As soon as I arrived, however, the couple took off for a sailing trip in the Mediterranean.
‘You’ll find the kitchen unusual’, sang the lady of the house as she headed out the front door, ‘and you’ll have some keeping up to do, the garden is so splendiferous!’
One of the lodgers was away for the entire summer, but a burly, good-natured American man and a willowy Jamaican woman remained. I unpacked and took a self-guided tour of the house.
As I passed her bedroom, the Jamaican woman whispered, ‘She’s having an affair. They’re off on their sudden holiday to try to work things out.’
‘Very interesting!’ I exclaimed.
Downstairs, as I was about to open the door, the American told me, ‘The kitchen does work. But it’s not really a room. He was gung-ho about do-it-yourself renovating and then he lost steam. You’ll see.’
I saw. The husband had torn down three of the kitchen walls and most of the ceiling and hadn’t put them up again. The phrase ‘kitchen garden’ took on new meaning here. The cooker, the sink and the fridge all worked perfectly despite tendrils of ivy, encroaching bean vines and huge marrow plants threatening to overtake them. The pots and pans had been arranged on the piano in the library, but I found the electric kettle near some spiky nettles. I plugged it in gingerly, wondering if the damp of the garden could cause electrocution. It didn’t. I made my tea and took it into the dining room to drink. There was no place to sit in the kitchen – unless you wanted to throw down a blanket and have a picnic.
In the morning, I tumbled downstairs, boiled my tea, then scurried shivering back into the dining room and brushed the dew off my slippers and dressing gown. The Jamaican girl was hanging up the telephone, and she informed me that she’d found a cheap flight and would be flying home to Kingston for a few weeks.
‘It’ll be so lonesome around here I may as well take my camping trip to the Lake District now when everyone else is away’, the American told me as he downed the last of his tea.
So just like that I was out of a job. I had no way to contact the lady and man of the house to tell them I had no one to cook for, but I felt I shouldn’t abandon my post.
That night, as it began to rain, I hurried to make myself some hot cocoa and then firmly latched the kitchen door while the garden plants gesticulated wildly behind the cooker and over the refrigerator. It was the first night I had ever spent alone under a roof anywhere, and I happened to be in a large, South London home on a quiet street ten minutes’ walk from the train station on a night full of thunder and pelting rain. I implored the cats not to knock anything over and scare the daylights out of me.
At around ten o’clock the phone rang. I desperately hoped it was the man of the house so I could tell him the lodgers had fled temporarily and I was unoccupied.
Thank goodness, it was a man calling. But his voice was so garbled I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
‘Call me back. Call me back!’ I shouted and hung up.
My boss might be calling from a dodgy foreign phone, I hoped. It seemed forever before he rang again. My heart was pounding.
‘I want you. I want you in every way that a man… pip, pip, pip.’ The man was calling not from a foreign phone, but from an English pay phone, because every few seconds the pipping sound that means the caller has to insert more coins interrupted the call. I could hear him plunging coins into the slot to evade the annoying pips.
Aha! The boyfriend of the lady of the house, I assumed. Perhaps he too was married, so felt compelled to leave his house to make this phone call.
‘You’ve got the wrong woman. She’s gone on holiday. I’m cooking for the lodgers.’
I felt sorry for him since he hadn’t been told his inamorata would be abroad for three weeks. But reaching the wrong woman didn’t deter him. His language became more graphic before I realised this was my very first obscene caller. And me alone on a stormy night. He rang a few more times, moving straight into the heavy breathing cliché. I hung up each time, but answered each new ring, hoping beyond hope it would be a different caller.
I wanted to ring my Irish friend Mauvourneen to tell her about the obscene call, but it was too late at night to call a live-in member of staff. I wanted to ring up my friend from New Zealand, but he was staying at a hostel and beyond the reach of a phone. I thought about how pathetic this fellow was to venture out on a wretched night with a pocketful of pence to do his business. I couldn’t stop smiling and shaking my head. I fell asleep despite the pounding rain and cracking thunder, wondering which vegetables would be ready to pick from the garden.
