of tar when warmed by England’s three days of summer, and strung with low hanging cables which offered the twin dangers of garrotting with electrocution to the unwitting sunbather. Here our cooking reached new lows. Chicken in Condensed soup became a staple when we were really pushing the boat out – and sometimes - tinned soggy pastry over a layer of gravy and gristle; Corned beef hash, hash being the operative word; and finally, mince four ways . These would be; boiled, straight up with onions, Bisto and carrots, mash on the side – the Scottish classic – mince and tatties. The same again but with mash on top turned it into Shepherd’s pie. A dollop of tomato puree and the exotic addition of garlic made it Spaghetti Bolognese with a bad Italian accent, or – for a little walk down Mexico way - with a teaspoon of chilli powder it was Chilli con Carne. I’d like to say we also added kidney beans, but to two teenagers from the clogged up fat-ridden heart of Scotland, beans really did mean Heinz. Autheniticity was as foreign a concept to us as soap was to Dave.
Eventually, I moved to a mansion in North Oxford with my boyfriend, who didn’t like onions or garlic, thereby removing two of the major food groups from my rota of recipes leaving me with only Oxo cubes. The house was phenomenal – with a lawn that went on as far as Woodstock and not one, but two kitchens in which the quasi landlady – Issy, whose parents had rented this amazing place for her while she finished secretarial college, prepared massive Sunday feasts for friends with names like Tamsin and Piers who arrived in sports cars or daddy’s borrowed Bentley. That was, officially, the first time I saw a broad bean in its natural casing and realised that they didn’t spring fully forth slathered in tomato sauce once liberated by can opener, and that there really were, at the very least, 57 different varieties. It was also the first time I came across the rich. Of the two, beans were the easier to swallow.
We were extremely thin.
Eventually we left the quasi-home comforts of our slippery, pastel-pink bedroom and moved into a shared house on the Cowley Road. Here we lived with Dave, a trainee merchant banker with Coutts who had the hygiene, and, poor chap, the skin of a warthog, and Mike, a handsome, floppy-haired, posh boy doing Estate Management at the Polytechnic (long before it asserted itself as Oxford Brookes University) in preparation for inheriting the family pile in Suffolk. Mike had a braying, blonde girlfriend called Imogen. Dave didn’t.
The flat was conveniently situated above an ‘offie’ and boasted a roof terrace, or at least aforementioned off licence’s roof coated with asphalt which smelled of tar when warmed by England’s three days of summer, and strung with low hanging cables which offered the twin dangers of garrotting with electrocution to the unwitting sunbather. Here our cooking reached new lows. Chicken in Condensed soup became a staple when we were really pushing the boat out – and sometimes - tinned soggy pastry over a layer of gravy and gristle; Corned beef hash, hash being the operative word; and finally, mince four ways . These would be; boiled, straight up with onions, Bisto and carrots, mash on the side – the Scottish classic – mince and tatties. The same again but with mash on top turned it into Shepherd’s pie. A dollop of tomato puree and the exotic addition of garlic made it Spaghetti Bolognese with a bad Italian accent, or – for a little walk down Mexico way - with a teaspoon of chilli powder it was Chilli con Carne. I’d like to say we also added kidney beans, but to two teenagers from the clogged up fat-ridden heart of Scotland, beans really did mean Heinz. Autheniticity was as foreign a concept to us as soap was to Dave.
Eventually, I moved to a mansion in North Oxford with my boyfriend, who didn’t like onions or garlic, thereby removing two of the major food groups from my rota of recipes leaving me with only Oxo cubes. The house was phenomenal – with a lawn that went on as far as Woodstock and not one, but two kitchens in which the quasi landlady – Issy, whose parents had rented this amazing place for her while she finished secretarial college, prepared massive Sunday feasts for friends with names like Tamsin and Piers who arrived in sports cars or daddy’s borrowed Bentley. That was, officially, the first time I saw a broad bean in its natural casing and realised that they didn’t spring fully forth slathered in tomato sauce once liberated by can opener, and that there really were, at the very least, 57 different varieties. It was also the first time I came across the rich. Of the two, beans were the easier to swallow.
Okay, I know, I’m making it sound like I grew up in a wasteland. Green grocers did exist in Scotland and, in deference to their name, they did sell the occasional bit of greenery. Cabbages were big, literally and figuratively. Sprouts were wizened and gnobbly, like the harvested testicles from a herd of small Martians. Lettuces, which enjoyed a whole month of popularity between mid July and mid August when the entire population of Scotland took it in turns to go and shiver in a caravan somewhere near a polar sea, were limper than a Larry Grayson handshake, and peas. I think. I’m not sure I ever saw them in a shop. However, my father, who was a keen gardener, did string and stake these out in regimented lines like Christians on the cross after a Roman purge, but I only ever remember eating them marrowfatted up from a tin. Greengrocers also did a nice line in turnips but those were orange, and swedes which weren’t. As I grew more adventurous with my cooking, on a visit home I decided to introduce my mother to the delights of Ways with Mince No 3 – spag bog. My mother’s previous knowledge of all things pasta had also been misinformed by Heinz so the notion of boiling noodles in the manner usually reserved for meat, was a huge novelty.
