The Memory Chalet Read online

  Rationing and subsidies meant that the bare necessities of life were accessible to all. Courtesy of the postwar Labour government, children were entitled to a range of healthful products: free milk but also concentrated orange juice and cod-liver oil—obtainable only in pharmacies after you established your identity. The orange juice came in rectangular, medicine-like glass bottles and I have never quite lost the association. Even today, a large glassful prompts in me a sublimated pang of guilt: better not drink it all at once. Of cod-liver oil, urged upon housewives and mothers by benevolently intrusive authorities, the less said the better.

  We were fortunate to lease an apartment above the hairdressing shop where my parents worked, but many of my friends lived in substandard or temporary housing. Every British government from 1945 through the mid-1960s committed itself to large-scale public housing schemes: all fell short. In the early 1950s, thousands of Londoners still lived in “prefabs”: urban trailer parks for the homeless, ostensibly temporary but often lasting for years.

  Postwar guidelines for new housing were minimalist: three-bedroom houses were to comprise at least nine hundred square feet of living space—about the size of a spacious one-bedroom apartment in contemporary Manhattan. Looking back, these homes seem not merely pokey, but chilly and underfurnished. At the time, there were long waiting lists: owned and managed by local authorities, such houses were intensely desirable.

  The air over the capital resembled a bad day in Beijing; coal was the fuel of choice—cheap, abundant, and domestically produced. Smog was a perennial hazard: I recall leaning out of the car window, my face enveloped in a dense yellow haze, instructing my father on his distance from the curb—you could literally not see beyond an arm’s length ahead of you and the smell was awful. But everyone “muddled through together”: Dunkirk and the Blitz were freely invoked without a hint of irony to illustrate a sense of national grit and Londoners’ capacity to “take it”—first Hitler, now this.

  I grew up at least as familiar with World War I as with the one that had just ended. Veterans, memorials, and invocations abounded; but the ostentatious patriotism of contemporary American bellicosity was altogether absent. War, too, was austere: I had two uncles who fought with Montgomery’s Eighth Army from Africa through Italy and there was nothing nostalgic or triumphalist in their accounts of shortage, error, and incompetence. Arrogant music hall evocations of empire—

  We don’t want to fight them, but by Jingo if we do,

  We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men,

  we’ve got the money too!

  —had been replaced by the wartime radio lament of Vera Lynn: We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when. Even in the afterglow of victory, things would never be the same.

  Reiterated references to the recent past established a bridge between my parents’ generation and my own. The world of the 1930s was with us still: George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, J.B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement, and Arnold Bennett’s The Grim Smile of the Five Towns all spoke to an England very much present. Wherever you looked, there were affectionate allusions to imperial glory—India was “lost” a few months after I was born. Biscuit tins, pencil holders, schoolbooks, and cinema newsreels reminded us of who we were and what we had achieved. “We” is no mere grammatical convention: when Humphrey Jennings produced a documentary to celebrate the 1951 Festival of Britain, he called it Family Portrait. The family might have fallen on hard times, but we were all in it together.

  It was this “togetherness” that made tolerable the characteristic shortages and grayness of postwar Britain. Of course, we weren’t really a family: if we were, then the wrong members—as Orwell had once noted—were still in charge. All the same, since the war the rich kept a prudently low profile. There was little evidence in those years of conspicuous consumption. Everyone looked the same and dressed in the same materials: worsted, flannel, or corduroy. People came in modest colors—brown, beige, gray—and lived remarkably similar lives. We schoolchildren accepted uniforms all the more readily because our parents too appeared in sartorial lockstep. In April 1947, the ever-dyspeptic Cyril Connolly wrote of our “drab clothes, our ration books and murder stories. . . . London [is] now the largest, saddest and dirtiest of great cities.”

  Great Britain would eventually emerge from postwar penury—though with less panache and self-confidence than its European neighbors. For anyone whose memories go back no further than the later 1950s, “austerity” is an abstraction. Rationing and restrictions were gone, housing was available: the characteristic bleakness of postwar Britain was lifting. Even the smog was abating, now that coal had been replaced by electricity and cheap fuel oil.

  Curiously, the escapist British cinema of the immediate postwar years—Spring in Park Lane (1948) or Maytime in Mayfair (1949), with Michael Wilding and Anna Neagle—had been replaced by hard-boiled “kitchen sink” dramas star-ring working-class lads played by Albert Finney or Alan Bates in gritty industrial settings: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) or A Kind of Loving (1962). But these films were set in the north, where austerity lingered. Watching them in London was like seeing one’s childhood played back across a time warp: in the south, by 1957, the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan could assure his listeners that most of them had “never had it so good.” He was right.

  I don’t think I fully appreciated the impact of those early childhood years until quite recently. Looking back from our present vantage point, one sees more clearly the virtues of that bare-bones age. No one would welcome its return. But austerity was not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic. Clement Attlee, the Labour prime minister from 1945 to 1951, had emerged—like Harry Truman—from the shadow of a charismatic war leader and embodied the reduced expectations of the age.

