My mother’s treat for surviving Harvard and for never having successfully made it all the way to Cuba to meet Che, or to Venezuela for the Peace Corps, was to take me to her ancestral Ireland before we went on to England. I chose the liner Maasdam because of my parents’ stories of Trimalchian feasts on Dutch freighters before the war. I had great expectations of eel and rijsttafel, of two-hour midmorning breakfasts of cold fish and fowl followed by more of the same throughout the day. But the food was so bad that I spent my time writing an outline for a cookbook called Quick & Cheap. It included a fifteen-minute tomato soup, green bean salad, citrus chicken, and a lamb-potato casserole modeled on the hot pot that had saved my life aboard the Queen Elizabeth. Then I wrote a regimen for a carbohydrate-free diet (fish, eggs, smoked salmon, melon, prawns, clear soups, watercress salads, trout, vegetable ragouts) before drawing up a list of all the famous restaurants in the world and a travel plan to visit them.
We landed in Galway, on the west coast of Ireland—a country that in those days had no famous restaurants, so we were a bit adrift after a few days in Ashford Castle, with its ease and splendor and fine old Amontillado. On the way to Dublin we ended up at the Welcome Home guesthouse, where it was a shock to learn that if you didn’t eat a high tea of eggs, fried bread, and grilled tomatoes at 6 P.M., you didn’t eat at night at all. Gone were the famous teas of Lady Portarlington, who replaced tea with Sidecars, and gone as well the fashion of cold grouse washed down with ancient Malmsey. Now it was store-bought cold sausage rolls.
All this my mother forgave when she discovered that every tiny village grocery store had a bar, and that a little tot of enlightenment was always just around the corner. Never one for whiskey during the day, I distracted myself by keeping records of every meal, in macabre fascination at the contrast between the richness of the countryside (lily-covered peat bogs and endless undulating hills covered in rhododendrons and fuchsia hedgerows) and the ubiquitous watery tomatoes, powdered oxtail soup, and canned peas.
In England I retraced my childhood culinary past. At Brown’s Hotel, beloved of my aunt and Russian uncle and a mecca for country eccentrics, gone also were its breakfasts of cold meats and ptarmigan, haddock, eggs and kidneys, ham and nectarines, and small mountains of scones and buttered toast. Gone were Brown’s vodka iced to perfection, and the hundreds of different kinds of pies that Leonard Woolf said had limbs peeking through the crusts. Gone the grand dinners with ten courses and the suppers that followed of deviled chicken and potted shrimp and a huge brandy or Scotch and soda. Gone also was this last attempt at something timeless in everyday life, like the party in Sir Alfred Munnings’s painting Tagg’s Island. These thoughts cascaded through my mind in the bar at Brown’s while I listened to the Texas, not my old-school Wiltshire, accents. I shed a tear into my champagne for everything wonderful that had passed, and we headed for the village of our old house, an hour southwest of London in the county of Surrey.
We stayed in Surrey with my English guardians. They had been my parents in 1958 when I was left at school in England as my parents returned to the States. They shared my mother’s passion for gardens and gardening, and their grounds were an ocean of enormous careless poppies, ceanothus scented like honey, columbines in various shades of night, fritillaries and delphinium, and a whole garden of roses, both tea and peace. Filled with nostalgia, we rushed to see our old house, with its acre kitchen garden lined with box hedges and framed with rose-covered arbors and trellises, its lawn tennis courts, vast orchard, goat paddock, stables, barn, and croquet lawn that held the huge tents of my mother’s garden parties. Eight houses now sat in its place.
Two Pimms before lunch, enjoyed back among my guardians’ flowers, assuaged the growing sadness that you can never go back. I learned that even this huge garden of my wealthy guardians was probably doomed by the vast cost of keeping it up. I realized that gardening, which so far was the only thing life had prepared me for, was not a way out. My mother went back to New York, a piece of her heart forever left in the eighteenth-century perfect Georgian property we had seen in the Wicklow Mountains outside Dublin, my father having decided they would live in Connecticut. I would have stayed in Ireland happily, but not Connecticut, so looked around in England for a job.
I had no leads for any, so perhaps the wine business could be the answer? My first visit to a wine company led only to the director’s bed and the advice that I was too ambitious to settle for never being able to own this, his boss’s family’s company.
Cooking was my last hope. But for whom? Back in Surrey I ran into my old girlfriend, the daughter of the publican at the Horse & Groom, next to where our old house had been. It turned out she was fed up with cooking the simple pub menu and offered me the job. The prospect of requisitioning ingredients and facing a row of orders at the rush while using such strange equipment as infrared steak griddles and deep-fat fryers was terrifying, but not as much as being penniless. The food, I figured, would be easy. All I had to do was cook everything a little less than this English kitchen had, put some butter and cream in the mashed potatoes, banish packaged sauces, and salt the previously tasteless soup. After a few disasters—among them not shutting the valve in the fryer when filling it back up with oil—I got the hang of it. Or so I thought. The customers hated my Frenchified food, thinking the mashed potatoes with butter and cream too rich and strangely flavored. Perhaps Napoleon had returned. Their thumbs-down gesture meant that after two months I was out pounding the pavement again.
I had just finished reading James Baldwin’s Another Country, with its line about security as a vast, gray sleep, so I fell on my grandfather’s offer to pay for graduate school in architecture, as long as it was back at Harvard, and left England for good. As the Belgian freighter docked in New York in hundred-degree heat I had my great-uncle’s fur coat over my arm and a handkerchief wet with the tears of an admiring chief steward in my breast pocket. My family took the wetness in my own eyes as a sign of my happiness to be back in America.