ME & CABBAGE...

 Me & Cabbage…

There was the aroma. No, it was a nasty smell. And my appetite floundered as the scoured saucepan on a rear gas-ring bubbled with dark green. The outer cabbage leaves waved about in boiling, then simmering water, like my father’s wet green socks flapping in a breeze on the Monday washing-line. 

The remnants of the cabbage (not my father’s socks) stuck to the metal pan too, like wisps of lichen dried onto stone and the ‘steel wool’ would be needed for an industrial-scale washing-up session afterwards.

The stink remained. I left my bedroom window open in Shard End, Birmingham to try to extricate the lingering pong. 

The stink of Floss Phillips’ cabbage cooking next door remained too, whatever she was concocting in her kitchen, masking even the stench of frying bacon, fried sausages and fried tomatoes in her house, a smell surely capable of adding weight onto anyone who simply breathed in her fatty fumes. 

Even Floss herself reeked of cabbage. The tight clothing upon her robust figure was tinged with Eau de Cabbage perfume too. Tom, her partially deaf and war-wounded spouse who bred budgerigars in an aviary at the bottom of his garden, seemed to exude some kind of cabbage based after-shave lotion also…  

Sometimes, on my way home from school, walking down the communal path between the two council houses, swept by my mother of course, never Floss or Tom, whose employment was actually a well paid sweeping job at Fisher and Ludlow, the odour was overpowering. My father was always peeved that Tom earned more by sweeping a factory floor than he picked up as an insurance agent, out all hours and attempting to collect folks’ cash…

On my plate, mum’s cabbage looked like something I could model with: a dug-out canoe perhaps, or a model of a racing car, rather than something I was going to be forced to eat, before the custard on my pudding turned to a nauseous, constantly thickening skin. This was known as blackmail. 

PREVENTING MUM FROM REACHING OVER A HEDGE TO FIND CABBAGES...

The pulp smelled awful and looked vile but of course, it was ‘good for me’. And I was made to eat it. Lamb chops meant mint sauce, made from the pleasant smelling plant grown in my father’s back garden and that, with its excess of vinegar, could just about mask the taste of the cabbage. I was, I have to admit, always keen to cut mint from the garden and I could have eaten beef, chicken, turkey, pork, or even liver with mint sauce too if I could only have veiled the taste of that damned bitter, pulped, loathsome dollop of cabbage. Cauliflower was nectar in comparison and sprouts were like marzipan teacake sweets to my palate. 

FALMOUTH 1961. SEAWEED? OR CABBAGES?

Cabbage though was the horror from the pantry… 

As time wore on, I saw cabbage on school dinners too. It was a light green colour however and I thought there was something wrong with it. It tasted awful, certainly but it lacked the pulp of my mother’s cooking. 

However, I constantly begged not to be served custard with my rhubarb, apple pie, or Christmas pudding but to no avail. It was plopped onto my puddings, so that if I didn’t somehow swallow my cabbage with some haste, the skin would form on the custard and cause me considerable fear and nausea. 

HAPPY THAT MY AUNTIE IVY WASN'T PRODUCING CABBAGE FOR DINNER...

My father of course used custard as a lever against me and my lasting memory of cabbage therefore is my father bellowing sternly at me:

“You WILL eat it...”

One day, father, I wouldn’t. 

Strangely, sometimes now, I do…