Renoir and Custard
School lunch, despair, hope and Le déjeuner des canotiers, and a recipe for tomatoes on toast
A large, poor-quality print of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (Le déjeuner des canotiers) hung in the dining room of Stover, the third-rate private school I attended between the age of nine and thirteen. I would have looked at it at least once a (school) day for these four years – hundreds of times. Renoir’s painting captures the sleepy energy one feels after a long lunch somewhere hot, a half-anxious, half-contented feeling brought on by being a bit drunk in the day, a bit too full, knowing that there’s the lone upward or downward slope of the afternoon to come. The capturing is in his soft-brush strokes, in their inclination toward movement. It’s summer now. We’ve brought flowers into the house and planted basil. Their smell is not of new life, but of life in bloom - a little sickly, heavy.
I could associate such a smell with the Renoir, but I don’t. Rather it conjures the near-universal cafeteria smell: cheap oil and custard powder from the kitchen, sweat and breath from the children. Against this the boaters retained their bonhomie, flaunted their youth and happiness and glamour. At nine I knew the painting did not fit in. The hall was brash and newish, the tables, chairs, floor, ceiling were dirty white, plastic, institutional, sticky. You took a varnished wooden tray and a plate to be filled by unsmiling lunch ladies. Spagbol, shepherd’s pie, chicken and mashed potato, mushroom stroganoff, insipid vegetables and a vat of gravy, shiny with cornstarch, followed by spotted dick, sticky toffee, lemon drizzle, blackberry crumble, apple pie and a vat of custard, shiny with cornstarch.
The painting was an affront, transgressive. Men and women together, entirely at ease. Wine on the table, sunlight, glasses coruscating, dull only when filled. Holiday things, things of my parents’ cosmopolitan friends in London. Or things of those who my parents’ cosmopolitan friends wished to be. Far from this school, where pupils and teachers conspired to reproduce the philistinism that is, has always been, England’s true form. Suspicious things included London, abroad, ‘languages’ (all speech but English), novels published after 1900, poetry by anyone alive and almost everyone dead, spices and happiness.
Most transgressive was the central figure, a thickly bearded man in a vest and straw boater, leaning against a railing, entirely at ease. Alphonse Fournaise, Jr. was the son of the Maison Fournaise, where the group are lunching. He rented the boats and flirted with the women, provided a confident and slightly rural humour. He is pictured in his element. This I know now. But at nine what I thought was this: how?
I was an awkward child, pale, shy, neither confident nor funny. I was not naturally athletic and hated sports, I was chubby. I spoke with a mixture of high-RP and shire, while the other students spoke with shire only. I had no games console and my parents hid our TV beneath a blanket. They made cultural choices which they believed to be superior and I felt signified otherness. Othered enough, I felt, by self and circumstance, I carried my heaviest secret closely: at nine I could hardly read and could not write.
My illiteracy was a product of my previous school, where education was disordered by early twentieth-century German pedagogy and quasi-theosophy. It had no uniform and the students were scruffy, parents ranging from hard-line hippies to professionals disillusioned with British education. It smelt of beeswax polish, blackboard chalk and, when it rained, damp wool. Gardening lessons stood in place of sports, something that sounds utopic but was not – I hated lugging my spade in the rain, hated the untalking labour of weeding and snail killing, all dictated by the stages of the moon. We jumped a fire on St Christopher’s day and practised a finely patterned dance in a rounded hall. Corners were bad. Black pens were bad. Writing was bad. We learnt our times tables by rote, stepping back and forth as we chanted, and committed acts of violence in our break times. Or played four-square. We had German lessons four times a week, but I remember none of the language. Our teacher was married to a sheep shearer. In the season she would be tired after he’d woken her before dawn.
The shame of illiteracy was so firmly linked to the aesthetics of that place – ones I saw as disordered, though now recognise as a uniform of a different sort – I sought another extreme. My report cards from the time speak of my impeccable uniform and my politeness, redeeming features dwelt on for the imagined pleasure of my parents before plunging into the meat of the matter: educational ineptitude and possible stupidity. The first piece resembling the writing I now produce was an essay about this time titled The Making of an English Gentleman, written when I was fourteen.
And so this chubby, unsporting, unfunny neurotic boy in a too-tidy uniform would look at Aphonse Fournaise Jr., and think how I loathe him, how I love him. Mine was an impotent jealousy, the sort we must’ve felt for birds before aeroplanes. I could not imagine inhabiting Alphonse’s life.
~
The situation of illiteracy did not last forever, though I hope this is obvious. My tenth summer was spent at our kitchen table with my mother who, motivated by guilt and love, did long, difficult work. “No, it is F-I-E-L-D, not F-E-E-L-D. No, not F-R-E-N-D, F-R-I-E-N-D, fry-end!” I still remember these admonishments each time I spell these words. It was an unusually hot summer and the kitchen looked out onto a chaos of green, giving way to a valley and after, a hill of thickly planted Douglas Fir. I could hear my friends and siblings playing outside: I felt hatred, sadness, shame. But, dragging my feet, I became basically literate, though I still hated written words, finding them unforgiving and sharp and unwieldy — cruel.
The next year was easier though I still lagged behind, unhappy because I felt un-special and excelled at nothing. Besides, I believed myself to be ugly, unfortunate and clumsy. I had no best friend and no group to which I belonged, was instead passed from boy to boy, unsettled, apart. I was joined with my fellows only in one unified goal — to study for the 11+, for mine was the sort of undistinguished prep school designed to feed the local grammar.
For anyone who doesn’t know, the 11+ is the exam ten and eleven-year-olds take to gain admission to selective grammar schools, which are championed by conservatives as the backbone of a meritocratic education. Putting a critique of exams aside, the lie of this is evident in the existence of schools like mine, which allow middle-class parents to game the system and ensure that even their stupid children pass the test.
