eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781741159301 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 948 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
I'm Not Eating Any of That Foreign Muck
Travels With Me Dad
By Brian Thacker
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2005 Brian ThackerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74115-930-1
CHAPTER 1
Glutinous rice cakes with Sayur Lodeh and chilli sauce for breakfast anyone?
The last time my father and I flew in a plane together, I threw up on him. I was five years old and it was my first time on an aeroplane. Our family were emigrating to Australia and the British Eagle International Airways turbo-prop tin can with wings that bounced around and shook us silly took fifty-two hours — via Kuwait, Colombo, Singapore, Darwin and Sydney — to get to Melbourne. Our return trip to London thirty-odd years later (minus the pit stops and vomiting) would take only twenty-two hours. On that flight alone we would spend around twenty hours longer together than on any other occasion I could remember.
There was an air of trepidation and a bewildered 'what-the-hell-are-wegoing-to-talk-about-for-two-months?' look on both our faces when Dad and I met up at my house before we headed off to the airport. At least our first conversation was easy. It was about Manchester United. They'd played Millwall in the FA Cup final the night before. Dad had called me that morning and as soon as I picked up the phone I'd blurted out, 'Don't tell me the score. I've taped the game and I'm just about to watch it.'
'All I'll say,' Dad sighed, 'is that I was very disappointed.'
'Oh gee, thanks Dad,' I moaned.
I watched the game and was surprised to see Manchester United take the silverware with an easy three to nil win.
'Why were you disappointed?' I asked Dad when he arrived.
'We should have won six–nil,' he grunted derisively.
Although I'd been back to the Old Dart quite a few times, it almost felt as if I was returning for the first time. The England I was going to now was not only the England of my father's childhood, but of my childhood as well. Mind you, I have very few memories of my early life there. And most of them are in black and white. Quite often what you think are real memories are only your recollections of an old photo, not the time itself. According to our family album, I spent most of my younger years playing with my willy. There is a faded photograph of me standing in our backyard in Spark Hill, Birmingham, clutching my willy so tightly it looks as if I was holding it in place. I do look very happy, though. There are other photos of me — at an amusement park, standing in our drab 1960s lounge room, and in an informal family portrait with my two brothers and sister — and in every shot I'm looking ever so cheerful with my hand firmly in place.
On the plane there wasn't any talk about the trip, our family or my childish insecurities. I did learn something new about myself, however. I learnt where I'd picked up a habit that some people find rather annoying: both Dad and I kept ourselves busy flicking through each and every audio station and watching five movies all at once on our personal TV screens.
On the second leg of our Emirates flight out of Singapore we were upgraded to Business Class (I'd emailed the airline and told them I was a travel writer — try it sometime). I'd never been in Business Class before. Neither had Dad, although he said he knew someone who had. For years I'd trudged past the rows of fat men in suits sipping champagne, thinking how smug they looked lounging in their spacious seats with their extra leg-room and complimentary in-flight socks. I had this theory that if I only ever flew Economy then I would stay happy because I wouldn't know what I was missing. It's a bit like my car. For years I had a car without air-conditioning and I was happy to wind down the windows and put up with the occasional scorching from the armrests. Then I got a car with air-conditioning and spoiled myself. There was no way I could go back to steaming underpants again. I was worried the same thing would happen with the Business Class thing.
As I lounged in my leg-friendly seat, sipping champagne and trying my very best not to look smug, the rabble in Economy were probably thinking, 'How can a scruffy-looking bloke like that afford Business Class?' Dad looked like the King of Muster. He ordered a second glass of champagne before we even took off. It may have been three in the morning, but that wasn't going to stop Dad from taking full advantage of our brief sojourn in the high-life in the sky.
There was Lobster Thermidor on the menu. Sadly (and I mean very sadly, because I love my lobster) we'd missed it. That had been dinner on the first leg out of Australia.
'What do they have in First Class, then?' Dad asked as he sipped his glass of 'fine' port.
I thought about it as I contemplated ordering another freshly squeezed orange juice.
'They probably have an entire slow-roasted antelope, hand-fed to them by nubile maids.'
