IN THE SECOND half of that peripatetic decade the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was at the glorious – to some vainglorious – acme of her power, any visitor to our house in Cavendish Avenue in the spring or summer might have chanced to see a portly white-haired man, bereft of all garments save a pair of yellow boxer shorts, seated on his garden bench regarding with concentration the contents of a tray balanced on his lap.
The visitor might justifiably have assumed, from a perusal of those contents, that the man was either engaged in some fantastical scientific experiment, or was an amateur geologist inspecting his more outlandish findings, or perhaps he was planning to embark on a horrible series of mass poisonings. For, arranged on little saucers, some accompanied by a teaspoon and a glass of water, others by only a fork, were potions, powders and concoctions, edible and otherwise, of every possible hue, texture and colour.
A man of a distinct atheistic bent, Father had long ago decided to sublimate his urges for immortality in a more tangible deity than the one offered by the Christian church. As he became older the God of his hearth took on the complexion and shape of vast amounts of preventive medicine and health foods. He worshipped these household spirits with increasing voraciousness, receiving as tablets from Olympus their doses of wisdom in the form of myriad periodicals, pamphlets, faxes and announcements, spewing these papers all over the house and the garden like heavenly detritus.
Father’s dietary habits were fantastical in the extreme. He would eat neither butter, cream, sugar, milk nor anything he believed to contain those inventions of Satan known to man as saturated fats. These, he was convinced, had been invented solely for the purpose of his physical destruction, leading to coronary attacks and cancer. He had a particular horror of butter, regarding it in the way one imagines a nineteenth-century missionary to have viewed the severed chicken necks of Voodoo death ceremonies. Every Friday, after Mother had returned from her weekly food shopping expedition, there were howls of wrath from the Portuguese lady cook as Father ransacked the kitchen in search of a pat of the dreadful stuff (which he felt sure Mother had secreted out of sight).
Father’s eccentricities permeated our relations with the outside world to an embarrassing degree. When Mother received in the post Cornish clotted cream from the Earl of Falmouth, a neighbour of my uncle, Father was torn between the natural human instinct of gratitude and the firm conviction that if the Earl had sent a letter bomb it could not have been more deleterious to our family’s well-being. In the end the latter feeling triumphed and the cream was duly sent to the Little Sisters of the Poor in Kilburn. I was puzzled by the way in which Father’s customary humanity seemed to have been subsumed. Didn’t he mind if the Little Sisters of the Poor contracted coronary disease and died? Father was scornful. He rolled his eyes at Mother as if to apologise for having bred a daughter of such slow wits.
‘Ignorant child,’ he chastised me. ‘It’s not for them to eat. I thought they could use the pots to keep their rosaries in.’
Meals in our house were, to say the least, unusual. Mother struggled with little success to construct menus around Father’s rigorous prohibitions. Most lunch and dinner dishes, including soups, stews and puddings, turned out to contain one or other of the proscribed ingredients. To my horror Mother tried to conjure up edible dinners around porridge oats (highly acceptable to Father, containing as they did unsaturated fats), mineral water and Hermesetas artificial sweetener. My youthful conventionality rebelled against these new and unsatisfactory meals. For a while supper en famille was conducted in sullen silence punctuated by the occasional breaking of wind that invariably signalled chronic indigestion on my part.
Father would beam, his eyes expanding like ripples of water, and say contentedly, ‘It’s good to hear that child burping. Excellent for her internal mechanisms.’
This always elicited what he called ‘a rise’ from me, particularly after I discovered that Father had taken to writing long letters to the High Mistress of St Paul’s School expounding his theories.
‘I’ve just written to that Brigstocke woman,’ he cheerily informed me one evening. ‘I thought you would like to see a copy. Quite outrageous how they try to kill little children in that school of yours.’
This particular epistle read, ‘I note that you have sent me a milk bill for Petronella. I believe I have said before that my daughter is not to have milk with the other children. It is full of dangerous saturated fats that block her arteries and raise her cholesterol to unacceptable levels.’
Mother was horrified.
‘But she’s only thirteen. She doesn’t have any cholesterol.’ Father was defiant. ‘She will have the way they force-feed her poison in that school,’ adding for the benefit of no one in particular an emphatic ‘Humph!’
This horror of saturated fats invariably overcame Father’s respect for the grandeur of his surroundings. No gilded gastronomical temple was spared merely because the food cost an exorbitant sum of money. Thus he would force his way into the kitchens of the Ritz Hotel or Le Gavroche in Mayfair and roar at the scurrying staff: ‘Why are you trying to kill me?’
The startled chef or waiter would then be pinioned against a wall as Father waved a copy of the menu in his face. ‘Look at that – beef in pastry – it’s absolutely murderous. My friend Prof. (the name of some unfortunate scientist was here inserted) says that if you eat pastry you might as well inject your body with strychnine.’ Or ‘Raspberries in meringue. Do you realise what meringue does to you? It’s meringue that causes cancer you know, not smoking.’
Father didn’t like restaurants in any case.
‘I always try to avoid them,’ he used to say. ‘The waste of time in getting to and leaving them is excruciating.’
