A few years ago, when telling a friend of my forthcoming move to Muswell Hill (an area in North London) he said, pityingly, ‘It’s a bit suburban there…’ Geographically speaking he was right: Muswell Hill is a London suburb – it’s more than 5 miles from Central London, in Zone 3 of the London travel network and the landline phone numbers begin with 0208 (rather than 0207, the mark of inner London). But his pitying tone conveyed the fact that the word ‘suburban’ is often used pejoratively to describe a particular lifestyle and mindset: conservative, small-minded and safe, in contrast to both the excitement of city life and the freedom and beauty of country living.
The suburbs emerged as a geographical concept in the late 19th and 20th centuries as a result of improved roads and transport connections. These allowed people to move away from the density of inner-city living whilst remaining within easy reach of the city centre for work and leisure. Being less densely populated than inner cities, suburbs allow for more spacious accommodation and more green areas: ownership of a house with a garden, something which is a real rarity in 21st century inner cities. As a result the suburbs have typically been a place that married couples with children – or hoping for children – have gravitated towards, which in turn has shaped the nature of suburbs: good schools, local shopping at all the high street names and lower crime levels than in the city centre. But that safety and quality of life are often regarded as coming at the expense of excitement, glamour and creativity.
Perhaps that is why literature has often thrived in either urban or rural settings. Novelists who deal with the suburbs often view them as a place to flee from – Julian Barnes’ Metroland and Hanif Kurishei’s The Buddha of Suburbia are cases in point.
However, the novelist Clare Chambers, whose wonderful novel Small Pleasures was longlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize in Fiction, takes issue with this denigration of the suburbs.
In an article published in the Guardian in December 2021, Chambers – who herself lives in the South London suburb of Bromley – notes that the fact that the suburbs are not glamorous and edgy like the city, or picturesque or bleak like the countryside, make them ‘rich terrain’ for her novels. Agreeing with the detractors of suburbs that a problem with them is that they are neither one thing nor the other, Chambers argues that it is precisely that which gives them value: ‘it is in the middle … that the ordinary truly shines’.
Small Pleasures is, to my mind, an extraordinary novel about the value and beauty of the ordinary. Set in 1957 in Chambers’ own homeland of South East London, it revolves around Jean Swinney, a journalist on a local paper, who is unmarried, approaching 40 and living with her widowed mother whose demands impact significantly on her ability to live a free and unencumbered life. But as a consequence of these constraints, Jean finds delight in small pleasures where she can – for example, on Tuesdays and Friday, between 8.30 and 9PM when her mother takes a bath, ‘Jean was mistress of the house, free to do as she liked. She could listen to the wireless without her mother’s commentary, eat standing up in the kitchen, read in perfect silence or run naked through the rooms if she chose.
Of all the various liberties available, her favourite was to unfasten her girdle and lie at full stretch on the couch with an ashtray on her stomach and smoke two cigarettes back to back’.
A key feature of Chambers’ style is the attention to detail, which complements perfectly the suburban setting. Jean makes her mother ‘a mug of Allenbury’s’ every evening (a hot drink designed for children, convalescents and the elderly), heating up ‘a mugful of milk and water’ in the process. A neighbour pops round ‘wearing a faded summer dress and a crushed straw hat, holding a Pyrex bowl of raspberries’ The brand names serve to create a sense of time and also highlight the post-war consumerism fuelled by advertising, and the author’s eye to detail also grants an importance to the characters, allowing the ‘ordinary [to truly] shine’.
It is the same with food: Jean and her mother eat basic, nutritious home-cooked food: ‘liver and onions… and a pudding of tinned pears with evaporated milk’; ‘roast heart and mashed swede’; ‘reheated cauliflower cheese’ and ‘mince and potatoes’.
Shattering this quiet routine existence comes a news story: a woman who claims to have had a virgin birth. When Jean volunteers to investigate the story for the paper, her life is turned upside down through the people she meets, the relationships she forms and the buried memories that are stirred up. Suburban existence is no obstacle to life-changing events.
In my next post I’ll write more about the life-changing events of the story and how they relate to food. But for now I’m sticking with the suburban ordinariness of Jean and her mother’s evening meal of mince and potatoes.
SUBURBAN MINCE AND POTATOES
Ingredients (serves 4):
1 large onion, chopped finely
4 garlic cloves, crushed or chopped finely
2 carrots, peeled and diced
1 teaspoon fresh rosemary, chopped finely
500g beef mince
200g tin chopped tomatoes (or ½ a standard size tin)
½ tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 beef stock cube dissolved in 500ml boiling water
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
750-800g potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
Butter, salt and pepper
Method:
Pour 2 tablespoons of olive oil into a large saucepan and place over a medium heat. Add the chopped onion and fry, stirring occasionally, until soft but not browned. Then add the garlic, carrot and herbs and fry for another few minutes. Then turn off the heat.
Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a frying pan and quickly brown off the minced meat. Then add the browned meat to the vegetables in the large saucepan, return to the heat adding the chopped tomatoes and Worcestershire sauce, stirring well. Add the beef stock, a pinch of salt and a grind of black pepper and bring the mixture to a boil. Lower the heat so the mixture is simmering, place a lid on the pan and allow to cook for 1-1.5 hours. Check the mixture from time to time, stirring it and adding a bit more water if it’s getting dry or beginning to stick to the base of the pan. Before serving, taste and add more seasoning if required.
About 20 minutes before the end of the cooking time for the mince, cook the potatoes in salted boiling water until tender when you stick a knife in them. Drain and mash, adding butter, salt and pepper to taste.
Serve the mince and potatoes with your vegetable of choice.
I’m sure they didn’t have garlic in the late ’50s. I still have recipe books from that era which say ‘1 clove of garlic (if liked).’ How tastes change!
I’m sure you’re right, which is why I always put a 21st century twist on my recipes to make them edible!