As I’ve already discussed in previous posts, food and memory are inextricably bound up together.
In Lark Rise to Candleford (1945), her autobiographical account of her Oxfordshire childhood, Flora Thompson’s food memories evoke the old custom and habits of a world that has long since disappeared and the delight of being a child at this time.
On other occasions literature provokes food memories in the reader. When I read Kate Atkinson’s 1995 novel Behind the scenes at the museum, the episode in which the characters celebrate the Coronation – and eat a good spread – reminded me of the street parties, and the food I ate, for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977.
In both these examples the memories are positive and can create a yearning or a nostalgia for a past time.
But literature is just as good – if not better – at exploring difficult, painful, and unresolved memories from the past.
That is certainly the case with Spies by Michael Frayn (2002), a bittersweet account of the main character, Stephen’s, memories of one summer in his childhood during the years of the Second World War which features secrets, misunderstandings, and of course food.
The novel opens in the present day with the elderly Stephen, now living in Germany, catching a smell that takes him back to his childhood: ‘The third week of June, and there it is again: the same almost embarrassingly familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time. I catch it on the warm evening air as I walk past the well-ordered gardens in my quiet street, and for a moment I’m a child again and everything’s before me – all the frightening, half-understood promise of life. ‘
Stephen’s reference to the ‘frightening, half-understood promise of life‘ signals the fact that the journey he will go on in the novel, both a physical journey back to the London suburb of his childhood years and a mental / emotional journey back to that time, will stir up memories of a painful, troubling time for him.
The pain of these memories for the adult Stephen is conveyed through the narrative methods: in the present day he uses a first-person narrative, but as he revisits his past he shifts to the third-person, referring to himself as ‘Stephen’ as distinct from the ‘I’ of the present day: ‘Stephen’s already crossing over the road, as I knew he would, too preoccupied even to turn his head to look for traffic …He’s walking slowly, his mouth slightly open, lost in some kind of vague daydream. What do I feel about him as I watch him now? Mostly, I think, an itch to take him by the shoulders and shake him, and tell him to wake up and stop being so … so unsatisfactory.’
The adult Stephen views his younger self with frustration and sorrow – wishing, with the benefit of hindsight, that he could change the way he acted in his youth. At the same time, the whole story is narrated in the present tense, to highlight that, however long ago the events took place, they are still very present for the older Stephen who has, in some ways, remained stuck and unable to move on from this painful time.
This painful time is concentrated on one summer in Stephen’s childhood, a summer played out in the Close where Stephen lived and its immediate surroundings. Stephen is socially awkward and knows – without understanding why – that his family does not quite belong, ‘that there’s something not quite right about him and his family, something that doesn’t quite fit … and never will’.
That being the case, Stephen feels a palpable sense of relief at being permitted into the social circle of another boy who lives on the Close, Keith Hayward. As the adult Stephen notes, ‘I was acutely aware, even then, of my incomprehensible good fortune in being Keith’s friend’. Stephen looks up to Keith – ‘he was the leader and I was the led’ – and so, when Keith declares one day ‘”My mother … is a German spy“’ Stephen is only too willing to believe his friend and support him in his endeavours to find out what exactly Mrs Hayward is up to. Why does she keep leaving the house with a basket? What is the significance of the monthly ‘X’s in her diary?
Like Henry James’ What Maisie Knew (1897), The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley (1953) and Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001), Spies explores what happens when children are thrust into the adult world without full knowledge, and the tragedies that ensue from their miscomprehension of it.
Even the food memories that appear in the novel, whilst in many ways positive for Stephen, are tinged with darkness, highlighting as they do Stephen’s envy at Keith’s world and a longing – which will never be realised – to be part of it. Stephen recalls the joy of being invited to Keith’s house for tea: ‘Those teas! At once I taste the chocolate spread on the thick plank of bread. I feel in my fingertips the diamond pattern incised in the tumblers of lemon barley.’ And, when it all goes wrong, and tragedy strikes, and Stephen faces ‘rejection’ from the Hayward household, his biggest fear is that he will ‘Never again… eat chocolate spread in the gleam of the polished silverware.’
As a child of the Nutella generation, I hadn’t realised that chocolate spread had been around for so long. However, I discovered that the chocolate company Fry’s had produced a chocolate spread that was very popular in the 1940s/50s; but, because jams and preserves were rationed, people also made their own chocolate spread using mashed potato and cocoa powder. My hunch is that Stephen’s nostalgia is likely to be for the Fry’s ready-made spread than a home-made full of carbs concoction made by Mrs Hayward, but I might be wrong…
Here’s my recipe – with not a mashed potato in sight!
NOSTALGIC CHOCOLATE SPREAD
Ingredients: (makes 2 small jars or 1 large jar)
60ml milk
100g caster sugar
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
115g dark chocolate, chopped into small shards
140g unsalted butter, cubed
Method:
Sterilise the jar(s) by removing the lid(s), placing both in a sink – with the plug in – pouring over enough boiling water to fill up and cover the jars, and then leaving to stand whilst making the spread.
Place the milk, sugar, cocoa powder and salt in a medium-sized pan and heat until the sugar and cocoa powder are dissolved, stirring frequently with a wooden spoon.
Add the vanilla extract, butter and chocolate to the pan and whisk continuously over the heat until blended.
Remove the jar(s) from the hot water and dry thoroughly.
Pour the chocolate mixture into the jar(s) and put the lid(s) on. Allow to cool before placing in the fridge. If kept in the fridge, the chocolate spread should last for several weeks.