Rare excursions with Father to eateries singled out for his patronage were hazardous. He described these outings with, I thought, undue optimism, as special treats.
One evening, not long past my fifteenth birthday, Father took me to supper at the Savoy Grill. A couple of weeks before I had been informed that, ‘It’s about time you had an omelette Arnold Bennett.’
When this statement drew a blank, he explained,
‘It’s an omelette named after Arnold Bennett, the author of The Card. If you haven’t read it, borrow it from the London Library. But for God’s sake don’t make biro marks in the book like you do with mine.’
On the appointed night I set off with Father to the Savoy. He was in a gruntled mood, having that afternoon purchased a good box of cigars in an auction at Christie’s. The hum of traffic sounded as comforting as the gentle buzzing of bees as we walked from where Father had parked the car, near Covent Garden Opera, down to the Strand. Each second seemed to show its own special glow and lustre as Father murmured contentedly to himself, ‘Omelette Arnold Bennett. Without doubt the greatest invention of the post-war era.’ For a while my misgivings were forgotten.
On our arrival at the Savoy we wandered through its art-deco splendour to the hallowed Grill Room, where banquettes formed comfortable altars for the enthusiastic congregation. We were sat at a small table, placed catty-corner to the others. With unerring snobbisme the head waiter had recognised Father and smothered us under a pile of menus and premier cru wine lists. Father brushed them aside with impatience.
‘We know what we want, young fellow,’ he said. ‘We want a half-bottle of house champagne and two omelette Arnold Bennetts.’
The champagne was all right but the omelette Arnold Bennett was not.
‘What was that, sir?’ enquired the waiter. ‘An egg boiled for one minute?’
Father was indignant. ‘Don’t you listen to your customers? I said an omelette Arnold Bennett.’
Still the waiter was not enlightened. ‘Arnold Bennett? Is he eating here this evening?’
This query did not go down well.
‘How could he be?’ roared Father. ‘He’s dead. He’d be a bloody unusual corpse if he was eating here.’
Father’s face became quite lumpy with gloom. His complexion pinkened, which it always did when he was feeling emotional. I glanced at him in terror. ‘Father, you’re not going to make a fuss over an omelette,’ adding my habitual and hopeless plea, ‘please don’t do this to me.’ Father put on his hang-dog expression, lowered his eyes in a mournful way and stuck out the point of his tongue. Finally, ‘I suppose I could have sardines,’ was uttered in absurdly trembling tones.
Father seemed uncharacteristically anxious to finish the meal and leave. When we arrived back home he bustled downstairs to the kitchen. I followed in some trepidation. Mother never permitted Father to enter the kitchen except to decant wine for a dinner party.
‘Come along, come along,’ he urged me on, ‘where are the eggs? I suppose your mother has hidden them as usual.’
There was a scrabbling about, a triumphant ‘hah!’ and then the rhetorical, ‘Do you want to be an angel, Petronella? Then go and fetch my swordstick.’
‘Why?’ I asked suspiciously. Why? Father could not have been more surprised had I asked him why, before bedtime, he wanted a toothbrush.
‘Why? To crack the eggs with of course. We’re going to make Omelette Arnold Bennett. What a chump your old dad is! Never go to a restaurant for what you can eat at home.’
After that Father regarded it as idiocy to stray for sustenance. Mother and I had particular difficulty in persuading him to accept invitations for country weekends.
‘But the cooking,’ he would protest. ‘One simply can’t eat it.’
It was one of his idiosyncrasies that not only did Father rarely eat the food provided in other people’s houses, but he regarded it as a positive insult that he should be asked to do so. On the occasions when he succumbed to the blandishments of Mother and me he would prepare for these outings as a mad apothecary might have packed for an exploration of new territories in the Wild West. Jars and urns would be unearthed from the cellar and then filled with various sacred substances including a quantity of prunes, green Sicilian olive oil, crushed charcoal (to prevent Father’s having indigestion), cloves of garlic (to ward off chills – Father always complained that other people’s beds were perilously damp), sugar-free marmalade and powdered ascorbic acid.
Even broad-minded hostesses were understandably nonplussed by the arrival of this weird caravan. On arrival at a larger country house, butlers would be dispatched to convey these strange objects to Father’s allotted rooms. I would follow behind in silent embarrassment, often bearing a plastic bag containing some of Father’s teaspoons, with which he ingested his medicines. Often I tried to persuade Father to confine his consumption to private quarters. Weekends became a series of battles as Mother and I tried to convince him not to flout the rules of hospitality by producing alternative victuals at every conceivable meal.
‘Oh, no, Voodrow,’ Mother would cry in horror as he slipped a generous helping of prunes into his trouser pocket. ‘You will sit on them and filthy all the chairs.’
The prunes were hardly the worst of it, however. One Sunday in 1989, Father and I had gone down to breakfast in the frescoed summer dining room of an elderly marchioness. The marchioness, a regal old bird whose eyebrows resembled the beating wings of a snowy eagle, was seated at the head of the table, regarding with a slightly distant air a plate of bacon and eggs.
