25. The Alphabet Enters Our House
... being a celebration of the moment that my head was turned from the World of Sport to wordplay
Back in the days of my childhood, there was no daytime TV during the week. Family life was accompanied by music, melodies and songs presented by Jimmy Young on the Light Programme (Radio 2) from my Mother’s Jim Reeves records, or my Dad’s collection of light classics, all played through our stereo radiogram, an imposing oak veneered piece of furniture which took up a lot more space in the living room than our little walnut veneered television set.
Weekday lunchtimes were mostly relaxed and happy occasions with pleasant music and a generally calm atmosphere. My mother prepared good meals that, whilst within the confines of the family budget, were nutritious, and served them up with love and attention. Marvellous meals: Stews which could be recycled into curries the following day through the addition of some exotic Eastern powder from a little cylindrical box, egg with sausage and chips, corned beef Alaska, and of course, always fish on Fridays.
But on Saturdays, things were a little different. Me and my sister had to be at the table prompt and early - half past eleven, to feast upon much less appetising fare. We had to eat it at a reasonable pace too, with no time for shilly-shallying about, poking food around our plate or complaining. Her aim was to get everything done and cleared away before Kent Walton took his ringside commentator’s seat for the wrestling on “World of Sport”, and the pantomime of good versus evil, of honest graft and hard work against the cheating antics of bad men were played out on the black and white screen in the corner.
I remember one regular Saturday meal with painful clarity. Cubed pieces of rubbery pink luncheon meat mixed with chopped tomatoes out of a tin. If you didn’t eat it quickly it went cold. Mine usually went cold. Sometimes some of the water that the meat had been boiled in would have found its way onto the plate. It didn’t quite mix with the tomato juice and made a streaky watery mess for the fleshy cubes to swim in. Sometimes the task of having to shovel it all into my mouth reduced me to tears. This just stressed my mother more. She might try to coerce me into eating it, with stories of starving Biafrans who would be grateful to have it. (They would have been welcome to it, as far as I was concerned). She might threaten me with having it served up again at teatime (this might be almost acceptable if we could have it fried). Or she might get quite angry about it and the whole situation would become oppressive. Once I cried so much that a large quantity of snot shot out of my nose and mixed in with the watery tomato juice. I didn’t have to finish the meal that day. Even my mother could see that the battle was over1.
A simpler hastily prepared meal was tinned beans, or tinned spaghetti on toast. We didn’t have that sort of thing as often as the luncheon meat and tomato though. maybe she thought it was less nutritious. There must have been a lot of goodness in the bread though. She and my Dad baked their own bread, as a sort of a hobby. It was brown bread, very solid, dense in fact, and was usually cut into doorstep slices, almost an inch thick. It took a bit of chewing, but it was palatable, and not served on a bed of watery tinned tomatoes.
Alphabetti spaghetti was the best thing to put on top of that bread as far as I was concerned. The sauce soaked into the hard bread, making it more moist and easier to swallow, and you could literally write your name in it!It always went down a treat.
In researching this article, I looked up the time when Alphabetti spaghetti was introduced. I expectied it to have been a new fangled idea in the 1960s, but I was wrong. Alphabet Soup dates back to the 1860s, and “Pasta that has been mechanically cut or pressed into the letters of the alphabet” is mentioned in a magazine article from 1877, (in a piece about Pasta shaped into the image of Napoleon, III). Heinz Alphabetti Spaghetti came out in the 1930s.
So I was partaking of a well established, traditional meal when I ate it on those long ago Saturdays.
I might have forgotten all about it too, were it not for a Read to Write Poetry Workshop delivered by Tracy Dawson, in which she introduced us all to Gjertrud Schnackenberg, a very accomplished contemporary American Poet, who amongst other things, wrote a piece called “The Alphabet Enters Greece”
This is a fairly lengthy poem about communication, which discusses how the language of the Gods was formalised into letters that mere mortals can comprehend. Well, something like that anyway.
...the continuum of sound That once streamed from the god's lips, ... Now broken off and shut into the silence Of written-down words, trapping the god's hexameters Together with folktales shepherds told about tyrants And gossip from an even older age
It was all a bit above me, possibly a bit Wittgensteinian. It points to a reality beyond that which we can express through language, which is the only means by which we can attempt to get a handle on its mystery. That’s sort of stuff that can keep me awake at night, if I haven’t got anything more pressing to worry about.
Tracy thought that it would be a good idea for us to write some kind of a response to Gjertrud’s poem, so I had a go. “The Alphabet Enters Our House” was the result. I suppose that it is just another poem which demonstrates what a pretentious child I was. However I do like the concept of my mind developing through language, moving from grunt and groan to more complex forms of communication. Which illustrates the point. “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man”, as Aristotle said - and here I am, a pretentious old bugger.
The Alphabet Enters Our House
As I remember it, the Alphabet
entered our house in 1970,
one Saturday, before the wrestling,
on lightly buttered toast, from Mam to me.
Swimming in a sweet tomato sauce
Tapas, as taps, came anagrams a plenty
of pasta. Endless possibilities
to be enjoyed by just the cognoscenti.
Word lovers and lovers of canned foodstuffs
now faced a repast that was double levelled,
A tasty treat, temptation for the tongue,
as play with words the intellect bedevilled
Distraction from the monochrome TV,
which budding intellects need to find fault in.
Now they don’t have to listen anymore
to Dickie Davis or his friend Kent Walton
For, to a youthful and precocious mind
a lexicon is filled with many treasures.
It’s fitting to eschew the grunt and groan
In search of higher, more cerebral pleasures.
I feel obliged to point out that it would be wrong to judge my mother on the evidence of those Saturday lunchtimes. She was a a kind, caring and loving mother, who always did her best for us. I sometimes feel sorry for the kids of today though, whose parents may not only be distracted by the television twenty for hours a day, seven days a week, but also have the internet on tap through their smartphones, computers and tablets. The 1960s was truly another world.
Snap, almost. I’m not sure I ever ate verbose foodstuffs, though they may have spoken later. We did have a huge mahogany Philips radiogram, Garrard deck. The stereo was good cos the speakers were soooooo far apart. What a lovely snapshot of 60s life. Our tv erred towards the scrambling but then I am almost a decade previous. And siblings brought variety; Bilk, Temperance 7, Dvorak compared to mums Simprini, Sylvester or dads Palastrina n Beethoven. Me? Pinky n Perky, The Flintstones…then the Rolling ones👍