A shivery skeleton of a home

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Sep 29, 2007 

When my parents were still together, our kitchen was a homely place. Small but not too small, it had a U-shaped Formica cooking area and an oil-fired boiler that hummed in the corner where I kept my mice in their pungent, sawdust-filled cage.

The sink and cooker were always clean and shiny, the cupboards full of packets of dried food and Barts spices arranged in neat rows, and there was a drawer that contained springy piles of clean tea towels. The Formica table was wiped down after each meal and the five kitchen chairs had seat pads with bright 1960s orange flowers - flower power.

In this kitchen my mother would cook mince or chops or sausages or cod in parsley sauce. Or else we would have corned beef salad with tinned Yeoman's new potatoes and salad cream. Blancmange or Bird's custard with steamed chocolate sponge pudding would follow.

We all sat around that little table to eat and, though I now remember nothing of those meals (Did we talk? Were we happy? Did we finish everything on our plates?) my sense of the kitchen at that time is of a safe, contented place.

But in the middle of August 1972, when my mother left my father and took us with her, the kitchen changed. Partly to express his fury at being left, partly to punish us and partly (I now see) to punish himself, he let the house slowly fall apart.

On that August night our mum had hired a removal van and (while he was away) taken about half of the furniture. I don't remember what she took from the kitchen - pots and pans? A potato masher? The bread bin? - but, whenever we visited, everywhere in the house items were missing. She took the soft things, the happy, homely things, the things she had chosen and bought. What remained was a sad, shivery skeleton of a home, a cold dead shadow of the life we used to live.

Our father seemed almost happy that everywhere there were reminders: sour marks on the walls where pictures had once hung; deep grooves and dents in the carpet where a particular chair or table had stood; dust gathering on shelves that had once held ornaments and bowls of flowers; the space where the dirty clothes basket in the bathroom used to be.

Actually he had no interest in replacing anything. He said that he wanted us to see exactly what our mother had done to our home, what destruction she had wrought. You could see it gave him a kind of weird pleasure to have us ask if there were any clean towels (there weren't) or where the hall hatstand had gone. Don't you remember? Is your memory so short? Your mother took it.

Our father wasn't, I don't think, an especially dirty man but like many men of the time, he didn't really know how to do the laundry or wash up. So after our mother left even the clean towels and bed linen in the airing cupboard somehow never felt quite fresh. All too quickly, the house grew unaired, unloved. All of the objects in it were functional and none was pretty. There were always too many ashtrays and not enough cushions.

I only remember a few pieces that he bought himself after the divorce: a leather chair, slick and dark and ugly, the kind of thing my mother would never have had in the house; an electric organ, and a strange, plastic picture of a naked woman, sprayed to look like it was bronze. Her long hair and her breasts and nipples stood out in relief. My father said she was tasteful and I - slightly horrified - pretended to believe him.

But of all the rooms in the house, the kitchen remained the saddest. There was never anything in the cupboards and when we stayed our father would let us choose ready meals, which we ate with relish. (We weren't allowed food like this at home). But we always finished with a feeling of emptiness inside that didn't go away no matter how many sweets we were allowed to eat.

Late afternoons on dark Sundays were especially difficult. This was when my mother and stepfather were due to come and collect us. We had to make sure to hide our relief at going home and anyway we weren't allowed to say "home". My father banned us from using that word to describe where we lived with our mother. So, once our bags were packed and in the hall and he was sitting silently smoking with an accusing look on his face, there was literally nothing left to do.

The kitchen cupboard still had a few sticky jams and spreads left over from the old days and I would go in there and, standing at the greasy kitchen counter, furtively stuff slice upon slice of white bread spread with Tate & Lyle Golden syrup into my mouth - delicious and horrible. I wasn't hungry; I didn't want it; I kept on going, swallowing down my grief, my tension and my rage.

That was then and I don't think I've ever confused food and emotion since. But recently something happened. Forced - for reasons I don't need to detail here - to revisit those times and give them some hard and painful thought, suddenly there I was, standing in our kitchen at home, eating slice upon slice of bread spread thickly with my kids' Nutella. It would be neat to say I realised what I was doing, stopped and let someone comfort me. But I didn't. I kept on eating and it was a whole week before I could either laugh or cry about it.