Food of Love: Cooking Up a Life Across Gender, Class and Race

APPETISER

I was born on a cold grey day in December 1945 in Luton, in a house like everyone else’s in the district: without central heating and where hot water was so precious that the immersion heater was switched on for only two hours a day. The men had just come back from the war and the women left their jobs to devote themselves to home, husband and children. Everyone in the street was white.

My working-class childhood was three changes of clothes, a few toys and privilege. I was English and therefore had inherited the earth. On Empire Day, my teacher, Mr Watson, pinned a map to the blackboard and pointed out that two thirds of the earth was coloured pink. ‘The most extensive empire the world had ever seen,’ he said as he moved his stick to a small island off the northern coast of Europe, ‘is ruled from here.’ We were taught Kipling’s view of the world: East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet.

That was about to change. Post World War 2 new immigrants from all corners of the globe explained their presence: We’re here because you were there.

Britain was about to go through one of its rare transformations, a root-and-branch reform of its core elements: race, sex, creed, class, economic organisation, social make-up. Profound and rapid change affected me, like my entire generation. My story is of chance encounters with good people and misogynists, with visionaries and racists, in a time of a quiet metamorphosis. It has been extraordinary—if occasionally exhausting—to have been part of that.

Food is one of humanity’s ways of expressing love. Most cultures express love through sustaining life with nourishment enhanced with pleasure. Food will flow through my narrative like the great rivers of the world that connect us. I love to cook for those I love, and I deeply appreciate the meals that have been lovingly made for me. The British diet I grew up with was stodgy, stolid and predictable. Who from my parent’s generation could have predicted that curry would become my country’s favourite dish?

My older brother Ray adored travel but was reluctant to sample local food, whereas for my other brother, Mike, and for me it is one of the greatest pleasures of exploration. Food has become an aspect of diversity that both left and right relish: it holds no prejudice-inducing fear. The recipes at the end of chapters reflect the diversity in our diet that has arisen from our growing diversity. People often fear difference but nothing illustrates better the pleasures that come with immigration than the recipes in this book. My mother’s English cream tea and my Cornish grandmother’s pasties have not gone away but now we can also taste the world.

This cultural enrichment is not only evident in our food but also in music and dance, art and language, gardens and architecture and so much more. It’s sad that the hard right has encouraged my fellow Brits to claim that British culture is under threat from change, instead of recognising our culture’s resilience and its capacity to expand and encompass.

Three miles from where I live is a house with a shark in the roof—a symbol that life is not predictable. You need to expect the unexpected. That’s perhaps the best advice I can offer.

Aged seven, I discovered libraries and a love of reading and writing but the idea that a working-class girl from Luton could become an author was as crazy as eating the straw boater with which my birthplace was associated. My parents had saved to buy us a set of Arthur Mee’s children’s encyclopaedias, and those books and the local museum I biked to fostered a love of history in me. If you had told the ten-year-old me that I’d become the director of an art and antiques centre, I’d have had to search in those encyclopaedias to find out what on earth you were talking about.

When I interviewed Chris Patten, the Chancellor of Oxford University, I asked him, ‘What would he, when a student at Oxford, have said if told he’d one day become the Chancellor?’ He shrugged and said that he would’ve suggested the speaker was high on marijuana!

If middle-class Lord Patten of Barnes’s future was so unexpected, how much more so was mine? Women were second-class citizens and working-class women were at the bottom of the pile. So my story inevitably shows the intersection of that class, that race and that gender at one point in history. There is a specificity to my changes, although I share them with many women walking in the same shoes. I hope my story offers some insight into what it was like to be acted on by those forces of history and to be a small part of embracing and building on those changes.

Mum and Dad’s wedding 21 December 1928

Expect the unexpected: The Headington Shark created by John Buckley.

