Toast (7 page)

My first glass of milk, in truth just two mouthfuls, had ended with my being violently sick over my new sandals. There had been odd attempts to encourage me to try it again, but none had succeeded in getting me to do more than dip my finger in it and shudder. If it looked as if I might be pushed further, a mock heave usually brought the matter to a close. At break times Miss Poole, our mild-mannered, grey-skinned, grey-clothed form teacher allowed any unopened bottles of the compulsory school milk to go to the first to finish.

One cold, flat morning in September I moved up a class. My teacher was now to be Mrs Walker, a woman so stern-faced, so unwaveringly strict as to be used as a threat by
the other teachers. She was a stout bulldog of a woman, her unwashed hair pressed tight to her head, dressed as always in a knee-length black skirt and grey twinset. As I picked up my pencil case, my set of twenty Caran d'Ache crayons in their flat tin, my English books with their spelling tests and essays entitled ‘An Autumn Day' and ‘My Ten Favourite Things', to move up to Mrs Walker's class, someone whispered, ‘She makes everyone drink their milk.'

One week later milk had yet to pass my lips. I started offering my small bottle of milk to any girl who would show me her knickers. After getting ripped off a couple of times by girls who failed to keep their part of the bargain, I worried I might have to start paying people to drink my unwanted white stuff.

‘Can I have your milk if you don't want it?' asked Peter Marshall one morning break. So I said, ‘Show me your dick first,' and with that set a precedent for the whole term. None of the girls wanted an extra bottle enough to give me a quick flash, but the other boys were queuing up for it and perfectly happy with the deal. I think this was the first time I realised food could be a bargaining tool.

Nothing prepared me for how ill a bottle of milk could make a boy. Mrs Walker caught me pretending to drink my ration while waiting for someone to finish theirs. ‘Come and stand at the front.' I put my milk on the desk and walked towards her. ‘No, bring your milk with you. I've been watching you for days and now you are going to drink it in front of everyone.' Uncertain of just how much
of the milk game she had seen, I half wondered whether she was going to make the girls show their knickers to the entire class.

I stood in front of the class, head bent down, my stomach flipping and diving. I worried not about the shame of being caught, but simply that I was going to have to swallow the wretched, wretched milk. Please God, don't let me have to drink this stuff. He didn't answer. ‘Drink it all,' said Mrs Walker, her eyes narrowing like a lizard's in bright sunlight. I put the straw to my lips and sucked, sticking my tongue over the open end. ‘We will sit here all day until you have finished every drop.'

It was a warm day, mid-September. The milk had been standing in its crate in the sun for a good hour before she sent Robin Matthews to drag it into the classroom. The tinkle of the bottles and scrape of the metal crate always filled me with fear. I sucked. A great bubble of warm, creamy milk hit my tongue, then filled my mouth. It was like vomiting backwards. I tried to swallow slowly, but my throat closed tight and then something acid, almondy, welled up from my stomach.

The vomit came so quickly I didn't have time to move the milk bottle. The straw shot out across the floor, the bottle fell with a clatter and I closed my eyes. Partly to block out the horror of it all and partly because I always close my eyes when I throw up. The puke spluttered down my green school pullover and on to the floor, it splashed the bottom half of the bookcase with its Conan Doyles
and Kiplings, Sylvia Mountsey's satchel and a marrow on the harvest festival display. At least it missed my bare legs. When I opened my eyes there was milk over the floor, running under the radiator and Mrs Walker's desk. There was thin, milky-yellow vomit over my shoes and the bottle, whole and unbroken, had rolled under Peter Marshall's desk. ‘Go and sit down,' she yelled, ignoring the fact that one of her pupils had just been violently ill down himself. She evidently intended to leave me to stew.

I skulked towards my chair, surrounded by a sea of shy smirks and dropped heads. I bent down to pick up the stray bottle. I got down on all fours and crouched under the table. As I stretched to reach the bottle, something moving caught my eye. It was a flash of three pairs of green knickers and Peter Marshall's dick, fully erect and waving back and forth like a child's flag at a royal walkabout.

PS Nesquik was my parents' last-ditch attempt to make me drink milk. Orange, strawberry, chocolate. The only thing that changed was the colour of my puke.

‘Don't ever, ever go beyond the compost heap,' warned Mrs Saunders, who had a house at the top of the road. We did, of course. Not every time, only when she went out. ‘Come on, there's peas.' We went down the rows, picking
and popping till we had had our fill. We hid the pea pods in our pockets. When they were full, we tucked the spent pods under the plants, hoping that Mrs Saunders wouldn't see them.

We flicked the peas up in the air, catching them in our gaping mouths. Missing a pea was pathetic. Worse than missing a catch at cricket. We ate just enough. Not to fill our bellies – you cannot fill a child's tummy with peas – just enough that we wouldn't get noticed.

