Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

When Mum asked me how my lesson with María had gone, I didn’t have an answer ready. I had been so busy mulling over the new flavours I had learned, and the problem of forging within my soul a vegetarian duende , that I hadn’t remembered to concoct an innocent version of the seminar for parental consumption. I certainly didn’t want to mention the sexual secret that María had shared with me, nor my adventures with Spanish cigarettes, so I simply said that she was very nice and very helpful, and had given me some nice home-made cake.

I could hardly have been more stupid. Mum might have been troub led by Spanish cigarettes and the discussion of jomosexuality, but she was certain to feel the threat if I touched another woman’s cake. It pierced her in her inner core of catering. She grilled me about the cake’s texture and probable ingredients. She was keenly competitive when it came to cooking. Her soufflés always rose and stayed risen, unlike those of some neighbours in Bourne End. She even borrowed a trick from Fanny Cradock by playing an electric fan on the fluffy ramparts of the finished soufflé before serving, to show that it wouldn’t collapse. It wouldn’t dare.

I said that the cake was low to the plate, as if it had hardly risen or not been made with flour at all. It certainly contained almonds, vanilla, perhaps some orange or lemon essence. I didn’t quite play into Mum’s hands by mentioning the potatoes. She seemed mollified and snorted that it didn’t sound like much of a cake, but I wasn’t sure I had fully made amends for my cake adultery in the kitchen of María Paz Binns.

His own costly Bovril

My essay on ‘The Tragic Bull in Lorca’ was delivered to Eckstein after school the next Tuesday. I had taken a day off sick in order to write it. It was a pretty torrid piece of analysis, fuelled by my anxiety to please my benignly scowling teacher, by the unique smoke rising from the black tobacco of a Ducados cigarette, and by my own abstract desire for the handsome bull-fighter, as long as he didn’t hurt the bull. His lithe body now lay twisted and crumpled in the sawdust of the bull ring, the suit of lights stained with his own costly Bovril. It was all very feverish, masochistic and pretentious. I was proud of it.

When I came in after delivering my essay, Mum was making a cake, and almost dancing around it, in an unusually sprightly way.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Oh, just trying out a new recipe,’ she said. I knew she couldn’t be as casual as she was trying to seem. ‘I got it from María Binns, who got it from Ideal Homes . The entire cake collapsed on her — poor dear! — so I told her I’d give it a try.’ She had already baked her cake bases, the bricks as I thought of them, and had mortared them together with her home-made buttercream filling. Now she was mixing something else in her pudding basin. ‘It’s a chocolate icing which goes all over the outside of the cake,’ she said, her voice as light and airy as a meringue. In fact she had just popped a batch of meringues into the oven on a low temperature. It was her thrifty habit to let meringues hitch a lift from the relatively high heat that had been used to bake the cakes. The extra expense was minimal.

After she had beaten her egg whites with the rotary whisk, she would hold it above the bowl of stiff peaks and gently work the handle back and forth about half-way round the circle of its action. If the movement was too fast then centrifugal force would spatter the kitchen with flying froth, but if she judged it properly then she could get a trailing sheet of woven foam to lower itself onto the rest of the whipped whites from the whisk, whose meshing blades were almost clean before they even reached the washing-up bowl.

The kitchen was her pride and her parish, although food in its finished form had little interest for her. She rarely served herself more than a few spoonfuls at mealtimes, and though she hated waste she sometimes left even that untouched. She was always saying she would eat later, and perhaps sometimes she did.

Her soft chocolate icing smelled as good as it looked.

‘Would you care to try a bit, JJ?’ she asked with a bright smile. ‘I know you say you don’t like cakes, but perhaps this is the recipe that will convert you!’

She passed me a spoonful of the mixture and returned to her creation. As she picked up her palette knife I noticed that she had now combined her sprightly dance with a færie flick. She was smothering the cake with the soft mixture, and as she worked she danced some more. She kept dipping her blade at lightning speed into a pot of water she had nearby. ‘It’s important to get only a thin film of water on the knife,’ she said, and the light flashed on her palette knife as she plied it about. Her blade plunged and scooped, making little peaks and valleys in the edible geography of the cake. I put the spoon into the cave of my mouth to test her offering, nearly fainting as the mixture dissolved back into the nothingness from which it was created, leaving my tongue-buds drugged and exulting in the subtle sweetness of chocolate, with a touch of bitterness pulling on my heart.

‘Oh, and there’s just one more thing,’ she said, ‘ — before I do the washing-up, of course! — that might interest you, JJ, as a scientist.’ She showed me the palette knife, so that I could see that there wasn’t a mark on it, in spite of all the sculpting it had done, the wonderful irregular symmetry it had given to the finished cake. I suppose the water she’d been dipping it in had been warm.

I didn’t need to say anything, and nor did she. The whole scene had expressed what she wanted to say. The equilibrium of the world had been restored, the proper balance of things. So much for Spanish cakes that don’t even rise! Poor dear María Paz Binns, such a darling, brainy as all get-out — and can’t even make a simple chocolate cake from a magazine!

Irrational fear of Tom Stoppard

Bourne End wasn’t exactly a glamorous place, but it was always a desirable place to live, and it was beginning to fill up with go-getters. It had been a big step up socially for Mum after years in RAF housing. Among the other service wives she had been something of a queen bee, but she felt the strain of her new surroundings. She was afraid of being shown up as stupid or tongue-tied. That was why the sewing circle, and the company of women who respected her needlework, had become such a necessity to her.

Not everyone triggered her reflex of panicked inadequacy. Jon Pertwee the actor, who was a neighbour, had become very friendly — even though he had been guilty of drawing the eyes of the world to the area, a few years previously, by recommending it as a location for the filming of The Pumpkin Eater . We could do without that sort of attention, thank you.

Pertwee knew how to butter Mum up, saying what a gem the house was — how had he missed it when he was looking for a house in the area? She must promise to let him know if she ever planned to sell.

He buttered us all up, telling Peter and me to call him Poetry — not Pertwee, which sounded like a baby trying to say poetry (he did a killing imitation) but ‘Poetry’ as a proper thespian would say it, chest out and shoulders back. He was entirely approachable, and younger than we originally thought, since at the time he had his hair dusted grey for a rôle.

Poetry was the life and soul of any party. Mum told us about one riverside gala (she heard about it at her sewing circle) at which Jon Pertwee had rowed an abandoned boat until it sank, then swam ashore fully clothed to wild applause.

I hadn’t minded when the film people came to make The Pumpkin Eater , being thirteen or so at the time. The only complication of the shoot was that one elderly resident turned out not to have signed the release prepared by the production company. She refused to take direction, and would trot out of her front door (innocently or not) whenever the cameras rolled.