by Ashly Graham
‘On the cards would be written a brief but solicitous message in a neat hand, closely written into the corners and around the description on the back of whatever was depicted, so as to make the most of the limited space. Grandpa was scrupulous about sending these communications, knowing how much I looked forward to receiving them. Photographs of markets, and squares, ports, coastlines, castles, and people: all were so sharply defined...one forgave the Kodachrome enhancements...that I felt I had been there myself, absorbed the atmosphere, and gained insight into the culture. On some of the views of towns or villages, Grandpa marked an x showing where he had stayed, or a point of special interest.
‘Some of these cards were miniature works of art, such as the one of an Andalusian woman—this would have been during the Spanish Interruption—holding a prayer book, whose flounced black silk dress and black lace mantilla were genuine material applications on the card; as were another fan-holding Málaga woman’s bodice and tiered frilly blue cinch-waisted flamenco costume edged with gold, and the red flower decoration under the comb in her hair; and a girl in Tangier’s white braided tasselled headdress, and yellow shawl, and red and white striped skirt, which were embroidered in real silk thread.
‘Every foreign postmark was a miracle to me, and each stamp provided much greater than its nominal face value—how Pappy came by his rare collectable items I never did find out—by transporting me to its source without the need for any intervention by postal services. The shapes, colours, and sizes of them said a great deal about the national character: those from the African republics and Pacific islands were big and cheerfully gaudy, bursting in my mind in expanding circles like fireworks. The ones from Communist countries, showing the heads of dour dictators and military men, were small and drab and symbolic of repression.
‘With the help of my Philip’s atlas, and globe, I followed Pappy’s progress from continent to continent, across around and along and through oceans, seas, gulfs, lakes, straits, channels, and canals. There were of course also many mountains, deserts, plains, islands, isthmuses, and marshes; but water was always dominant in my mind’s eye as the encapsulating force and environmental element, especially salt water, and where I didn’t have details—a postcard is only a postcard—I supplied them for myself. I saw smokestack steamers, blaring tugs, sleek yachts, galliots, ketches, dhows, sampans, and fishing smacks. I saw the bows of funnelled liners and ships, as they cleaved waters that were sometimes frictionless and calm, and sometimes in a rolling swell or hill-sized waves, and sometimes violent rough with white-crested combers.
‘My visions never became memories, or paled or receded, but remained as keen as the moment they seared my mind.
‘Wherever Pappy, and therefore I also, travelled were paradises free of persecution, unjust laws, war, hunger, cruelty, poverty, and destitution...and domestic argument and tension; and boredom. It was as if every departure and arrival, every sun-filled harbour and historical scene, had been created by Pappy for me alone—though I believe the mailing of these cards and the impression they created on me was as important to the sender as it was to the recipient. From across the world my grandfather and I were bonded by these images, photographs and pictures that never seemed to have been made by any person, but to exist of their own right as tiny squares cut from the tapestry of life—which, by the time they arrived, like old daguerrotypes had acquired a patina of truth and permanence that had not been inherent at the moment of their creation.
‘Each year as the Margate hiatus time approached, the only plain white postcards Grandpa ever sent were delivered, addressed to my mother. They recorded facts only: the details of Pappy’s return to England; and they were written in heavily impressed black ballpoint, instead of the usual blue biro or brown ink of his carefully preserved fountain-pen—sometimes Pappy put his cards in envelopes, if he wanted more unaddressed space to write on, and which would not be obscured by a postmark—so as to ensure that the writing was not indistinct or blurred by rain.
‘Whatever multifarious delays might affect my grandfather’s other communications, these white postcards invariably came exactly a week before he was due; when our house cat, who always knew when the postman would have something from Pappy in his bag, would be inside the front door with her tail twitching, waiting for it to come through the letter-box at seven o’clock in the morning, so that she could watch it until someone came to pick it off the mat.
‘There was never any other mail on such days.
