Two small children were at the table, which was inside the windows that were ‘just like the bow of a ship!’ so said my mother. There was a proper little commotion of a scene going on. The little girl was wailing that she wouldn’t eat her egg, and the boy echoed that he wouldn’t either. ‘I don’t like slimy eggs,’ said the girl.
At which Daddy snaps, ‘What a damned disgrace. You won’t eat your eggs. Think of the starving little children in India.’
These starving Indian children had a role in our family meals, and later I discovered that their fate was regularly appealed to when middle-class children disliked their fare.
‘Think of the starving Indian children’ was bound to get a laugh at school, for instance.
Why didn’t my father say, Think of the hungry children in the compound? But he never did. Deprivation has had to be a long way off to be effective. And I don’t think the children in the compound were starving or went hungry. The compound was for the farm labourers and we were supposed to know how many were there. That is because by law a farmer had to provide rations, mealie-meal – the staple food – peanuts, beans, weighed out once a week, the boss-boy supervising. All the labourers in this district were from Nyasaland: this area was on the path southwards for the men, and some women, who walked south, for days stopping at this farm or that. They stopped where there were relatives, or the boss-boy was a relative. Thus my father might joke, ‘We may think we are in control but don’t you believe it. The boss-boys are.’ Now, if a party of Nyasalanders went through the compound some stayed, if there was a chance of work. Then there were a good many more on the farm than was officially the case. That meant the rations would be stretched. That meant some children might be hungry.
‘Damn it, Smoke,’ my father would expostulate. ‘You tell me there are twenty-five in the compound, and I’ve provided twenty-five rations. But you are asking for more.’
‘Yes, Baas. My brother came last night and he has his wife with him.’
‘Am I employing him?’
‘No, Baas, but he will look for work next week.’
These ‘brothers’ caused instant and inevitable misunderstanding, for every relative designated a ‘brother’ was owed hospitality.
‘And so, how many children?’
At which old Smoke (because he smoked dagga hemp) was evasive and mumbled, ‘Not very many.’
‘But there aren’t meant to be children in the compound.’
‘So how many people are really living down there?’ my father could have asked, but did not, because then old Smoke would have had to lie.
But for the evening of the day their rations were given out old Smoke had the keys to the storeroom.
So, if there were no starving children in our compound I am sure none had boiled eggs and toast and butter, let alone marmalade and jam.
In April 2007, the BBC ran a series about Edwardian food. ‘This is what our grandparents ate.’ Impossible: so far has our diet evolved away from those imposing heavy meals. But the food on our table was impressive enough, and when I escaped from it, as food became lighter and healthier, I would look back and marvel.
Breakfast: various kinds of porridge and the new cornflakes, then bacon and eggs and sausages, with tomatoes and the delicious fried bread, which is no longer the same now that beef dripping has become obsolete. Toast, butter, marmalade. Then there was morning tea, with biscuits and scones. Lunch was cold meat, various kinds of potatoes, or made-up dishes, like cauliflower cheese or macaroni. Then pudding. Afternoon tea, with more scones, biscuits, and cake. We children had supper, and plenty of it – too much – and the starving Indian children often played their part. Dinner, when we got older, was a proper meal, with roasts, chops, liver, kidneys, tongue, and wonderful vegetables from my mother’s vegetable garden. And puddings. This amazing diet was going on through the seventies, the eighties…At my brother’s lunch table there it all was, at my son John’s. And, yes, they did both die of heart-attacks but surely one has to ask, how did they survive so long?
When I remonstrated with my brother about meals that would fuel a labourer, a navvy, he replied, ‘But we have to keep up our standards.’
In other words, it was eating that said, ‘Look what I can afford to eat.’ This was true everywhere in the legacies of the British Empire. And we may hear Australians even now laugh helplessly, describing Christmas meals that Dickens would have recognized, including the pudding, and mince pies, with the thermometer at ninety. I don’t know how often I watched my father saying, ‘Oh, God, do we have to have a Christmas dinner? I want to plant out the tobacco seedlings – replant the mealies – make the silage.’ And that scene went on (does it still?) on 25 December because standards had to be kept up.
The heavy Edwardian meals went on in our house at least until the early thirties. But new ideas were brewing, and the parents succumbed to a hundred diets and fancies, some of them like those that are around today. In our household Nature magazine came in with the Observer and the newsletters about English politics. We knew about roughage, vitamins, cooking vegetables the right way. I was sent to visit friends of my parents for a fortnight and was overthrown by encountering the opposite of everything my parents then believed. ‘Meat!’ insisted my hostess. ‘It’s the only thing. And you are a growing girl – meat.’ If I put forward the latest theories from home – the necessity of salads, steaming vegetables – I was overthrown by burning convictions absolutely opposite to those of my parents. This happened more than once. I had hardly reached my teens when I was in possession of all the latest fads of the time. I have in my lifetime seen every commodity lauded as essential, or despised as bad – sugar has always been Very Bad Indeed.
