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Overview
As a young John grows up in the fifties and sixties, the Haneys are a rough-and-tumble clan of bus drivers, telegraph operators, salesmen, junior civil servants, and secretaries. They work hard to put meals on the table and a shilling in the gas meter. When they gather at weddings and wakes and Christmas parties, they talk about politics and two world wars, drink cheap sherry, chain-smoke cigarettes, and eat platefuls of distinctly British fare: winkles, whelks, sausage rolls, marmalade sandwiches, and spotted dick.
Enchanted and, at the same time, slightly embarrassed by his Cockney pedigree, the young John Haney lives a life torn between his colorful East End relatives–with their penchant for bangers, bacon sandwiches, and highly irreverent banter–and his lower-middle-class mother, who is preoccupied with her children’s education. Thanks to the generosity of his more moneyed neighbors, John is able to take trips to France and Italy, where, despite his continuing passion for baked beans on toast and toad-in-the-hole, he cultivates a taste for snails, Sancerre, stinky cheese, and minestra di pasta grattata.
Having survived grammar school, university, four years of part-time horsing around in the RAF’s equivalent of the JROTC, and a stint of semi-starvation in the music business, John is poised to break out of the working class–and ends up in Manhattan, where he promptly falls in love and decides to stay put.
But crossing the Atlantic–and with it the class barrier–leaves John with deep feelings of displacement and nostalgia. As he eats in some of New York City’s most expensive restaurants, he tries (and fails) to reconcile his new appetites with the indelible tastes of his youth. His sense of self becomes further conflicted when his father, a taciturn but loving man, dies and later when his ferociously proud mother, following the death of her second husband, must subsist on a minuscule pension. Suddenly John is forced to reconsider his defection and to grapple with memories, fleeting but formidable, of the long-ago life that has continued to, and always will, define him.
Peopled with unforgettable characters who find in even the greasiest kitchens the sustenance to see them through life’s hardships, Fair Shares for All is a remarkable memoir of resolve and resilience, food and family.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781588368041 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/19/2008 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Monstrous Bowl of Peanuts in the Shell
ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN OCTOBER 1959, MY FATHER, DENIS, informed me, while chewing a little morosely on a marmalade sandwich, that one of my aunt Rose’s sisters—who, like Rose and her husband, Dad’s half-brother, Don, lived in a part of London known as the Isle of Dogs—was getting married at the weekend. And “all of us,” “the Haney mob” entire, had been invited.
At this news, I excitedly emitted, through a mouth stuffed with soldiers—toast slashed into fingers for dipping in soft-boiled eggs—a butter-blotted gasp of interest and approval. I’d been bewitched by the name of the place (and by the knowledge that the island concerned sat at the heart of the working-class East End, from which my father’s side of the family came) ever since a very different Sunday some months earlier, when I’d first heard it mentioned, by Don himself, at the hospital bedside of my dying maternal grandmother. It was also on that Sunday that I’d first met “all of us” en masse, in fact, and, within minutes, grown not only to like them but to find myself feeling more at home in their company than I did with my parents.
My outburst, predictably, provoked a standard-issue, much-resented reprimand from Kitty, my wildly ambitious though not particularly educated mum. She came from the solidly lower-middle-class London borough of Redbridge, spoke with an accent that some of our Cockney relatives quite justifiably thought upper-crusty, and was, at that moment, otherwise engaged in retrieving the sleepy head of my three-year-old sister, Joy, from the hill fort of cornflakes into which it had fallen. I was, according to Mum, supposed to be eating my soldiers one at a time and hadn’t the slightest right to be greedy given the fact, as she never tired of telling me, that both she and Dad (and particularly Dad) had often been severely famished as children.
Her reasoned appeal to my rudimentary understanding of the years before World War II—of the orphanage to which Nana Haney, reduced to destitution by her husband’s death from cancer, had had to send two of my uncles and Dad, and of the shortages of food they’d known thereafter—got her nowhere despite my expanding and infernal fascination with the poverty-stricken portion of the Haney family’s past.
During the week that followed Dad’s announcement, time refused to fly. (I was five.)
