andforstarters

[andforstarters]

As if I didn’t have enough reasons to be grateful to Hilary Mantel, it was her recommendation that led me to the author whose novels and writing I consistently turn to more than any other’s – Elizabeth Jane Howard, who published her first novel in 1950, her last in 2013, and who is best known for the Cazalet Chronicles, a five-part work of social history, astonishingly deft characterisation and technique like the finest embroidery where the stitches are entirely invisible. As one reader on GoodReaders observed, these books have suffered from their treatment as “historical chick lit”, published in pink floral covers and adorned with quotes from women’s magazines, when they are serious and important works of art, but this is because they describe domestic and interior life from a woman’s point of view, and even now, as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out a year before Howard’s first novel came out, it is only the masculine that is considered universal.

And it must be said that Howard’s books fall far from the current zeitgeist, capturing, as they do, a world of affluent white members of the British ruling classes in the last decades when the British were still attempting to rule the world.  They describe a past that is more astonishingly distant for being so recent (Howard was of my grandparents’ generation - the generation who were teenagers and who came of age during the Second World War.) This world of nannies, cooks and housemaids, of steam trains, of women who were virgins when they married and were lucky if they even knew what sex was when they said “I do”, of limited contraception and backstreet abortions, of nursery teas, of plain cooking – it feels not just a foreign country, but another planet. And yet the people she depicts so brilliantly – these upper and upper-middle class people – are the people who shaped the people whose children are now in charge of this country. And so, out-of-touch and unimaginably distant as it can sometimes all seem, it is a world that is worth understanding, as best we can, if we are to have a hope of understanding why this country is the way it is today (and, sad to say, the way it will probably be tomorrow, unless something revolutionary happens).

There are many astonishingly strange things about this world that so closely preceded our own and yet which ran according to rules, spoken, or, mostly, unspoken, that are so strange as to be often downright confusing to the modern reader. But the thing that I am drawn to think of most often (probably due to my habit of reading while eating) is the relationship that people in this world had with food, and particularly, with cooking it.

Food and drink are important in Howard’s work, particularly when she writes (as she does brilliantly) from children’s point of view, with their endless appetites, picky dislikes, and unashamed greed. (That she co-authored a cookbook with the restaurant critic Fay Maschler is proof that it was a subject in which she was interested beyond sheer social accuracy.)

The sheer abundance of mealtimes in her books is enough to make one feel sluggish with indigestion upon reading – breakfast, something called “mid mornings”, lunch, tea and then dinner for the adults (or nursery tea, then supper, for the children). The work of preparing and clearing these (for the servants) or even consuming them (for the served) must have been exhausting. Why would anyone want or need so many meals, given they were all copious - every day beginning with a full cooked breakfast, lashings of stodge of every kind, and serious puddings at every lunch and dinner?

 No doubt a great deal of this was due to the fact that for a leisured class, there was not much else to do beyond eating. But it was while reading one of the many accounts of one of these many meals, sitting picking at a snack I’d made to tide myself through to the dinner I would go onto make, that it struck me – something so obvious to the people in these books as to not need mentioning, but something so strange to me that it had not occurred to me before: in this era, if you were not served food, you could not eat. If you got hungry mid-morning, or mid-afternoon, unless food was being prepared for you and brought to you, there was no food for you to eat. You didn’t go into the kitchen and make yourself a snack. The kitchen was the cook’s domain, and cooking was her work. You were no more likely to make yourself a meal if you were hungry (there are many women in the book who it is made overtly clear have never made a meal in their lives) than we are to make ourselves a bottle of wine if we fancy a drink . This went as much for the servants as it did for the staff – they ate when their meals, prepared for them, were served to them.

 To be this disassociated from the production of meals is almost unimaginable for us, unless we have been institutionalised in one of the few places that preserve such a system to this day – a boarding school, an Oxbridge college, or an army with its mess. We are so used to having ready access to a place and the means to cook, and things that we have decided to buy and will decide when and how to eat, that to have none of these things at our direct disposal is almost impossible to imagine.

In the books and world of Elizabeth Jane Howard – a world which, I repeat, was the world of our parents and grandparents – this was not the case. The mistress of the house planned the week’s menus with the cook, according to the budget and the social diary, and at the allotted times, the inhabitants of the house sat down and ate what they were given. If you were hungry at 11am and there had been no such thing as “mid-mornings”, you would not have been able to eat. So the overabundance of meals began to make sense to me as offering a chance to eat that would otherwise simply not exist -  and God knows I have eaten enough much-needed snacks between breakfast and lunch, and lunch and dinner, to know that provision for these occasions is needed. For me, that means putting a cereal bar in my office drawer, or wandering into the kitchen for some cheese and biscuits. For a big household back then, it meant serving a meal to everyone.

Of course, not everyone was part of a big household – either as the family or as the servants. Those who worked in jobs other than service – in manufacturing, retail, or anywhere else – would fend for themselves. But even then, men did not plan their own meals, or cook them. The only people really planning, cooking and eating their own food - seeing the process through from start to finish, as it were - were working-class women, and while many of them worked outside the home, being a housewife was such a vast and full-time job that many did not, even though money was tight.

What is remarkable to reflect upon is that almost nobody in the past – during this period, or any other in modern history – did what is now expected of almost all of us, and that is to simultaneously earn money to put food on the table, and do the work of putting that food on the table.

Countless working parents – or even working single people – struggle with this; struggle not simply with the reality of doing it, but with the guilt they are made to feel if they fail to succeed in doing it. Yes, it is true that thanks to innovations in shopping (supermarkets) and technology (modern ovens and microwaves, food processors and mixers, dishwashers and so on) have made shopping and cooking far less onerous and time-consuming than they were in the 1930s, but they are still time-consuming and onerous, and yet somehow we are bad parents or bad people if we do not whip up nourishing home-cooked meals at the end of our 10-hour working days. There is perhaps a reason why the work of planning and preparing meals, and the work required to provide the means with which to buy and prepare those meals, was separated in the past, even if it is unfortunate (to put it mildly) that those roles were almost always rigidly distributed along strictly gendered lines. 

Never in human history have we been both expected to bring home the bacon and then cook it too, and yet everyone from the government to lifestyle food programmes and glossy cookbooks suggest that we should be managing to do just, and what’s more, to enjoy doing it too.

It’s not surprising that those who can afford it now delegate so much of this work again, just as they always used to – although this time, their staff don’t sleep in their attic and deliver food from the kitchen in their basement, but rather prepare food in nearby restaurant kitchens, for diners who will never see them, let alone know their name, and deliver it by moped to their front doors. 

As astonishingly strange as the as mid 20th-century world of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novels may seem to us on so many levels, there are far more similarities than we may first observe.