In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [57]
But in the basement preparations for Sunday dinne; began on Saturday afternoon when Flo went to the market, assisted by Jack, and came back with baskets laden with food. By now she had appropriated my meat coupons and Rose’s. It was understood we should all share Sunday’s food. ‘It’s only right.’ Flo said, ‘All them cigarettes, and I’ll never get round to paying you back, sweetheart. I don’t know why it is, but there’s something about cigarettes that’s too much for me. Well, you just give me your meat ration, and you’ll not be sorry, I swear it.’
On Sundays we all slept late. About twelve Flo knocked on my door and on Rose’s, and said, smiling with pleasure: ‘We’re starting now. Come on down.’
In the basement, the children played on the floor among the puppies and the kittens, the men sat in their white singlets over the Sunday newspapers, and Flo and I and Rose began work.
‘That Mrs Skeffington, that Miss Powell, they’re cooking their roasts again,’ Flo said. ‘That’s their week’s ration gone and Where’s the sense. I’ve told them. I’ve told them over and over. But Mrs Skeffington, she says her husband kills her without he gets his roast Sundays. And Miss Powell’s the same. Ah, my Lord, it’s enough to make you cry, the waste of it.’
Meanwhile, Rose and I were preparing vegetables and beating butter and sugar.
‘Ah, my Lord, but say what you like, I talk and I talk, but what can you do with this Government, no eggs, no meat, no fat, nothing but flour and water, and you expect me to cook with that?’ Rose winked at me; Dan smiled over the edges of his paper.
‘Yes, and look—’ Here Flo flung open the doors of her food cupboard. ‘See that? See that butter, for a whole week? The grocer couldn’t give me extra, well, it’s not my fault, is it now, if the food tastes of nothing at all.’
Flo had ‘cooked English’ until the year her Italian grandmother came on a visit. It so happened that her mother had to go off unexpectedly to visit a relation in hospital. Flo and her grandmother were alone in the house together.
‘And no sooner had she set foot on our soil, the old cow broke her leg. There she was, propped up stiff as a dead rabbit with her bum on one chair and her heels on another, groaning and carrying on, and saying: “I’m going to die.” Die, my fanny. She’d the energy for a fifty-year-old, though she was seventy-nine and she’d lived out two husbands and one or two men on the side. She said: You look after me, my girl, or I won’t give you permission to marry. I said: I’m married already, you old witch – that was my first husband, what died all those years ago – but I’ll look after you. I wouldn’t see ray worst enemy die of starvation. We liked each other, see?’ Flo interrupted herself in an explanatory way. ‘Well. I put on my apron and cleaned up for her and cooked her dinner and she began to wail like a baby with a pin stuck in it. She said: I don’t mind dying of a broken leg, if that’s God’s will – she was a Catholic, see? You mustn’t mind that, everyone is in Italy, so she said, it’s just a habit with them, like we have a Labour Government in with us. But I’m not going to die of your English cooking, she said. You must learn to cook or your husband will die of it.’
‘And what had you cooked?’ asked Rose, playing her part in the tale.
‘Fish and chips, like always.’
‘What’s wrong with fish and chips?’ asked Dan, obediently, as Flo looked at him, waiting for him to contribute.
‘What’s wrong? Why, that’s all I knew.’
‘Best food in the world,’ said Dan grinning.
‘Yes, but you know better now, don’t you, sweetheart?’
‘You’ve just broken me in,’ he said.
‘My God, the ingratitude.’ Flo said to me, ‘Do you hear? When we started courting, he knew nothing but fish and chips. And when I cooked real food, like my granny taught me, he’d grumble, grumble, grumble, grumble. He’d come to the back of my kitchen in Holborn, and I’d feed him all the best bits, and he’d carry on like he was being poisoned.’
Dan nodded, and went on with the News