Arabella Weir - The Real Me is Thin

It was lunchtime and Mum announced that she’d made some ‘delicious lentil soup’. Ah. Now, this would be a good few years before the lentil had managed to shake off its reputation as the unremittingly dull pulse of choice for the kind of hippies who baked bread using their own placenta and wove their own shoes out of bark. Back in 1968, only Claudia Roden and a tiny minority of truly talented cooks well versed in the exotic ways of rendering a lentil palatable could possibly have dreamt of eliciting a positive reaction from four recalcitrant children who were already slightly wary of their mother’s idea of ‘delicious’.

In one synchronised movement we all slumped our shoulders as Mum plonked down the pale brown, lumpy slop in front of us. (My kids, at 10 and 11, around the age I was then, have taken up this physical means of showing displeasure. ‘Not pasta again!’ they moan and it makes me want to scream ‘Yes, bloody pasta again!’ – even though my starting point is not one of frustration, loneliness, and desperation. It can’t have been much fun for Mum.)

Of course, us doing this made Mum cross, crosser even than her constant default mood which was… cross. ‘It’s delicious, and what’s more you’ll like it!’ she yelled. We all peered nervously down into our bowls. It certainly didn’t look delicious. In fact, it gave every sign of being utterly revolting. I was sitting next to my sister and opposite both my brothers at the kitchen table. Mum had gone back to the cooker. We exchanged worried looks. ‘What are we going to do?’ We couldn’t eat it; that much was obvious. Andrew, always the peacemaker and, it has to be said, the one least likely to spark Mum’s rage, fell on his sword. He picked up his spoon and tasted the soup. Emboldened, Matthew, Christina, and I gingerly followed suit. As we had suspected, it was absolutely foul.

We dropped our spoons, which clattered noisily back on to the table.

Mum spun round. ‘What’s the matter? I spent hours making that, and you’re bloody well going to eat it.’

We knew better than to put up a fight. One by one we picked up our spoons and tried again, but we couldn’t get it down. It didn’t just taste horrible in an infantile all-lentils-are-yuck way. It tasted wrong. The soup had a tangy fizz – surely that wasn’t right?

‘Is this what lentils are supposed to taste like?’ I hissed at Andrew.

He furrowed his brow and hissed back, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so, but she’s going to go nuts if we don’t eat it all.’

He continued, bravely, with tiny spoonfuls, while I resorted to clanking my spoon about in the bowl in the hope that somehow this would reduce the level of the soup and convince Mum I’d eaten some. Mum’s rage could flare so suddenly, and you could never be sure what would spark it. We didn’t know how we were going to get out of this.

Then it happened – sudden, blissful, unexpected salvation. Andrew summoned up his courage. ‘Mum, I think there’s something actually wrong with this—’ But before he could finish his sentence, as if by magic, projectile vomit shot out of his mouth and nose, travelling at speed right across the kitchen table. The jet was so strong, it looked as if it had come out of a fireman’s hose. No one said a word.

As the last regurgitated lentils dropped off Andrew’s chin, Mum marched forward and picked up his spoon to taste the soup. Never one for apologies, she chose her words carefully. ‘Yes, very well, the lentils might have gone off, but it was delicious when I made it.’ Thanks to Andrew’s super-reactive stomach, unbelievably, we were off the hook.

I’ve since grown to like lentils (only when they’re fresh) but I still can’t eat them without instantly recalling the fizz they emanate when they’re off. But I’m not sure any child genuinely likes them. I made some delicious (no, really) lentil soup the other day and even persuaded my kids to taste it. My daughter went first, before urging her younger brother to try, too, but ‘not to look at it before’. He wrinkled up his nose: ‘I’m not being rude, but I think that’s more of a grown-up’s type of thing.’

I don’t think, for one moment, that Mum knew the lentils were off or that she was deliberately trying to poison us. Very irritatingly for her, they’d simply gone off since she’d cooked them, so, operating in the belief that she had something to give us kids, she suddenly found herself a meal ‘down’, as it were, and I can certainly relate to how bloody maddening that can be. You know you’ve got to feed your kids, find that the intended meal is sabotaged, and now have to find a substitute. An unfortunate episode such as this might be a small hiccup, hardly worthy of mention, to someone for whom cooking for their kids is no big deal; but if your default position is one of anger, resentment, and frustration at where you find yourself in life, as was Mum’s at the time, then it’s small wonder she was so pissed off. Those lentils exemplified Mum’s hatred of cooking and the insurmountable drudgery that it was for her. They also illustrate that we were not accustomed to food being prepared with love and care. Our food, such as it was, was angry.

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