Where Did It All Go Right? (21 page)

Food and drink played a small but significant part in this five-day Gallic odyssey, beginning when we reached our destination,
le colonie vacances
in drizzly Quiberville (it’s not in my current Philips atlas – although there is a Thiberville in the approximate region; perhaps I misheard the teachers).
Le colonie
was an unlovely halfway house between school and campsite, with dormitories and washrooms. Anyway, they gave us all a bowl of tea. A bowl. Of tea. Why, was there a cupmakers’ strike? (After all, those French really know how to do industrial action.) I reckoned it was a practical joke this phoney tradition, foisted upon English visitors by the staff of
le colonie
to throw us on arrival and make us think all tea was drunk this way
en France
. I mean, isn’t a bowl of tea Chinese? We didn’t argue at the time of course. If they’d fed us bratwurst and Welsh rarebit we’d have accepted it as the French way of things and sung ‘Frère Jacques’.

I have no record of the meals we ate with our spurious
bols de thé
but I remember well the school dinner we had in Dieppe. As a means of getting our hands culturally dirty, we spent the day at a French school, highlight of which was finding out what their dinners were like. ‘Nicer than ours!’ would be the clichéd response, but they weren’t really. I’m afraid I described the food as ‘gob’ in my diary. The dessert was especially curious: a plain yogurt
⁹
which you mixed with sugar. It would have been alright without the yogurt.

On the Wednesday I bought what I described as a ‘French Cornetto’ from the village, and on a day trip to Paris I ate a rock-hard baguette with cheese and ham by the Seine, though I was too shallow to appreciate the romance of the situation. I did buy a French stick from a market in Dieppe to take home (
Je voudrais une baguette s’il vous plais
), but my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted Angel Delight and Dream Topping, with perhaps a little sugar mixed in, just to show how European I was.

It took me three days of regular Northampton eating to remove the taste of that snail though. We were served
escargot
for our evening meal on the final day – mere hours before a coach ride and a Channel night crossing, more proof that sadists were at work here. ‘They were vomit,’ reads the review in my diary, and they were. But it wasn’t the gristly little knuckle on a pin that tasted so foul and foreign to me, it was the
garlic
the snails were swimming in. I had never eaten garlic before. I was 13 years old.

(That’s three brand new taste sensations in the space of a week: a mollusc, a pungent bulb, and a crystalline orange powder of laboratorial origin.)

It is fair to say that throughout the Seventies (and even into the Eighties) the Collins family enjoyed whatever the opposite of a cosmopolitan diet is. (Monopolitan?) No foreign holidays to broaden our culinary tastes, and Fanny Craddock was not much help.

Writing of our adventure-free tastes reminds me of the story a music industry friend of mine called Phill used to tell about his infamous dad – a conservative sort – visiting him at his first flat and refusing a cup of tea because Phill only had Earl Grey. ‘I haven’t got time for experiments,’ he said. That should have been the Collins family motto.

There may have been no rice in our house, but then nor was there any Eastern cuisine to demand it. No curries, not even a packet Vesta with curly crisps, not even super-mild like the stew-with-curry-powder version we
very
occasionally got at school with sultanas in (school food was always essentially meat in gravy, whatever they chalked up on the board – the first hot meal I ever ate at school was ‘goulash’: meat in gravy). There was no pasta in Mum’s cupboard, unless you over-generously count the wheaten slop in tomato sauce canned by Heinz. Herbs and spices? The white pepper shaker was only there for symmetry.

I tried my first ever rice while walking home from town with Hayley Mayo,
¹⁰
Anita Barker and Chris Thompson in the summer
of
’78 (about a fortnight after getting back from Quiberville/Thiberville). Chris had bought a one-person Chinese takeaway, which we were invited to share, a decidedly tame dish but no doubt the most exotic thing you could buy on the Wellingborough Road in 1978: sauceless chicken in egg-fried rice. I took a few slickened fingerfuls from the foil tray and it neither converted me to Asian cuisine nor made me sick on the pavement. There were, I decided, easier ways to get at meat.

Neatly enough, the four of us had been on a double-date to see
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
at the ABC, in which electrical engineer Roy Neary makes contact with extraterrestrials and is whisked to another galaxy. A similar thing had happened to me: I had eaten my first ever ‘Chinky’ – as you were still allowed to call them in 1978 – and it had transported me to another world.

