Photograph: Bill Boch/Getty Images
One spring, when I was 11, my mother stuck a pin in a map and said, “Boulder, Colorado”.
She was planning our summer holiday, believing my dad’s distinction as a mathematician was such that he could invite himself, like Henry VIII, pretty much anywhere and the locals would have to say yes. Sadly, and not unlike the monarch’s experience, saying yes didn’t mean they had to like it.
So my dad wrote to the University of Colorado at Boulder, and proceeded to deliver the ensuing lectures on function theory to an audience that turned out in droves of at least 10 at first, and fewer each time after that, no doubt according to a formula that would have intrigued any passing statistician.
Meanwhile, we had to find something else to do. “We” being me, my middle sister, and my mum. My sister is a world-class brain and so, aged 16, took herself off to postgrad summer school courses in ancient Greek culture, which she stuck at despite the disappointing discovery they weren’t actually delivered in ancient Greek. My mother found an orchestra to play in and did some walking in the mountains. One day, she took me with her, purloining a colander to pan for gold in a local stream, which turned out to mean staring at a pile of mud until the sunlight made your eyes go funny. We didn’t go again.
Something had to be found for me to do.
It wasn’t our first trip to America. That had been six years earlier, on the Queen Mary – and although Britain was long past rationing, the first breakfast was enough to let me know there was a heaven, and it was across the pond. Next to us, an ancient woman weighted with gold and sheathed in synthetics was sharing her table with a volcano of scrambled egg, shards of bacon and lava lakes of what I assumed to be Lyle’s Golden Syrup.
It didn’t stop for five days: beef tea and cheese straws on deck at 11am, cake in the cabin, and three square meals around the edges. By the time we docked, I was hooked on the Promised Land. Europeans have been in love with this promise since the 1770s, when Benjamin Franklin wowed Paris with his drab outfits and refreshing lack of poise, from a new country where folks said and did whatever they liked, and didn’t need a 13th-century title to get a job. Soon, unfathomable wealth had been added to the picture (we weren’t the first people to take a sieve to a stream in Colorado) and every generation since has rediscovered America’s magic. For David Hockney, it was the light; for me, it was the food.
My mum may not have understood me, but she knew me well. And she wasn’t about to waste five weeks in glorious scenery with her nose in a saucepan. What better solution than to hire an 11-year-old cook who only wanted to hang out in the supermarket anyway? So that’s what she did. As soon as we’d dropped off my dad at the university with my sister, trailing thesauruses, we would set the appliances on to the housework and take the car shopping.
I had no idea a shop could be that big. It was like Harrods all on one floor, with self-service, brighter lights and the enticing aroma not of Chanel No 5, but flame-broiled chicken and key lime pie.
It wasn’t food to take home in plain wrappers and turn into something else; this was food all done up in frills and ready to play. Cheez Whiz and Reddi-wip in spray-cans, Kraft slices you could mould like plasticine before they got near a sandwich, Wonder Bread in its adorable spotty wrapping, soft enough to take a nap on. And Betty Crocker Devil’s Food cake mix. Not even the Hotel Sacher’s chocolate cake can hold a birthday candle to Betty Crocker.
At the end of the month, the family had survived, I had put on a stone and become a decent cook. My mother gave me $5 and I felt like a Vanderbilt. But what I took home for keeps was an incurable addiction to the US of A.
