In the UK greasy spoons are also referred to as ‘working men’s cafés’, which in the South is often colloquially referred to as a ‘caff’ . . . The typical working men’s café serves mainly fried or grilled food, such as fried eggs, bacon, black pudding, bubble and squeak, sausages, mushrooms and chips. These are often accompanied by baked beans. Wikipedia
ENGLAND 1974
When I was fifteen I wore a black straw hat with square holes punched in the brim and wrote on paper napkins in the greasy spoon by the bus station. I had a vague idea this was how writers were supposed to behave because I had read books about poets and philosophers drinking espresso in French cafés while they wrote about how unhappy they were. There were not many cafés like that in the UK at the time and certainly not in West Finchley. In 1974 the miners were on strike, the conservative government had made a five-day working week a three-day week to save electricity, China had given two black and white pandas (Ching-Ching and Chia-Chia) to the British people – and I was planning my Saturday morning getaway to the greasy spoon as meticulously as a bank heist. These plans were nearly ruined in a big way by a swarm of suicidal bees. A pot of honey – no lid on it of course, nothing had a lid on it in our house – had defied all laws of gravity by falling from its place on the shelf above the washing machine to inside it. Not only was the stainless steel drum now dripping with honey, it was also crawling with delirious, satiated bees that had flown from their nest outside the window and into the washing machine too.
It was now my extra job in the family (we all had jobs on Saturdays) to scrape the bees and honey off the drum with a teaspoon and dispose of the corpses. While I was on my hands and knees, head stuck inside the washing machine, it occurred to me that this was how suicidal women poets ended their life, except they stuck their head into a gas oven. There was something humiliating and religious about kneeling down to remove the bees but I couldn’t summon the energy to work out why because I was in too much pain. At least five of the bees had somehow gathered up enough energy before dying to sting my hand and no one was particularly sympathetic. My mother said, ‘Yes, bees do sting,’ and told me to put my hand under cold water. As an afterthought, she said, ‘In Russia they actually rub bees’ venom onto arthritic joints.’ I tried to bribe my younger brother Sam to do the job for me, but he was too busy blow-drying his hair into a teddy boy quiff. ‘Bees have lots of eyes,’ he shouted over the whir of Mom’s hair dryer, ‘about six each.’ We had both seen a programme on the telly where they showed a close-up of a bee that was apparently a ‘keystone mutualist’ because it pollinated seed-laden fruits in desert communities. The voice-over said that honey bees were the highest form of insect life and that a strong colony flies the equivalent distance to the moon every day. Then they showed men in a field smoking the bees out of a hive. What was I supposed to do? Set fire to the washing machine? Desperate to get out of my life as fast as possible, I tried putting four jasmine joss sticks into the holes of the steel drum and lighting them. I reckoned the smoke would make the keystone mutualists fly out on their own accord without having to scoop them up into my teaspoon. But I knew they were the highest form of insect life and couldn’t be bothered to move. All that happened was ash fell from the joss sticks into the honey and I had to clear burnt-up sticks and ash as well as the bees who obviously thought they were in heaven. I didn’t blame them for not wanting to budge because I could see from their point of view that a washing machine full of honey was more appealing than the grey suburb I was wasting my life in – a desert community without the bonus of sunshine or seed laden fruits.
By ten o’clock, when the last four of the plump, drunk and hedonistic bees had been wrapped in the sports page of The Times and dumped in the bin, I grabbed my black straw hat and waved goodbye to my mother so she could see my swollen fingers and suffer immense remorse.
‘You’ve got to clean the oven. That’s your second job.’
I tried to stare at her blankly but my eyes began to hurt. The effort it took to look cool and unfazed by everything was exhausting me. I walked down the stairs tripping over my denim flares, banged the front door with my smarting right hand which was hot and red from the stings and attempted to run in my new lime green platform shoes. As I passed the Chinese take away called HOLY and the dry cleaners called REUBANS, a pensioner dragging her beige plastic trolley in zigzags across the pavement said, ‘I like your funny hat.’