I ate my first-ever pasta at my friend Paul Bush’s house, around the same time. (His was the first ever stepdad I’d encountered too. So many firsts.) I was pre-warned. Paul’s mum had asked me if I liked spaghetti and I’d said yes, assuming she meant the real stuff, Heinz, out of a can. She meant this long, white Italian stuff I’d seen only in that clip from
The Lady and the Tramp
. Now it’s stressful enough eating at someone else’s table, especially when they all sit down together, even on weekdays (strict!). But to be served Spaghetti Bolognese – an Advanced Eating dish at the best of times – when I’d never seen any in 3D before; this was sheer torture.

I left almost half of it; I admitted defeat, having done my best to ape the practised spooling and sucking of Paul’s family. What crazy Bohemian people they clearly were. (I hated leaving food on my plate. It was not the done thing. If I did it at home, Mum would say, ‘Your eyes are bigger than your belly,’ scrape my plate on to Dad’s and I would be a pariah.
¹¹
) I’m sure Paul and his folks worked out that I was a pasta novice.

It’s a rite of gastronomic passage we must constantly repeat,
ordering
one thing and getting another.
¹²
So while I cautiously applaud my parents for allowing me to eat
exactly what I wanted
, it wasn’t exactly preparing me for the world, was it?
¹³

Here’s a dinner table conversation from March 1983:

Dad
[to Simon]: What’s in fruit cocktail that you don’t like?

Simon
: Fruit.
¹⁴

You see, that’s what they were up against. They had created a monster with their non-interventionist food policy. Our relationship with food was broadly emblematic of our relationship with Mum and Dad: based on love, leavened by practicality, and governed by a selective discipline. By and large, we ate when we were told, at the table, with knife
and
fork, never on our laps in front of the TV, and
we
cleared our plates. We had a lolly from the ice-cream van only when it was decreed, and two biscuits between meals with a drink of squash, but
no more than two
. Mum didn’t put the packet out, and we would never help ourselves from the cupboard.

However, within that rigid framework, we seem to have been the masters of our own diet.

The Alpine lorry brought with it a tantalising taste of autonomy, just like the Freedom Train imagined by poet Langston Hughes.
¹⁵
Other lorries had literally come and gone – the coal lorry, the vegetable lorry (made redundant by central heating and cars) – but the Alpine lorry was a signifier of modernisation, not a victim. Alpine, based I understand in Sunderland, made fizzy drinks in hefty, family-size glass bottles (these were anything but fun size; they were serious). They delivered them to your door like ill-health milk, and they took your empties away. It was the mid-Seventies so having screw-cap bottles of pop around the house was
ne rigueur
(Nan Collins sometimes had a bottle of orange Corona in, but nans do soft things like that). My childhood drink was squash, lemon or orange, with an occasional mania for Ribena (mixed strong and dark in the glass). I was never a milk-drinker – my teeth stand testament to that – but that was because an early experience with the skin that forms on hot milk had put me off it.

So, our family signed up to the Alpine deal and every week the lorry would bring brightly coloured carbonates – cherryade and limeade being my big faves – which would then ‘live’ behind the kitchen door. (No room in the fridge for these big boys.) It was risky, but we did sometimes sneak a glug of fizzy out of the bottle – a forbidden act twice over (you don’t know where that bottle’s
been
!) – thus breaking down the walls of parental control.

It was the Soda Stream that put Alpine out of business, and Mum back in control of pop consumption. She and Dad’s resistance was finally broken by the purse-friendly prospect of cheap DIY fizzy drinks (an endless stream in fact), and as if to prove them
right
we consumed no end of that sickly syrup with metallic-tasting self-carbonated water in it (especially the ‘cola’, which tasted so unlike Coca-Cola it was like discovering a brand new drink). It was of course virtually impossible, with all that clanking and shooshing, to sneak under the radar and make Soda Streams without Mum’s blessing.

Once, as a much smaller boy, I’d hidden behind the settee (that’s how small) at Nan Collins’s house and eaten a whole packet of Jaffa Cakes. Mind you, these were the first Jaffa Cakes I’d ever seen and I treated them as if they might also be my last. Unbelievably, I was neither physically sick nor physically reprimanded, but I never ate cakes or biscuits without signed permission ever again.

