Jerry

2009

Jerry couldn’t seem to stop baking. He snorted to himself and muttered, “Jerry couldn’t seem to stop baking” sotto voce, and conjured an image of a dog in a pinny baking scones. He did wonder if he was barking mad and had gotten mixed up in some kind of surreal life within the ink frame of an old Lost Consonants* joke. He used to enjoy reading those in the Guardian each week; had even cut them out and pasted them into a scrap book for a while. 

Indeed, Jerry pondered as he sifted flour, he was often accused of barking these days when in fact he was laughing; it was just his sad, bitter version of a laugh. Ha! This had all come about since his marriage had officially “failed” three months ago. Failure. What was that? Or, rather, what was success?

This week’s recipe was Parkin. Oats, self-raising flour, brown sugar, butter, treacle, golden syrup, a pinch of salt, some bicarb. and milk. Don a pinny. Tune the radio to 4. Mix the dry, melt the wet, combine the lot and pour into trays. Bake at 150˚C for one hour. This baking malarkey was a breeze and the results were so rewarding and garnered such outpourings of love from the recipients – a secret that Jerry reckoned 50% of the human population had kept cunningly undisclosed for far too long. 

Jerry’s baking had been 100% successful through the Brownie phase (eggs, butter, flour, brown sugar and a slab of the best quality chocolate he could track down. The secret, he had worked out, was to pick the brand with the highest percentage of pure cocoa and the least of everything else.), and the shortbread phase (butter, flour, sugar – that was the easiest yet). 

His repertoire now included savouries as well, like pizza and quiche and Spanish omelette. This last he had learnt from his Dad many years ago and it was really nothing like an ordinary omelette. It was a wonderful way to use up leftovers – you pretty much just cubed whatever your leftovers were – tatties, peas, meat – and fried them up in olive oil and then poured whisked eggs over them, cooked the lot over heat for a couple of minutes and then under heat (the grill) for another couple of minutes. With cheese on top of course. Delicious.

But the first time he made Parkin – just last week – he forgot the sugar. He was happily admiring his creation through the clear (well pretty filthy actually, but he didn’t know how to clean it) window of the oven, when his eye caught sight of the weighing scales still tipped in favour of 8oz of brown sugar. Damn! 

When his boys came to visit they hoofed in the cake at their usual speed and made their customary appreciative noises, but Jerry knew it wasn’t right. He asked them to guess what the missing ingredient was and they all said “sugar, like duh!” in unison. His sons were, a) very polite (well taught by their Mum) and, b) constantly hungry, so the rapid consuming of the cake proved nothing. That’s why he was making it again and getting it right this time.

He stirred the melting butter, syrup and treacle. It smelt glorious. He cast his eye across to the old mixing bowl full of the dry ingredients. Yup, he’d made a tidy well in the middle, ready to fill with divine bubbling stuff. He dropped two teaspoons of bicarb. into the melt. Stir like crazy as it froths up, then pour, scrape the last drops from the pan, drop said into sink of washing up water then start stirring all those lovely ingredients together. Oh he loved doing this. 

Perhaps he should search for a job in a bakery? Or he could start his own freelance baking business? “Home baking delivered to your door” “Too busy working off your mortgage? No time to whip up those home baked culinary delights?” “Welcome to Mr Home Bake!” “Delivered to your door daily!” “Kids and hubby need never know!” Slogans and images coursed through Jerry’s mind as he put a bit of welly into stirring up the thick, syrupy, oaty mix. The aroma was almost more than he could bear. One thing was for sure, he was going to have to find an outlet for this creativity or he’d get awfully fat.

It was ironic really. Really, tragically, ironic. One of the major criticisms his wife had levelled at him before she walked out was that he did nothing around the house. For the last year, since Jerry lost his job at the Bank, Marie had kept them afloat financially (she worked freelance as a cleaning lady, cash in hand, no questions) and had continued to keep house as well. Jerry could see now that this was a tad unbalanced. Marie was skin and bone with all the work she did. But at the time he lost his job he kept going “out to work” in that he actively sought a new job (although admittedly this quite often included making enquiries at his local watering hole). Even as that hope faded – and with the whole world in a downward spiral of recession no one expected to find new work – Jerry could not bring himself to call it quits and offer to take over as house husband. It just didn’t fit with his self-image. 