It was very very urgent that I got out of my life.
Inside the greasy spoon’s steamed up windows and haze of cigarette smoke, this sense of urgency accelerated. I had so little time. Time for what? I didn’t know but I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me and I had to work out what it was before I cleaned the oven. I hastily ordered eggs, beans, bacon and bubble and squeak, and then, realizing I didn’t have enough money for beans and bubble and squeak, decided to cancel the beans. Holding a mug of scalding tea in my unstung hand, I made my way past the builders and bus drivers towards a Formica table to begin my impersonation of the writer’s life. As soon as I sat down I reached for the white paper napkins that were kept in a glass alongside the salt, pepper, ketchup and brown sauce and started to write with a leaking blue biro. This is the word I wrote on my napkin:
ENGLAND
‘England’ was an exciting word to write. My mother had told me we were in exile and would one day return to the country of my birth. The idea that I was living in Exile and not in England terrified me. When I told my new friend Judy (who was born in Lewisham) that I didn’t really want to live in Exile, she said, ‘Yeah, I’d be scared shitless too.’ Judy wanted to look like Liza Minnelli in the film Cabaret and Liza was American. Judy’s father was a docker and he was as English as they come. He had died of cancer, something to do with asbestos in the cargo he landed, but Judy didn’t really know the whole story. On the weekends I painted her fingernails with sparkling green nail varnish to turn her in to Liza so she wouldn’t always have to be Judy whose father had died in England when she was twelve years old.
There were certain things about England that I still couldn’t quite grasp. One of these ungraspable things occurred right here in the café. The greasy spoon cook who was called Angie always gave me bacon that I considered raw. It was as if she put it on the hot plate to make it warm but not to actually cook it. This was very upsetting to me because the livid pink rasher on my plate made me think of the pig it had been sliced off. Somewhere in England there was a pig that was still alive running around with a chunk sliced off its side. I did not feel I could ask Angie to cook the bacon for longer because I did not live in England – I lived in Exile – and reckoned this was the way things were done in the country that was my host.
‘I can’t fall apart because I’ve never fallen together.’
This was something my teenage hero had written, or words that meant something like that – the man whose blank stare I practised in front of the mirror. I reckoned that every time Andy Warhola painted a tin of American soup it was his way of escaping from the flat brown fields of Eastern Europe where his parents were born. Every single tin of clam chowder got him nearer New York and away from living in Exile with his mother in Pittsburgh. Andy’s words were like a prayer I said every night before I went to sleep, and they rolled around my mind now as I sat in the greasy spoon piling up napkins to write England on. While I drank my mug of tea and watched the red London buses arrive and depart from the station, I thought about his collection of wigs. Apparently he stored them in boxes in his factory in New York and actually glued them to his head. I was interested in Andy because I reckoned I was a bit in disguise too. Judy wasn’t really in disguise as Liza (she wore velvet hot pants and fishnet tights to the Wimpy). Everyone could see what she was aiming for because they had seen Cabaret too, but I was not really sure what I was aiming for, especially as Andy was a man. She told me to focus on David Bowie, the star man who came from Beckenham, which was quite near Lewisham, but who now lived in exile on the planet Mars.
English people were kind. They called me pet and love and said sorry when I bumped into them. I was clumsy because I was sleepwalking through England and English people didn’t mind because they were sleep walking through England too. I reckoned this was because it got dark so early in winter. It was as if someone pulled the plug out of England at 4pm. Most curiously of all, when Joan next door tied her dog to the Wall’s ice cream stand outside the corner shop she spoke to her pet as if it could talk back.
‘Holly, say hello to the girl.’
There was always an embarrassing silence after she said that. But Joan wasn’t embarrassed. Even if her dog just scratched its ear or gazed at the chewing gum stuck on the pavement, she always had an excuse for why Holly didn’t actually talk. ‘Oh she’s in a funny mood today isn’t she?’
