I said, ‘Excuse me. I will ask you something if I may. Can you perchance tell me…’ I raised my head to look upon her in the eye and asked, ‘How do you make a chip?’ (Andrea Levy, Small Island)
We often think of food in terms of comfort and nostalgia. Certain dishes remind us of home, of our childhood, of a wonderful summer holiday we once had.
But food can also make us feel very much not at home. It can make us feel that we don’t belong and are out of place. So, whilst I have little patience with people who complain about ‘foreign food’ or who on their overseas holidays head to the restaurants offering English dishes, maybe they are simply expressing a sentiment of feeling out of place and disorientated, albeit in a crude and xenophobic manner.
In Andrea Levy’s prize-winning 2004 novel Small Island, food is used to express that feeling of alienation. The novel is principally set in post-war London (1948) at a turning point in British history. The end of the Second World War saw the disintegration of the British Empire, provoking a profound destabilisation of the British sense of identity. At the same time, post-war Britain needed an increased workforce to help rebuild the country and the economy, and residents from its colonies in the Caribbean were urged to come and serve ‘the mother country’. Many came, most famously on the ship the Empire Windrush which docked at Tilbury in Essex on 22nd June 1948, with dreams and aspirations which would be cruelly dashed by the hostile welcome and prejudices they subsequently encountered.
This is the background to Levy’s novel and the context in which Levy – herself a second-generation immigrant, whose parents emigrated to Britain from Jamaica – places her characters.
The novel is told in four different voices, from the perspectives of Levy’s principal characters. They form two married couples: a white British couple, Queenie and Bernard Bligh; and a black couple from Jamaica, Hortense and Gilbert Joseph.
Queenie is open-minded and fair. Her open-mindedness is communicated in the novel’s prologue which tells of the young Queenie going with her family and friends to visit the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1924. Her fascination with the Africa exhibition, and her willingness to shake hands with a black man, to the consternation of the other children, foreshadows her friendship with Gilbert (to whom she rents a room whilst her husband is away serving overseas) and her extra-marital affair with a black serviceman. Queenie’s alienation from the beliefs and customs of her own family, is shown in her rejection of her father’s trade and her decision to become a vegetarian, which provokes her father’s anger: ‘After that I became a vegetarian. “A what?” Father thundered at the table. “A ruddy what?” Who’d ever heard of that? A butcher’s girl who won’t eat meat.’ Not long after this decision, Queenie moves from Nottinghamshire to London to live with her Aunt Dorothy, ‘Mother’s posh sister… She had come, she told me, with a whisper and wink, to take me away and better me’.
In stark contrast to Queenie, her husband Bernard is presented as close-minded and prejudiced. When he volunteers for the RAF after the outbreak of war, he is sent to India. Whilst he is horrified by some of the aspects of life he encounters there, he also sees parallels with Britain which help him feel at home: ‘The train might have been in Bombay, but the footplate I stuck my foot on said it was made in Crewe. The sooty stench of steam had me thinking of childhood holidays in Dymchurch’. The food, whilst recognisable, is seen as something to be avoided and not like its British counterpart: ‘We’d been warned about their oranges. Boiled in filthy water to make them big. The cakes spoke for themselves. Gaudy as Christmas and speckled with black – not raisins but flies’. The horror of the food lies in the unsettling combination of its familiarity and its otherness which makes it not fit for consumption.
Somewhat ironically, though, it is Britain – in its post-war state – that proves most unsettling and alienating to Bernard. When he returns, he finds that ‘England had shrunk’ and ‘Nothing was familiar’, compounded by the discovery when he eventually arrives back in London in 1948 that his once familiar home has been taken over by black lodgers.
Gilbert and Hortense’s first experiences of Britain prove to be profoundly disappointing. Gilbert arrives during the war ready to serve with the RAF as either ‘A wireless operator/air-gunner or flight engineer’; however, he is relegated to driving duties. Hortense, who does not arrive until 1948, is well-educated and a trained teacher who prides herself on her spoken English. However, her success in ‘Miss Stuart’s English pronunciation competition’ at school in Jamaica, comes to nothing when she tries to speak to a taxi driver on her first day in Britain: ‘It took me several attempts at saying the address to the driver of the taxi vehicle before his face lit with recognition’.
Hortense’s alienation from England is summed up in her first attempt to cook a meal for Gilbert. On his way out to work in the morning he says to her: ‘”You think you can fix me up a little something to eat? There are some eggs and potatoes in that cupboard by the sink? You can make some chips for me?”’ Hortense agrees, without knowing what to do or what this meal is. Later that day she asks her landlady Queenie what a chip is, and Queenie tells her it is ‘a potato cut up small … that must be peeled first’.
Queenie obviously thinks that these instructions will suffice, but the meal Hortense presents Gilbert with is not what he had anticipated: cutting up the potatoes into small pieces, she places them ‘in a pan of water so they might boil’ and presents them to Gilbert alongside a soft-boiled egg, which it turns out has gone off: ‘… looking at the dinner before him he say, “What is this?” But I paid him no mind. “Hortense, what kind of meal you call this?”’
We never find out whether Hortense eventually learns to make chips, though she and Gilbert settle into a half-comfortable existence in this country. I’m not sure how impressed Gilbert would be with my version which features oven-roasted spicy potato wedges, rather than fried chips (since I don’t have a deep-fat fryer), but I like them and they make me feel comforted and at home in our current lockdown situation. Having given up meat for Lent I decided to add some long-missed bacon too, but that is by no means essential.
EGG AND CHIPS (in a manner of speaking)
Ingredients (per person):
2 medium potatoes
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt and pepper
1 egg
2 rashers of bacon (optional)
Method:
Preheat the oven to 200C / fan 180C / gas mark 6.
Wash the potatoes; there is no need to peel them. Slice them into wedges.
Place the wedges into a bowl, season with salt and pepper and sprinkle over the paprika. Then pour over the olive oil and using a spoon mix everything together so the wedges are well coated.
Spread the wedges in a single layer over a baking tray or roasting tin. Bake in the hot oven for 30-40 minutes, until tender and golden in colour.
Fry the egg (and the bacon if using). Serve with the potato wedges.
