It was at the Sunday farmers’ market in Palmers Green that we bought duck eggs. Whenever we went there, Malli would get lost. We usually found him among a heap of purple-sprouting broccoli, his hair sticking up like a baby heron’s. We’d buy greengages in August. Often they were perfect, not too yielding, but not unripe. And in the spring Steve bought artichokes. He steamed them with garlic and bay leaves, and we ate them hot. Steve showed the boys how to separate each petal and scrape out the pulp with their bottom teeth. He’d describe to them how he first ate artichokes when he was about ten, and was traveling in his father’s lorry somewhere in France.
For my father-in-law, Peter, the isolation of driving a lorry for weeks on end on European roads was redeemed a little by wine and food. Peter shunned the egg and chips served at the truckers’ stops. Instead, every evening he coiled his articulated lorry onto narrow country lanes to reach a French or Italian village where he’d made friends with a family who ran a small restaurant, which was usually their dining room, and where each day just one dish was cooked. From the time Steve was about seven, he’d gone with his father on a long trip to Europe during the summer holidays. It was on those journeys that he first tasted risotto, and rabbit stew with bacon, and bouillabaisse, and ravioli that didn’t come out of a can, and he loved it all. His friends back home were envious of these trips. But if he began telling them about his culinary adventures, they looked at him blankly and said, “You wha—?” and got on with causing grievous bodily harm to each other playing football, accusing him of “eating foreign.” Foreign was not popular fare on an East London council estate in the early 1970s.
But for Steve’s family it was. Steve’s father was born in Rangoon and lived there and in western India until he came to England with his parents and three brothers in 1946, when he was ten. According to family lore, they were the first Lissenburghs to return to Europe after one Wilhelm Lissenburgh left northern Holland and sailed on a merchant ship to South India in the mid-seventeenth century. When they settled in England, in a small seaside village near Bournemouth, Steve’s grandmother and her sisters drove long distances searching for spices and ingredients for making balachang, a tangy prawn paste. My mother-in-law, Pam, when she married, quickly learned to eat spicy food and to cook chicken curry. So Steve grew up on curries she made using Bolst’s Curry Powder, which came from Bangalore in a tin and which his father relished when he came home at the weekend from Italy or France.
Vik and Malli liked stories about Granddad being a lorry driver and about Steve’s travels in the lorry when he was a boy. We’d linger over lunch as Steve described how he slept in a bunk inside the lorry and did his homework as they drove through long tunnels in the Italian Alps. Vik was impressed to learn that Steve even helped Granddad unload his enormous container. Mal was incredulous that sometimes there were only tomatoes in there, so many tomatoes, that’s unbelievable. Or rather, unbeleeevable, in Malli-speak.
These conversations inevitably ended with Vik complaining about Steve’s chosen occupation. He was peeved that Steve had really bungled this. “Why can’t you be a lorry driver? What’s research? I hate research, it’s so boring, Charlie’s dad’s a policeman, that’s even better than being a lorry driver. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
He’d stop grumbling when I gave him his pudding. In the autumn I often made apple-and-blackberry crumble. The two apple trees in our garden go wild with fruit. We sometimes picked blackberries when we went walking in the woods, and Steve instructed the boys to only pick the clusters hanging high in the bushes. “My granddad called the ones lower down pissed-on berries,” he would tell them, and they liked that. Later in our oven those urine-free blackberries burst under the crumble and trickled like purple lava across that buttery crust.
In our house, Malee was the best pudding maker. She was much more than a nanny to us, she was our friend. And she spoiled us with her delicious food. She made blueberry muffins with buttermilk and baked bread buns with grated coconut and palm treacle inside. Steve and I returned from work to the warmth of freshly steamed string hoppers and the heady aroma of blackened tuna curry bubbling in a clay pot, thickly spiced and sharp, with lots of goraka, a dried, very piquant fruit.
Steve loved cooking seafood. In London we’d get live lobsters from the Wing Yip supermarket off the North Circular Road. I tried not to watch as the man behind the counter took out a couple of live lobsters from a tank and killed them and chopped them and cracked their claws for our stir-fry. In our kitchen that night, chunks of lobster turned crispy in a sauce of black bean, ginger, and shallots and red chili flakes. If the claws were well cracked, the liquid seeped in, and the meat inside was delicious, and Steve helped the boys dig it out with chopsticks. I would tell them that when I was their age and went on holidays in Sri Lanka, my parents bought gunnysacks filled with live crabs from the market, and we’d have crab curry for lunch, very, very spicy. And that the grown-ups always drank fresh coconut toddy before lunch. And that the toddy smelled like puke, so my cousin Natasha and I sat on the steps of our rented bungalow crying and retching from that stink. The boys were gleeful at the thought of our distress.
Our quest for fish sometimes took Steve and me to Billingsgate Fish Market at dawn. Our friends thought we were quite insane, waking up at four a.m., having Malee sleep over so we could leave home without the children. “Why can’t you just go to Waitrose?” they’d ask. The sparkle of big fish markets they just didn’t get.
For us it was bliss. We sloshed about from stall to stall on those nippy mornings, drinking coffee that tasted like barely brewed tea, from plastic cups. We’d stop and admire Devon crab in their gleaming purple shells and olive-skinned John Dory with disgruntled deep-sea faces and clawlike spikes on their dorsal fins. We searched for the sea bream with the brightest eyes and flesh that sprang to the touch, and for the plumpest monkfish tails. We bought squid by the boxful, and whole cuttlefish shining in their pinkish cloaks, and tuna, and sometimes swordfish. When we got home, Steve would try to ask Malee nicely if she could clean the squid and cuttlefish, and she would tell him to get lost. If he was mad enough to go out in the wee hours and stink the house out with tons of fish, he could clean it himself. So Steve got further delayed on that report for the Department of Work and Pensions and labored at the kitchen sink, his hands covered in cephalopod slime.
The boys were curious about our early-morning excursions. Did we see a whole swordfish at the market, they’d ask, big sword and all. I had told them that when I was a girl in Sri Lanka, I had a swordfish blade with spikes sticking out of it, I kept it on the bookshelf in my bedroom.
I was about twelve or thirteen when I got that blade. We were holidaying in Wilpattu, a national park in the northwest of the country, and had driven for hours on bumpy dirt tracks to a fishing hamlet deep in the jungle. My parents, uncles, and aunts were in their usual search for lobsters and crabs. The swordfish blade was perched on a broken-down catamaran, and I was looking at it with interest when a very handsome young fisherman came up to me and told me I could have it. Just as I was beginning to enjoy what I thought had been an unnecessary crab-shopping trip, my uncle Bala marched up and asked the young man if he wanted to marry me, boasting my virtues, I always came top in class. The poor boy hurried away, shocked and embarrassed. Someone did take a photo of him, though, bare-chested, wearing a blue and yellow sarong and a shark’s tooth tied on a black string around his neck. Some years later I found that photo in a book I’d taken with me when I went to Cambridge, having failed to make it as a child bride. That photo is still in a box at home in London. I once showed it to the boys. “Much better looking than Dad, no?” I asked. Vik was affronted, “No way!”