Or so it was imagined. But there was more shame still since I couldn’t take part in this joint exploit with any grace. My parents were told I would not pass and given the number of a private tutor. My tutor taught in a cottage in a neighbouring village, had a swimming pool, dyed blonde hair and a rounded, bulbous convertible. The first time I visited she made me toasted fruitcake, buttered. I can still smell it, taste the salt and the sweet. She was my companion on Saturday and Sunday mornings and I tried hard, but always with the weight of exams in my stomach, a weight so rich it bordered on the sexual. On the way home my mother, full of pity, would buy me a sausage and egg turnover from the village store, its innards magma after two minutes in the microwave.
Everyone was collected by parents that day, their faces bearing comfort or grins of pleasure. I did not pass. My father, the professor of medicine, collected me on results day in his tiny blue Peugeot, which I hated. It was unusual to see him before the evening, so he must have taken time off work. I suppose my parents thought he would be better at delivering the bad news. My mother had also failed her 11+ and had attended a failing comprehensive. She had not, as I would be, been coddled and cushioned by money and culture and so took my failure badly.
I stared straight ahead all the way home, deep into the lanes, losing myself in their waft and weave. I had never been so disappointed. Have never been again because, since then, I have never tried to beat the odds in life, have only done what I was sure I could. This has led to pleasure and to laziness, a constant chafing against my own protestant work ethic, a feeling of guilt and discomfort.
My parents, not knowing what to do with me, still semi-literate, fragile, possibly stupid, decided I would stay at Stover. I was given an art scholarship — I overheard my mother say it was an inducement to keep them paying. I would be part of the first cohort of boys sent to the upper school, which had educated South Devon’s minor bourgeoisie’s girl children for fifty or so years. I learnt recently, happily, that a similar thing happened to Robert Lowell, so can start the story – “Like Lowell I went to a girl’s school”. There were ten boys, four left over from prep, five new boys and me. The leftovers were all, as I was, un-special — a fat boy, a tiny boy, an anaemic boy and one with eczema all over his body. The new boys were much the same: we were not the elect. The girls, educated in separate classes, mixed with us at break and lunch. Forty odd of them, they walked around in groups, green kilts swishing, laughs piercing.
First I would look at them like I’d looked at the women in Renoir’s painting. Were they possible, was their existence earthen and real or something closer to the brushy softness of the painting? It must have been the second week of term – not long after I’d started, and I was sitting with the other boys, close to the loudest and, I felt, prettiest of the girls, a group of six or so. I stood to return my tray, and suddenly a confusion and a rush, brushy soft, as she flexed her feet to tiptoes and whispered in my ear, hot and quiet, that her friend liked my friend. Bonnie. The hot quiet of her breath dispelled all my shame and disappointment. She had a blonde bob, her father owned a toy factory and a large house in Torquay. Seeing their house, my mother asked if her father was Tony Soprano, which I did not understand.
I was soon friends with this group, beginning the pattern of intense friendship with girls, and then women, that has structured my life. There was an exotic about them – their smells, songs, games, their words and fast-thinking, their clever jokes and cleverer spite – that I soon became used to, soon became part of. I loved each of them, really, madly, truly, for in their drama they rescued me from what seemed humdrum and grey, my inferior boy’s life. They were excited and loved music and books, lived as firmly in words as on grass, were so rarely content with what was there. We lived out a continuous drama, a back and forth, in our breaks in the school’s large grounds and in the evenings, on MSN.
I was struck with a new calmness, a recognition of the reprieve I had been given. I was no less than my peers and began, as everyone should, to have a sneaking suspicion that I was more. I regarded The Luncheon of the Boating Party with newly expansive eyes. Who had hung it, had chosen a vision of freedom for this unfree place? Had they seen it on a trip to Washington or in a book, did they dream of a table beside the Dordogne? And since they willed toward escape, somewhere tumultuous and glittering, might I?
Simplicity would have me end here since the point is that I did escape. But simplicity would miss the dark side. Most fragile children receive no such reprieve, no gentle landing and space to grow, and it is shocking and vicious and unjust that gentle landings are almost exclusively the reserve of those with money. Anyone with the vaguest pretensions toward equality can see that private schools do more than anything to perpetuate England’s hellish cycle of privilege, class and snobbery.
Cherry Tomatoes on Toast
The Sunday market is currently awash with cherry tomatoes from a polly-tunnel in Kent, sweet and firm. Mostly we’re having them raw, sliced in two, with the best oil and salt, but occasionally - reaching right back to my schooldays — I fry them (not in the best oil) until they resemble jam.
Lo’ and I used to make these before school, especially on cold mornings in winter, her sitting beside the pan on the Aga, me stirring. They were best on the bread from the bread machine with slabs of cold butter.
I began frying imported cherry tomatoes in this way, especially outside of their season, to enhance their mediocre flavour, and feel it’s almost a waste to use the Kent one’s I’m gorging on now. Large tomatoes will not work for this method, since they turn to mealy paste rather than jam.
For two
Generous glug of olive oil
Around 500g cherry tomatoes
Roughly chop the tomatoes, heat the oil in a cast iron frying pan until very hot and add the tomatoes. They should protest angrily. Throw in a generous pinch of salt. Continue to cook on a high heat, stirring every thirty seconds, until all the tomatoes have broken down and taken on a jam-like consistency. This will take ten or so minutes. Regular stirring is necessary so the tomatoes do not burn. Spoon onto heavy, buttered brown bread.
If you’re a bit spicy rub a clove of raw garlic onto the bread before the tomato and substitute butter for good olive oil.