2002 - Wake up (6 page)

§

When I was a child we were given polio vaccines in a sugar cube. All others were by injection. There was no doubt which we children preferred.

It’s now twenty years since foreign DNA was first inserted into the genomes of plants. Shortly after that, it occurred to a couple of American molecular biologists that plants might be coaxed into expressing vaccine antigens, and eaten as an alternative to a jab.

This is the idea. Edible Plant Vaccines.

I met Simon Wright, the MD of AlphaGen, five years ago. I joined his board soon after. With academic partners in Plant Biology at Cambridge, AlphaGen had just achieved the first successful expression of a hepatitis vaccine in transgenic potato. They were almost ready to conduct human trials, and a partner in the potato trade—one willing to invest—was welcomed.

§

There can’t be many ring roads go right around an old town like ours, roundabout to roundabout.

How nice it is to orbit the town. I wonder whether I or the car might get dizzy, going round in circles like this? I should cross to the other side, and resume in the opposite direction.

I feel like a satellite. Things are slowing down. We’re gradually transcending the gravitational pull of the earth. Entering galactic time, where nothing matters if it lasts for less than a million years. Where empires rise and fall in the blink of an eye. Where all that matters is an ice age…or a falling star…or the birth of a child.

§

While my son sleeps beside me in the early morning, I scribble. I still make plans at dawn.

He doesn’t like to be watched in his sleep, John Junior—which is what I call Jacob. He’s like me (of course). However silent I am, he’ll stir, he’ll fidget. Sometimes his eyes open simply because, it seems, he’s being observed. It’s true, they really do. But I love to watch him. It feels less the absorbing observation of a process taking place, of life unfolding (though it is this too), than me feeding myself, visually. Feasting on my son with my eyes.

Our son is woken in the early hours, either by what Lily takes, from his reddened cheeks and drooling, to be teething, for which she slips a camomilla homeopathic pill on his tongue, or else by some hindrance in his digestion.

His mother soothes him with soft stroking words, but sometimes he won’t be calmed and I scoop him up out of bed, rush him away from my exhausted wife. Then you may find me in the dead of night, feeding John J., my finger dipped in dill water.

His existence revolves around his digestion. Mysterious rumblings emanate from deep in his little gut; I listen to them like sonar readings, though I understand nothing. When his digestion upsets him he flexes and twists, grimaces, whimpers. Distressed by food—the processing of it or his need for more of it. Not in a minute or two or ten. Now!

§

I keep digressing. But I want to go over it all, everything, before I see my brother—so I can start explaining it to him.

I mean, Greg, look at where we are, I’ll say. The Age of Enlightenment is dead. Civilisation didn’t lead to ever greater civility, tolerance, equality. It was never going to—only over-educated fools thought so. No, we’re back in the jungle. Or rather, the laws of the jungle operate up here on the high plain.

This is an age of reason. There’s no religion, no ideology, no ideal, to inhibit us. Only relative secular humanism, and what does that amount to? If you can afford it, you can have it, you have a right to it. Everybody wants the money, so they can buy what they want. The only barrier to whatever we want is public opinion, a cautious, slow-moving animal, to be dragged along in the wake of brave pioneers.

§

Now our father was dead, I realised I need no longer situate myself in opposition to his determined ignorance. He wasn’t there any more. And neither had Greg’s business any connection to Dad’s market stall other than a sentimental one.

“OK, Greg,” I said, at the end of that summer. “I’ll work with you.”

“You will? Really?”

“Partners.”

“Of course,” he said. “That’s what I’m offering, John. In everything.”

§

What was odd was that as soon as I made the decision I felt less that I’d given up one course of action—in science, in academia—than that I’d rediscovered a path allowed to grow over and obscured. As kids Greg and I helped Dad evenings, weekends and holidays, scaffolding the stall, humping crates. Me replenishing fruit displays, loudmouth Greg hawking raucous and unflagging.