‘If Grandpa he was en route across Europe, the card might read, “Arriving Waterloo 16.04.” This meant that, from the Gare de l’Est where the Orient Express came in, he would cross to the Gare du Nord and take the train to Calais, and the ferry to Dover; he could have taken the train on to London St Pancras, but it made him feel lonely not to be met upon re-entering his own country and having to travel onward alone.
‘Or, if his return direction was from the west, the card might say, “Docking Southampton RMS Queen Mary 10.00 a.m.” Why my grandfather should be aboard a Cunard White Star transatlantic liner remains a mystery that I never felt it necessary to solve—as I said, Pappy moved in mysterious ways.
‘Grandpa would also send a confirming telegram, unnecessarily, because there wasn’t a post office in the world that would dare to delay or lose a missive of his.
‘The reason for these strict communications was indication of, not a double standard, but a strange incongruity in my grandfather’s personality: he wanted my mother to drive down from Yorkshire in order to meet and collect him either from Dover or Southhampton in her car, and remove him from the ongoing company of those who had shared his final transportation on the last leg of his homeward journey.
‘These people for some reason Pappy considered to be in a lowly category quite separate and distinct from everyone else he encountered in his travels. The incoming tourists amongst them—it never occurred to Pappy to think of himself as a sightseer when he was abroad, only as a citizen of the world, an eager participant and engager in life—he regarded as an aimless, selfish type, bent on frivolous amusement; individuals who lacked self-worth and were incapable of formulating and adhering to any consistent philosophy of life. Returning holiday-makers to him were all guilty of disloyalty to their country. Those travelling on business were traitors.
‘Always there was a temporary gloom, or mild depression, that settled upon my grandfather when he came home from far-off places, which made him cranky at first. He was aware of it, and his demand that my mother and I should meet him was evidence of his desire that we should help ease his brief return to the familiar world of his own upbringing, when his own character was not fully formed.
‘Upon returning for his annual visit, our Ulysses would stay with us for a week where we lived in a maisonette near Bridlington, at my insistence taking my bed while I bunked on the lumpy divan in the living room: this was years before my father became successful in his business affairs, and we moved into our ugly but commodious residence with its tastelessly expensive furnishings—my father liked to call the shots in everything—in Bradford.
‘Then we would make the journey up to London, and deposit Pappy on the train at Charing Cross station for Margate; where Mrs Bayliss would be waiting for him, having received an equally emphatic notification of Pappy’s imminence…which in her case was brought to her by her dachshund, an animal as prescient as our cat, who would watch her as she read it aloud with its head on one side and an ear cocked.
‘We were never introduced to the good Mrs Bayliss, or spoke to her on the telephone, and knew only that she ran the Cockleshell Bed and Breakfast, and drove a green Ford Zephyr, in which in the time-honoured manner she would be waiting to greet Grandpa off the train.
‘From Dover or Southampton Dock to our house up north; from home to London Charing Cross; Margate station to and from the Bayliss residence; from Charing Cross station to Dover or Folkestone ferry terminus—after dropping her father off my mother and I took the opportunity to stay in L
ondon overnight in a Paddington hotel, so that we could have a pre-theatre dinner and attend a West End show—those were the only journeys that Pappy would ever consent to make in a car driven only by his youngest daughter or Mrs B…he did not–would not drive himself.
‘As he sat in the front of our Morris Minor while my mother drove, Pappy would invite me, from where I sat in the back seat, to lay my finger in the deep lateral crease that he had at the base of his freshly barbered closely cropped skull. Then he would snap his head back and catch my finger, with a belly laugh that deafened us in the confined space.
‘I could tell that Grandpa, who began to recover his equanimity as soon as we were away from the arrivals area, enjoyed our drives, from the way he looked at the scenery with a delight that amazed me, given how humdrum it must have seemed compared to where he’d just come from. And when we arrived at our destination he would turn to my mother with delight, and exclaim, “Didn’t hit a thing! Didn’t hit a thing!”
