Authors: Jonathan Coe
‘Not calculated to be a very popular move, I wouldn’t have thought.’
‘Well, there’ll be an outcry, of course, but then it’ll die down and something else will come along for people to get annoyed about. The important thing is that we save ourselves a lot of money, and meanwhile a whole generation of children from working-class or low-income families will be eating nothing but crisps and chocolate every day. Which means, in the end, that they’ll grow up physically weaker and mentally slower.’ Dorothy raised an eyebrow at this assertion. ‘Oh, yes,’ he assured her. ‘A diet high in sugars leads to retarded brain growth. Our chaps have proved it.’ He smiled. ‘As every general knows, the secret of winning any war is to demoralize the enemy.’
The meal concluded with apple-quince bread pudding, smothered in a honey and ginger sauce. The apples, as usual, were from Dorothy’s orchard.
∗
Ingredients:
Modified starch, dried glucose syrup, salt; flavour enhancers monosodium glutomate, sodium 5-ribonucleotide; dextrose, vegetable fat, tomato powder, hydrolysed vegetable protein, yeast extract, dried oxtail, onion powder, spices, flavouring; colours E150, E124, E102; caseinate, Eioz; caseinate, acidity regulator E460; emulsifiers E471, E472(b); antioxidant E320.
Once when I was about twenty-five, I came home to visit my parents for the weekend. There were many such weekends during my time at university, but this one stands out because it was then, for the first time, that I noticed how drastically their eating habits had changed since I was a child. It started, probably, when I was eleven and they decided to send me to a fee-paying school. From then on they never seemed to have enough money. My father’s rises in salary were small and infrequent, and I think he continued to wish that they had bought a house in a less expensive area. My mother, at this point, went from part-time to full-time teaching. And yet it was a point of honour with her that there should be a hot meal on the table for us every evening. Increasingly, these meals were starting to come from packets, and in the mid
1970s
this process was accelerated when they bought a small deep-freeze which was kept in the garage. My father, far from complaining, had developed quite a taste for this sort of food, partly because it bore a resemblance to the lunches which he enjoyed with his colleagues at the office canteen every day. I remember coming home that weekend and finding that the deep-freeze was stacked with more than twenty cartons of one of the Brunwin Group’s more lethal inventions: hamburger fritters with chips. All you had to do was shove the whole tray in the oven, and
voilà,
you had an appetizing meal on your plate in about twenty minutes. He explained that this came in very useful on the two evenings a week when he had to cook for himself, when my mother was working late at the school, supervising extra games. I said that it didn’t sound very balanced to me, and he explained that he supplemented it with two more Brunwin delicacies, viz. a powdered soup for starters, and then a strawberry or chocolate flavoured instant whip for pudding.
Ingredients:
Sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, modified starch; emulsifiers E477, E322; flavourings, lactose, caseinate, fumaric acid; gelling agents E339, E450a; whey powder, stabilizer E440a; colours E110, E160a; antioxidant E320.
All those years, I see now, my father was clogging his arteries up with saturated fats. He would die of a heart attack, not long after his sixty-first birthday.
Does this mean that Dorothy killed my father?
∗
Dorothy’s record of success in pig management was just as impressive. These are only a few of the difficulties she was able to surmount:
1. CLUMSINESS: As soon as she started taking her sows off the earth, away from straw and into concrete stalls, she found that their chain of instinct would be upset: they would become clumsy and often lie on their own piglets while suckling.
SOLUTION: To fit a farrowing rail, allowing piglets access to the teat without getting close enough to be crushed.
2. CANNIBALISM: Denied the opportunity to exercise their rooting instincts, the sows started to eat their own piglets.
SOLUTION: To fit them into closely confined farrowing crates where they could neither move nor turn around, their movements usually restricted by a device known as the ‘iron maiden’. The piglets would then be lured away from their mothers with an infra-red light. This would reduce the weaning period to two or three weeks, instead of the more usual eight.