Where other parts of the country ‘shopped’, we Scots ‘did the messages’ so ‘going for a message’ did not mean riding romantically cross-country with a wax-sealed missive strapped to your chest in a leather sack, but your father sending you to the corner shop for a pint of milk and 10 Embassy Regal (nobody cared about selling cigarettes to children, indeed packs were broken up into ‘singles’ so that the under age could afford them). So in preparation for my equivalent of Babette’s Feast, my mother donned her astrakhan coat, set her Fair Isle beret at a jaunty angle, hooked her message bag over her arm like a Matador’s cape and we set forth for the high street.
Picture rain. Picture low lying cloud the colour of tumble-dryer fluff. Picture a slick black ribbon of tarmac running through the middle of nowhere separated by dashed white tear lines, a handful of metal-shuttered lock-ups on either side,; a grass triangle with a small redbrick building in the middle that, on closer inspection, appears to be public toilets and you’ve conjured up the picture postcard of unlovely Fallowhill that the newsagent had been selling since 1957. The postcard though was hand-tinted in old-lady mauve, rouge pink and eye-shadow blue, while the real-life vista was unrelentingly gray. And there wasn’t much of a hill either, more of a gentle incline.
Lottie’s, where we went for three pounds of onion and a green pepper was, unfortunately, right next door to the hairdresser’s where the eponymous owner – Pauline - was often to be found idling near the door, fag in one hand, Daily Record in the other. I was afraid of Pauline and her steel comb which had mercilessly raked my skull leaving no tangle, of which there were many, untagged. For Gala Days and weddings had torturously set my unruly hair in rollers before cooking me for half an hour under a hood-dryer while my mother talked about me in the third person, loudly, over the roar of the hot air. ‘Too skinny, too picky, too curly, too cheeky, too lanky,’ she’d say, counting off my shortcomings to rosary to the nodding priest Pauline, her pitiless confessor. The memory of the time I’d been pilloried in front of five stern-faced matrons, all with identical perms, after I’d unwisely trimmed my own fringe with nail scissors still made my ears burn with shame. Then I had been ten and tall and gawky with an assymetrical cow’s lick and hair that stuck out like the rays of the sun in a kid's drawing. Now it was 1976 and I was no less thin but a great deal taller, helped by the fashion for platform shoes, and the proud owner of a bad feather which the mist humidified into a froth of frizz that danced in the wind like a sea anenome in a strong current. My fringe flicked up like a tick against the right answer to a very big question. There was no way I wanted to subject myself to the scrutiny of Pauline who still back-combed for Britain and brandished a can of hairspray as though it was pepper spray and the client a man with a knife huddling in a dark alley.
Lottie wasn’t much better with her insistence on treating me like a boy through much of my childhood.
‘A vot?’ she asked after the onions had been tipped, dirt and all, from the scales straight into my mother’s shopping bag. Lottie still retained her German accent despite several decades in the central Lowlands that, during the war, had included a spell in an internment camp in Fife, something that made her pronouncements sound harsher than they were meant, turning a statement such as ‘fine day’ into an indignant accusation.
‘A green pepper,’ I repeated, less confident now than my original, look at me I’ve lived in England for a year and I’m now an international gourmet, self. Anyone would have thought I’d asked for a pair of satin dance shoes.
‘Ach, son, ve dinnae ‘ave any pepper. Try the Co-op,’ she snapped, screwing up her perpetually cross chipmunk face, as creased as a cabbage,with something akin to pity for a person, so divorced from the real life that they didn’t know that you couldnae buy pepper in a greengrocers. And I hadn’t missed the ‘son’ bit either. I mean, really, with hair half-way down my bag, breasts padded out by the wonder of Playtex and more jewellery than an Indian bride, what did she think – that I was Fallowhill’s first cross dresser?
My mother bought five pounds of compensatory potatoes, and we crossed the street to the Co-op, recently rehoused from a small shop with a counter behind which a person fetched and carried the items you reeled off from a list. Its new incarnation was in an ugly seventies concrete box, the kind you use to detain suspected terrorists in Guantamano Bay, with aisles wide enough to dance an Eightsome Reel, and a row of tills, all empty, but for the one womaned by Cissie McLusky, a girl I’d gone to school with. She looked exactly like her mother, the comparison easy to make since Mrs McLusky senior was on the fag-counter behind her with an identical hair-do, a Pauline special, similar ovoid, dark-framed glasses, and a twin set. Cissie’s was heather blue, her mother’s salmon pink. Of the two, the mother looked the younger.
We exchanged pleasantries.
‘Aye Mari,’ Aye Mrs McGee.’
