Animate Objects

It was the Kenwood Chef that did it.

This is not, as you might reasonably assume, a reference to some geographically-specific version of Cluedo: ‘the chef, in the Kitchen at Kenwood, with the carving knife’. It refers instead to what happened rather unexpectedly this week at the world-renowned North Tyneside Refuse Recycling Centre. Something that suddenly evoked ambition, and harmony, and unquestioning love, all manifest in a small kitchen device.

My late Mother was an early adopter of overseas cookery, or ‘foreign muck’ as Uncle Ronnie termed it. Since the world of the 1960s was considerably smaller and more isolated than today’s - which I am not entirely persuaded is a bad idea, to be Strait with you - this meant Mrs Arvold’s Continental Cookery Course at the North Shields YWCA. The English of the period could not imagine much beyond Dover. ‘The Continent’ was what today we call Europe. You may recall that peerless newspaper headline, ‘Fog in the Channel, Continent Cut Off’. Like the description of Peter Mandelson peering at the mushy peas in a chip shop and asking for ‘some of your splendid guacamole’ it is unfortunately apocryphal; but both stories, despite being invented, reveal an essential truth. The UK, as it was then never called, was splendidly isolated. It still regarded itself as Great, sufficient unto itself. It didn’t need any funny foreign food, thank you very much.

This was a time when husbands worked, wives were homemakers (they were always wives – ‘living in sin’ only happened in London), children came home from school in the middle of the day for dinner, and the evening meal was tea, eaten at four-thirty, with the entire family round the same table. Homework followed, then some communal TV, and everyone was in bed after the Nine O’Clock News. It was a time when ties were worn, even when washing the car, and woe betide any ‘housewife’ who put washing out on a Sunday.

In this narrow world, diets were similarly xenophobic. Meat and two veg prevailed, and nobody sniggered over the phrase. The pressure cooker worked overtime, usually cooking vegetables that were organic but came from the allotment, not an overpriced shop. It would not be true to describe the results as ‘al dente’. Sandwiches contained cheese, or Marmite, or bananas, never smoked salmon. Corned beef in Fray Bentos tins found its apotheosis in ‘corned beef hash’, topped with potatoes from a packet. ‘For Mash get Smash’. (You remember - the ad with the Martians). Cakes abounded, all made by said housewife when she wasn’t cleaning the home or toiling over a twintub, despairing when it rained and the washing got soaked. Wine was unheard of, and once in a blue moon the ladies would ‘throw caution to the winds with a little dry sherry’, to quote Alan Bennett’s fabulous line from A Private Function. Life was hydrated with tea, never herbal, always with milk and sugar. I expect restaurants existed somewhere, but nobody went. There were no fast food outlets. Nobody was fat.

My Mother broke free from this constricted world each week, returning from the YWCA extolling the virtues of a dangerously modern, unheard-of thing called ‘pasta’. Then ‘pizza’, pronounced pits-er. Some garlic was even invoked. These weird new dishes contained something called ‘oregano’, pronounced the American way, for some reason. There may even have been the occasional avocado. Yes, as you can tell, we were living dangerously. Good job the neighbours never found out. We would look at these sumptuous delights, delivered on the Formica-topped kitchen table, ribbing her gently for her adventurous taste then gobbling them up, rejoicing at our internationalist worldview.

And then, one day, when things must have been going well for the family finances, my Father suddenly handed my Mum a precious gift, the summit of culinary ambition; a labour-saving device. Yes, it was a Kenwood Chef. She’d wanted one for years, then suddenly … I recall it being removed from its box, that new plastic smell, the cardboard packaging, devouring the instructions, being told to get your hands off and we must wash it before use. Pressing a button tilted it up. Turning a knob made it go whir. We’d never seen anything quite so exotic. It was an instrument of adoration in a house which never had a dishwasher, and holes were drilled by hand, with a brace and bit. I recall my Mum’s excitement at pushing in the weirdly-shaped beater and having her cakes mixed for her. Bit by bit, ‘implements’ arrived; a dough hook for the bread we never baked (who needed sourdough when there was Sunblest?), and a coffee grinder, a perfect complement for the Russell Hobbs Coffee Pot which, I can confirm from recent testing, still works, and still makes appalling coffee. I would watch her, with the focused eagerness of a greedy dog, as she pressed the button to tip it up, pulled the lever to release the beater, then twisted to release the bowl and pour the mixture into a cake tin, hoping there would be enough left for me, and my licked finger. This for her was not a tool, it was a passport to a better world, a manifestation of ambition, a signal of the same intent which sent my brother and me to university with the merits of hard work and ambition schooled into us. The Kenwood Chef lifted us from our small home on a housing estate to a world of possibility. It was Modern. And so easy to clean!

And then this week, we finally came to the end of the rituals arising from my Mother’s death almost three months ago. The paperwork is long done; all that remained was her house. I think I have made forty trips to the local tip, my pickup full of dumpy bags with branches from the back garden, now no longer a jungle, and then the clothes and then the furniture and then the house was finally empty, but for the carpets. This week, as the estate agents hovered, waiting to be given the go ahead, I took the last few things, ‘small electricals’ all rejected by the charity shop for lacking any PAT testing. And there, in the garage, at the back of the pile of small broken radios and an answering machine that is redundant in a digital world and a fan heater that smells of burning something and that awful coffee pot, was the Kenwood Chef. It is vintage now, but not in a good way; the plastic is discoloured, the gleaming white which we wiped so carefully now reduced to a yellowish dullness, the suspicion of rust around the metal, the cable fraying in the plug.

And so, as I made that last journey to the tip where the guys say ‘you back again?’ with good humour, forgetting to check for my online appointment because they’ve seen me so much, my hands paused over the cavernous metal container with other people’s discarded, disregarded, hoovers and kettles, microwaves and laptops, remembering Mrs Arvold and the pits-er and licking the spoon and feeling safe. Then I paused, and threw it over the edge. And then I followed.

The Kenwood Chef did me in.