CHAPTER 1: Flopsy 1952

When Flopsy was served up in a stew, I couldn’t eat her. I’d fed my rabbit groundsel from the waste land at the bottom of Pomfret Avenue and bolted lettuce from my father’s allotment. Dad had no problem doing the necessaries. His father and grandfather were butchers with land near Sennen Cove, overlooking Land’s End in Cornwall. My reluctance to eat Flopsy pointed the way to becoming a vegetarian in 1987, a concept which I knew nothing about until I met my husband.

Charles Thomas Harry, my father, was born in 1902 in St Buryan, Cornwall and, by the age of two, had lost his own father. His mother, Elizabeth, remarried a year later, and Charles never inherited his father’s land or the butcher’s shop in St Buryan. Instead his stepfather gave Charles the motorbike in the picture as his inheritance. How he loved that dream machine! That gift determined his life. He trained as an apprentice mechanic with Vauxhall Motors in Vauxhall, London and then joined the RAF. When he was stationed at Henlow Camp, he drove his bike through the village of Stotfold and captured the heart of my mother, Doris Howard. They married in 1928 when she was eighteen and he was twenty six, and in the act, Charles gained a large extended family.

Stotfold 1928: Dad’s precious motorbike

Grandma and Grandpa in the centre. Doris is at the front between Charles and Arthur. My favourite Aunt Alice is standing behind my grandmother. For a while all the girls worked at the Spirella corset factory in Letchworth.

On April Fools’ Day in 1957, the weekly documentary programme, Panorama, broadcast a three-minute spoof report of the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland, showing attractive young women lifting strings of pasta off bushes. Hundreds phoned the BBC the next day for advice on how to grow their own spaghetti tree. Many more fell for the joke.

The narrow culinary experience of most Brits was a main meal of meat and two boiled veg, with fish on Fridays. My mother was not alone in cooking a roast dinner every Sunday. On Monday—wash day—we ate cold meat, potatoes and salad. On Tuesday, Doris would grind the remaining leftovers and make shepherd’s pie. We ate mint sauce with lamb, parsley sauce with fish, horseradish with beef and apple sauce with pork. My mum prepared her own ham and tongue. Every Friday I’d come home from school to a house fragrant with the aroma of baked cakes. I can’t remember one spoiled meal.

My mother had grown up on a smallholding in Stotfold, Bedfordshire. When I interviewed Icolyn Smith, the founder of the Cowley Road Soup Kitchen in Oxford, she described how she was born of subsistence farmers in Jamaica. Her experience of food sounded so like my mother’s. The two-up two-down house accommodating my grandparents and their nine children would have been more solid than Icolyn’s, but apart from that, subsistence farming describes it well.

Mum’s brother Arthur and his wife Bertha continued to live there after my grandparents died when I was six and seven respectively. I loved visiting. Many of the Howard tribe were in the Salvation Army and played brass instruments but Bertha owned and played on an upright piano. My favourite aunt, Alice, who became an officer in the Salvation Army, was a proficient pianist. (More about her later.) The family liked to gather around the piano and sing hymns and popular songs. At the bottom of the garden was an orchard and beyond that soft fruit. My parents were used to just-picked freshness.

Towards the end of the war they bought the semi-detached house in Luton in which I was born. My dad’s peacetime job was as a rectification fitter at the now American-owned, Vauxhall Motors factory. Our house was unusual in being newly built in early 1945. Italian prisoners of war laid the road in Pomfret Avenue. Some of the neighbours criticised my mother when she plied the prisoners with cups of tea. Her brother Horace was a prisoner of war in Germany captured in North Africa and she empathised. My favourite uncle, Charlie, was a sergeant in the Forgotten Army in Burma. When he returned he could find nowhere for his wife Eva and himself to live, so they squatted in a Nissen Hut in the New Forest until in 1949 they moved into a new council house in Petersfield. Charlie loved Eva to bits and all he wanted was to enjoy what he could of life. I never persuaded him to answer questions about Burma and to my knowledge, all he ever said, even to Eva, was that his officer was killed and he had to find a way of getting his men back to India.