EnglAND
eNGLAND
ENgland
As well as the England doodles I also wrote sentences very fast on the white paper napkins. This action (scribbling) and also my costume (the black straw hat) were like being armed with an AK-47: the sort of rifle the newspapers always show third-world children holding instead of an ice cream with a flake bar stuck in the middle of it. As far as the builders sitting next to me were concerned, I was not quite there. I had written myself in to some other kind of status and they didn’t feel easy about chatting me up or asking me to pass the salt. I was out of it.
Writing made me feel wiser than I actually was. Wise and sad. That was what I thought writers should be. I was sad anyway, much sadder than the sentences I wrote. I was a sad girl impersonating a sad girl. My mother and father had just separated. Some of Dad’s clothes were still in the cupboard (jacket, shoes, a hanger full of ties) but his books had disappeared from the shelves. Worst of all, he had left his forlorn shaving brush and box of migraine tablets in the bath room cabinet. Love between Mom and Dad had gone wrong in England. Sam knew and I knew but there was nothing we could do about it. When love goes wrong, instead of seeing the front of things we saw the backs of things. Our parents always walking away from each other. Making a separate lonely space even when they sat together at the family table. Both of them staring into the middle distance. When love goes wrong everything goes wrong. Wrong enough for my father to knock on my bedroom door and tell me he was going to live somewhere else. He was wearing his English suit and he looked torn up, like the road outside.
When Angie carried the English breakfast to my table, she hovered too near me and for too long, pretending to re-arrange the bottle of brown sauce. I knew she wanted to ask me where I was from because she could see I was curious about things that were quite normal to her. The red double-decker buses. The men smoking Number 6 after they tucked into the pile of beans and chips on their plate. The fact I asked for tomato sauce and not ketchup or said robot instead of traffic lights and thenk yoo instead of thank you. Angie had given me a portion of beans even though I had cancelled them. English people were so kind it was unbelievable. I loved my new country and wanted to belong to it and be as English as Angie, though it occurred to me she might not be entirely English because I had heard her talking in Italian to the man who owned the greasy spoon.
I was so pleased about the extra beans. I pierced one of them with my fork while I doodled on the napkins. The prospect of returning home to the house which no longer had Dad in it was unbearable. I counted the beans on my plate. Thankfully there were about twenty of them, so that would give me a bit of time to work out how I was going to get to my other life. The existential writers who I thought might give me some clues – I always got the letters of Jean Paul Sartre’s last name mixed up so it came out as Jean Paul Stare – probably didn’t have to clean ovens with evil Brillo pads.
They were evil because they were not just squares of scratchy material with pink detergent stuck to a piece of felt on the end. As far as I was concerned, they had been designed to waste the lives of girls and women. This thought made me so desperate that I ordered a slice of extra toast to slow the injustice of things down. Jean Paul Stare was French. Andy Warhol was half Czech but totally American and so was Liza Minnelli, who like Angie might be half Italian and all the rest of it. I wrote down some of the rest of it on the napkins with my leaky biro and it took quite a long time. When I looked up all the bus drivers and builders had gone back to work and Angie was asking me to pay for my extra toast. I hadn’t even noticed she had brought it to the table and I still had fifteen beans to get through. Worst of all, she was blatantly staring at the napkins I held in my right hand, the word ENGLAND biro’d into all of them.
‘Shall I hold those for you?’
I didn’t want Angie to hold my napkins because they were part of my secret life and they were also going to be my first novel even though they only had England biro’d into them and a few odd words and phrases. She watched me search for coins in my purse, all the while clutching onto the napkins as if something terrible would happen to me if I let go of them. Three of her teeth were completely rotten, the colour of the steaming teabags she scooped out of the urn with a spoon.
‘What did you do to your hand?’
‘I got stung by some bees.’
Angie screwed up her nose in sympathy and made her lips mime ouch, which was more than my mother had done.
‘Where were the bees then?’
‘They were in the washing machine.’
