Mum would put a Mars Bar in the ’fridge to chill, and then cut it into thin slices. That worked pretty well. It wooed me. I could usually manage two or three of those little slices, and the daintiness of the presentation was a pleasure in itself — its elfin picnic aspect. Or its laboratory overtone, I suppose. Mum made meticulous cross-sections of those Mars bars as if she was a lab assistant preparing slides for the microscope. She even took the trouble to chill the saucer she served it on, so that the slices didn’t warm up too quickly, and lose their satisfying firmness of texture before they entered the cavern of my mouth.
Mum was enough of a traditional housewife to bake cakes, but I took no notice of them. They all went down Dad’s throat. I loved to eat the scrapings from the bowl, but I set my face against the finished cakes. Cakes were fine until they went into the oven, as far as I was concerned, and then they were spoiled for good, done for.
Theory of eating
I had pretty much given up on the practice of eating, but Mum didn’t stop educating me in the theory. She explained that the correct and best way of eating, which didn’t apply to me for the time being because of my hands and so on, was to sum up the whole meal in each mouthful. So: suppose I was going to eat 1) Sausage, 2) Yorkshire Pudding, 3) Roast Potato, 4) Garden Peas and 5) Gravy, first I would have to survey my plateful, assessing the elements at my disposal. The gentle art of eating started with the setting aside of a building area on the plate. This was why it was never correct to fill a guest’s entire plate. Although it would not actually be wrong to assign the centre of the plate for this job, this course of action was less than ideal. A blank sector to one side of the plate was a better choice.
Then the job was to build an entire miniature meal on the convex side of the fork. Convex, not concave. If some of the food was awkward, for example peas, then a little mild mashing was allowed, but only as much as was needed to help the peas to stay in place while mouthful-building was completed. ‘Why?’ I asked. Why go to so much trouble? Because the delight of mixing is to take place in your mouth — as long as you don’t open it for all the world to see.
Mum gave a demonstration, and it was fascinating to watch her at work. First she mashed and moulded a tiny piece of potato onto the rounded side of the fork. I guessed that this was to be her foundation, a moderately squashy substrate for the cornerstone of sausage which would still leave room for the addition of Yorkshire pudding in a small but unprocessed chunk. There must be room left for a bonnet of lightly crushed pea. I was fascinated to watch the whole edifice grow, tottering a little but never in serious danger of falling.
Finally it was time to crown the forkful with gravy. This was the moment of truth, a test of the cook as well as the diner. Mum carefully rested her loaded fork on the plate. A suitable puddle of gravy would be waiting to one side of the perfectly balanced forkful. Providing the gravy was properly viscous, she could coax it with a swoop of the knife against the urgings of gravity so that it ended up on the top of the potato-sausage-pudding-pea amalgamation as a savoury varnish.
‘With practice it soon becomes possible’, she told me, ‘for one to have an intelligent conversation about something entirely different at the same time. While working in this way it should never appear that any particular effort is required. Food must always be incidental to the pleasures of conversation.’ In this way her atomic theory of the forkful melted into a fantasy of gracious dining. In fact the whole little demonstration of microcosmic eating may have been the only meal I ever saw her eat without anxiety.
Mum had a cunning way of serving bananas. It wasn’t so very long since bananas had become available again at all, and those with memories of rationing greatly prized the yellow fruit. Mum could hardly believe it when I showed no interest in a fruit so rare and distinctive, so curved to the eye and creamy on the tongue. There was no trace of the excitement I had shown before I was ill, snug in Dad’s arms and seeing the yellow hands hanging from their hooks.
Then one day Mum tried again. She would never give up. She waved a banana in front of me and when I said I wasn’t hungry, she said, ‘This one is different. This is a special banana.’
I stayed silent just as long as I could, but curiosity was spreading over my body like a rash, as Mum had known it would. ‘What’s so special about it?’
‘It’s a magic banana.’
She had me. This was irresistible. ‘What makes it magic?’
‘What makes it magic, John, is that it’s already in slices. Inside the skin. Just open it and you’ll see.’
Already in slices inside its skin? Now I was in the palm of her hand. She held the banana where I could see it close up, and revolved it slowly so that I could see that there was no blemish on it of any kind. Finally, with me still watching very closely and ready to halt the operation if I saw anything at all fishy, she tugged on the hard stalk on the top of the banana until it broke open with an alarmingly definite noise. It was as if she had snapped the neck of a sleeping yellow bird. Then she peeled back a strip of skin, far enough to show me that she was telling the truth. The flesh was cut into even discs. I was baffled and thrilled. Impossible for the skin to have been peeled and then put back in place.
‘Where did you get it? How did you do that?’
‘Eat it and perhaps I’ll tell you.’
‘I won’t eat it unless you tell me.’
‘You’ll have a long wait. Patience is a virtue,’ Mum chanted, presumably re-hashing one of the many bitter lessons of her childhood, ‘Virtue is a Grace. Grace is a little girl — who never washed her face.’
The prestige of the magic banana was so great that Mum won an argument at last. I ate it. From then on magic bananas appeared at regular intervals, when my indifference to food became actively alarming. Mum knew how to keep the magic going, too. Sometimes she would produce a banana and I would ask, ‘Is it a magic banana?’ And she would say, ‘I’m afraid not, John. This is just an ordinary banana. There weren’t any magic ones in the shops. It’s a very short season, you see.’ And it sometimes happened, since human nature is perverse, that I would eat the ordinary banana anyway.
It was years before I learned how she did the slicing, and how she discovered the method in the first place. While I was in bed I obviously didn’t attend parties, and my own birthday celebrations were muted to the point of inaudibility. But Mum had heard from a neighbour about a magician who performed at children’s parties and had amazed everyone — the adults perhaps more than the children — with the banana trick. Mum managed to get his address and sent off a letter begging to be told the secret. She enclosed a ten-shilling note. A letter came back sharing the secret, but also returning the ten-shilling note. With all the heart-rending details she included in the letter, the return of the money was practically certain. Sometimes there are worse ways of getting what you want than her life-long technique of milking the world for the sympathy it contains.
The secret was laughably simple. All you need is a pin (needle, miniature bodkin). What you do — what Mum did — is to push the pin into the banana at one of the seams of the peel, and then work it back and forth until the improvised lever, pivoting where it enters the tougher tissue of the peel, has carved a slice through the flesh. Withdraw the pin, leaving no more trace than a pinprick, and repeat at intervals along the fuselage of the fruit. Abracadabra! Magic banana.