THE ABSENCE OF DOGS from the island caused one of the two disappointments I felt on the day of the wedding. (The other was the ceremony, which bored me.) After leaving the church, Mum and Joy and Dad and I and everybody else adjourned to an enormous, run-down room distinguished by knot-niggled floorboards, naked lightbulbs, and barely whitewashed walls. This late-model cave contained, on three sides, rickety folding tables sporting glasses packed with cigarettes known as Churchman’s, which, said Dad, though not frightfully posh, weren’t exactly rubbish. The fourth side was home to a worm-eaten crate of an under-raised stage occupied by an upright piano, electric guitars, a trumpet, a trombone, and drums.
Two hours later and after the speeches, our ranks now distended by lots of people who hadn’t been at the church, we stood in a ring, stuck out one leg and then the other, turned around, joined hands, and skipped back and forth while singing something that sounded like “Go smoky smoky”—a redundant exhortation, since most of the celebrants, with the possible exception of the under-eights, were already smoking furiously. After that, I sat next to Mum, who often felt uncomfortable at parties, her social skills having only narrowly avoided being inoperably maimed by her none-too-loving parents.
Dad appeared to have disappeared but then, with a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette fizzing in the other, he reappeared—his beaklike Adam’s apple and shrubbery eyebrows sticking out impressively that afternoon—followed by a flushed-looking Rose and her bristle-headed, perspiring, lager-laden, and loudly good-humored husband.
“Here’s your uncle Don,” said Dad. “And your auntie Rose. You remember them, don’t you?”
“Course he bloody does,” yelled Don, who had not done well at school and drove double-decker buses for London Transport. “Me and Rosie made a right old fuss of ’im and Joy at the ’ospital. We all did. Sad day, that was. This is a bloody good knees-up, though. You remember me, mate, don’t yer?”
“Yes,” I squeaked.
“And here comes the rest of our crowd, looking a little the worse for wear and I really can’t think why,” said Dad, who had the physique of a grasshopper and (when especially pleased, which wasn’t often) a smile as wide as a dolphin’s.
UNCLE RAY AND AUNTIE EILEEN, Uncle Dick and Auntie Joan, and Uncle Dave (the oldest Haney brother) and his wife, Auntie Ena, clustered and plunged into courtesies first and, next, into banter. A few minutes later, eager to mix with less familiar members of the substrate to which, ever since the visit to the hospital, I had begun to feel I most belonged, I took a short tour of the premises.
Avoiding the dancers, I kept to the outskirts and found myself rewarded with the sight of gargantuan grannies who were trailing yards of imitation pearls and creakily cleaning the loophole backsides of a battery of naked babies while their war-painted daughters (and two generations of beer-spilling husbands) hiccupped, yapped, backslapped, and crowed among themselves. Many of the older men were clumsily coifed apparitions in ill-fitting two-piece suits, rutabaga-faced antiques with fists the size of wrecking balls, chests like damaged barrels, feet (more accustomed to work boots) rammed into well-polished second-rate shoes.
I gazed up at the unrestrained laughter and self-deprecating grins with a rapture undermined by unhappy recollections of how different this all was from my life at home, at No. 13 Mayflower Way, in Chipping Ongar (usually referred to simply as Ongar), a village in the Essex countryside, about twenty miles from London and not so far from Romford, the suburb where Dave and Ena and their daughter, Pauline, lived. Everyone seemed to know everyone here, and even if they didn’t, they were unusually nice to you. Which was rarely the case, for as long as I lived there, in Ongar.
Dad, a grapher (that’s a contraction of “telegraphist”) by trade, at least appeared less serious, less harried and hounded, than usual. (“A grapher’s life,” he liked to say, usually when up in arms about feeling financially pinched, “is a sad one.”) And Mum, who sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, resented the fact that Dad’s was little more than a steady job with modest pay and nonexistent prospects, looked oddly relaxed. She had Joy on her lap, and her curly permed hair was in just the slightest disarray from dancing, at which, unlike Dad, she was awful.