Our only foray into the culinary delights of Business Class would be breakfast. Dad screwed up his face in disgust when I pointed out, amongst the toast and cereal, the Nasi Himpit on the breakfast menu. 'It's glutinous rice cakes served with sayur lodeh and chilli sauce,' I explained. Although glutinous rice cakes did seem an odd replacement for Rice Bubbles, it doesn't take much to disgust Dad when it comes to food — I just have to mention the wildly exotic dish of spaghetti and he screws up his face.
* * *
'I've had a good life, I can't complain,' Dad announced as I drove the hire car out of Heathrow Airport. Although Dad was itching to drive, I wasn't letting him anywhere near the steering wheel. He was too old and too expensive. As soon as you hit seventy, the insurance premium hits the roof. So, it would appear does your tendency to panic.
'Look out for the runway!' Dad bellowed into my ear. Yes, the runway was parallel to the road that we were on, but there was a three-metre-high fence in between.
'Watch out for that car!' Dad shouted, gesticulating wildly a few seconds later. The oncoming car was about half a kilometre away. I was a nervous wreck by the time we hit the first roundabout out of the airport. And, to make me even more apprehensive, Dad was navigating. We didn't have a map, but I had put him in charge of my AA Route Planner (and no, it wasn't full of directions to the nearest alcohol-free establishment). On the Automobile Association website you simply enter your starting point and destination (including exact street addresses) and you are presented with a detailed plan, indicating every road and roundabout with a few pubs thrown in for good measure. For example, 'At roundabout take 3rd exit'would be followed by 'Pass The Slirpin' Sausage (on right)'.You'd really need to visit the other AA if you stopped at every pub marked on the Route Planner!
I thought it would be relatively easy to follow. That was until we got to the second roundabout after the airport and I asked my appointed navigator which exit I needed.
'I can't figure the bloody thing out! It's too complicated,'Dad said.
'Do we need the M4 West or East?' I barked as we passed the first exit.
'It says to go forward. We're already going bloody forward.'
After three laps of the roundabout and me pointing out to Dad that 'Forward (signposted 'West') to join Motorway M4' wasn't really that complicated, as we finally joined the M4 and headed north past the outskirts of London. According to the Route Planner, the journey time to Royal Leamington Spa was one hour and twenty-seven minutes — that's three hours with 'Dodgy Navigator'.
Royal Leamington Spa is not quite a tourist town, but it is in Warwickshire, which is home to two of England's biggest tourist attractions: Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon and Warwick Castle. Dad lived a hop, step, and jump from both attractions for fourteen years and hadn't visited either.
I didn't have a map of Royal Leamington Spa because Dad had told me that he knew the town backwards. As we drove around (and around) the town, I got to know it backwards, forwards and sideways.
'I recognise that building,' Dad would say as we passed it for the third time.
As part of our impromptu tour we drove through the centre of town, which was filled with fine, eighteenth-century façades that put a pretty face on such fine British institutions as KFC and Burger King. There was a sale on at the Woodwards department store and a neat queue of oldies in grey coats was waiting patiently to rush in so they could get ten per cent off grey coats. Seeing them, an odd thing struck me. There didn't seem to be anyone in the town under sixty. Indeed, the majority of the shops seemed to cater for a wrinkly population. There was an inordinate abundance of optometrists, funeral parlours, pharmacists and cute little shops that sell cute little porcelain ducks.
After a few more laps of the town we pulled up out the front of Dad's cousin's house. As Dad knocked loudly on the door, a woman popped her head out from next door and said, 'What are you doing, you silly old man?' Dad was banging on the door of the wrong house and the woman was my Aunty Barbara. I hadn't met my Aunty Barbara before. She lives in Canada, but when she found out that her brother was popping over to England she'd decided to pop over too.
Dad's seventy-year-old cousin June lives alone in a large (well, large for England) and extraordinarily neat terrace house.
