Peas And Poverty

Alongside a new life in England, my education at The Crescent Road Infants School continues. It is still 1972 and Mama, Papa, Sis and I have now been living in the town of Brentwood for the past year (see post Girl With Television). During the school day I hungrily devour my reading books one after the other, and along with it the fascinating adventures of the two main characters, Janet and John in this strange new language called English. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that children could do such marvellous things such as go to a zoo, or even bake a cake. I also never knew that an oven was for baking, my Spanish grandma uses hers for storing pots and pans and this is exactly what Mama also does at our new home in 51 Crescent Road. Even though I like my reading classes, I must admit that the school moments that really captivate me are those that rotate around food; one of them is the afternoon story time and the other is called lunch.

In the afternoons, we have this marvellous drink called ice cold-milk from adorable miniature glass bottles, and  I have never had such a thing in my life. Back in Tenerife we generally drank goats milk which was never deliciously chilled in this way. The machine they use to chill the milk is called a fridge, and this is also something I have never seen before back on my island. We children eagerly take it in turns to distribute the milk bottles out between everyone in the class, after which we sit quietly at our desks and sip our drink from long straws as Mrs Jones reads out the newest instalment of the afternoon story, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. England definitely has some good sides to it, I think to myself as I sip and listen. It may not have the beaches of Tenerife, but I could definitely get used to this wonderful drink every afternoon, and whenever I am afforded the slightest opportunity I make sure to help myself to two. 

The Headmistress, Mrs Chapman often supervises us at lunch time in the school cafeteria and this for me is another strange experience all together. English food is like nothing I have ever seen before; it's made up of different components on the plate and separated by multiple invisible barriers. In Spain, we normally have it all mixed up together. Today we have sausages, runny potatoes called mash, peas and nothing else. All of this is then drowned on the plate in a tasteless brown liquid called gravy. Mrs Chapman tells us that we must all eat our food like fine ladies and gentlemen, slowly and elegantly with our knives and forks in hands at all times. No  shovelling of peas into the mouth is allowed. Rather they must be must be piled delicately onto the back of the fork and then inserted into your mouth that way. But the problem is that you cannot pile more than about five peas onto the back of your fork at any one time before they start dribbling off, so it takes me an absolute eternity to eat the pile of peas on my plate. I would really want to shovel them onto the fork as we would do in Spain and then pop the whole thing into my mouth, but I dare not even contemplate the thought, Mrs Chapman does not look like she would tolerate pea shovellers lightly. 

I have also never eaten with a knife in my hands at all times as Mrs Chapman equally demands. Back home in Tenerife we cut up the tricky bits with a knife, let it drop on the table and then forget about it as we shovelled the food into our mouths with the fork. I dare not tell Mrs Chapman this either, I have a feeling that she would be appalled. It's no wonder that the English school children around me are generally thin. By the time they have manoeuvred the pile of peas onto the back of their fork to delicately transfer to their mouths, the bell indicating that lunch break is over has rung, and they can forget about the rest of the food on their plate. When I am home after school, Mama asks me what I had for lunch today, and I reply that runny potato, sausages and forty-seven peas. Mama and I cannot understand why anyone would want to load peas delicately onto the back of a fork when the other side of the fork does a more efficient job, nor why anyone would want to take a perfectly good potato, smash it to bits and then put it on a plate. We have teeth for that, so why do they bother? Sometimes it feels that we will never understand these English and their strange ways.

One a weekend day when I have no school, Papa sometimes takes me with him to work on the pig farm. The owner, William has two children called Stephen and Jane. Stephen is a lot older than me, but Jane is just two years older. I still do not speak too much English but that does not deter Jane and I from playing together on the farm and we roam within the confines of the farm perimeter, just as I had done on the chicken farm with the daughter of Papa's supervisor (see post ). We peek into the area where the adorable piglets live along with their siblings and cannot in our wildest dreams imagine that they will eventually end up on our breakfast plates as bacon. Jane and I always make sure to return back to the house for The Tea Break, this is when both our Papa's sit down with the other farm workers and have their sacred morning break (see post Watching The English Part I And II). We children do not get to drink tea, but we get something equally wonderful and that is juice and biscuits. 

If it is rainy or cold, we play inside Jane's home and she sometimes takes me up to her bedroom. I notice that Jane's home has things in it that I do not have in mine; She has her own bedroom with her very own bed, at home I share a room and a bed with Sis but I don't mind because in the winter the house is very cold and sleeping next to Sis keeps us both warm. She also has a wardrobe full of beautiful dresses which captivate me. Most of my dresses are handed down by Mama and Papa's kind friends and I am forever growing out of them so that the sleeves always look ridiculously short. Jane also has a large pile of dolls all called Sindy and they sit grouped in a corner of her bedroom surrounded by a sea of Sindy accessories; Sindy clothes, Sindy shoes, Sindy handbags and whatever else you could imagine that a Sindy doll would need. 

I just have Emilia, the doll that Papa sacrificed all his money to buy me at the fair in Andalusia when I was three (see post Meet The Family). Emilia also sits in a corner of my bedroom, but unlike Jane's many Sindy dolls, she only has the clothes she is wearing and nothing else. Also, she is alone. Jane also has something called a carpet. Its thick and inviting and cosily covers all the surfaces of the floor throughout the house. In our home, we have small patches of it here and there covering the wooden floor boards and the staircase is completely bare. Finally, I notice that Jane has an unimaginable luxury. It's called a telephone, and this is something that I have never seen inside a home before. As my eight-year-old mind and eyes slowly absorb this decadent opulence, I gradually comprehend that we are not living in the lap of luxury, rather I begin to understand that we are dirt poor (see post Toast And Television).

To be continued...

Next post published on Sunday, 3rd May: Hot Pants


Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.