Now you know by now that I am not a domestic Goddess. At Dothegirls Hall, they made us do witchcraft sorry I mean of course housecraft, in a sort of nasty flat. Expectations were low. According to the curriculum, we could expect to be working in a sweatshop (Needlework) or a sweetshop (Maths), before we met Mr Right. As my surname then was Wright, I found this perplexing.Anyone who met my Dad would have run screaming towards the nearest convent. As indeed did my Mother, but she was in labour by then (see blogs passim).
We were being groomed in the direction of some sort of genteel manual serfdom,mixed with a little light accountancy for the purposes of the household budget. It was 1967.
Our Housecraft teacher was the most terrifying woman since Irma Grese. She was very tiny, and very deadly, like an asp. She had a little girly voice, and was neat. She would creep up behind you and peer into the pan that you were stirring vaguely whilst looking out of the window and musing on Truth, Beauty, and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.Then she would tell you that you were "a useless article", and poke you.This always made me jump and burn myself. We were supposed to make a thing called a "Pear Conde" one day. It involved much tedious peeling and coring of pears, and fannying around with raw rice. I brought in a tin of pears and a tin of rice pudding, going "What?" Two minutes tops and no washing up,especially if you ate them both out of the tin.
I begged not to do Housecraft. I suggested that if I were to do some extra "O" levels in that slot, I would be more employable and consequently able to eat out and pay a cleaner. This perfectly reasonable request was refused, so I needed another strategy. I had managed to get out of Games after several years of guerrilla warfare, and the most successful method had been to hide or lose the vital component of said game. On one occasion I put a rounders ball in my pants and sat on it.
This was clearly not going to work in the Kitchen Of Dread. So I started to burn things "accidentally".Plastic spatulas melted and sealed themselves irrevocably to the bottom of pans. Oven gloves smouldered to their destruction, and everything I cooked was turned up to 11.Hissing Sid, the serpentine homunculus who ruled the "Housecraft Room", looked at me with undisguised loathing."Elizabeth Wright! What are you going to destroy THIS WEEK, I wonder...."
I wondered that, too, as I hadn't quite made my mind up. There were so many interesting possibilities...
I was banned from the room altogether, after torching my eyebrows and making an egg explode.
The thing about cooking is that you put things in pans and on grills, but then something else happens,and you wander off and forget all about it. It was pointed out to me by a dear friend that you actually needed to be in the same room with cooking when it was happening. It was she who gave the GB the number of Childline on hearing that I was cooking him dinner. And so, it came to pass, with heavy irony, that The Frenchman ( accidental father of GB) was a chef. And not only a chef, but a French Chef Who Had Worked With Gordon Ramsey. They had a lovely time bellowing and throwing hot water at each other. At first, I was unsuitable casting for the role of kitchen porter, but after a few conflagrations I was banned and barred in perpetuity. So the GB, when dining chez Frenchman, ate a three-course meal with wine, after a hard day at school.He would then spend a week with me, scraping dead oven chips off the baking tray. Then a week with Monsieur again, eating roadkill, and raw liver. Then back to cremated Pizza with Mother. I think adaptability to be so important in the young, don't you? And he doesn't look malnourished. He looks as though he eats his own weight in kittens and asparagus, every day. Lord knows how big he would have been, had I not had the foresight to smoke twenty Capstan Full Strength throughout the pregnancy.See, Mothers Just KNOW.
We were being groomed in the direction of some sort of genteel manual serfdom,mixed with a little light accountancy for the purposes of the household budget. It was 1967.
Our Housecraft teacher was the most terrifying woman since Irma Grese. She was very tiny, and very deadly, like an asp. She had a little girly voice, and was neat. She would creep up behind you and peer into the pan that you were stirring vaguely whilst looking out of the window and musing on Truth, Beauty, and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.Then she would tell you that you were "a useless article", and poke you.This always made me jump and burn myself. We were supposed to make a thing called a "Pear Conde" one day. It involved much tedious peeling and coring of pears, and fannying around with raw rice. I brought in a tin of pears and a tin of rice pudding, going "What?" Two minutes tops and no washing up,especially if you ate them both out of the tin.
I begged not to do Housecraft. I suggested that if I were to do some extra "O" levels in that slot, I would be more employable and consequently able to eat out and pay a cleaner. This perfectly reasonable request was refused, so I needed another strategy. I had managed to get out of Games after several years of guerrilla warfare, and the most successful method had been to hide or lose the vital component of said game. On one occasion I put a rounders ball in my pants and sat on it.
This was clearly not going to work in the Kitchen Of Dread. So I started to burn things "accidentally".Plastic spatulas melted and sealed themselves irrevocably to the bottom of pans. Oven gloves smouldered to their destruction, and everything I cooked was turned up to 11.Hissing Sid, the serpentine homunculus who ruled the "Housecraft Room", looked at me with undisguised loathing."Elizabeth Wright! What are you going to destroy THIS WEEK, I wonder...."
I wondered that, too, as I hadn't quite made my mind up. There were so many interesting possibilities...
I was banned from the room altogether, after torching my eyebrows and making an egg explode.
The thing about cooking is that you put things in pans and on grills, but then something else happens,and you wander off and forget all about it. It was pointed out to me by a dear friend that you actually needed to be in the same room with cooking when it was happening. It was she who gave the GB the number of Childline on hearing that I was cooking him dinner. And so, it came to pass, with heavy irony, that The Frenchman ( accidental father of GB) was a chef. And not only a chef, but a French Chef Who Had Worked With Gordon Ramsey. They had a lovely time bellowing and throwing hot water at each other. At first, I was unsuitable casting for the role of kitchen porter, but after a few conflagrations I was banned and barred in perpetuity. So the GB, when dining chez Frenchman, ate a three-course meal with wine, after a hard day at school.He would then spend a week with me, scraping dead oven chips off the baking tray. Then a week with Monsieur again, eating roadkill, and raw liver. Then back to cremated Pizza with Mother. I think adaptability to be so important in the young, don't you? And he doesn't look malnourished. He looks as though he eats his own weight in kittens and asparagus, every day. Lord knows how big he would have been, had I not had the foresight to smoke twenty Capstan Full Strength throughout the pregnancy.See, Mothers Just KNOW.
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