No. 31 - The Turkey's Revenge

‘I’m sorry about it Christopher - but there we are,’ was my mother’s unconvincing explanation as to why I had to survive on ready meals. She often told me tales of the wonderful things she used to cook and bake when my older brothers were children - crusty bread, sumptuous cakes and delicious savouries - but after my father died I had Heinz, Findus and Bird’s Eye to thank for most of my meals.

Findus French Bread Pizza (Evening Standard 1979 courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive)

Before he died, every Sunday she would make the best roast potatoes I’ve ever tasted with thick, tasty gravy, to accompany roast beef so well done that admittedly, it wasn’t to everyone’s taste. The vegetables were a tinned afterthought in the form of peas and carrots. I was probably eleven before I even realised that there were any other vegetables.

Dessert was often rice pudding, but she couldn’t really win with those. Dad liked them thick and I liked them runny. Dad also liked to stir raspberry jam into them whereas I preferred not to sully their glorious milkiness. She occasionally made beautiful rhubarb or apple tarts, sponges topped with chocolate or coffee buttercream, she made a fine Queen of Puddings, and she was very good at gingerbread.

On Sunday afternoons, sometimes there were fruit scones for tea but more often than not it would involve the serving of tinned fruit. The slimy slivers of peach or pale, gritty pear halves and occasionally Mandarin oranges, accompanied by tinned evaporated milk by Ideal or Carnation, were, I think, a generational thing. These might have been considered luxuries during the War but they were rather underwhelming to a child born years after the end of rationing.

Mum was a traditional housewife, but she had a number of health problems that interrupted each day and led to her growing reliance on convenience foods. She almost literally floored Dad and I one lunchtime by serving us tinned suet pudding, followed by more suet in the form of tinned jam roly-poly. She ate neither of these, so we had half each of both, even though they were intended to serve four. As I sat through double Chemistry that afternoon, I suffered waves of pain as it gradually set like concrete in my stomach.

Previous efforts at telling this story have often prompted the question, ‘If you were that bothered, why didn’t you get off your backside and cook for yourself?’ But these were different times - my parents were old enough to have been my grandparents and they were very traditional. Dad didn’t cook and I wasn’t expected to. I had never been taught so much as to boil an egg - because I was a boy.

In retrospect, learning how to cook would have been far more useful to me than my various inept attempts at crafts like woodwork and metalwork. One of my few efforts that made it out of the workshop was a metal key-ring with my mother’s name punched onto it. When I asked her later why she never used it, she confessed that although she thought it was ‘very nice’, it was ‘a bit heavy,’ and had she used it, she’d have been dragging her handbag along the floor behind her.

Dream Kitchen

In 1973 when I was fifteen, we moved from the terraced house in which I grew up, to the house adjoining the primary school at which my father had been head teacher since 1932. Decorated with white anaglypta wallpaper and filled with flat-pack, easy-wipe MDF stuff to replace our lovely old wooden furniture, it was Mum’s dream home. Whenever I argued in favour of keeping the oak or walnut pieces, she would counter with “You’re not the one who has to dust and polish them now are you?” which effectively shut me up.

Daily Mirror 1987 (courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive)

Having endured over thirty years of cooking in a ramshackle scullery, she adored her new kitchen, a floral explosion of 1970’s colour. It looked nice enough, but built into the granite, it was cold and dark and so damp that you couldn’t leave a biscuit out overnight without it going soggy. Fortunately, with Mum and I around, the life expectancy of a biscuit was short.

When Dad died (not because of Mum’s cooking I hasten to add), meals got worse. She was grieving of course, and I believe that in some ways she took it as her retirement from decades of domestic drudgery. She still did a roast on Sundays and at Christmas, but otherwise convenience foods advertised on TV abounded - disappointment on a plate in the form of a crispy pancake or a French bread pizza - that isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy them at the time. Like most teenage boys, I wasn't known for my discerning palate and I readily confess that there are occasions when I still quite fancy these things. Every new convenience food advertised on the television would probably appear on our table, or rather our laps in front of the telly soon after. Freed from my father’s conservative tastes, she was adventurous in her own fashion, seizing upon anything new she spotted in the shops, as long as it looked easy. I vaguely recall something brown and runny from a tin that went under the rather optimistic title of ‘Lamb Garni’. That was Mum being exotic that was.