Kids today (not them again!) don’t eat, they graze. They chew the crud, steadily, round the clock, with an access-all-areas pass to the larder, eating sweets between sweets. It doesn’t
spoil
their appetite, like our parents always warned us it would (you’ll
spoil
your dinner), as child hunger doesn’t work the way it used to. Kids don’t work up an appetite, they have a continuous need for sustenance that ebbs and flows but never switches off – which is presumably why parents have stopped trying to control the food. Instead, a running buffet of sweets, crisps and biscuits is laid on, 24 hours a day (cupboard doors will be the next thing to go), and mealtimes involve the blasé moving around of items on a plate until it’s time to get down and return to the games console.

I had a Winnie the Pooh lampshade in my bedroom when I was very young and I began to obsess over it, as you do. After hours of lateral thinking, I worked out that I could copy the familiar Disney characters on to paper and recreate all the colours needed to fill them in using … foodstuffs. The brown of Owl could be made using Marmite, the orange of Pooh using marmalade, the pale yellow of Rabbit with lemon curd, and so on. I’d love to be able to tell you why I wished to do this thing, this edible painting, but all I can say is, the very act of discovering that I
could
was enough of a reason to have a go.

I’m sad to say, having plucked up the courage to ask Mum if she had all the ingestible pigments required (she did) I then chick
ened
out. She asked me why I wanted them (was it for school?) and I said it doesn’t matter. Pity. I could have made a profound statement about the links between processed food, Disney characters and pester power with my condiment art.

The irony is, if Mum had spread either Marmite or marmalade on a piece of bread for me, I would have refused to eat it. (Didn’t
like
Marmite, didn’t
like
marmalade.) Smear them on to a sheet of paper, no problem, but try them?

Don’t play with it, they would say – but what else were we supposed to do with toy food? If it didn’t have a face on, it was shaped like letters of the alphabet or zoo animals. Even the relatively grown-up tomato ketchup was, in our house, indulgently decanted into a roadside-caff squirter in the shape of a tomato. This stuff should have been found in the Kays catalogue under ‘jokes and novelties’.
¹⁶

My long epicurean journey from bib to enlightenment was thus free of obstacles. I ate nice things, and when I was presented with something green or simply bland, like the occasional frond of Seventies lettuce for Sunday tea or a bowl of Ready-Brek in winter, I smothered it – the former with salad cream, the latter with treacle. If I can’t see it (or taste it), it can’t hurt me.

Weetabix was a classic case: an adult cereal which Mum ate exclusively (a
surreal
, then, if we adopt her unique pronunciation). But we became frustrated at the leisurely rate with which she got through them, because Weetabix gave away premium gifts (always flat and card-based, so that they fitted in the box, but highly collectable, like
Asterix
characters,
Star Trek
or
Dr Who
). In order to speed up turnaround and increase productivity, Simon and I valiantly began to eat
Weetabix
ourselves. It was vile. No, worse than that, it was boring, like eating sawdust bricks. There was only one thing for it: layer an inch of sugar on top of each ‘bix’ and drown in milk, creating a sweet soggy mulch which could at least be dispatched quickly.

And that, when it comes to the crunch, is how we regarded food: as a means to an end. Firsts were a way of getting at afters; savoury food a mere underlay for ketchup; meat a way of melting margarine; meals something you ate in order to get biscuits in between.

Just to prove that we did have a soul, some cereals were rejected as too unpleasant to contemplate, even for gifts: Shredded Wheat, Shreddies, Golden Nuggets,
¹⁷
Sugar Stars (they had Sweep on the front) and Puffa Puffa Rice (without doubt the finest source of plastic toys in the land but virtually inedible, like sunset yellow pellets). But we had a crack at them all, even the surreal cereals, at least once. If only some bright spark had thought of putting gifts in with vegetables.

* * *

Breakfast was a ritual meal, in that all five of us ate it at the same time, every single day – although ‘getting ready for school’ allowed you to leave the table at any time. Porridge made with hot milk in winter (central heating for kids), cereals in summer, and toast with the crusts cut off, I’m rather mortified to recount. (If we were lucky, at weekends Dad would cut our toast into the shape of a house, which sure made it taste nice.)