‘Although Pappy felt for my mother and me a kindness that he never evinced towards his wife and other children, it did not matter to me that the conversations he and I had at home, though not strained, never matched the distant intimacy of those postcards and occasional letters from abroad. For our relationship was forged in hemispheres, not houses, and had no need of strengthening. When he departed on his next consecutively lettered tour, seeing him go was more of a hello than a goodbye.
‘Cecil “Pappy” Bulstrode kept travelling to the end, and died in the Wallis and Futuna Islands. If an accident had to be the cause, it seemed fitting that a man like him did not go to meet his Maker after falling under a Clapham omnibus, or choking on a huss bone on the seafront in Margate. And so it was, for at age eighty-six Pappy was pierced through the heart by an errant harpoon, off a reef where he was participating in a barracuda hunt with a group of natives in loincloths. Pappy was wearing one himself, and could not be identified until those with him did a roll-call.
‘King George the Fifth’s last words, “Bugger Bognor”, which were spoken in reply to his physician’s assurance that “Your Majesty will soon be well enough to visit Bognor,” were reported in The Times as “How is the Empire?”.
‘Cecil Bulstrode’s farewell statement as he was carried ashore, though not pungent or trenchant, or rewritten in a hokey phoney version, was reported as: “Give my regrets to Zanzibar, and scatter my ashes over Zululand.”
‘And so it was, with Zululand, posthumously, that Pappy concluded his appreciation of the thick alphabet soup of nations; which I considered, and I think he would have agreed, was a perfect way for a life to end in an imperfect world.’
Chapter Ten
‘Turning now and at last,’ said Snipcock, ‘to the subject of my older post-crisis self, when I finally was able to make use of the latent gifts with which I was endowed, people who knew me were startled when I became obsessed with the art of cooking. I’ve often wondered myself what attracted me to it, unless it was the subconscious desire to indulge a passion for another kind of exploration to that favoured by my grandfather.
‘For I was aware that, after all I had experienced vicariously through Pappy Bulstrode’s postcards, no pleasure that I could derive from travel would compare with what was already within me. Indeed, when I was invited to be a guest on Desert Island Discs, the longest-running radio programme, devised by Roy Plomley, and was asked what single musical recording, and what book in addition to the Bible and Shakespeare, and what luxury item, I should like to have with me if I were to be marooned on an island, my answer was: nothing at all.
‘To me, the promiscuous charms of memory are more fulfilling than a monogamous tie. Having only one piece of music to listen to, to me would be torture, and I would quickly come to hate the sounds I thought I prized sufficiently to exclude all others, and stop playing it.
‘Regarding another book, even if I never opened the cover, so unlimited would be the unconsidered, and ill-considered, matter that I already had in my head waiting to be revisited, pondered, reinterpreted, and enjoyed, given the unlimited leisure to do so, that my choice’s exclusive presence at my side demanding to be read would become intolerable, until I would surely toss it into the ocean for the edification of mermaids and mermen.
‘As to the luxury, given a crate of Lindt chocolate I would doubtless consume much of it too fast, and make myself so ill as to want to dispose of the remainder in similar fashion to the book, and amuse myself by listening to the gurgles of dyspepsia from the depths.
‘A simpler explanation for my decision was that, when it came to the prospect of employment, I wanted nothing to do with my father’s fertilizer business after his death. From the moment I took it over, if so proactive a term can be applied to my stewardship, I neglected it to the point where, by the time I decided it should be sold, it was worthless.
‘And because I was adamant about not profiting from the stamp collection that Cecil Bulstrode had somehow put together in the course of his sojourns around the world, having donated it to the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum without making any effort to ascertain its value, I awoke one morning to find myself penniless and in need of a job.
‘Despite having no training in any craft or line of work at which I could hope to make a living, I was motivated to do well at something. I had no wish to be fat and fifty and with no prospects but that of an impoverished old age.