  Churchill mockingly described him as a modest man “who has much to be modest about.” But it was Attlee who presided over the greatest age of reform in modern British history—comparable to the achievements of Lyndon Johnson two decades later but under far less auspicious circumstances. Like Truman, he lived and died parsimoniously—reaping scant material gain from a lifetime of public service. Attlee was an exemplary representative of the great age of middle-class Edwardian reformers: morally serious and a trifle austere. Who among our present leaders could make such a claim—or even understand it?

  Moral seriousness in public life is like pornography: hard to define but you know it when you see it. It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the profession: precise, restrained—and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Salvador Dalí (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing—and cupidity—of Damien Hirst.

  In the arts, moral seriousness speaks to an economy of form and aesthetic restraint: the world of The Bicycle Thief. I recently introduced our twelve-year-old son to François Truffaut’s 1959 classic Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows). Of a generation raised on a diet of contemporary “message” cinema from The Day After Tomorrow through Avatar, he was stunned: “It’s spare. He does so much with so little.” Quite so. The wealth of resources we apply to entertainment serves only to shield us from the poverty of the product; likewise in politics, where ceaseless chatter and grandiloquent rhetoric mask a yawning emptiness.

  The opposite of austerity is not prosperity but luxe et volupté. We have substituted endless commerce for public purpose, and expect no higher aspirations from our leaders. Sixty years after Churchill could offer only “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” our very own war president—notwithstanding the hyperventilated moralism of his rhetoric—could think of nothing more to ask of us in the wake of September 11, 2001, than to continue shopping. This impoverished view of community—the “togetherness” of consumption—is all we deserve
from those who now govern us. If we want better rulers, we must learn to ask more from them and less for ourselves. A little austerity might be in order.

  IV

  Food

  Just because you grow up on bad food, it does not follow that you lack nostalgia for it. My own gastronomic youth was firmly bounded by everything that was least inspiring in traditional English cuisine, alleviated with hints of Continental cosmopolitanism occasionally introduced by my father’s fading memories of a Belgian youth, and interspersed with weekly reminders of another heritage altogether: Sabbath evening dinners at the home of my East European Jewish grandparents. This curious mélange did little to sharpen my taste buds—it was not until I lived in France as a graduate student that I encountered good food on a regular basis—but it added further to the confusions of my youthful identity.

  My mother was born in the least Jewish part of the old London East End: at the intersection of Burdett Road and the Commercial Road, a few blocks north of the London Docks. This topographical misfortune—she always felt a little tangential to her surroundings, lacking the intensely Jewish milieu of Stepney Green a few hundred yards to the north—played into many otherwise curious aspects of her personality. Unlike my father, for example, my mother had great respect for the King and the Queen, and was always half-tempted to stand up during the Queen’s speech on television in later years. She was discreet to the point of embarrassment about her Jewishness, in contrast to the overtly foreign and Yiddish quality of most of the rest of our extended family. And in an inverted tribute to her own mother’s indifference to Jewish traditions beyond those ordained by annual rituals (and the decidedly Cockney ambiance of the streets where she grew up), she had almost no knowledge of Jewish cuisine.

  As a result, I was brought up on English food. But not fish and chips, spotted dick, toad in the hole, Yorkshire pud, or other delicacies of British home cooking. These my mother scorned as somehow unhealthy; she may have grown up surrounded by non-Jews, but for just that reason she and her family kept to themselves and knew little of the domestic world of their neighbors, which they looked upon with fear and suspicion. In any case, she had no idea how to prepare “English delicacies.” Her occasional encounters, via my father’s friends in the Socialist Party of Great Britain, with vegetarians and vegans had taught her the virtues of brown bread, brown rice, green beans, and other “healthy” staples of an Edwardian left-wing diet. But she could no more cook brown rice than she could have prepared “chop suey.” And so she did what every other cook in England in those days did: she boiled everything to death.

  It was thus that I came to associate English food not so much with the absence of subtlety as with the absence of any flavor whatsoever. We had Hovis brown bread, which always seemed to me even more boring in its worthy way than the rubberized white toast served for tea at my friends’ houses. We ate boiled meat, boiled greens, and, very occasionally, fried versions of same (to be fair, fish my mother could indeed fry with some style—though whether this was an English or a Jewish attribute I never could tell). Cheese, when it appeared, was usually Dutch—for reasons that I never understood. Tea was ubiquitous. My parents disapproved of fizzy drinks—another unfortunate heritage of their political dalliances—so we drank fruitified, uncarbonated soft drinks, or Nescafé in later years. Thanks to my father, Camembert, salad, real coffee, and other treats occasionally surfaced. But my mother regarded these with much the same suspicion she harbored towards other Continental imports, gastronomic and human alike.

  The contrast with the food that my paternal grandmother prepared for us every Friday night at her house in North London could thus not have been greater. My grandfather was Polish-Jewish, my grandmother born in a Lithuanian shtetl. Their taste in food ran to Northeast European Jewish. It was not until decades later that I was to taste the flavors, variety, and texture of the Jewish cuisine of South-Central Europe (Hungary, in particular), nor did I have the slightest familiarity with the Mediterranean cooking of the Sephardic tradition. My grandmother, who had made her way from Pilvistok to London via Antwerp, knew nothing of salad and she had never met a green vegetable she could not torture to death in a saucepan. But with sauces, chicken, fish, beef, root vegetables, and fruit she was—to my understimulated palate—a magician.