3. DISEASE: Unfortunately the piglets treated in this way became subject to severe pulmonary diseases which could only be partially halted by antibiotics and rigid temperature controls.
SOLUTION: Embryotomy. It was discovered that living piglets could be cut from the womb of their dead mother in aseptic conditions in order to establish what was to become known as a ‘minimal disease herd’.
4. TAIL-BITING AND BOAR-TAINT: Weaned piglets moved into densely stocked pens soon develop aggressive behaviour, of which tail-biting is the most obvious example. ‘Boar-taint’ is the strong, unpalatable taste which is alleged by some butchers (notably the supermarket chains) to be found in meat from male pigs.
SOLUTIONS: Tail-docking and castration. Preferably to be done with a blunt instrument, as the crushing action helps to reduce bleeding.
5. DEFORMITY: Dorothy once conducted a survey of 2,000 of her pigs kept on concrete floors, and found that 86 per cent suffered from lameness or serious damage to their hoof horns.
SOLUTION: None. As she once drily remarked to a journalist from
Farmers’ Weekly,
‘I don’t get paid for producing animals with good posture.’
∗
One evening when I was about thirty-seven, I came home to my flat carrying a small plastic bag, half filled with provisions from the local supermarket. I had a pint of milk, some cans of soft drinks, a packet of chocolate biscuits, four Mars bars, a loaf of bread, and one serving of the Brunwin Group’s ‘Heat’n’Eat’ Bangers and Mash, which I put in the oven at once, before transferring my other purchases to the fridge or the food cupboards
.
Twenty-five minutes later, when it was time to turn the oven off, I fished the packet out of the waste bin to check that I had followed the instructions correctly: and that was when it happened. It was, I suppose, a sort of epiphany. You have to remember that at this stage I hadn’t spoken to anyone for more than a year: I may have been going mad, but I don’t think so. I didn’t start laughing hysterically, or anything like that. None the less, I experienced what you might call a rare moment of lucidity: a flash of insight, very subtle and fleeting, but enough to produce a lasting change, if not in my life, then at least in my diet from that time onward.
It wasn’t so much the picture on the front, although that in itself might have given me pause for thought. A family of four were shown gathered around the dinner table: the healthy, white-teethed paterfamilias, two ruddy-cheeked children beaming with anticipation, and their young, pretty mother, her face lit by an almost beatific glow as she laid the last helping of Bangers and Mash before her husband, as if this meal, the final, crowning triumph to a day of honest toil and wifely achievement, offered the ultimate confirmation of her own self-worth. Such fantasies are thrust upon us every day, and I’ve become immune to them. But on the back of the packet was a photograph I was not prepared for. It was captioned ‘serving suggestion’. It showed a portion of Bangers and Mash on a plate. The Bangers took up one half of the plate, and the Mash took up the other. The plate was on a table, and there was a knife and a fork on either side. And that was it.
I stared at this photograph for some time, while a nasty suspicion began to creep over me. All at once I had the feeling that someone, somewhere, was enjoying a monstrous joke at my expense. And not just at my expense, but at all our expenses. I suddenly took this photograph to be an insult aimed both at myself and at the world in general. I pulled the plastic tray out of the oven and threw it into the bin. It was the last Brunwin meal I ever bought.
I remember being hungry that night.
∗
On his way back from the Lake District, only ten miles or so from the farm, George stopped his car by the side of the road and stood for a while at a gate, looking out over the moors. He was reasonably sober, and had no hangover (he never got hangovers these days), but still managed to feel weighed down by a curious heaviness, a sense of foreboding. As usual, he was nervous about seeing his wife again; and to make matters worse, they would be entertaining her insufferable cousins Thomas and Henry the next evening, along with a couple of senior managers from Nutrilite, the Brunwin animal-feed supplier. He was supposed to have discussed a provisional menu with the cook, but had forgotten all about it. Dorothy would probably be furious.