My brother’s hot; he grabs an orange and steps behind the back of the stall. Greg peels the orange salivating; as soon as he’s peeled enough he plunges his impatient mouth in, greedy teeth puncturing tiny sacs, juice squirting out and dribbling down his chin, which he retrieves with his tongue. And, afterwards, after he’s devoured the orange, ripping it apart and pulling off the last of the pulp clinging to the pith on the inside of the skin, Greg wipes his mouth with the back of his hand with so relishing a gesture that it looks like he’s gained a further tangy pleasure from the act.

There was this one day, wasn’t there, aged fourteen, when I stumbled upon a truth I think our dad sensed only dimly, if at all. Which was the sheer ubiquity of food. That everyone eats. A lot. We eat and drink, and we piss and shit. The delicious, fundamental basis of life, of human lives, meant that we were blessed, in the provision of food, not simply with the most necessary profession but an almost holy vocation. I remember this revelation, conferred upon me in a moment of grace.

Or was it a fortuitous whim of conversational flow?

Yes, that’s more likely it.

One summer Sunday our father had dropped Greg and me off in a lay-by with a parasol, a crate of punnets of raspberries and strawberries, and a satchel of coins.

Hot tarmac. Petrol haze. I watched cars pass by. I served those travellers who paused to buy in a dozy, preoccupied manner. The cars went past, an eternal cavalcade, endlessly replenished. I began to think of the cars as like food, items of food endlessly conveyed. I thought of food as a flow of matter, and we, our bodies, enter that flow, let it flow through us, for the brief duration of our lives.

I mixed up someone’s change, and when they’d gone my brother said, “You’re not with it.”

“I’m considering things,” I said.

“Get a grip, John.”

“These people.” I gestured with a sweep of my lower arm at the traffic. Swishing to and fro. “What do they have in common?”

“They dislike public transport?”

“All these people,” I said. “They’re different. Young and old, kids in the back, men, women, white, black, rich or poor. Everyone different, but any of them might stop for a berry because they all eat.”

“Sure.”

I said it again. “They all eat. Everyone.”

My brother stared at me. Then somehow he was staring in my direction but at me no longer. Greg looks downright stupid when he’s thinking. “They all eat,” he said eventually.

“That’s right.”

“Everyone eats.” He came over and placed his hands on my shoulders, looked into my eyes. I nodded. “And we, John,” he said, “we sell the food. If we do it right, we can’t lose.”

§

Six years later came that summer that changed my life, the summer of 1976. Three things happened: our father died, I failed to obtain the degree I expected, and it was the worst drought for a generation. People recall the heat but no one remembers that before the drought, in late May, even in some places early June, a late frost had fallen. It was a double whammy, the frost as much as the drought. Greg had already started dealing directly, on a very small scale, with a few potato farmers kind of inherited from Alfred Jemson. Come harvest, farmers who expected ten ton of spuds an acre were lucky if they got five; prices soared, and some of them got greedy. Desperate. They broke contracts they’d sealed with a handshake months before, demanding higher prices per ton for their diminished yield. Greg could see their point of view, and was prepared to haggle his way to a reasonable medium, but I told him we couldn’t accept that.

“Trust me,” I said. “Let me deal with this,” I said to our farmers, me twenty-one years old, “You take the price we shook on; we’re not paying a penny more. And if you break this deal, my brother and I’ll never buy from you again.” Four farmers walked away, fetching better deals elsewhere.

We had to scratch and scrabble through the following winter, rustling up spuds wherever we could to keep ourselves and one or two other retailers we began to work with supplied. We even hustled old guys on their allotments to sell us a few tatties. But our reputation was made. Farmers knew we’d strike a deal and stick to it, and they came to us.

We never did do business again with a single one of those growers who reneged that summer. Greg and I toasted the last of them to sell up, around 1993, as I recall. We happened to be driving past this bastard’s small farm soon after hearing the news and Greg pulled the car over in a gateway. We walked into a field, unzipped our flies and pissed on his last lot of haulms. Our own triumphant crop spray.

My word is my bond.

No, that’s not quite true, is it? Like, for example, just now, I confess, I made that up about a therapist. Would I have lain down on the couch of some old Jung witch and bared my soul? Am I serious? With my background?