The next day when the phone rang I felt nervous about answering it. Thankfully, it was the man of the house. I sighed with relief, yet my hand was still shaking as I held the receiver. Finally I was able to tell him, in full detail, about the obscene caller, and oh, that the lodgers had gone. He told me to enjoy myself and to take full advantage of the garden.
Since I had no one to cook for, I decided to have Mauvourneen and my friend from New Zealand over for an all-American Sunday dinner. I bought a plump chicken from an adorable butcher boy with a blue apron tied charmingly around his narrow hips. I bought some sweet corn from the greengrocers. And then I raided the garden, and discovered that the pallid tomatoes twisting up stakes by the tool shed tasted wonderful. I dug up some stubby carrots and a number of potatoes and found some minute lettuces battling for their very existence between two gargantuan marrows. I came across some eggplants and for the first time understood why they are called eggplants, because these were white and egg-sized and -shaped.
For dinner I’d serve Southern fried chicken with mashed potatoes and chicken gravy, buttery corn on the cob, biscuits slathered with honey, green salad with tomatoes and shredded carrots, and chocolate layer cake, known as Victoria Sandwich in England.
It was a lovely summer’s day, slightly overcast but not really threatening rain. I had never needed to worry about rain affecting my cooking before, but here I wanted to have everything ready to go, just in case. I cut up and soaked the chicken in milk, peeled the root vegetables, and washed and sliced the lettuce and tomatoes. All the condiments and spices had been moved to the downstairs bathroom, so I needed to run inside and out a dozen times to find everything. I whipped up a salad dressing, prepared the biscuits and mixed up the cake batter. I would bake the cake and biscuits simultaneously – just in case the clouds burst.
I couldn’t find a kitchen timer and there wasn’t one on the cooker. I had never owned a watch. There was no clock in the music room-turned-pantry, nor one in the dining room. Nor the living room. There was a clock on the chest of drawers in the master bedroom, but it had stopped. I tiptoed into all three of the lodgers’ rooms and found nary a timepiece. So I dialled the speaking clock. It was busy. I dialled again and again. Still engaged. So I turned on the TV and thumbed through the TV Times so I could correspond what was airing to the time of day. But on a Sunday afternoon nothing was on any of the three stations except endless soccer scores. I supposed every game ever played by every team from Manchester United to the smallest team of toddlers on the Isle of Wight aired that afternoon. I kept dialling the speaking clock every few minutes with no response but a busy signal.
I finally opened the front door to see if I could hail a passer-by. But no one passed by. I peered into neighbours’ lounge windows. The inhabitants all seemed to be on Sunday outings.
How could I not find out what time it was in the middle of the afternoon in a city of eight million people?! I felt Rod Serling might step out of the twilight zone at any moment.
The cake! By the time I had searched high and low to time the cake, it had baked – not to cinders, happily, but to perfection. The biscuits looked perfect, too. Cooling the cake was a breeze, literally. I frosted it and put the biscuits aside to warm up before serving.
My guests arrived, and I prepared the remaining dishes in a stiff wind but without a drop of precipitation. And even fussy Mauvourneen proclaimed everything
tasted delicious. It was truly one of the best meals I had ever cooked.
What a funny man was the man of the house. The next three times his sailing boat docked, he rang me up and the first thing I’d hear was exaggerated heavy breathing and in an attempted cockney he’d whisper, ‘I want you. I want you in every way a man wants a… pip pip pip!’ And then he’d break into giggles. He’d ask after the health and appetite of the cats and if the rain was ruining the kitchen yet. ‘No’, I’d answer. ‘I love cooking in your kitchen. The food tastes fantastic!’
A few days after my wildly successful all-American meal, as I sat reading on the sofa, I heard the keys in the lock and the man of the house entered all alone. He dumped his bags in the hall then walked into the lounge and poured himself a whisky. I thought maybe I should repair to my room, servant-like, but he launched into a monologue I was meant to hear.
