My mother was not much of a sensualist. But what amazed me was the effort she expended to thwart my father’s sensuality. She hated spending time on cooking, but she’d never, ever have saved it by buying fillet steak, or lobster, or oysters, all of which he loved.
Helpless in the place where it really hurt, all she could do was micromanage his desires in every other quarter. Half-cups of coffee, bacon scraps instead of Lachsschinken (pork loin); dozens of tiny, incessant punishments, all in the name of housekeeping.
She covered the serious food shopping during the week, dragging my arm from its socket round Sainsbury’s, where in those days you queued in turn for bacon, pork pies and mousetrap cheese from the immutable list in her head, then piling it into the boot of her car – the big Rover.
But on Saturday morning my father was sent out in his own car – the Mini – with a minor list that he inevitably lost, consisting of frivolities that wouldn’t matter if he did, such as toffees, cakes for tea and rolls for Sunday breakfast. A short leash, but long enough, apparently, to give him a dangerous illusion of freedom.
One Saturday he made the mistake of returning from his recreational mini-shop with a pound of white asparagus – not something that would ever have featured on one of her lists, if only because it cost as much as a year’s worth of swede. She was furious, ostensibly because of the intellectual effort involved in changing her mental map of the week’s meals. But what he had really done was challenge her control, in a way that reminded her, only too forcefully, that they came from very different places.
Take those bread rolls. To my German father, fresh white rolls for Sunday breakfast were indispensable to civilisation, and well worth the effort of a special trip to the shop. My mother’s Lancashire mother bought her bread, brown more often than white, from the travelling baker’s van, then kept it for two days until it was stale enough to slice into genteel wafers. My father piled the butter on to the warm pillow of bread until it was soaked through, and dotted with soft, shiny puddles. My mother hated the feeling of butter between her teeth, having been raised on those stale wafers, through which you could have seen the butter from the other side – had the butter been thick enough to see.
But all of this was disguised by the circumstance of their meeting, at university, under rationing, in war. Nobody was chowing down on the fat of the land in those days, except of course for people actually living on the land.
Dad’s refugee parents ate nettle sandwiches and acorn coffee, which was called starving, not foraging, in those days, and were glad to have him off their hands. At my mother’s college, all the students were dragooned into helping in the fruit garden and handing over their sugar rations; in return they each got a tiny pot of jam. And that jam brought my parents together.
There was only one cake at the one teashop in town, and it was something called a dough cake, which from her account was essentially two currants playing hide and seek in a bun. It was a rare item, dispensed by the shop girls selectively, and always to male students. My father, handsome and thin, with the pitifully neglected look of a boy whose mind is always on function theory, was an obvious target for their favours. Armed with this booty, he’d go round to my mother and offer it in marriage to her jam. How was he to guess that rationing was to her not a punishment but the ideal housekeeping regime?
By the time it sank in that he’d seen the last, at least in his own home, of Schwarzwälder kirschtorte three times as tall as it’s wide, and miraculously held together by whatever Germans put in their whipped cream that enables them to eat a pint of it without dying, it was too late. Cake in their house was a very different thing. But that’s another story.