One day, she surprised me by proudly announcing that she had acquired some fresh peas still in their pods. They’d be good for me, she said. She may even have got me to shell them for her, a pleasant, almost therapeutic activity, like popping bubble-wrap. I looked forward to having them as part of a delicious and for once, nutritious meal. Sadly for me, they were the meal. Try presenting a bowl of peas to a hungry teenager nowadays and calling it dinner. When I protested she told me I could have bread and butter with them. That’s more or less a pea sandwich! Who ever heard of a pea sandwich?

It isn’t that I was a fussy eater. To this day, fried egg accompanied by home made chips represents the unsurpassed taste of Saturday lunchtime, before retiring to watch Frank Bough on Grandstand as the afternoon football scores rolled in. I reckoned I could have made that for myself, but there was no way that Mum was letting her teenage son anywhere near the chip pan. If anyone was going to burn her dream kitchen down it was going to be her. This she did in 1976, but that's a story for another day.

Heinz Lamb Garni (TV Times 1966 courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive). The photo is flattering.

Shades of Brown

A few years later, I was on vacation from college and having had a few drinks in the pub with my mates I came home ‘hungry starving’ as Mum would have put it, in her distinctly Rhondda way. I asked whether there was anything in for me to eat. She was just about to retire for the night but told me that I could help myself to a piece of the apple tart I’d find in the oven. Her tarts were always delicious, so I was pleased. “Don’t you scoff the lot mind!” she warned. The stove was a New World dual oven affair with the grill also serving as a smaller oven, with a larger one beneath it in what I consider the traditional place for an oven. Living alone as she did when I was away at college, the smaller oven was usually sufficient for her needs and the larger one was seldom used.

Being a little tipsy and in great need of the apple tart, I unthinkingly opened the larger oven. The light went on, and behind the internal glass door I saw something large and brown, which was most definitely not a tart. I stared and stared at it because not only was it not a tart, I couldn’t fathom what on earth it could be. It was certainly not something one would contemplate eating – not even after the pub. It glistened with a reptilian wetness and what wasn’t some shade of brown, was black. Then it dawned on me what it was.

I went to the bottom of the stairs and called up: “Mum? You know you’ve left the Christmas turkey in the oven don’t you?”

“Don’t be so soft!” came a cry from above, “You must have had one too many!”

“Come down and see for yourself then, if you don’t believe me.”

The trouble was that this was mid-May and we never had a turkey at Easter. If I was right, that bird had been festering behind the internal glass door of the large oven for nearly five months. Mum appeared in her hairnet and dressing gown with her ‘stupid boy’ expression written large on her face and joined me in peering through the glass at ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ was.

“Well damn me, you’re right,” she concluded grimly. Of course, having had a few pints I thought it was hysterically funny and fell about laughing, much to her chagrin.

“All right clever clogs. We’d better get shot of it,” she said.

Give Mum her due, she was decisive and quickly formed a plan of action. I was to hold open a bin bag while she lifted it out and scraped the carcass off the plate. She met some resistance in pulling open the glass door, but eventually it gave, with a ‘puh’ sound. The oven had been airtight and suddenly we were nearly overwhelmed by the rank smell of putrefaction. The incident may have amused me, but this vile, disturbing smell of decay did not. We had no option other than to flee retching into the yard and give it a few minutes to clear. When it became bearable, just, we recommenced salvage operations, but Mum was unable to detach the revolting carcass, which while becoming liquid in places, had petrified itself to the plate in others. I had no idea there were that many shades of brown. It was the most revolting sight I have ever seen. In the end, the plate had to be consigned to the bin bag too.

After all the excitement of this unpleasant task, having had to deal with a putrefying turkey and a nearly hysterical son, she was in no mood for sleep, so, truly British in a crisis, we had a cup of tea to help calm us. As we drank it she noticed the student's smirking face.

“What’s tickled you now?” she asked grumpily.

“I believe two and a half to three hours in the oven is recommended for a turkey that size Mum, not five months,” I replied.

“Oh very funny,” she replied, “Don’t you dare tell anyone about this mind. Don’t you dare!”