Many decades later I had the privilege of interviewing that master of speculative fiction, Brian Aldiss. Sixty years after WW2, I could taste the fear that came from the slightest rustle in the jungle as he described his experience as a soldier in Burma. Private Aldiss, with other veterans of that war in the east, arrived home in Southampton to be met on the docks by NO ONE, not even a representative from the army. Truly the forgotten army.

Father had an allotment half a mile from our house where I learned how to trench potatoes and pick peas, eating a lot raw as I worked. One Saturday afternoon as I walked home alone, I passed a man standing by a narrow alley. It wasn’t until I was close to him that he turned around displaying his erect penis. That was the first time I’d seen that particular male organ. I ran home but didn’t tell my mother—I didn’t have the vocabulary. Sex, biology, reproduction, sexuality were not topics at that time for any child, or indeed most adults. I’m not exaggerating.

Although the vegetables I picked were mostly boiled, they had flavour. It is hard for my grandchildren to grasp the idea of an orange or a satsuma being so precious that it was a star ingredient in my Christmas stocking. My parents were not unusual in post-war Britain buying their first refrigerator in 1958. Before that, food had to be bought fresh and vegetables were only available in season. In the winter, we ate whatever could be conserved: cabbage, cauliflower, sprouts and root veg. Tomatoes, often called ‘love apples’ because they evoked the colour of ruby red lips, were only available in the summer and early autumn when courting was easy. The first aubergine I saw was a sad-looking shrivelled thing imported by an Asian shopkeeper in Smethwick in 1963. No wonder a diet without meat was unusual.

While at primary school, I came home for lunch but it wasn’t called lunch; it was called dinner and was the main meal of the day. The evening meal was ‘tea’. The idea of eating out was not just foreign, it was unaffordable. The only meals I experienced before secondary school, apart from my mother’s cooking, were take-away fish and chips, meals at aunts and every other year a week’s summer holiday in a boarding house. Bill Bryson described it well in Notes from a Small Island.

Mrs Smegma... gave me a tour of the facilities and outlined the many complicated rules for residing there: when breakfast was served, how to turn on the heater for the bath, which hours of the day I would have to leave the premises and during which brief periods a bath was permitted (these seemed oddly to coincide), how much notice I should give if I intended to receive a phone call or remain out after 10pm.

There were so many rules that Bryson concluded, ‘This was like joining the army.’

And then there was the rationing. I recall between the ages of four and six, taking my ration card to the sweet shop half a mile away down a steep lane at the bottom of the road leading to High Town Road. Scooped from jars, my four ounces of sugar-filled treats were carefully weighed. Food rationing only ended in 1954. The government needed a large standing army because it was trying to cling to its colonies. The tax base was eradicated and we still had commitments on the Continent. All told, it meant that England was poor and the government couldn’t expand food production fast enough.

Milk was delivered to the door and so were some groceries. If the grocer’s van was seen at the top of the road, it offered no danger because it was slow, as were most cars in the fifties, and we had plenty of time to get onto the pavement. Boys and girls played together tag, hide and seek, French cricket, rounders, sticky toffee, What’s the Time Mr Wolf, five stones, marbles and hop scotch. Girls alone tended to skip and play two balls up the wall. In the summer holidays we migrated to a grassy slope at the bottom of the road to play cowboys and Indians, soldiers and nurses—all gender stereotyped and unknowingly racist. In August, we picked the blackberries and loganberries growing in the hedges.

My father was one of the first residents in Pomfret Avenue to buy a second-hand car. Unlike today, there were no parked vehicles on the road and we children played together in the street until the sun set, when Mum would call me in, give me hot chocolate and send me to bed. Parenting was a lot easier in those days. The number of minutes parents spend with their children is dramatically higher now than it was in my childhood, rising from 50 minutes in 1965 to 150 minutes in 2016. The world was safe and secure, England was the transcendent nation and my neighbourhood was my universe.