‘We thought the holiday together would do us good. But what we really need is some time apart. We’ve been together since college. Ten years is a long time. We’re not breaking up, mind you. We love each other. She just wants to spend some time with her boyfriend. Which I truly think she should do.’
‘Right.’
‘And I thought…’
‘Mmm?’
‘I thought. I thought… perhaps… you’d like some grapes… from Greece.’ He took some out of his bag.
We sat on the sofa, sipping whisky, savouring the grapes.
‘With no lodgers for you to cook for and my two weeks of holiday time left, perhaps you’d care to join me on a culinary tour of Britain?’ he suggested.
He was a slight man with a jet-black, late-Beatle haircut, angular features and sharp green eyes. I was all for it.
‘That your wife has a boyfriend was the best news I’ve heard in a long time. I’d love to join you. In fact, I want you. I want you in every way… pip pip pip.’
We put out food for the cats, climbed into his van and set off for the West Country, aglow with infatuation.
‘Let’s have a row!’
‘Huh?’
‘Let’s fight. Nothing makes two people row and bicker and gripe more than a road trip. Except, of course, household repairs. If we do it now before we take off, we’ll have a taste of each other’s arguing style. I’d like to know if you are the Cold Shoulder type or a Censorable Diatribe kind of girl.’
So as we drove out of London, through the suburbs and finally into pure country, we practised fighting about money, about toilet stop frequency, about drinking and driving, about dinner choices and about which side of the van to sleep on. I never had such a good laugh. And I found I’m neither Cold Shoulder nor Vituperative Rantings, but more the peevish sort. Needless to say, after the rowing rehearsal, we never bickered for the entire trip.
We stopped often to eat or drink. I broadened my tippling beyond Guinness by learning about beer, lager, ale, stout and half-and-halfs. In Devon we ate ploughman’s lunches of crusty bread with pungent, crumbly Cheddar cheese and vinegary Branston pickle washed down with hard apple cider. Some of the cider tasted as good as an apple from the Garden of Eden, while others tasted like vinyl. We ate Cornish pasties. I learned that miners’ wives had made their pasties with meat stuffed on one side and sugared blackcurrant with mint, as dessert, on the other.
One morning my travelling companion suggested, ‘Let’s go to Wales for breakfast. They do brekkies better there than here.’
I never got used to how close everything is in Britain. We spontaneously set off for Wales to park for the night and wake up to a splendid breakfast. Eventually, tired and lost, we drove off the highway to a rest stop flooded with light.
‘It must be some kind of industrial park. I know it’s not scenic, but I’m knackered. Let’s go to sleep and in the morning we’ll drive somewhere more picturesque’, said my disappointed tour guide.
In the morning it was as if we had been transported, van and all, to a better world. We had not passed the night in any industrial park but a sylvan grove. Groggily we sat up to find a group of kids on horses jumping over a fence situated right at the back of the van. Each of them, sixteen in all, got a big grin when their horse landed and they spied the two of us, in disarray, smiling ear to ear. After the riders had galloped off, three little boys in short pants and jumpers scurried around.
‘Who can gather the most manure to put on the fire?’ asked one.
‘I can!’
‘No, I can!’
Enchanted as we were by our resting place, we nonetheless felt peckish, so we drove to a truck stop where my tour guide insisted the best ever breakfast awaited us. We had greasy Irish bacon and greyish ham, cold fried bread, mushy tomatoes and rubbery eggs.
‘You must have been mighty hungry to think this breakfast was any good’, I scolded.
Ignoring the old advice never to swim until an hour after eating, we bathed in the incredibly warm turquoise sea that looked more like somewhere in Hawaii than Swansea. In the evening we settled on a moonlit hillside by a castle. That night a male choir of a thousand voices happened to be singing. We got a Chinese takeaway and a bottle of wine.
The wine tasted like cough syrup watered down with rubbing alcohol. The spring rolls seemed like Cornish pasty dough rolled and deep-fried. Still, it was a memorable meal because the wine and Chinese food were the worst I’d ever had. And we got teary-eyed, not over the horrid meal but at the glorious voices resounding over the hills.
