I don’t want to know about my other memories of South Africa. When I arrived in the UK, what I wanted were new memories.
Three. Sheer Egoism
In the UK greasy spoons are also referred to as ‘working men’s cafés’, which in the South is often colloquially referred to as a ‘caff’. . The typical working men’s café serves mainly fried or grilled food, such as fried eggs, bacon, black pudding, bubble and squeak, sausages, mushrooms and chips. These are often accompanied by baked beans.
ENGLAND 1974
When I was fifteen I wore a black straw hat with square holes punched in the brim and wrote on paper napkins in the greasy spoon by the bus station. I had a vague idea this was how writers were supposed to behave because I had read books about poets and philosophers drinking espresso in French cafés while they wrote about how unhappy they were. There were not many cafés like that in the UK at the time and certainly not in West Finchley. In 1974 the miners were on strike, the conservative government had made a five-day working week a three-day week to save electricity, China had given two black and white pandas (Ching-Ching and Chia-Chia) to the British people — and I was planning my Saturday morning getaway to the greasy spoon as meticulously as a bank heist. These plans were nearly ruined in a big way by a swarm of suicidal bees. A pot of honey — no lid on it of course, nothing had a lid on it in our house — had defied all laws of gravity by falling from its place on the shelf above the washing machine to inside it. Not only was the stainless steel drum now dripping with honey, it was also crawling with delirious, satiated bees that had flown from their nest outside the window and into the washing machine too.
It was now my extra job in the family (we all had jobs on Saturdays) to scrape the bees and honey off the drum with a teaspoon and dispose of the corpses. While I was on my hands and knees, head stuck inside the washing machine, it occurred to me that this was how suicidal women poets ended their life, except they stuck their head into a gas oven. There was something humiliating and religious about kneeling down to remove the bees but I couldn’t summon the energy to work out why because I was in too much pain. At least five of the bees had somehow gathered up enough energy before dying to sting my hand and no one was particularly sympathetic. My mother said, ‘Yes, bees do sting,’ and told me to put my hand under cold water. As an afterthought, she said, ‘In Russia they actually rub bees’ venom onto arthritic joints.’ I tried to bribe my younger brother Sam to do the job for me, but he was too busy blow-drying his hair into a teddy boy quiff. ‘Bees have lots of eyes,’ he shouted over the whir of Mom’s hair dryer, ‘about six each.’ We had both seen a programme on the telly where they showed a close-up of a bee that was apparently a ‘keystone mutualist’ because it pollinated seed-laden fruits in desert communities. The voice-over said that honey bees were the highest form of insect life and that a strong colony flies the equivalent distance to the moon every day. Then they showed men in a field smoking the bees out of a hive. What was I supposed to do? Set fire to the washing machine? Desperate to get out of my life as fast as possible, I tried putting four jasmine joss sticks into the holes of the steel drum and lighting them. I reckoned the smoke would make the keystone mutualists fly out on their own accord without having to scoop them up into my teaspoon. But I knew they were the highest form of insect life and couldn’t be bothered to move. All that happened was ash fell from the joss sticks into the honey and I had to clear burnt-up sticks and ash as well as the bees who obviously thought they were in heaven. I didn’t blame them for not wanting to budge because I could see from their point of view that a washing machine full of honey was more appealing than the grey suburb I was wasting my life in — a desert community without the bonus of sunshine or seed laden fruits.
By ten o’clock, when the last four of the plump, drunk and hedonistic bees had been wrapped in the sports page of The Times and dumped in the bin, I grabbed my black straw hat and waved goodbye to my mother so she could see my swollen fingers and suffer immense remorse.
‘You’ve got to clean the oven. That’s your second job.’
I tried to stare at her blankly but my eyes began to hurt. The effort it took to look cool and unfazed by everything was exhausting me. I walked down the stairs tripping over my denim flares, banged the front door with my smarting right hand which was hot and red from the stings and attempted to run in my new lime green platform shoes. As I passed the Chinese take away called HOLY and the dry cleaners called REUBANS, a pensioner dragging her beige plastic trolley in zigzags across the pavement said, ‘I like your funny hat.’
It was very very urgent that I got out of my life.
Inside the greasy spoon’s steamed up windows and haze of cigarette smoke, this sense of urgency accelerated. I had so little time. Time for what? I didn’t know but I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me and I had to work out what it was before I cleaned the oven. I hastily ordered eggs, beans, bacon and bubble and squeak, and then, realizing I didn’t have enough money for beans and bubble and squeak, decided to cancel the beans. Holding a mug of scalding tea in my unstung hand, I made my way past the builders and bus drivers towards a Formica table to begin my impersonation of the writer’s life. As soon as I sat down I reached for the white paper napkins that were kept in a glass alongside the salt, pepper, ketchup and brown sauce and started to write with a leaking blue biro. This is the word I wrote on my napkin:
ENGLAND
‘England’ was an exciting word to write. My mother had told me we were in exile and would one day return to the country of my birth. The idea that I was living in Exile and not in England terrified me. When I told my new friend Judy (who was born in Lewisham) that I didn’t really want to live in Exile, she said, ‘Yeah, I’d be scared shitless too.’ Judy wanted to look like Liza Minnelli in the film Cabaret and Liza was American. Judy’s father was a docker and he was as English as they come. He had died of cancer, something to do with asbestos in the cargo he landed, but Judy didn’t really know the whole story. On the weekends I painted her fingernails with sparkling green nail varnish to turn her in to Liza so she wouldn’t always have to be Judy whose father had died in England when she was twelve years old.
There were certain things about England that I still couldn’t quite grasp. One of these ungraspable things occurred right here in the café. The greasy spoon cook who was called Angie always gave me bacon that I considered raw. It was as if she put it on the hot plate to make it warm but not to actually cook it. This was very upsetting to me because the livid pink rasher on my plate made me think of the pig it had been sliced off. Somewhere in England there was a pig that was still alive running around with a chunk sliced off its side. I did not feel I could ask Angie to cook the bacon for longer because I did not live in England — I lived in Exile — and reckoned this was the way things were done in the country that was my host.