The Cook
The imagined life of someone totally dedicated to something I really don’t understand.
I’m Sitting beside the phone. It’s big and white, with huge numbers. This is because I’m not supposed to be able to read the numbers on a normal phone. “At my age”. My daughter’s mobile number is programmed in, so that I can I just press the number one if I think I am going to die. Not capable of dialling a number and speaking to anybody. “At my age”. But I do, sometimes. I am a bit scared of her, my eldest daughter, of what she might do to me. Now she is in the house, she could have me put in a home. She would I think. Does she check on the calls I make?
They have gone out for the weekly shop, her and the husband. Will they go in to the Kings Arms for a drink? Will they find out? They might just find out. Margaret next door says I should tell them, but I can’t, not yet. Perhaps I want them to find out by accident. Perhaps I want all those people, their friends, people I don’t know mostly to turn up on the day and find there is nothing doing. Nothing, because I have cancelled the booking for my eightieth birthday celebration. I used the White phone. It was quite easy.
Celebration. Celebration. Catered for, at a Hotel. No. So here I sit, upright in the invalid chair with a flask of tea and some ginger biscuits, worrying. Margaret is right, I should tell them, but it is a bit exciting too, waiting to see if they find out, waiting to see how angry she’ll be. Yes, a bit of excitement. I don’t get much of that “at my age”.
Is it that excitement that brings my own mother into my mind so clear now? I was afraid of her too, my mother. Why can I never picture her smiling? She had a hard life but she made it harder, hating, despising, unbending. Stiff as that brass poker in the grate there. No, to tell the truth it’s these damn ginger biscuits. I am ten, eleven maybe, going to the seaside on the Sunday School outing. Me. Going to Whitley Bay. My cousins went to Whitley Bay. Not me. I couldn’t ever be spared. Too many errands to run. All the fault of my father of course; my blind father, hated and despised. Everything had to be his fault.
So this was my big treat. It was hot, so hot the sand almost burned my feet when I ran out of the icy cold sea. When it was time to eat our picnics I opened my brown paper bag to find a lemonade bottle filled with tap water and half a packet of ginger biscuits. Ginger biscuits. Can you think of anything worse to give a child on a hot summer day?
Not my earliest memory of food. Always scarce. My father, unfit for military service, never went to the war, the Great War they call it. Why? But the dust from the cordite in the munitions factory where they made him work, did just as much damage to his poor eyes as the Germans could have done with their gas. I only remember him making baskets, that was what they did then, in workshops, set up for the war wounded. At least they were there, the workshops, but I don’t suppose baskets brought in much. My mother must have worked. I can’t remember.
Food to eat had to be clutched at, scraped around for. When I was five years old I was being sent early in the morning down to the docks. Where we lived you could see the tops of the ships going up the Tyne, above the roofs of the little terraces, like they were strolling up the street. Not that anybody strolled on Tyneside then. Five years old, cold, on cobbled streets. I did have shoes though, not all children did. I remember the shoes, they had to be boys shoes, because she said they would last longer. I can understand that now, logical, but I didn’t understand it then. Being made to look clumsy and ugly. I just thought she did it for spite. Down to the dockside then to scrape for food that was going cheap or even better, free, cracked and broken eggs, cheap, bacon with maggots moving in it, even cheaper. Cooked for my father with the maggots jumping in the hot fat, well, he wouldn’t see them would he? Different when Jim came home, worshipped Jim, the eldest son, in his Marines uniform. The best that could be got then. Everything for Jim. Scraped up scraps for my unseeing father, and unseen me.
She got rid of me, as soon as she could. I even had a new pair of shoes for the journey, boys shoes of course. Twelve years old on a train, fare paid by the people I was going to work for. Some sort of Toffs, a Guards officer, in London, the other end of the world. Alone, with new shoes that rubbed my heels. To be a kitchen maid. The lowest of the low.
Mostly I remember that time as cold, my hands always cold, the skin dry and scaly, from being in water and using rough soap to scrub and clean. For all that it was better than home. I worried all the time about my father, but I liked the other girls, and it wasa good house. We were well fed. And I think people took to me, though I couldn’t join in much with the others in my bit of time off because I sent nearly all of my wages home. Strange to think of it now, but it never occurred to me to keep the money for myself. On my day off I walked the streets mostly, on my own. Streets full of tall buildings, even taller than the ships on the Tyne. I would go into churches for a bit of warmth and shelter, and sometimes there was music you could sit and listen to. Once, In Westminster Cathedral, Catholic that was, but warmer than the Abbey I heard The Messiah. Knocked me for six that.