Now, this preoccupation with health in our house did not prevent my father getting diabetes, or my mother complaining of a hundred ills. Meanwhile, her need to stuff me with food made me miserable, because I was getting fat. Yes, nothing has changed. While I was not subject to the awful girlie magazines with their prescriptions, I and the girls I knew did not want to get fat. I devised a diet for myself, which impresses me because of its determination that I would not succumb to malnutrition. For three or four months I ate tomatoes and peanut butter, thinking that between them they would give me adequate vitamins. It worked. I lost weight while my mother wept and bewailed, but that also because I was acquiring my adult figure, which wasn’t bad at all, and which she hated.
If there was ever a woman who would have been happy to see her little daughter never leave fairy childhood behind, then it was my mother. I started to make myself dresses, I earned money, and throughout this process she exhorted, complained, warned of all kinds of disastrous ends for me.
I recommend this diet, tomatoes and peanut butter, to slimmers, but I don’t know what the experts would say. Of course, tomatoes just in out of the hot sun, peanut butter made from fresh peanuts, just out of the ground, yes, these are not easily got, and certainly not in London, with all its piled plenty.
And what of my father, while I refused to eat, except my chosen two foodstuffs? He was too ill, he was so dreadfully ill, but now might easily have said, ‘Think of the hungry children in Britain,’ for the Slump had set in. The swathes of the working class ate bread and marge sprinkled with sugar, or bread and dripping, drank strong tea heaped with sugar. Soon I was to meet RAF men, when the war came, whose childhoods had been like this, or similar. ‘How about the hungry children [June 2007] in Darfur, in the Congo, in…Zimbabwe, in…’
Sometimes it is asked, rhetorically enough, ‘What will our descendants blame us for as we now blame the slave traders?’ Surely that is easy enough. They will say that one half of the world stuffed itself with food while the other half was hungry. Easy to imagine some prime minister, hoping for a good mark from history, apologizing for the disgusting greed of us, his forebears.
I do not see how there can be forgiveness of what we are doing.
Probably the most disgusting sight in the world is to watch plates carried out of an American restaurant, still piled with food, and see the garbage bins in the street piled high with uneaten food. As disgusting as seeing the same in England, food that would feed thousands of hungry people. Hungry and dying. They die, they are dying as I write this…
Well, would you forgive it? I doubt it.
But while children in Britain, not to mention parts of Europe, were going without, here in old Southern Rhodesia the food was better than anything you can get now. The vegetables were grown without pesticides and artificial fertilizers. The meat had never heard of hormones. Chickens had a healthy life: no one had heard of battery chickens. And what very good use was being made, on the farms, of what was grown. Some of those concocted dishes have disappeared from memory, I think. For instance, all the different dishes made from what we call sweetcorn, the fresh maize kernels, the cobs just brought up from the fields.
The mealie kernels in a cheese sauce, baked so it had a slight crust, or cooked in batter, similarly with a crust, all kinds of soups and stews. There was a sort of vegetable stew consisting of maize, pieces of pumpkin, onions, beans, potatoes, with or without a little meat, according to the vagaries of the new diet rules. When I went to Argentina, we asked the driver allotted us to let us eat where he did, in the restaurants for the locals. And there I encountered this stew again, but it had chilli in it and tomatoes. And now we come to the pumpkin, which no one seems able to cook in Britain. Pieces of pumpkin are sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon and allowed to caramelize. Delicious, particularly with roast meat. Or pumpkin fried with onion, or mashed with cinnamon and nutmeg. Pumpkin soups. And, best of all, pumpkin batter fritters, crisp and spicy.
Meanwhile my mother was trying to get the labourers to eat the vegetables she was growing so successfully. They liked the spinach, they liked onions. But while she explained about vitamins (yes, she did – ‘They have to know sometime, don’t they?’), they would not eat tomatoes. No, they would not, not then. She begged them to go to the vegetable garden and the garden boy would give them all the tomatoes they wanted. Or runner beans. ‘But cabbage is so good for them,’ she might wail. But not cabbage, not then. All that has changed. They took mealies from the fields, with or without permission, and a band of Nyasers passing through could strip a line of them. ‘Well, what do you expect?’ said my father. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘But it’s thieving,’ she protested. ‘What else would you call it?’
‘Well, old thing, I would say that is the right word for it, yes.’
I haven’t mentioned the fruits we took for granted. Grenadilla vines grew wild in some parts of the country. Guava trees were in many gardens. Pawpaw trees – the big pawpaws were everywhere. So were avocados. Plantains did well, but not bananas. In more than one of the houses I lived in, lychees grew outside the kitchen door. Oranges, lemons, grapefruit: the old Southern Rhodesia grew everything, somewhere, and I haven’t mentioned the peaches, or the mangoes, from Mutare, or…
In short, the diet enjoyed by the whites, and some of the better-off blacks, could not be bought now for money or for love. It doesn’t exist.