'Ello me doocks, would you like a cup of tea?' June asked before we even had a chance to put our bags down. June, who was wearing her best frock but had a large apron on over the top of it, ushered us into the lounge room. I stood in the centre of the room too scared to move. Every shelf, table and most of the floor was dotted with porcelain clowns, swans, horses and ducks. Sitting uncomfortably in the middle of a gaggle of porcelain geese was Dad's oldest brother Fred. He'd driven down from Birmingham to greet us and was dressed up in jacket and tie. I'd met my Uncle Fred on a number of occasions and he was always perfectly coiffured and elegantly dapper. I wouldn't be surprised if he donned a three-piece suit just to pop down to the shop for a pint of milk.
Each one of Dad's immediate siblings has a different accent. Fred has a Brummie (as in Birmingham) accent, Barbara has that Canadian twang, Gerry 'Ey-oops' like a Mancunian (from Manchester), Gladys (the only sibling to stay in Leamington) has a Warwickshire accent and Jim sounds like a pirate (he lives in Devon). After thirty-eight years in Australia, Dad still pronounces words like someone from Coronation Street but has picked up that uniquely Australian habit of ending each sentence as a question?
'So what's your book going to be about, then?' Barbara asked.
'It's about me travelling with the old fellow here,' I said, pointing across to where Dad was sitting amongst a herd of horses.
'You're not really telling everyone he's your father, are you?'
Barbara (the second youngest of the Thacker clan) was born in 1934 — three years after Dad. She went to Canada for a holiday and decided to stay. That was close to forty years ago. Fred was another overstaying sightseer. When he left the army in 1954, he visited Birmingham for a long weekend. 'I stayed for fifty years,' Fred said. 'Now that's a loooong weekend.'
Although Dad's family are very distant geographically, they seemed very close and they hugged, joked and teased each other a lot. Dad certainly loved to tease June. When she waltzed into the room balancing a tray crammed with cups of tea and five varieties of gooey pastry, Dad said, 'So they haven't put you in a home yet?' June just smiled, looked at me and said, 'Int' he a cheeky booger, me doock?' In the three days we stayed with June not once did she call me Brian. I was always 'Me doock' and Dad was either 'a cheeky booger', 'a dozy sod' or 'a right pain in the arse'.
I'd just polished off a large piece of cream cake when June announced that our dinner was almost ready. Five minutes later, Dad and I were escorted into the dining room. 'Bloody 'ell!' Dad snorted. 'We're in the special room. This hasn't been used since I was last here five years ago.'
June, Barbara and Fred had already been out for an early dinner, but that didn't stop June from preparing us a mountainous roast dinner. There was roast chicken, roast potatoes, carrots, beans, peas, pumpkin and a slice of Yorkshire pudding as big as Dad's suitcase. I shovelled food into my mouth for fifteen minutes and didn't even put a dent in the pile on my plate.
'I can't finish it, I'm sorry,' I groaned to June, who was hovering over me waiting for me to finish.
'That's okay,' June clucked as she swept the plate away and immediately returned with two towering bowls of homemade apple pie.
I waddled into the lounge and collapsed on the couch just as June sauntered into the room with another tray piled high with Boston buns and cups of tea.
'No thanks, I just couldn't,' I squeaked.
'Would you like some biscuits?' June asked, looking worried because I wasn't trying to eat my body weight in food. 'What about some chocolate? Amuffin? bread and butter pudding? Arack of lamb?'
When Dad's oldest sister Gladys arrived we had four out of the remaining six Thacker kids (Iris and John had passed way) together in the one room. When Gladys was having her third child about forty-three years ago she had a stroke and lost the use of her left arm. She was now in a wheelchair. Dad's nickname for her was Rigor mortis, which everyone, including Gladys, thought was hysterical. Gladys got so excited that when she spoke she would forget to breathe and every few minutes Barbara would say, 'Take a breath! Take a breath!' Gladys was full of life and loved nothing more than a good ol' chinwag. In the space of one cup of tea (and a round of scones with jam and clotted cream) I was bombarded with more information about my Dad's family than I had heard in the previous forty years.
To begin with I found out my Grandma's name — Violet. I was quite surprised to hear that she had died from an aneurism. Dad was just as surprised — he thought his Mum had died of a heart attack. The reason why I was so surprised was that my Mum had died from an aneurism when I was nine. So even though Grandma and Mum weren't related, they both died from the same thing at roughly the same age. I'd never really stopped to think that Dad and I shared the experience of losing our mums when we were young. It's just yet another thing that we had never talked about.
