Free Toast by Nigel Slater Page A

Everything glistens.
    There are shouts from the boys up the road firing snowballs at one another. I am playing alone, about a hundred yards away from them. My mother is watching me through the dining-room window. She looks worried. I am the proprietor of an imaginary cheese shop, carving slices of Cheddar from the huge rock of snow lit by the street lamp. As I ask my next customer what they want, I catch my mother’s eye. I smile and wave at her and she looks down,embarrassed. The front door opens and she calls to me.
    â€˜It’s time to come in now.’
    â€˜Oh, can’t I stay out just a bit longer? There’s a queue.’
    â€˜You must be freezing, you’ve been out there for hours. Anyway, it’ll be dark soon.’
    â€˜Were you watching for Daddy?’
    â€˜No, I was watching you. What game were you playing?’
    â€˜Grocers. I’ve been selling cheese like Percy Salt does in his shop.’
    She comes out and looks anxiously up the road at the boys having fun, yelling and running and sliding in the snow. Five of them, four from my own class. She looks disappointed. A cold little smile. She puts her arm round me, wincing at the frozen hairs on my cold duffel coat.
    â€˜Come on in, I’ve made a crumble.’
    Even bad crumble is good. The perfect one is that whose juices have bubbled up through the pale rubble of the crust, staining it deep claret or gold. The ultimate is that which has damsons or greengages underneath and comes with a jug of yellow cream.
    We chip away at the dry, gritty powder that fills the top third of the Pyrex baking dish. Sweet sawdust. The apples below have fallen into a watery mush. They are our own Bramleys from one of the three trees in the garden, which have been stored, wrapped in pages from the Telegraph , in a sack in the garage since September. Mother throws half the apple away when she peels it. She cuts in short thickstrokes, as if she was cutting chips instead of paring the delicate skin from a fruit. She cooks the apples first, with a heaped spoon of white sugar and another of water, until they are starting to froth. Then she tips them into the dish. She takes down the yellow drum of Lion brand cloves from the shelf in the pantry, prises off the rusty lid and takes out two little stalks. These she tucks deep into the apple. Then she rubs the butter into the flour until it looks like dry breadcrumbs, and stirs in the sugar. This is tipped on to the apple and then the whole thing is put in the cool oven of the Aga.
    The juice of Mother’s crumble never bubbles up through its crust. The rough, uneven pebbles so vital for a perfect crumble are, in her version, as fine as sand. They are deep beige, almost the colour of a digestive biscuit. The bottom inch of crumble is sodden with apple juice. There is no cream, no custard.
    Even bad crumble is good.

Sherbet Fountains
    I never bought bags of sweets. They carried an implication that they were to be shared. A Mars bar or Milky Way carried no such baggage, and so that was what I bought with my pocket money.
    A good way round sharing was to buy Sherbet Fountains – those tubes of acidic white powder wrapped in red-and-yellowpaper with a stick of liquorice poked down the centre. You dipped the liquorice into the sherbet and sucked it. Not only did its staggeringly acid sweetness make your eyes water, you could have it all to yourself. At least I did. No one ever asked to suck my liquorice.
    For some reason Sherbet Fountains were considered girls’ stuff. Like Refreshers and Love Hearts. Nobody told me this until I had been seen dipping my little black stick into the depths of the fountain every day for a month or more. Real boys didn’t eat Sherbet Fountains.
    The only sweets I offered round were Love Hearts. Love Hearts were real girly sweets. Everyone knew that. But they could be very useful. I am sure I wasn’t the only one to cunningly rearrange the sweeties in their packet