  The characteristic quality of a Friday night dinner in those days was the repeated contrast between soft and crunchy, sweet and savory. Potatoes, swedes, turnips were always brown and soft and appeared to have been drenched in sugar. Cucumbers, onions, and other small, harmless vegetables came crunchy and pickled. Meat fell off the fork, having long since fallen off the bone. It too was brown and soft. Fish—gefilted, boiled, pickled, fried, or smoked—was omnipresent and the house seemed to me always to smell of spiced and preserved sea creatures. Interestingly and perhaps revealingly, I have no recollection of the texture of the fish or of its provenance (probably carp). It was its wrapping that one noticed.

  Along with the fish and the vegetables there came dessert. Or, more precisely, “compote.” All manner of stewed and squeezed fruits, prominent among them plums and pears, would appear faithfully after the main course. Occasionally they had been compressed inside a thick pastry of the kind traditionally employed in Purim hamantaschen, but more commonly the compote was freestanding. Liquid refreshment consisted always and uniquely of a horrible sweet wine for the adults and lemon tea for everyone. Together with bulk in the form of black bread, challah, matzoh balls in soup, and dumplings in all shapes and varieties (but only one texture—soft), this meal would have been recognizable to anyone born between Germany and Russia, Latvia and Romania in the course of the past half-millennium. For me, transported weekly from Putney to Pilvistok, it represented Family, Familiarity, Flavor, and Roots. I never even attempted to explain to my English schoolboy friends what we ate on Friday nights or what it meant to me. I don’t think I knew and they would never have understood.

  As I grew older, I discovered other ways to add taste to a hopelessly, helplessly bland domestic regimen. In England in those days there were just three paths to interesting food if your grandparents did not happen to come from exotic foreign parts. There was Italian food, still confined to Soho and the bohemian fringes of the aspirant talking classes. This was beyond my teenage or student budget. Then there was Chinese food, not particularly interesting or widely available in those years and in any case commercially adapted to British taste. The only serious Chinese restaurants in London before the mid-Sixties were in the East End and patronized by Chinese sailors and a handful of East Asian immigrants. The menus were frequently untranslated and the dishes unknown to locals.

  The real escape route lay to the Indies. I don’t believe my parents ever went to an Indian restaurant—my mother was under the curious illusion that whereas Chinese food (about which she knew nothing) was somehow “clean,” Indian food was suspiciously camouflaged in flavor and probably cooked on the floor. I never shared this prejudice and spent most of my student years and disposable income in Indian restaurants in London and Cambridge. At the time I just thought it delectable, but on reflection it is likely that I made an unconscious association with my grandparents’ table.

  Indian food too consisted of overcooked protein drenched in flavorful sauces. Its bread was soft, its condiments spicy, its vegetables sweet. In place of dessert came fruit-flavored ices or exotic fruit compotes. And it was best accompanied by beer, a beverage hardly known in our home. My father never vouchsafed the thought, but I’m sure that somewhere deep inside him resided a prejudice against pub-crawling, beer-swilling ethnic Englishmen. He was European enough to drink decent wine, but otherwise shared the older Jewish prejudice against excess alcohol consumption.

  Indian food made me more English. Like most Englishmen of my generation I now think of takeout or delivered Indian food as a native dish imported centuries before. I am English enough to think of Indian food in particular as an aspect of England that I miss here in the US where Chinese is the ethnic d
ish of local preference. But my Englishness also leads me to miss East European Jewish cuisine in its very slightly adapted British form (a little more boiling, a little less spice than Jewish cooking here in the US). I can work up a nostalgia for fish and chips, but in truth it is nothing more than a self-generated gastronomic Heritage Exercise. We hardly ever ate the stuff when I was a child. Were I ever truly to set out in Search of Past Taste I would begin with braised beef and baked turnip, followed by chicken tikka masala and pickled wollies swabbed in challah, Kingfisher beer and sweet lemon tea. As for the madeleine that would trigger the memory? Naan dunked in matzoh ball soup, served by a Yiddish-speaking waiter from Madras. We are what we ate. And I am very English.

  V

  Cars

  According to my mother, my father was “obsessed” with motor cars. In her view, the perennial fragility of our domestic economy was owed to her husband’s proclivity to spend all our spare cash on them. I cannot judge whether she was right about this—it’s pretty clear that, left to her own devices, she would have confined the family to one small car per decade, if at all—but even to the sympathetic eyes of his admiring son my father did appear somewhat absorbed in his cars; and particularly in Citroëns, the French company whose idiosyncratic products graced our front yard throughout my childhood and adolescence. There was the occasional soon-to-be-regretted English impulse purchase—a convertible Austin A40, a sporty AC Ace—and a rather more enduring fling with a DB Panhard, of which more below; but year in, year out Joe Judt drove, talked and fixed Citroëns.