The peas at home were dried Surprise peas, which came in white rectangular boxes so thin and light you might think they were empty. My mother took to Surprise peas like she had been waiting for them all her life. After twenty minutes in boiling water, a Surprise pea was still only the shadow of a pea. Just like my mother's cooking was always a shadow of what it was meant to be. You had just the outside skin. Like someone had stolen the inside. My father said that was the surprise.

To my mother, instant dried peas and carrots were everything she had ever hoped vegetables could be. Quick and effortless to cook and light to carry home. According to Mrs Saunders they were ‘ridiculously expensive'. I didn't understand my mother's obsession with things being light to carry home from the shops, that didn't weight her shopping bag down.

Mrs Saunders, of course, grew her own. She planted them in late winter, she would save sticks to support them, cosset them with home-made compost and protect them from the
birds with netting and fat strips of green and silver tinsel on sticks. She picked them herself and podded them, a colander in her lap, then boiled them with sprigs of tender mint from her garden and topped with a fat knob of softly melting butter.

My mother emptied a cellophane sachet of dried peas into a pan of water. There was never any mint or butter. Sometimes she even forgot to put salt in the water.

‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside, Oh I do like to be beside the sea,' sings my father, somewhat predictably, as we come over the brow of the hill, salt air suddenly gusting through the sunshine roof of the car, seagulls squawking on cue. There before us, just as it was last year and the year before (and the one before that), stretches the long beach with its neat frame of formal flower beds. We pass the tall stucco houses that lead down towards the ‘front', all sugared almond colours and nodding hydrangeas. ‘No vacancies' they proclaim with barely concealed smugness.

My mother starts fussing about a parking place. ‘There's one, there, there! Oh, now we've missed it,' she flaps. I point out to my father that we have just missed three on the other side of the road, but I am talking to a man who drives a Rover wearing string-and-leather driving gloves. A man who is no more likely to do a dodgy U-turn than to
walk stark naked through the resort's fastidiously preened Winter Gardens.

At last we wiggle our way into a parking space a hundred yards from the hotel. Its paint is peeling more than ever this year. We unpack the unshakeable paraphernalia of the Slater holiday: the striped windbreak, the inflatable beach ball, the picnic basket we have never yet used, my bucket and spade and assorted flags to poke in the top of my intricate sandcastles. Savlon. Bite-eeze. Plasters. Cotton wool. Dettol – the smell of which can make me fall into a dead faint. Mum's spare Ventolin. Some anti-diarrhoea pills. The beach towels that will allow the discreet removal of bathing costumes. The only stuff we buy new each year are bottles of Ambre Solaire – which my dad insists on calling Amber Solaire – and the pastel-coloured plastic windmills that whirl round in the wind and with which I am obsessed.

We have the same rooms as last year. As spotlessly clean as ever, but this year there is an unspoken sadness that hangs over the corridors as surely as if there was a dead seagull strung up over the threshold. We later learn that this is to be the proprietors' final year. They have been getting a different sort of clientele lately – the sort who order morning coffee instead of tea and who don't make their own beds – and have decided to give up. My father talks in hushed tones of moving up to one of the hotels just off the front. Noisier, but you get half-board there and they have a bit of entertainment in the evenings. I wince
at the thought of watching my parents dance to the strains of the Ray Miller Combo.

Mother insists on me wearing plastic sandals into the sea. All the other boys on the beach have bare, nut-brown feet. I have red sandals made of plastic so hard they rub blisters into my heels and on the knuckles of my toes. Then my father tries his annual attempt to interest me in ball games. I have to catch the wretched beach ball at the same time as trying to dislodge the sand that has crept inside my sandals and is sticking to the pink skin under my freshly burst blisters. The ball always hits me in the face or brings a shower of sand with it. My father sighs one of those almost imperceptible sighs that only fragile boys who regularly disappoint their father can hear.

We always take lunch at one of the open-air cafés along the beach, Mother desperate for the shade of a parasol. I can see deep-fried fish and chips, with battered plaice the size of a beach tray being brought to the tables by waitresses in tight, pastel dresses and white aprons. We have ham salad. ‘Could we have some bread and butter please?' asks Mother, though none of us really wants any.

The meal cannot move on quick enough. I sit there, urging everyone to eat up so that we can get to the ice cream. Why would anyone take their time over a ham salad when there is ice cream to follow? The rules are vanilla, strawberry or chocolate. But even the most acid-tongued old bag of a waitress will let a sweet, blond-haired boy order a ball of each. There's the wafer, of course, a thick, smooth fan if
we're lucky, two thin rectangular waffle-wafers if not. I eat them not because they taste good – they are about as flavoursome as a postcard – but because of the way they stick to your bottom lip. My mother likes the wafers more than the ice cream, which to me is a mystery quite beyond comprehension.