‘Ah.’ This time she rolled her eyes towards the nicotine-stained ceiling.
‘A pot of honey fell into the washing machine and the bees from outside flew in.’
‘Right.’ She smiled. And then she asked the question I knew she wanted to ask ever since I walked into the greasy spoon.
‘Where are you from?’
Now that I was fifteen years old, South Africa was the part of my life I tried not to think about. Every new day in England was an opportunity to practise being happy and to teach my new friends how to swim. I reckoned that if the council filled the pool with tea, everyone in England would be happy to put their heads under water. They would soon all become champion swimmers and win gold medals a go-go.
‘Where are you from then?’
Angie repeated her question in case I hadn’t understood it the first time.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well you don’t know much do you?’
I decided it was best to agree with her.
As I left the greasy spoon with the England napkins in my hands, I was cold and knew the central heating at home wasn’t working. Two days ago, the man who came to fix it said: ‘I officially condemn this boiler. The law says you’ve got to buy a new one,’ and then he winked and switched it on again and told us to give him a ring if it played up again – which it did, two hours after he left the house where Mom had made him a cup of tea in a mug that had the word ‘Amandla!’ written on it. Mom said, ‘Amandla is a Zulu word, it means POWER.’ The heating man said, ‘Well you should have a bit of power in your boiler for a few years yet.’
By the time I got to the Chinese take-away called HOLY, I pressed my cheek against the window and waited for my life to change. A large bag of bean sprouts was propped up outside the take-away which had a sign on the door that said it was closed.
A Chinese girl, also about fifteen, opened the front door and hoiked the bag of bean sprouts up from the pavement.
‘We’re not open till six o’clock,’ she shouted.
I stared at her jeans which had home-made flares stitched into the denim. Her ‘I Love NY’ T-shirt came to just above her belly button and she wore white stiletto shoes. She stared at my black straw hat and then lowered her eyes to take in the lime green platform shoes I was so proud of and which I believed would help me escape from Finchley, even if for the time being they just gave me a different view of things. A woman’s voice was calling to her, shouting out some orders. Like me she was a girl who had jobs to do.
When I arrived home (West Finchley), I was in despair. How was I ever going to escape from living in exile? I wanted to be in exile from exile. To make matters worse, Sam was now lying on the sofa in the living room thrashing a drum he’d wedged between his knees. When he saw me, he stopped drumming for three seconds and started to say profound things.
‘You know how chicken legs are called drum sticks?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Hhhhaa hhhhaa Hhhhha Hhhhhhaa.’
He was such a maniac. I started to laugh too. And then he told me to shut up because our au pair was in the next room and he was in a ‘mood’.
Two months after Dad left our first proper English house in West Finchley, our mother said she was going to get an au pair to ‘hold the fort’ while she was at work. Sam and I were expecting a pretty young woman from Sweden with a blonde pony tail. Instead, when our au pair arrived on the doorstep, he was carrying a huge book called The Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China 1938. He was balding, pot-bellied, bad tempered, and explained his name was ‘Farid with an F’. We couldn’t work out why he bothered to tell us about the F and he didn’t even ask us our names, he just gave us orders. Farid told us he was writing his PhD and we were required to run him a bath regularly, also that he liked his tea with a slice of lemon and three sugars. He was so appalled by the standard of hygiene in our home that when he came back from the London School of Economics he shut himself up in his room and guzzled three bags of pistachio nuts rather than cook in our kitchen. Farid couldn’t understand why nothing in the kitchen had a lid on it. We didn’t understand either. Even the brand new pot of yoghurt, completely untouched because the silver foil was still unbroken, was now standing by the sink without a lid. Someone in the family has just ripped it off for the sake of it. The one time Farid cleaned the kitchen floor, he squashed a wet towel under his bare feet and walked across the lino scrunching his toes in disgust at the chicken bones and tops of ketchup bottles, yelling something about how his mother in Cairo would never have let her house get into this kind of mess.