‘Aye Jean,’ This called across the shop floor from Mrs McLusky to my mother.
‘Aye Doreen, Aye Cissie.’
‘Aye Charlie,’ To the man on the meat counter.
‘Aye Jean,’
Each ‘aye’ was accompanied by sort of head nod that usually accompanies a wink, but there was no winking. It was like they had been a vote and everyone was in agreement.
‘Been away Mari?’ asked Cissie as she rang up my purchases, looking each one over as she moved them out of the wire basket into my mother’s shopper: A pound of mince, a tin of tomatoes, a jar of Schwartz garlic powder (accompanied by a sniff), a packet of spaghetti, and finally – the holy grail – a box of dried Green Pepper flakes.’
I’d also wanted Basil – which even I still thought only came in a jar from the Herb & Spice aisle in the supermarket, but I knew my limitations and didn’t even bother to ask.’ The only Basil anyone had ever heard of in Fallowhill owned a hotel in Torquay.
I told Cissie I was now living in Oxford as I peeled a Toytown Scottish fiver out of my wallet which it was almost impossible to convince anyone in England was perfectly legal currency.
‘Is that right? Thought Ah hadnae seen you for a while.’ I’m not sure she knew or cared where Oxford was, especially if living there encouraged the use of such outlandish ingredients. To be frank, I was surprised they even stocked garlic in Fallowhill when the condiment of choice was salt, salt with brown sauce, or salt with malt vinegar., and even the newly opened Chinese take-away ‘Aye, Taiwan Hoose, can a help you?’ regularly asked their customers ‘do ye want chips wi that?’
Back home in the temple to Formica that was my mother’s kitchen, I fried the onion (in dripping – Olive Oil was to be warmed for sore ears), fried the mince, added the tinned tomatoes,(are ye sure ye dinnae want a wee bit of Bisto?) garlic powder and a string of tomato puree, sprinkled in the dried green pepper (without bothering to rehydrate them) and presented the modified mince to my parents on a coil of slightly too soft spaghetti. Two thousand kilometers away there was a collective sharp gasp of horror right down to the heel of the Italian boot;around the G-Plan dining table of Bide-a-While, at 29 Sheep House Brae (again, more of a slope), there was similar dismay.
Reader. I knew no better.
Neither did my parents but nevertheless they remained unimpressed. After they’d drowned it in salt, chased the noodles round the plate with a knife and fork in dogged silence, until the plate was mercifully empty, followed by the sigh, less of satisfaction, than of relief.
Coffee was served.
Mugs. My mother’s emblazoned with the name of a proprietary cough medicine – a freebie from a parmaceutical rep at the chemist where she worked; my father’s celebrating the 10th Anniversary of a local builders’ merchants, mellifluously called Scobie Bros and locally knows as ‘scabbies’, and me with smoked glass pyrex. The coffee, a level teaspoon of Co-op instant, sweetened with Saccharine and accompanied by a plate of Kit-Kats, Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers, and Gypsy Creams.
And then in the first of what was to be an oft repeated ritual whenever I cooked for my parents over the next twenty five years, my mother snapped open the two metal teeth of her handbag, rummaged around, and produced the Scottish equivalent of after-dinner mints; a packet of Rennies.
This happened even after I could make and bottle my own tomato sauce from dad’s greenhouse offerings; even when I made my own pasta with real, home-grown basil embossed into the dough which was then hung over the clothes horse to dry; and even when I layered it up with a proper ragu made with red wine and cubes of correctly pronounced pancetta, alternated this with balsamella, and topped it with pecorino. It happened if I made an omelette, a stew, a birthday cake or a round of cheese and toast. Whether it was an offering from Delia, Marcella Hazan, Claudia Rodin or Colman Andrews, everything was covered in salt and the second the fork went down, the Rennie’s were passed round the table with resigned acceptance.
The message was clear. Anything from a chip pan cooked in lard that contained 80 percent animal fat; anything with margarine, processed cheese, or made by Mars; anything that came shrink-wrapped in plastic with a polystyrene bum, or that could be transferred from supermarket to deep freeze – that was all fine. But my food? Well, that was indigestible…
My father and mother both died in the nineties. After they retired, they transplanted themselves from Scotland to England and subjected themselves to weekly lunches in the London house where I’ve lived, first with my husband and four children, and now alone, for the last 26 years. Now I flick through Peter Gordon or Jamie and wonder what to cook for my vegetarian boyfriend who would, quite frankly, eat a sock if it contained no animal protein, was coated in breadcrumbs and served with chilli sauce. I make far too much food, unable to come to grips with portion control for only two people. I fill the fridge with the snap-lock tupperware which won't fit into the already over-flowing freezer, and then I look at the many empty chairs round the many empty tables in the many, mostly empty, rooms in my house and feel a deep, sharp, sad pang of nostalgia for all the people who used to fill them.
And I miss the Rennies.