I also learnt that my Grandpa Fred was one of fifteen children and his Dad was a chimney sweep. Apparently the house was always full of soot. Grandpa Fred fought at Dunkirk during the Second World War and watched his brother Arthur die on the battlefield and couldn't go over to save him.
One story about Grandpa Fred that did make me laugh happened when he came home from the war. He met a London lass when he was stationed in Devon and married her. They'd been married for a few months when one morning over breakfast he said, 'Darling, could you please pass the sugar and ... by the way, did I tell you I've got eight kids?'
Meanwhile, back in Warwickshire, Barbara thought her Dad had died in the war. She didn't even know she had a Dad until she was twenty-eight.
I was beginning to OD on tea and the jet lag had really kicked in. My body thought it was four in the morning andmy head thought it was next week. Everyone was quickly bouncing off each other now.
'Uncle Albert died of a heart attack ...'
'No, that was Uncle Cyril and he had gout ...'
'Oh, that's right, there was a terrible smell in the house and everyone was looking for bad fruit until they found his body slumped behind the radiator ...'
'Wasn't that John's Dad?'
'No it was Len's and it was after he married Mary Sykes.'
'Oh, yeah, and he wasn't allowed into the house with his shoes on.'
'Yes, and Aunty Mary used to hang out the washing with no clothes on.'
'Her family's all in prison now and she lives in Grotting Poop Road.'
'No, she's in Wallywiggen Way.'
Before my head exploded, I crawled upstairs to bed.
* * *
My breakfast was the size of a small country. It was fried everything.
'No wonder there's an oil crisis,' quipped Dad.
'Int' he a dozy sod, me doock?' June said as she ladled more grease onto our plates. June was still in her apron. I hadn't seen her out of it yet. When she wasn't cooking, she was cleaning. As soon as we'd finished eating breakfast, June whisked the dishes away from the table and they were washed, dried and put back in the cupboard before we even got out of our chairs (which were immediately stacked on the table when we got up). The floor was swept and mopped by the time we'd collapsed with bloated bellies on the couch.
I asked June to join Dad, Barbara and me for a drive around Leamington, but she said she had lots of cleaning to do. As we left, I heard the vacuum cleaner start up. Barbara told us she hoovers every single day.
I almost hit a lady in an electric scooter as we were driving to the house where Dad was born. That was because Dad would say, 'Turn left here,' and Barbara would scream, 'No, it's right.'
The Thacker family home at 7 Willes Road was a gorgeous three-storey Georgian terrace house. 'We only lived on one floor, though,' Dad said.
'No, we didn't.' Barbara was shaking her head. 'We had the entire house!'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from I'm Not Eating Any of That Foreign Muck by Brian Thacker. Copyright © 2005 Brian Thacker. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,England,
1 Glutinous rice cakes with Sayur Lodeh and chilli sauce for breakfast anyone?,
2 Chicken tikka masala (food that looks like diarrhoea),
3 Butt & Oyster's fish and chips,
4 If it's Tuesday, it must be bangers & mash,
5 Steak with just a hint of mad cow's disease,
6 Death by chocolate,
7 Death by fried lard,
8 Animal-all-sorts pie,
9 Cockles, whelks, mussels and jellied eels,
10 Mushy pea fritters and a nuclear accident,
Gibraltar,
11 Judias en salsa de tomate (baked beans on toast),
Spain,
12 Deep-fried tripe in hot paprika sauce,
13 Goat's balls and real lettuce,
14 Fish, chips and stewed bull's penis,
15 McGazpacho and McTapas,
Malta,
16 Maltese cave pizza,
17 Freshly cooked cute fluffy rabbit,
18 Lemon f___king chicken,
19 KFB (Kentucky Fried Bunny),
Sri Lanka,
20 Fish head curry and brain masala,
21 Dead spiders covered in pubic hair,
22 You can stick your devilled chicken right up your Kyber Pass,
23 Hoppers and rotty botty,
Singapore,
24 Volcano burgers and exploding arses,
Port Melbourne,
25 Calamari with weed salad,
Acknowledgements,