Читать книгу The Real Me is Thin - Arabella Weir, Arabella Weir - Страница 7

On 6 December 1957, in an uncharacteristically chilly San Francisco, it snows for the first time in 17 years. A much-longed-for baby girl is born. Encouraged by the forward-thinking obstetrician (and very unusually for the time), the father witnesses the birth. A sister for two boys: Andrew, a few weeks away from turning three, and Matthew, a few weeks past turning two. Now the parents have three under three (as they would often say in future years with an air of both pride and disbelief). A telegram – a wild extravagance in those days – dispatched to the parents’ parents back in Scotland contains only one word.

Arabella.

That’d be me.

They tell me this story many times over the years. My adored Granny Sheila, my mother’s stepmother, also repeats the story many times. It has always made me feel like an important event, like a ship’s maiden voyage or a spacecraft successfully circling the sun. No explanation necessary, no further information required. Everyone reading the telegram will understand: that’s it, mission accomplished – the longed-for girl has been produced. As the years pass, my mother never fails to add the extra, not so welcome, detail: ‘and she weighed nearly 11 pounds!’ So in some ways, given that the average newborn’s weight is 7 pounds, I sort of was a ship, actually more of a tanker, practically an ocean liner compared to the tiny dinghies most babies are.

The family was in San Francisco awaiting removal to Washington, DC, where my father was to start work at the British Embassy a few months after I was born. I have very few, fragmented recollections of the following four years, except of time spent with our wonderful Jamaican cook and nanny, Innes. She was a short, round, squishy woman who showered us with affection all day long. She wasn’t officially our nanny. A fierce Scottish woman had been brought with us to do that job, but she’d soon left, not able to compete with the loving and beloved Innes. Innes used to feed us in front of the television and give us Coca-Cola in glass bottles! A combination of thrilling indulgences tolerated by our parents, thanks to Innes’ irresistible charm and easygoing nature.

My parents’ marriage was probably at its happiest in Washington. And why wouldn’t it have been? Those were the Kennedy years, the Camelot years. Washington was full of exciting, young, politically active people. Professionally, Dad, though still very lowly, was right in the thick of it; Mum got to know other like-minded, bright, capable women and she didn’t have to cook. What could have been better? Although, unusually for the time, Mum had lived independently before getting married (and had therefore, presumably, fed herself), she’d managed to overlook the obligatory grind that was central to a successful married life – the provision of endless, appetising, not to mention nourishing, meals for children and spouse. It’s the iceberg lurking under seemingly calm waters, the unspoken yet taken-for-granted clause of most marriage contracts: there will be cooking, day in, day out, whether you feel like it or not, for year after year after year. In the early Fifties, when my parents married, this chore fell exclusively to women. And there was no discussion about it being a chore. More than 50 years on, little has changed. Sure, there are plenty of flamboyant male cooks around now, taking the sting out of cooking being a ‘girly’ thing to do, but the relentless daily grind of actually feeding a family still falls to the mother in the vast majority of instances.

In my mother’s case, I guess she’d imagined (as she often did about anything that irked her) that if she ignored this inexorable chore, it would somehow go away. Up until that time, though, she hadn’t had to deal too much with that most wearing of responsibilities, since they’d had only a few years of married life in London before being posted abroad – and a foreign posting always included an allowance for ’staff. Obviously, the poorer the country of your posting the more staff you could get, since you were paying wages at the local rate. So, in America in the Fifties as a First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington, Dad’s staff allowance meant they could afford Innes, who was doing the job of both cook and nanny. I’m not sure how many of the changes promised by the burgeoning civil rights movement Innes was ever going to see, but she was much loved and greatly treasured by all our family, even Mum and Dad.

If they were having a big dinner or a party Mum and Innes would cook together. One of the very few positive food-related memories I have of Mum is the sensational sweet-sour salad dressing she made with a ‘secret ingredient’ she attributed to Innes – dark brown sugar. The dressing was richly brown and gooey, like very liquidy tar, and tasted so good. Nowadays, of course, anyone who fancies themselves as a bit of a turn in the kitchen uses sugar in salad dressing, or balsamic vinegar which, tasty as it is, is really just sugar in a bottle. Back then, it was Innes’s own invention, or at least a trick brought with her from Jamaica, and I can’t taste or make that dressing without thinking of our cuddly, uninhibitedly affectionate nanny-cook.

Mum was a good cook but lazy or rather unconventional about how and when to cook. Added to that she was breezily capricious about meting out food, constantly, and always on a whim, changing her mind about who deserved what. It was like being fed by King Lear. She cared greatly about good-quality food; just not if she was the one who had to provide it. But I can still remember some fantastic things she cooked: chocolate souffl$eAs she’d unintentionally leave in the oven too long, so that the top skin crustified a bit and became chewy and nutty, like a brownie; leeks slow-cooked in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, and brown sugar (again); mushroom risottos; apple crumbles with raisins and cloves, the crumble buttery and crunchy with sugar. And bread. Mum used to make batches of delicious wholemeal bread long before wholemeal was trendy and everything was suddenly supposed to be home-made and not-white.

But all this stopped when she and Dad started breaking up. I say ‘started’ because, like some unloved old clapped-out car, they let the marriage limp along for years, giving it an occasional kick to see if it could be made to work properly, but then letting it conk out again, not really knowing if either of them cared enough to put the effort into getting the engine restarted. It’s hard to make something work if you don’t know whether or not you really want it to. The first time I think I realised my parents were in real trouble was when I bit into a slice of Mum’s bread and got a mouthful of rock salt. There was so much of it that the skin on my lips puckered up instantly, as if I’d dived into the Dead Sea with my mouth open. Mum hadn’t crushed up the salt properly before mixing it in. That’s when I knew things were really beginning to fall apart.