Any fool can mind a child
The way my mother had been brought up by Granny could just as accurately be described as a keeping down. When Mum was little, Granny hired domestic help, at a time she could hardly afford it. There was a curious patch of no-money in the family history. Mum had coincided with it. Some nights Granny would crawl upstairs to bed on her hands and knees, not just because the house was old and the stairs were steep, but because she had starved herself to feed everyone else, and she was too dizzy to stand up. Only much later did Mum realise there was something perverse about Granny’s domestic arrangements, and when she did it really wounded her. Bad enough to be raised by a father who barely seemed able to see her, having eyes only for her younger brother. It was worse that her mother paid someone to come in and look after the children, freeing Granny herself to concentrate on the more important business of cleaning the house. Mum grew up in a household where there might just as well have been a motto in cross-stitch over the fireplace, reading HOUSEWORK IS A SERIOUS ENTERPRISE, and a companion piece on the opposite wall declaring ANY FOOL CAN MIND A CHILD.
Dad must have been away at the time of ‘word-bits’, but when he came back he told me the word I was looking for was ‘syllable’. It was great to have it confirmed that words had bits, and the bits had names. Proper names. And ‘syllable’ itself had three syllables, which was an extra pleasure for some reason.
Dad and Granny had a strange sort of relationship, a pact of mutual invisibility. For the most part they just walked past each other. They didn’t approve of each other, but they couldn’t seem to be bothered, either of them, to hide the fact or else to spell it out.
Granny cast a strange spell over the household, magnetising assent without lowering herself to ask for it. She didn’t hold with drinks at mealtimes. By drinks I mean ‘fluids’, she wasn’t talking specifically about alcohol. Sherry before a meal was permitted, as long as it was dry and not sweet. Granny’s was a theory about digestion: don’t dilute the gastric juices. Let them do their work. So when she came to stay everyone meekly went without.
Granny rarely cooked, but when she did it was a bit of a performance. I remember one evening when she made scrambled egg. There was a definite overtone of masterclass, despite the humbleness of the dish, and spectators seemed to be welcome.
I imagine Granny made sure that her visits coincided with the times that Dad wasn’t there, but this was one occasion when they overlapped. I have no idea how the sleeping arrangements were worked out, in that small house. Only one possibility seems thinkable, either practically or in psychological terms, and that would have been for Mum and Dad to hang by their heels from the rafters like roosting bats, while Granny took possession of the marital bed.
I know Dad and Granny were both there because I was allowed to witness the ceremony (almost the sacrament) of scrambling, and my expedition to the kitchen took a lot of planning. First Dad moved the armchair from my room to a spot in the kitchen with a suitable view. Then Mum carried me. It wasn’t a long trip, but had its hazards even so. Dad was much the stronger, of course, but he hadn’t had much practice and he lacked the necessary sense of my vulnerability. I was so immobile that I had become a little statue of myself, though I was as sensitised to pain as a violin strung with stretched filaments of nerve instead of catgut. It wasn’t just that banging my feet against the doorframe would have me jangling with agony. Even the fear of an impact would set off the same detonation in my joints. I trusted Mum to make the transfer, and she didn’t let me down.
Mum’s carrying was reliable but her lap wasn’t a suitable place for me to sit. It was too bony. Not that I really sat — my posture was closer to leaning, but even with the padding of a cushion Mum’s lap offered no comfort. That was where Dad excelled. Of course I was magnetised to his lap in any case, but I think this really was a medical necessity rather than a preference. Mum padded Dad’s lap with a single strategic cushion and then I could lean there perfectly happy while Granny got to work.
Officially Peter had recently grown out of his high chair, but on this special occasion he was wedged back into it, so that he had a sort of tennis umpire’s vantage-point.
I wouldn’t have thought there was a special implement needed for scrambling eggs, but apparently there was. ‘Don’t you have a spirtle, Laura?’ asked Granny. She made it sound like something absolutely basic, like a cooker or a bath. A spirtle turned out to be a spoon without a blade — no more than a rounded stick — used in Scotland for the proper agitation of porridge. Granny made do with a wooden spoon held upside down, so that what entered the egg mixture was indeed nothing more than a round stick, a cooking dowel.
Glossy suspension
Granny had laid the table before she started (no drinking glasses of course, our internal juices must be at their keenest), which gave us the impression that eating was imminent, but there has never been anything less like fast food than that pan of scrambled eggs. She set the flame on the stove at its lowest, and stirred indefatigably. Nothing seemed to happen, and it kept on not happening for a very long time. No curds were forming at all, as far as I could see from my perch, in the glossy suspension she stirred so constantly. Her activity seemed designed in fact to protect the contents of the pan from any changes that might be brought about by cooking. Yet the long-delayed transformation of the texture must have happened all at once, spreading in a yellow instant from a million specks of ovonucleation. Suddenly the eggs were scrambled, and yet scrambled seemed too casual a word. Granny took the pan off the heat, and ground pepper onto a saucer, then tipped it into the pan. I was relieved that we had a pepper-mill if not a spirtle, since she regarded that as essential — almost as if there was no point cooking eggs without it. Dad himself was a pepper mill fiend who ground thick specks densely over everything. His plate at mealtimes had the look of something unearthed at Pompeii.
I realise now just how rare an item was the table-top totem of a pepper-mill in a ’fifties kitchen or dining room. Mum behaved as if ours was a loaded weapon, never so much as touching it if she had the choice. Granny treated ours with grudging respect — no doubt hers was an heirloom that lived in a monogrammed case on a bed of velvet, like the pistol which it must have resembled in Mum’s mind.
It can’t have been easy for Dad and Granny to ignore this node of affinity in the matter of their shared addiction to the dried berries of Piper nigrum, but they rose to the challenge.
I was puzzled that the pepper had to be ground onto a saucer and only then scattered on food. When I asked Granny why this was, she explained that over time the steam rising from hot food would corrode the mechanism, as if it was something everyone should know from an early age. It was high time I learned.
The moistly solid savoury cream she now spooned reverently onto plates was barely palpable to the tongue. It melted there. It was barely particulate. We ate it in wondering silence. Part of Granny’s success was to have made us wait so long that she led us to a contemplative state on the far side of hunger. It was as if we’d been starved to death and then brought back from the grave for a light meal.
For once Dad ate what was put in front of him without taking his own turn with the pepper grinder. It occurs to me now that he didn’t like spicy foods or strong flavours. He liked roast meat — the ritual joint that needed a family to justify it — accompanied by potatoes and runner beans, the only green vegetable whose claims to edibility he accepted, and served with redcurrant jelly, a condiment he honoured with its own acronym (‘pass the RCJ, will you, m’dear?’). Really what Dad liked was bland food that he could grind pepper over until it almost disappeared. His pepper habit wasn’t to do with taste, it was to do with showing the food (and the cook) who was boss. Granny’s scrambled eggs, though, he ate without insisting on the usual black top-dressing.