We secretly agreed with Farid and wished we could all go and live in Cairo too. Yeah, we would shut ourselves up in our nice clean rooms and throw away the key and look out of the window at the pyramids and wait for someone to bring us sandwiches – which is what we did for Farid – who regularly told us he didn’t like peanut butter because it sat in his stomach like a bullet. But today, Saturday, our new au pair was beside himself. When Sam began drumming again, Farid marched in to the living room, furious, fat and shaking.
Did we not understand he was trying to WRITE in his bedroom? Did we not understand he had to finish his dissertation on Karl Marx by Monday morning? Did we not know the meaning of the word PhD, how it would put food into his little daughter’s mouth and send her to a good school? Our au pair had gone bright red and he was sweating. All around him were posters on the wall of black South African women marching against the pass laws – ‘YOU HAVE STRUCK WOMEN YOU HAVE STRUCK A ROCK’ splashed across the centre in angry capital letters. Next to it was an oil painting of an African woman with a box on her head walking barefoot alongside a man on a bicycle, two figures walking into dust and sky. On the kilim rug were three lids that had been thrown haphazardly onto the rug. Ketchup, Marmite, Branston Pickle.
‘WHY DON’T YOU KEEDS (Farid always said keeds instead of kids) EVER PUT THE LID BACK ON?’
He was on to something. Although we never talked about it, the whole lid thing was something of a mystery to us all. We secretly wanted to live in a house where everything had a lid on it. Not a day went past without one of us staring forlornly at yet another bottle or jar that now stood lidless on the shelves. We never asked each other to put the lid back on because we suspected we might be incapable of doing this ourselves. It was possible that leaving the lids off happened after Dad left the house, but we really couldn’t remember and didn’t want to think about it anyway. While Sam drummed wildly, his shiny eyes fixed on the wall opposite the sofa, I asked Farid if he knew where our mother was? Farid always knew where Mom was because she was his bread and butter. In fact, she was so nice to Farid we had started to resent him. ‘Your poor mother,’ Farid snarled, ‘has gone shopping.’
‘SHOPP-ING SHOPP-ING SHOPP-ING,’ Sam chanted over and over again, laughing and drumming at the same time. Farid lunged at Sam and snatched the drum out of his hands. And then he grabbed the bamboo stick as well and started to beat Sam’s leg with it. Above his head was a world peace poster showing three children playing happily in a field with a ball, a yoyo and a badminton racket. Farid was now out of control. He bent his fat knees so that he could strike harder. Sometimes he missed Sam and hit the wall instead.
‘DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE A STRANGER IN YOUR COUNTRY?’
Farid saying that made me laugh hysterically while Sam howled.
‘YOU KEEEDS’ – whack whack – ‘DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND’ – whack – ‘THAT I AM NOT FROM YOUR COUNTRY?’
The top button of his shirt had popped off and sweat dripped down his cheeks.
‘I DO NOT HAVE EVEN ONE PAIR OF SHOES THAT ARE RIGHT FOR THIS WET COLD PLACE.’
That’s what happened to us too. When we first arrived in England we never had the right clothes. In January we wore duffle coats and flip flops. February was the month of wellingtons and a sleeveless polka-dot dress. And June, which was supposed to be the beginning of summer, was the month we all finally got it together and wore thermal vests, boots, gloves and thick woollen hats.
I liked it that Farid had said, ‘Your country’. Yes, I said to myself, I am English. As English as they come. While Farid tried to beat my brother, I looked at the curtains my father had hemmed in blanket stitch one night after work. He had made them a week before he left the family house. Sam and I had stood on either side of him, leaning in to see his big fingers holding the tiny silver needle. When Sam tied a knot in the cotton thread and handed it back, Dad had said: ‘I think we are getting to know each other again aren’t we?’