He had been away for three days: three wasted days, because he had come to no important decision regarding his marriage, even though – now he came to think of it – that had been the purpose of the trip, originally. He knew, at least, that he would never be able to leave Dorothy and live with the knowledge that she retained control of the farm; and in that case, it seemed there was nothing for it but to carry on as before. There were always the animals, of course. Pathetic though it might seem, he did not feel that he was completely wasting his life as long as he was able to bring some kind of comfort to the creatures who had suffered the worst of his wife’s abuses. He was already looking forward to seeing them again, to revisiting the cowshed and drinking their health from the whisky bottle he kept hidden behind the loose bricks in the wall.
It was late in the afternoon when he arrived home. Dorothy’s car was parked in the yard but he was able to sneak round to the kitchens without being seen. The cook was sitting at a table with her feet up, reading a magazine. She did not give a guilty start and resume working when George appeared: it had long been the case (although he never noticed it) that he had absolutely no authority over his staff.
He asked if everything was in order for the dinner tomorrow night, and she told him that it was all under control, that they would be having veal, and that Dorothy herself had chosen the calf and carried out the slaughter less than an hour ago.
George felt suddenly sick. He ran to the cowshed and kicked open the door.
Herbert was not yet dead. He was hanging by his legs from a beam, and blood was dripping from the thinnest of cuts in his neck into a bucket on the floor, now three quarters full. His eyes were milky, pale and sightless. Otherwise, the cowshed was empty.
Beginning to whimper, George ran back to the farmhouse and found Dorothy in her office, tapping away at a computer keyboard.
‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘Home already?’
When George didn’t answer, she said: ‘I’m sorry about your little friend, darling, but he was really the leanest and best-looking of the bunch. It had to be him.’
She swung around in her chair, looked at him, sighed, and left the room. A minute or two later she came back, carrying a shotgun.
‘For God’s sake,’ she said, handing him the gun. ‘Finish him off if you want to. He won’t taste as good, but who cares? Anything to spare your feelings.’
George took the gun and left. Dorothy went back to her keyboard, and listened out for the shot. In fact there were two, a few seconds apart.
‘Idiot,’ she muttered. ‘He can’t even hit a calf from three feet away.’
She was never able to establish, with absolute certainty, which of her farmworkers fed the story to the
News of the World.
She ended up sacking a troublesome middle-aged labourer called Harold, but that was very much by way of killing two birds with one stone, because his lungs were giving out from inhaling too much crop spray and he wasn’t much use to her any more. It was unlikely to have been him, on the whole. In any case it was only a small story, tucked away on page nine: a few lurid, joky paragraphs under the headline KINKY FARMER IN CALF-LOVE SUICIDE PACT. Her PR people assured her that no one would take it very seriously, and indeed the whole incident was all but forgotten after a few months.
This would have been in June, 1982.
June 1982
1
The word existed, I knew. I just couldn’t think of it.
…
panache … polish … style …
My aim was to catch the 3.35 train, but this review had taken longer than expected, and now I was running late. Clumsily I stuffed five days’ worth of clothes into a holdall, along with a couple of books and my writing pad. I’d been hoping to phone the copy through to the newspaper before I left, but there wasn’t time now. It would have to be done when I got to Sheffield. It was always the same: always those last couple of sentences, the even-handed summation, the ironic parting shot, which took such a disproportionate toll on one’s time and effort.
I scribbled a note to my flatmate, locked all the doors, and then, bag in hand, climbed the wrought-iron stairs which led up to street level. It was a hot, windless summer day, but because I hadn’t stepped out of the flat for more than forty-eight hours – the time it had taken to read the book and formulate my responses to it – the sunlight and the fresh air seemed immediately invigorating. Our basement flat was in a side street not far from the Earl’s Court Road, just a few minutes’ walk from the tube station. It was a lively area, a little overcrowded, a little seedy; its restless bustle and activity could sometimes be overwhelming, but this afternoon it really lifted my spirits. Suddenly I began to feel, for the very first time, that I might be setting out on a great adventure.