Oberon: And this Ditty, after me,
Sing, and dance it trippinglie.
Titania: First, rehearse this song by roate:
To each word a warbling note …
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V. ii
London was still dark. There were blanks and bomb sites and cratered backstreets where the lights that went out with the war had not yet gone back on. The Houses of Parliament were shabby with centuries of soot. Most people dressed quietly and sensibly. At school we watched chalk on blackboard and at home, black-and-white television.
My mother’s cooking was half Mrs Beeton, half New Age – roast beef, kedgeree, steak-and-kidney pudding, liver and bacon, but also boiled wheat and ratatouille with a salad of dandelion leaves yanked out of the lawn. There was something called Gurdjieff Salad – a purple foment of beetroot, tomatoes, apples and red peppers. Our bread was dense brown bricks made by my mother, who was indulgent enough to supply sliced white bread as well. When we came home from school, tea was on the table. It consisted of anything from chopped raw cabbage and sliced oranges to pork pie and chocolate cake. The cake would be homemade on an industrial scale and served up in slabs from a roasting dish. My mother then prepared our main meal for when my father got back from evening surgery at eight. She made three or four meals a day for at least six and often ten or more people, and always provided pudding (rhubarb crumble, Eve’s pudding, zabaglione, apple snow) yet she did not like gadgets. She had a Kenwood mixer, which could take on anything, but we had neither toaster nor electric kettle. She saved time by grilling bread on one side only and conditioning us not to want to drink anything with our meals.
School lunches combined black and white with Technicolor. Grey slices of beef, darker grey cabbage and lighter grey roast potatoes sat next to jade-bright peas, bullion-yellow fish fingers and pillar-box-red baked beans. Pudding was a glassful of strawberry-pink foam with a cherry-coloured glacé cherry on top, or leathery jelly which looked so green it convinced me that it tasted of lime. There was also sponge pudding or tart served with custard. The tart tasted dry and the custard wet but they were properly pink and yellow. Even the milk in the custard seemed artificial, its texture that of something whose molecules had been rearranged. No one worried about additives. My eyes itched, my stomach bloated, my lips swelled and I felt some afternoons as if I’d been clubbed, yet I craved this stuff. Often, the pink foam or lime jelly would be all I ate.
Occasionally shop-bought confections appeared on the table at home: Swiss Rolls and Wagon Wheels. When we turned our noses up at a cake she’d bought because it was cut-price and past its sell-by date, my mother noted the sugar content, made a calculation, melted it down and greeted us the next afternoon with a plate of fudge which we devoured. (‘It was the doily that did it,’ she later observed.) Now and then she would offer us Angel Delight, which we could make ourselves by whisking a sachet of powder into a pint of milk and leaving it to set for one minute. We stood in a row by the fridge door and counted down.
Artificial colours and flavours suggested the heightened and simplified world of the cartoon, in which everything has become simulacra – not so much an image of itself as an image of that image. I didn’t buy my first real record until 1972 but, for a year or so, rehearsed the act by buying Top of the Pops albums, cover versions of recent hits. Like artificial colours and flavours, these versions were more themselves than themselves. With their colouring-book definition and lack of depth, they were easy for a child to make sense of: strawberry mousse.
Like someone looking at Dürer’s rhinoceros 400 years ago, I knew this was not the real thing but I didn’t yet understand why that mattered. I was not ready for real taste or texture.
There was another kind of cover version, as Top of the Pops also featured the dance troupe Pan’s People. Each week they gave a recent hit single a heavily themed interpretation. They might be wartime sweethearts, teachers or astronauts and simply rearranged or embellished the same old moves accordingly. This was the world of the fairy king and queen where everything could be rearranged as everything else, the mechanical fantastic where everything was plastic and everything was play.
And what of my mother? It was only many years later when I heard someone ask her why she had never practised as a doctor that this question occurred to me. Her reasons are her own but they include the fact that having been brought up by nannies, she wanted to look after her children herself. She protected us from expectation and we grew up vague in our ambitions while gradually discovering what we were for. The complicated model I was given was no cover version. It made a complicated life seem possible.