Back in Cornwall we concentrated on finding a cream tea. There’s something so delectable about those words: cream tea. I had had many a fancy Ritz tea with strawberry tarts and finger sandwiches, but I had not had many cream teas. I immediately fell in love with the gooey richness of berry jam, the bland coolness of Devonshire clotted cream, and the dry flakiness of just-so scones. After licking my fingers and downing the dregs of my tea, we hopped into the van and drove on, stopping here and there to wade in a stream or visit an ocean cove. Then we came to a particularly sweet-looking teashop that boasted – cream teas.
‘Oh, don’t look so forlorn’, said the man of the van. ‘Who’s to say you can’t have two cream teas in one day?’
So we stopped and had our second cream tea, this one even better than the first.
I was in heaven.
‘Let’s stop in at Cambridge and I’ll show you my old haunts.’
As we neared Cambridge an adorable teashop with a lawn full of cows beckoned to us.
‘It’s a culinary tour. You need to fully experience cream teas’, said my guide as he caught me longingly looking at the teashop.
We enjoyed our third cream tea of the day.
By the time we entered Cambridge my belly was aching and I thought I would burst. We found some public facilities, but I was not up to touring and we had to stop far too often all the way back to London.
Back home we discovered that an army of small green caterpillars had set up camp in the kitchen. We crushed them wherever we walked, they sizzled whenever the cooker was lit, and they had woven cocoons in the handle of the refrigerator. With a heavy heart, the man of the house announced he would order a truckload of building supplies. It was time to permanently separate the kitchen from the garden.
COMING TO AMERICA
AMANDA JONES
Amanda Jones is a travel writer and photographer who lives in northern California. Her work has appeared in Travel & Leisure, Town & Country Travel, the Los Angeles Times, the London Sunday Times, Vogue and Condé Nast Traveller, among other publications. Thanks to a predilection for wandering, she has an embarrassing number of on-the-road tales of woe and misadventure. Amanda was born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand.
In 1982, at the age of twenty, I was still living at home with my parents in Auckland, New Zealand. The product of a spectacularly sheltered and conventional existence, I had graduated from university and had no plans for the future. One day, my father summoned me into his den, accused me of being ‘rudderless’, and presented me with a truly horrible suggestion. He was
president of Auckland’s Rotary Club at the time, and he clearly felt the position entitled him to practise the worst kind of nepotism. ‘Rotary’, he announced, ‘is offering a scholarship for an MBA programme in America. I’ve entered your name. I feel quite sure you’ll get it. I think you can rely on the fact that you’ll be off to graduate school in a matter of months.’
‘What?’ I responded, wondering what I had ever done to make him think I would be either good at, or interested in, business. I was, however, suddenly buoyed by the notion that I should pick myself up and move to America. ‘Where?’
‘Georgia. It’s in the southern portion of the country.’
‘Christ!’ I shrieked. ‘Georgia! How desperate do you think I am? They don’t even drink in Georgia!’
I had no idea if this was true, but we’d all heard the stories about America’s dry college campuses – a notion incomprehensible to a New Zealander – and I had no desire to go to the Deep South. It certainly gave my father pause. He stood there speechless, likely imagining visiting me at my dry college and being obliged to exchange his gin and tonic in cut crystal for a Tab, straight from the can. He sloped off, and the scholarship was awarded to some other hapless creature.
That conversation did, however, make me realise that I had to take control of my life before my father came up with more insane ideas. I must leave. And anywhere but Georgia sounded good.
I quickly determined that Gina, an American exchange student who’d lived with my family for a year, was my salvation. We were both fifteen when Gina had come to live with us. Back then she’d towered over me. She had enormous breasts, she smoked clove cigarettes, she had one pierced ear and a mane of frizzy, white-blonde hair that gave her an exotic, feral allure. Boys adored her, my parents despised her, and I desperately wanted to be like her. Gina had hated New Zealand. She’d hated the food, hated the rain, and she’d especially hated being made to go to my all-girls high school wearing a tartan kilt uniform.
By the Seat of My Pants Page 19