Farid was nothing like our Dad. For a start, had our father still lived at home, he would have said, ‘Don’t torture the oven. Smooth the Brillo pad gently over the surface.’ Why did he always say don’t torture the kettle, don’t torture the light switch, don’t torture the ice cubes? My father had a very intimate relationship with objects like kettles and door handles and keys. According to him they had to be understood, never bullied or tortured. To fill a kettle through its snout and not to take the lid off was to humiliate the kettle. To turn a door handle too roughly was to ‘duff it up’. He would not tolerate what he called ‘brutality’ to inanimate objects.
While Farid and my brother rolled on the floor punching each other, I could hear people mowing their lawns and washing their cars, the sort of things that happened in England on Saturdays, while Joan next door shouted to her dog, ‘HOLLY HOLLY HOLLY come home for your tea.’
Farid had somehow managed to get up onto his feet and was staring at Sam’s face.
‘Som,’ he said.
Farid seemed to want to say something else but couldn’t get the words out. Still staring at my brother, he eventually asked where our father actually was? Why was it that he was not living with us in the family house?
‘Mom and Dad have separated.’
Farid shook his head, puzzled. For the first time since he arrived on our door step it occurred to me he might be a kind man. He even started to collect up the lids from the floor.
When Mom got back with the shopping, she said, ‘Everything is very calm. How nice to come back to children who are not fighting with each other for a change.’ She lifted up a bottle of Asti Spumante from the shopping bags and slipped it in to the fridge along with six pots of hazelnut yogurt. Good, I thought. I’ll take that fizzy wine out of the fridge when it’s cold and I’ll run with it to the park. Then I’ll drink it all and jump under a moving car, leaving my napkins with ENGLAND biro’d on them to my biographers. They will flock to the house in Finchley to see where I lived and a blue plaque will be nailed on to the bricks and mortar of our first English house. As usual my brother took it upon himself to interrupt my thoughts and stir things up.
‘Farid hit me,’ Sam whined to Mom.
‘Did you Farid?’
‘Yes, I did,’ Farid confessed in a meek, pathetic voice.
‘He was banging the drum while I was translating Marx’s essay on wage labour written for the German Working-Man’s Club in Brussels.’
‘Farid,’ Mom said sternly, ‘Never hit my children again or you’ll be out on your ear.’
Our au pair smiled. He looked happy for the first time since he arrived.
That night, we ordered an Indian take-away and watched Steptoe and Son on the television. Sam lay with his head in Mom’s lap and begged to be spoonfed dhal like a pasha. Farid sat in the armchair Dad had always sat in but we didn’t mind anymore. He said he had a stomach ache from all the stress yet managed to finish his own lamb madras and polish off my chicken korma as well.
‘I like this family very much. You are good people even though you do not know how to make a home. But I have no home in England so I am honoured you have given me a room in your tent.’
By the time I got to bed, I felt weird and shaky. I had lived in England for six years and was nearly as English as they come. All the same I had come from somewhere else. I missed the smell of plants I could not name, the sound of birds I could not name, the murmur of languages I could not name. Where exactly was Southern Africa? One day I would look at a map and find out. That night I lay awake all night long. I had so many questions to ask the world from my bedroom in West Finchley about the country I was born in. How do people become cruel and depraved? If you torture someone, are you mad or are you normal? If a white man sets his dog on a black child and everyone says that’s okay, if the neighbours and police and judges and teachers say, ‘That’s fine by me,’ is life worth living? What about the people who don’t think it’s okay? Are there enough of them in the world?
As the milkman clanked down milk bottles on our door step, I suddenly knew why the lids for honey and ketchup and peanut butter were never in their right place in our family house. The lids, like us, did not have a place. I was born in one country and grew up in another, but I was not sure which one I belonged to. And another thing. I did not want to know this thing, but I did know all the same. Putting a lid on was like pretending our mother and father were back together again, attached to each other instead of prised apart.
I rolled off the bed and found the napkins I had saved from the greasy spoon. I saw the word ‘England’ biro’d into the tissue, crumpled and stained with bacon fat, but I couldn’t work out what I was trying to say. I knew I wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world, but I was overwhelmed by everything and didn’t know where to start.