‘Ho, ho, ho,’ began Father in greeting before sitting down beside her. He waved to me, where I was loitering uncertainly in the doorway.
‘Here’s Petronella,’ he announced, quite unnecessarily. ‘I employ her as Hebe, my cupbearer. Hebe, bring in the nectar and ambrosia.’
Nectar and ambrosia could not have been a more inappropriate description of the objects that I hastily deposited in Father’s lap. ‘Can’t you do this later?’ came my desperate whisper. Too late. Father was already helping himself to a large bowl of porridge. Then, from the folds of his dressing gown, after uttering a loudest ‘Ho!’ so far, so as to attract the marchioness’s attention, he produced a filthy jar of pungent-smelling olive oil.
Slowly, but con brio, Father began to pour the putrescent liquid over the plate. As the marchioness watched, speechless, Father cried in triumph, ‘Nothing like olive oil for getting my bowels to move on time.’ This ceremony was followed by a loud burp.
Our hostess demurred at this display. Father merely turned upon her pityingly and remarked, ‘You obviously haven’t read Dr Johnson, dear girl. Dr Johnson used to say that only a fool suppresses a belch. You could do with belching yourself.’
At home and abroad, Father was a very slow and deliberate eater. He insisted upon chewing a piece of meat or fish fifty-odd times before he was prepared to swallow it. The rationale behind this was simple. Father had read that William Gladstone had masticated his food for a similar length of time before releasing it down his gullet and ‘What was good enough for Gladstone is good enough for Woodrow.’
This often made the longevity of meals at home hard to bear. A bowl of soup, for instance, took Father up to three quarters of a hour to consume. Mother was fond of a Hungarian chicken broth with noodles, which was invariably served up two or three times a week. Father had immense difficulties with the noodles. He had not yet mastered the trick of eating spaghetti, having to cut it up with a knife and fork.
‘Oh Buttercup,’ said Mother despairingly at Father’s inelegant slurps around the damp strands of pasta, ‘you sound like a river bursting its banks.’
‘It’s your fault,’ returned Father crossly, ‘you give me this food just to humiliate me. It’s because you don’t love me any more.’ Mother hotly contested this, recalling how, ten years before, Father had bought himself a baby lobster and missed an important vote in the House of Commons so he could extract the last grains of flesh from its claws.
‘Humph,’ said Father. Father always said ‘humph’ when he really had no argument to deploy.
The meal I looked forward to most as a child was breakfast. Father was of the ante-bellum generation that regarded this meal as a rip-roaring eighteenth-century affair. Breakfast was treated with great seriousness and approached with ceremony. It bore no relation to the bland and anaemic snack of cereal or wholemeal toast that now passes for the meal. To Father it was the breaking of his fast and by God, how he would break it. I had read a book called Mr Rowlandson’s England, which described the breakfast that might have been eaten by the stereotypical Englishman of 1795. Father’s made it look positively mean by comparison.
At seven in the morning I would be awoken by the sound of singing about the house. If Sydney Smith’s idea of heaven was eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets, Father liked contemplating breakfast to the sound of his inimitable compositions. During this exhibition of musical non-talent, groans could be heard from the stairs as the maid struggled to carry the enormous breakfast tray. The meal was invariably based on something savoury. It began with salted porridge, moved on to boiled eggs, bacon and kidneys, then to toast and sugar-free marmalade and finally to the pièce de résistance: two yellow kippers that sat smiling up at you from the plate like watery supplicants.
Father was very particular about his kippers. In London the nerves of the Portuguese cook were soon permanently impaired. One morning, Mother rushed into my bedroom. She was evidently agitated. ‘My God,’ she cried. ‘Get out of bed at once. The cook is in the garden lying on the grass.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Does Father want her to mow the lawn?’ This seemed a reasonable query to me, but Mother became furious. ‘Don’t be stupid. Your father must have done something awful to her. She can’t stop screaming.’
The sight that greeted one in the garden was indeed enough to made Diogenes scream. The cook was prostrate on the grass like some crushed white insect. Every six seconds or so she uttered strange howls which, after a few minutes, became increasingly strangulated until she seemed not to be able to breathe at all. All one could make out from her cries was that she could feel nothing in her legs. It occurred to me that the woman was in real danger of meeting her end with her nose pressed to our rose bed. Mother telephoned for an ambulance.
When the paramedical team arrived, they asked the cook to blow into a large paper bag. Slowly, agonisingly, a semblance of normality returned. Then, from her unclenched fingers something queerly moist and yellow fell onto the grass. Mother sniffed at it. She looked at me in horror. ‘It’s fish,’ she said. At this the cook became lachrymose once more. ‘I have been working as cook for ten years and this has never happened to me.’ ‘What, dear?’ asked Mother hopelessly. The cook could only gesticulate and point upwards towards Father’s study.
Later that morning we confronted Father on the stairs.
‘Can’t understand what the row is about,’ he muttered defiantly. ‘It was only the kippers.’ The kippers? ‘They were overcooked. So I threw them out of the window.’ He spoke as if it were perfectly natural to throw one’s kippers out of the window if they proved an unsatisfactory companion at breakfast.