Then there was the cook. What an old cow she was. Terrified everybody. I don’t think even the Colonel would have had the nerve to stand up to her for all his scarlet uniform and his bearskin. No, I don’t think so. But I watched her, what she couldn’t do with food was nobody’s business. Magical things, between the shouting and the screaming. Her hands were magic, and I watched her and took it all in, this new knowledge, gobbling it up with my hungry, greedy mind. And it was love, yes it was a whole new kind of love in my life.
I thought I heard a car pulling up, but it’s just someone turning in the lane end. I need a drink of the tea, calm me down from all these thoughts of food. But not a ginger biscuit, no. They know what they can do with their bloody ginger biscuits.
I was only nineteen when I became head cook at Clare Hall. His lordship liked his food, and he didn’t have to worry about fitting into a smart, tight uniform. Baggy old tweeds, muddy mac and boots, that was his style. Nothing was safe I’d say. Birds, animals, every day out with the gun, and all the poor little floppy corpses ended up in my kitchen. It was a job to keep up with him. Game pies, steamed puddings, huge luscious meals, and money no object. Sort of food you’re not supposed to eat any more. But I had the talent for it, and the temper too if the truth be told. Do you have the temper before you take on the job, or does it come after? I never took it out on the other staff though, I’d seen enough of that. It was things mostly. I would chuck the plates and pans around fairish. Would still if I had the strength!
If my memory of London is cold, I suppose my memory of the country would be mud. Muddy boots, muddy passageways, slopping about in mud everywhere. I had spent all my life in streets. Never got the hang of mud! Thank God it was not me doing the cleaning and scrubbing anymore. Then there is another memory, the rickety old greengrocer’s van that came every week. I had to go out to it in person to choose my produce didn’t I? I knew there was a bit of nudging and winking behind my back though. Because of the greengrocer, Joe. Handsome, bachelor, blue eyed Joe. And goodness knows why but I think he took to me right from the start, Me. And he married me.
Another war came, hard times, and three children. This one, a boy and then the little girl, long after and unexpected. Hard times, but I did my best with what we had, and what he could grow, or kill without getting caught. A different kind of love, making poor things go round too many mouths, and still taste good, but love all the same. Rabbits we ate a lot of. I could skin a rabbit in my sleep. Nothing to turn your nose up at. Haven’t had rabbit for years. Can’t remember the last time I had rabbit.
Thirty three years married we were, but he died. They do, Men. I have been on my own now for twenty five. I find it hard to forgive him for that. Yes.
Children grow up and then there’s nobody to cook for. Dinner and lunch parties now and then, wedding cakes, birthday cakes, cooking for the farmers market, and for the old folks do’s. ‘You should be eating it mother, not cooking it’, my eldest says. “At your age.” Do you know she can even make the word ‘mother’ sound like a criticism.
All my grandchildren are boys, made me sad that. No hope, I thought, of passing on the magic and the love. But one of my grandsons does have the feel for it, my youngest’s boy. The love is there – not like his mother, she’d be the first to admit it. It’s him that’s egged me on really. He comes to sit with me when they go off to their Rotary Club meetings, and for a while now we have been making party food, “cooking up a storm” he says. Whatever that means. He makes me laugh.
Roasting a turkey, making vol au vents, sausage rolls, all sorts of party bits,a birthday cake. I’ve given him the instruction and there he is busy with it all, frowning, completely taken up with it, with his crimson hair and his earring. He doesn’t chuck the plates when things go wrong, he swears like a trooper, worse than him on the tele. Wish I could have done that – would have saved me a fair bit of crockery over the years! Six foot odd he is with great hands and feet like hams. And the confidence in him. He doesn’t just stick to what I tell him. Took me years to get that confidence, but he’s got it.
He has hidden everything away in his mother’s big chest freezer in their garage, and so far she hasn’t twigged. She wouldn’t unless it was in a microwave packet. So we’re nearly there. He has printed out new invitations, very smart on his computer, inviting everyone to my youngest’s house, though we haven’t told her yet, I wonder when we should do that?
We’ve set a date for the telling. He’s made me promise, if they don’t find out, to do it this weekend. He’ll be here he says. And I will have my celebration of my eighty years. Prepared by him and me. With love.