‘I decided to make a new start in an energetic and sociable métier: as a chef; and not just any chef, but a great one who owned his own restaurant and became rich and famous. For as Barabas says in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta…that, as their wealth increaseth, men of judgement should frame their means of traffic from the vulgar trade, and so enclose infinite riches in a little room…fortunes may be made by those whose private interests lie within the confines of a Smallbone kitchen.
‘It was a serious aspiration, for in addition to possessing talent, a chef-in-training has to spend years attaining proficiency in multiple disciplines before he—or she, for I do not mean to imply that it is a male-only profession—can hope to win his toque; and even then success is far from assured. Those who complain about a tough apprenticeship are either not up to the job, or they lack the necessary drive, or ability to function as part of a team—and I was determined in the way that only one who’d reached bottom in life can be.
‘To fully understand the trade, one must begin in the lowliest position and work one’s way through the ranks of the line employees, being prepared to accept and endure long hours, low pay, and rudeness from those whose skills and performance one needs to acquire and emulate. The knowledge that one is there to steal the secrets of others, to improve upon their methods, and thereafter to compete with them for jobs in the culinary marketplace, makes one’s colleagues the surliest and most begrudging of teachers.
‘In addition to which, in order to succeed one has to have a head for business, an eye for trends, and to be a good judge of people in hiring the right sort of assistants. Ultimately every chef is dependent upon those who work under him, and before lording it over others he must demonstrate that he is capable of earning their respect.
‘I took out a loan on the strength of my slight remaining credit, and signed up for classes at a Cordon Bleu school, from which I graduated with honours. I then applied for work at a long list of restaurants in different cities that specialized in diverse cuisines, so as to become accustomed to the pace and pressure of all types of commercial gastronomy. In what others called their spare time—I should have regarded it as a serious deficiency in myself if I had any—I studied French, to ease my assimilation into the trade, for it was my conviction that cookery in its supreme form is a Gallic province.
‘I learned my lessons well, beginning as a prep cook, and then a commis, or assistant to the chefs de partie, otherwise known as station chefs or line cooks, in which capacity I was responsible for basic preparation in the kitchen; as well as helping select the finest meat, fish, vegetables, and o
ther ingredients from the best suppliers and markets. Under the guidance of an excellent saucier, I practised the five mother sauces until I could make them blindfold, and I distinguished myself in similar fashion under the tutelage of poissoniers or fish cooks, entremétiers or vegetable cooks, rôtisseurs or roasting cooks, fry cooks, and soup cooks. The garde manger, or pantry chef, versed me in the preparation of cold food, and the pâtissier, or pastry chef, in making desserts.
‘As I advanced in proficiency, I was encouraged to use my instincts and be adventurous in the creation of new dishes, new dining experiences. From chef tournant, or relief or swing cook, within five years I was promoted to sous-chef.
‘Three years later I obtained a position as chef de cuisine, and then executive chef, upon the departure under a cloud of the incumbent, from a restaurant that had formerly been well known and popular, but which had allowed its standards to slip. Custom had fallen off dramatically, and the partners who owned it were desperate as to what to do, now that the business in which they’d formerly made a killing had become a drain upon their resources in a down financial market. What had once seemed a limitless geyser of profitability as an investment, was now a dry well.
‘The decline of a great restaurant is sad to behold, especially because as soon as word gets around that it is not what it was, it is likely to go under sooner than it might deserve, especially if the right improvements are already being implemented to address the faults and deficiencies. The public is as irrational and fickle in its loyalty to such establishments as chefs are egotistical and highly strung. There are any number of things that can go wrong, but whether the cause is staff problems, or a deterioration in quality, or service, or a citation for unhygienic practices, or a combination of different reasons, the effect is fast and devastating. The case of the owner–chef who fell into such a great depression when he lost one of his Michelin stars that he killed himself, was a tragic reflection of what can happen in the industry.