§

Business plans may have made Greg anxious, but I saw them as absolutely necessary. I spent my first months working with him, with
Sharpe Brothers
, analysing the business we had and that we might hope to develop. Greg and his team were quite capable of running things as they were so, appropriately enough, the boffin brother studied. I read. I attended conferences and seminars. I spoke to management consultants, bank managers, agriculturalists, retail advisers, wholesale experts. I outlined plans, sketched flow charts, drew up columns of speculative figures. I stared at a pocket calculator Greg gave me, adding and subtracting endless variables.

Above all I woke at dawn every morning and made myself a cup of tea and returned to bed. If occasionally there was a girl there, Jen having moved on, I’d do my best not to wake her, and lay in the dark, thinking. That was where I let what I’d learned sink in and make clear to me its practical application. The following spring I laid out my plans for Greg. It was a short speech, that stunned him, for maybe a full minute, which is a long time when you’re waiting for someone to say something. Then Greg shook himself and leapt to his feet.

“Sell the stalls?” he demanded, pacing the room. “Even Dad’s?”

“Yes,” I nodded. “Let the guys you’ve got take them over if they want, pay us off in instalments.”

“Sell the shop?”

“That’s right, Greg. Sell the lease outright.”

“But keep the school contract?”

“Hustle for more. Any way we can.”

He stopped prowling the room. “And did you say? Am I right?” Greg peered at me. “You’re saying get rid of fruit and vegetables?”

“Except potatoes. Everything else.”

“Keep the warehouse.”

“Of course. Get Mum out of that trailer, we buy her a bungalow. We get rid of the trailer, and build more warehouse in the yard.”

Greg stood there, staring at the carpet, muttering, “Get rid of the fruit and veg.” As if I’d mortally insulted Dad’s memory. Shaking his head. “Fruit and veg.”

Then he blinked at me, and said, “Potatoes, John. Who knows? It might just work.”

“Trust me,” I said. “It will.”

§

Is that the whole answer, though—economics? Is that why we specialised in potatoes? Or was it also because they’re wondrous? You can’t expect people to understand. Few do. But what I learned during those months is that what the Spanish brought to Europe towards the end of the sixteenth century can provide, supplemented with a single beaker of milk, a nutritionally complete diet. One acre of spuds provides more than ten people with their annual energy and protein needs, which is not true of rice or wheat, or corn or soybeans, or any other staple.

And what else? Their versatility. People may have seen the slogan a few years back:
You Can’t Beat ‘Em, But You Can Fry ‘Em
. Variations on this were posted in supermarkets everywhere.
You Can’t Beat ‘Em, So Why Not Mash
‘Em? Yes, and
Boil ‘Em. Roast ‘Em. Bake ‘Em
.

Greg claims he thought those up, doodled on his handheld computer in a BPC meeting, downloaded to someone there. Swears it. I don’t believe him, mind. But what other food can you do so much with? I can’t name one.

§

The potato was brought to England by one of Elizabeth’s marauding adventurers, Raleigh or Drake or Hawkins, in the late sixteenth century, but it took another two hundred years for the potato to take hold here. In the early days they were poor yielding, unreliable, susceptible to all kinds of disease and infection. But the beginning of the nineteenth century saw a string of poor cereal harvests: grain prices soared, and the Corn Law of 1815, which protected corn growers by restricting imports, kept them high. Riots took place, with the Napoleonic Wars going on in the background.

The government saw the result of dependence on one major food, and identified the potato as a cheap, alternative source for the masses. Parish officers were encouraged to provide allotments for the poor, which became known as potato patches.

The potato market, the amount consumed, increased enormously through the nineteenth century, eaten by the new class, the urban poor. They were hurried, overcrowded, and lacked equipment, fuel and time for cooking. Urban workers lunched on a mess of potatoes, into which a little butter or lard was poured, with fried bacon added occasionally. They dined on tea and bread. And in cities the baked-potata man appeared, a vendor who paid a baker to bake his spuds then sold them, with butter and salt, from tall cans kept warm with a charcoal boiler.

Potatoes as convenience food for the urban working class. A person could guess what came next: baked-potata sellers in Lancashire branched into frying at about the same time—the 1880
s
—that the steam trawler netted large catches of fish from ever further afield, to be rushed in ice on trains to inland markets. Fish and chips were married in a million plates of paper and greasy fingers.