Instead he took up online trading – Marie insisted on calling it gambling. It involved betting on whether currencies would go up or down and it fascinated him. He convinced himself that it was good use of the knowledge gained during his erstwhile banking career. Sometimes he won a lot of money and felt fabulous. Sometimes he lost and felt dismal. Overall he stayed above the red line and managed to filter off a half-decent weekly wage out of it, which seemed to him to be a pretty reasonable way to make money. As reasonable as anything else in these financially stricken times.

Obviously this was another of Marie’s gripes. A man – her man! – earning money through gambling. She hated it, was embarrassed by it, didn’t want the boys to know anything about it. What could she tell her mother and friends? No, it just wasn’t on.

When Marie left Jerry, she did it by just walking out. No note, no argument, no attempt to keep the house and make him leave. The last thing he recalled her saying to him that morning was, “you never close drawers”. He found it all rather inexplicable and perplexing. Plenty of his friends and old Bank associates were going through lengthy and expensive divorces right now – economic recessions tend to have that effect, as the veneer of love slips away and the bald nature of the marriage contract shows its true colours.

But Marie didn’t seem to want anything. Well – they didn’t have any money as such and their house belonged mostly to the Bank, so he guessed she’d figured out that there was nothing to demand really, except a millstone of a mortgage. She had taken their five sons, of course, and they were all living at the other side of town – the side she’d always wanted to live on, the coastal side – in a huge, old, half-derelict place, for a pretty small rent. Marie had immediately picked up new cleaning jobs: the area was awash with gentrification from those quick-buck years that had preceded the 2008 onset of this dratted recession. The boys all went to the local school and enjoyed the rougher edges of it after their experience of what they now referred to as “woossy” public school.

The dog. She took the dog too, and he reckoned he missed old Struan, hairy and smelly though he was, more than anyone. Now, when he thought out loud, he had no one to pretend to be conversing with. The house echoed with loneliness. He’d sell it if he could but….the recession, no buyers in sight and a negative equity to boot. Perhaps he should take in lodgers?

Today’s bake was going places. Specifically, it was going in a tin and along with Jerry, five boys and five backpacks, was going on the night train to London. This was a first, Jerry getting to take the boys anywhere alone, and he was feeling a heady mix of excitement and fear. Could he actually look after five boys between the ages of thirteen and five, with twin nine year olds creating the fulcrum of energy, for the duration of an overnight train journey? He used to take them places all the time, but since being alone his confidence seemed to have slipped. He didn’t quite understand how something so natural and taken for granted could become so questionable in such a short time. But there it was. 

Once in London he and his brood were being swept up into the capable arms of his older sister, with her one, wonderful, fifteen year old son as right hand man. They’d travel west to Suffolk as a team and have a fine week together playing on the beach, December or not. He had been astonished when Marie had agreed that he could have the boys for Christmas, and was determined to make it a wonderful week. So it was just the overnight train journey he had to cope with. Ach, it’d be fine.

Jerry consulted the kitchen wall clock as he slid his baking trays (he’d quadrupled the recipe) into the warm oven. An hour. Just time for a pint and a puff, down the street in that indoor-meets-outdoor room they’d made at the pub since indoor smoking had been banned.

Or…Jerry flipped open his dear-departed Great-Aunt Dora’s tatty old cookery book again and searched the index for pancakes: eggs, flour, milk and a pinch of salt. Could he make a batch of those? That’d use up the last of the eggs and make a good breakfast for them all. Or, his eye caught three spotty bananas languishing in the fruit bowl, banana loaf? He’d seen a recipe for that somewhere on the internet. Oh what the hell, he had time to rustle up both the pancakes and the loaf. It would keep his mind busy all through the afternoon until it was time to collect the boys and he would have mastered two more recipes. He really should be jotting down all these into his notebook. Perhaps, with enough recipes under his belt (so to speak! he patted his tummy and chortled) he could write a cook book for newly separated, jobless, middle-aged blokes?

©Julia Welstead

*With thanks to Graham Rawle for the baking pun. www.grahamrawle.com