There is a moment, shortly after the waitress puts the battered silver coupe of ice cream down on the table, when life is pretty much perfect. I am not sure it is possible to be happier than I am at this moment. I eat all three flavours separately, trying not to let them merge on the spoon. The vanilla and chocolate are OK together, but the strawberry and chocolate don't marry well. As the cold, milky balls of ice cream disappear I scrape up every last drop, the edge of the spoon tinkling on the dented silver dish. I try not to scrape too loudly. Catching Daddy's attention always results in a ‘don't be silly' from him. When every last pool of melted ice has gone I use my finger to catch the drips of vanilla ice and the pearls of condensation that have run down the outside of the dish. The cold ice cream in the hot sun is too much for my mother and she turns discreetly away to use her inhaler.

In the evening we walk along the front. I am not allowed on the beach in my best sandals, so we amble slowly along the path, admiring the floral displays. ‘How do they do it, it must take them for ever?' marvels Mum, stopping to wonder at a clock made from lobelia and baby begonias. My father is rather taken with a copy of the royal warrant
faithfully copied in white alyssum and purple petunias, the words
Dieu et mon droit
picked out in African marigolds. There is, much to everyone's incredulity, not a weed in sight. You could hear the admiring crowd's collective intake of breath as a wayward toddler broke his reins and headed across the grass towards the Queen Mother, so tastefully reproduced in coral-coloured miniature roses and lilac candytuft. His mother got to him in the nick of time. Of course, had he got there first it would have been the highpoint of everyone's holiday, no doubt talked about for years to come.

Enough excitement for one evening. We turn round and walk back, my mother pulling her cardigan over her shoulders as a breeze comes in off the sea. A young guy with wet hair is getting changed by the water fountain. He drops his trunks and pulls on his jeans. ‘Excuse ME!' says my father as we all cop a flash of full-frontal nudity.

‘Golly,' says my mother, reaching quietly for her inhaler. ‘And in Bournemouth.'

My collection of toy cars filled an entire wooden toy box, the three shelves above my bed and my bedroom window sill. That didn't include the Morris Minor I deliberately crashed into the garden pond or those vehicles sporty enough to be permanently on the mini Monte Carlo rally
that spread throughout the entire house. Dinky Chevrolets and Corgi MGs lined up bumper to bumper along every skirting board. Occasionally, one was turned over, the scene of a devastating crash. However, the cars weren't allowed on the stairs. ‘Someone will slip and hurt themselves.' This was my licence to send the least valued ones careering headlong down the banisters instead.

My collection was pretty cool. I had the much envied pink Chevrolet Impala, the Corgi Mini Countryman in mint green (the ones where both back doors opened) and even a metallic purple Buick. What I didn't have was the Royal Rolls-Royce. With its glass roof and waving queen, its plastic flag on the radiator and hand-painted royals, it was out of the realm of pocket money. I just had to have it. Nothing would be a bigger sock in the eye for my best friend Warrel Blubb.

Nagging, if done regularly enough and with spirited reasoning rather than a spoiled whine, was a tactic that worked with my parents…eventually. It could take weeks, sometimes months, but at some point they would come up with the goods. Usually just after I had lost interest and gone on to the next thing. My mother agreed that she would get the Roller for me and let me pay her back at sixpence a week. I knew she would never really ask for the money, doing that thing that parents do of forgetting on purpose. One Saturday morning we walked Wolverhampton for it, but were told over and over again it was out of stock. Then, in a part of town my mother had never dared
to set foot in, we found a shop whose owner, a quiet man with owl eyes and wire-framed glasses, who it turned out knew my uncle Geoff, would order one for us. ‘Anything for such a sweet boy,' he said.

Rarely was I forced to eat everything on my plate. With my mother's cooking it could have been classed as child abuse. My finicky ways were tolerated as if I was an only child. But occasionally I went over the limit. One cold Monday I had left more of my lunch than usual. It was more a case of boredom than bad cooking. I got down from the table and thought nothing more about it.

That afternoon I got home to find no one in. Sitting in the middle of the dining-room table was my Royal Rolls-Royce, complete with sunroof and lifelike corgis. I picked it up and turned it over and over in my hand. I stroked the long maroon bonnet. Yes, I was disappointed it wasn't the jet black it looked in the photographs but it didn't matter that much. I could barely wait to show Warrel Blubb.

I was hungry to break the news of the car's arrival. I wanted to run round with it then and there. But I could have more fun than that. He had had a telling-off recently – for walking in the house with his wet shoes on. Last time I saw him he was sulking, gazing out of his bedroom window. Vulnerable. I decided to leave the car on the dining-room window sill. That way, he couldn't miss it when he passed on his way to school. I wouldn't even mention it. Just leave it there and watch his face through the window.

But there, perched on the corner of the hearth, about two feet from the electric fire, was a plate. My plate. Exactly as I had left it on the table, except that the gravy had now shrunk to a thin, rubbery brown skin around the remains of the lamb chop. The boiled potato had gone grey at the edges and the peas had sunken and dried.

So that was to be the deal. Clean my plate and I would get the car. Apparently, Warrel Blubb wasn't going to be the only one to eat shit.