Mum’s well-thumbed scone recipe in her own writing

CHAPTER 2: Cornish Pasties

My parents named their house Lamorna after Dad’s favourite spot in a three-mile walk from St Buryan, Cornwall. Lamorna Cove was also an inspirational location for Laura Knight, one of the few celebrated female artists of the early twentieth century. My first trip to Cornwall to visit my grandmother was in 1952, aged six and a half. We went from Luton to Paddington Station where we caught the legendary Cornish Riviera to Penzance. I can still feel the shiver of excitement at my first sight of the sea from the carriage window as we sped past Star Cross, Dawlish and Teignmouth, places I later got to know well. I remember clearly that romantic wooded valley leading to the dramatic rocky cove and Lamorna’s small sandy beach where I fell in love with Cornwall.

It was intended that my paternal grandmother would greet me when I entered the world. I guess I was difficult even then because I was meant to arrive on 5 December 1945, and yet chose not to. Grannie Elizabeth arrived on the first of the month to help my mother before and after the birth. My brother Ray was fifteen and my brother Michael four and half so there was plenty of work in the home. In working-class homes, there were no machines to help with the washing and cleaning, no easily prepared meals, coal fires had to be cleaned out and lit each day, and a copper boiler to be filled with water by the bucket and heated for the weekly wash.

It’s astonishing that in those days there were two postal deliveries and letters almost always arrived the next day. Dad’s step-sister Gladys wrote to Grannie every day asking when she was coming home. And so, on 14 December, two days before my birth, she packed her bags and went back to that other country called Kernow, presumably to be welcomed by the waving of the Cornish black and white flag.

Ray and Jean were a handsome bride and groom & I was the little bridesmaid.

Before my first trip to Cornwall to meet this Grannie, my brother Raymond married in Stoke-on-Trent and I was a five-year-old bridesmaid. Ray had spent his National Service stationed near Stafford. Fate determined that at a dance Ray met Jean Turner who, like all Turners, worked in the potteries—she was a painter at Spode. Her glamour captured his heart just as fate had arranged for our father to drive through Stotfold on his black motorbike and, much later in 1963, for my future husband Atam to pull up on an Italian Vespa outside the Gurdwara in Smethwick.

After their wedding Ray and Jean moved in with us while he trained as a policeman. A year later they moved north. My first holiday away from my parents was in 1954 when I stayed with Ray and Jean in Port Vale and as an eight-year-old aunt met their daughter, my niece Lesley. Ray followed in Dad’s footsteps in having an allotment but in addition he had a shed where he grew the most delicious mushrooms—a rare treat in the fifties. On that trip Ray took me to Trentham Gardens and bought me a Mr Whippy ice cream—a new experience. Life was changing. And it was sweet.

It was in between Ray’s wedding and my holiday in the potteries that I had that first visit to Cornwall to meet my paternal grandmother. She hadn’t come to Ray’s wedding. I was slow to understand how deprived of love my father had been. My warm-hearted maternal grandparents in Stotfold died when I was six and seven years old so, when I never received a single birthday card, letter or present from my Cornish family, I didn’t know it was strange. I was grateful that, a few weeks before Dad died, I could tell him that I loved him.

I have no recollection of my dad’s mother ever hugging me or playing with me, but I do recall my first taste of Cornish pasties which she made to a traditional Cornish miner’s recipe. Clotted cream from Jersey cows was a delicious surprise, surpassed only by clotted cream ice cream. I drank warm milk straight from the cow. My mother learned Grandma Elizabeth’s recipe and growing up, Cornish pasties were one my favourite dishes. Occasionally Mum made a Cornish Clanger to take as a picnic. The savoury filling was at one end and the other end was filled with strawberry jam.

My grandmother’s recipe for Cornish Pasties

The rough shortcrust pastry was made using lard. The pastry was rolled out in large 10inch plate size circles and filled and then carefully folded over and the edges twisted