Читать книгу Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger - Nigel Slater - Страница 28

We rarely had visitors who stayed to eat. We had never even been to, let alone given, a dinner party, despite having a dining table that could seat twelve. But there were friends who would appear now and again, usually couples so similar as to be indistinguishable from one another. They had names like Ray or Eunice. All the men wore ties and cardigans. The women wore twinsets. The sort of women who talked about their ‘dailies’ and would never leave the house without a brooch. I do remember them all laughing a lot, but I never understood what about. Everyone was taller than me. It was as if I wasn’t there.

It was my job to pass around the room with the food. Oh God, the food. ‘Now, dear, you make certain that everyone gets a cheese football, won’t you?’ my mother would say. Our place in local society seemed not to depend on whether we had a double garage (we had) or which golf club my father belonged to (he didn’t). It was more a question of whether you had Huntley & Palmer’s Cheese Footballs or not.

The pièce de résistance was a grapefruit spiked with cocktail sticks holding cubes of cheese and pineapple. The preparation was always a bit of a performance: draining the syrup from the tinned pineapple, cutting the Cracker Barrel into even-sized chunks, finding the cocktail sticks that would usually end up at the back of the gadget drawer covered in a dusting of flour. I hated doing it.

Few things could embarrass a would-be chef quite as much as having to hold out a whole grapefruit speared with cubes of Cheddar and tinned pineapple on cocktail sticks to men in cardigans.

The worst of it was that everyone thought I had done the food. ‘He wants to be a chef,’ my father would say, as I held up the spiked grapefruit to the Masonic Worshipful Master’s wife, who had a tight perm and lips like a cat’s bottom. When it came to offering the dreaded grapefruit to everyone else, I would throw my head in the air and flay my nostrils in disapproval. ‘Don’t pull a face like that,’ my father once snapped, ‘you look like Kenneth Williams.’ But I had to let everyone know my disdain for my parents’ catering arrangements. After all, if I had done the food, they would have had prunes wrapped in bacon.