THE FOOD APPEALED TO ME as much as the bonhomie, especially the kinds that I had never tried before: the pickled onions (which Dad always bought at Christmas and which Mum, who thought them déclassé, refused to touch), the whelks (which I risked when I noticed Rose and Don eating them with the eagerness I always brought to the first-degree murder of Jelly Babies), and the prawns, whose beaded heads and slippery tails I quickly became adept at removing. Ray, a dapper man with a face like a ferret’s, then taught me how to butcher winkles with a pin.
“These are quite nice,” I murmured, while grappling with their slightly gamy scent.
“That’s not what your mum said the first time she tried one,” said Ray, who worked as a tax inspector and, to my amazement, didn’t smoke. “Remember that, Eileen? First time Kitty met Mum. Over at Phillips Street. That sit-down tea we had.”
“What did she say, Uncle Ray?” I asked, reminding myself that Phillips Street was in Plaistow, the part of the East End where Nana had lived both during and after the war. (Eileen and Ray still lived there, in a tiny house inherited from Eileen’s mother.)
“Didn’t exactly say anything,” said Eileen, whose monumental bosom I’d begun to find quite a distraction. “Just pulled a face and, well, stuck to bread and butter.”
“I—I like bread and butter,” I bubbled.
“I do, too,” she said, reapplying her lipstick, which perfectly matched the cherry-red frames of her glasses, with swift but spot-on movements of her pudgy hands. “But it’s nice if you can tart it up a bit.”
“I was a bit surprised,” said Ray, fidgeting with the fountain pen parked in his jacket breast pocket and staring with barely disguised disgust as a rumpled Uncle Dick—who, like Dad and Uncle Dave, worked for the Commercial Cable Company—stubbed out a ready-made cigarette (Dad almost always rolled his own) in a saucer. “I mean, her father’s from the flipping East End.”
“That’s true,” said Eileen. “But her mum weren’t.”
“Whose mum wasn’t what?” said Mum, just returned from taking care of a queasy Joy in the toilet.
“Yours, love,” said Eileen. “Not from the East End.”
“No, she wasn’t,” said Mum. Her mother, Grandma Bush, a person of refinement, had almost been disowned by her parents for marrying a penniless man who had started life as a slum kid. “But my dad is. Ray, what’s John eating?”
“Winkles,” said Ray.
“Winkles? Ugh!”
“Oh,” said Dick. “Eating winkles, are we? Well. There you are, Kit.”
“What?” said Mum.
“Your little boy’s one of us,” he averred, sluggishly nuzzling a welterweight glass of whiskey, the drink that eventually killed him.
“Oh, really?” said Mum, who liked the Cockneys well enough, particularly for their kindness, but had absolutely no intention of allowing her children to follow in their working-class footsteps. “What makes you so sure?”
“He looks pretty happy to me,” said Dick.
“‘One of us’?” I asked, a bit belatedly.
“Yes. One of us. An East Ender—here, have a good look,” said Dick, putting down his drink and, a little unsteadily, picking me up and sitting me on his shoulders.
Cigarette smoke gusted and swam before me, drifting above the cardboard suits, the slender skirts, the frill-fractured frocks, and the skyscraping updos.
Dad, who had been desperate to leave the East End and give his family a life amid breathable air and green fields, seemed less than impressed with Dick’s antics but, as he always did when provoked or upset or on the verge of spiraling into vexation, held his tongue.
Table of Contents
A cliff face of stiltonA Monstrous Bowl of Peanuts in the Shell 3
Kippers and Custard 29
Bottomless Bumpers of Port 50
A nice cup of tea and a biscuit
A Pipsqueak of Marmalade 63
High-Speed Burnt Toast and Fake Coffee 88
The Hasty Consumption of Pilchards 100
Cocoa and Corned Beef Sandwiches 114
Greasy Grub and Gliding 134
The Birthplace of Toad-in-the-Hole 150
A splat or two of all-devouring mustard
Damage from Oily Chickpeas 167
The Graying Purveyors of Haddock and Eels 184
A Nonconsolatory Splurge of Meursault 217
Drip-Dry Shirts, Spilt Milk, and Sugared Almonds 238
Epilogue: Ham and Cheese, Egg Salad, Ham Solitaire 261
Author's Note 277
Acknowledgments 281