NEVER KID A KIDDER

Photo by Kiyomi Carter on Unsplash

       My father had been to America.

       That may  be something of an overstatement. During the Second World War, he had done his Air Force training at an RAF camp somewhere in Eastern Canada, from where – through some sort of publicity campaign whose details were mysteriously never quite explained to us – he had spent a glamorous weekend being wined and dined by the high society of New York, staying with an artist called Neysa McMein who had Walt Disney original cartoons on her walls, being introduced to her fashionable friends, and one evening being set up to go out on a dinner date with the film star Anne (The Magnificent Ambersons) Baxter. These were not the circles in which the son of Syd and Agnes Donnelly of Wood Green, North London, generally moved, and I can safely surmise that the trip provided him about as much experience of the real America as an all-expenses paid stay at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons today would show of the Corn Belt.

        Nevertheless, he had been to America, and in 1950s and ‘60s Britain, where the average vacation getaway consisted of a jaunt to the nearest seaside, or maybe, if you were feeling particularly adventurous, the next one along, this set him apart as somewhat exotic. Pat Donnelly had seen the New York skyline. He had visited – or at least walked past – a drug store. He was able to nod with knowing approval when they showed Angels With Dirty Faces on television, and would say things like “Never kid a kidder,” and “Now we’re cooking on the front burner,” and occasionally, when his transatlantic dander was particularly elevated, “Nuts.”

       My father was on the whole a man of temperate habits, but he did enjoy his food, and his favorite dessert was apple pie topped with ice cream, topped again with the warm, egg-based sweet pouring sauce that French people call crème Anglaise and British people call custard – an unusual combination of tastes, admittedly, but it was what rang his gastronomic chimes, and it wasn’t as if it were about to harm anyone, not even, apparently and somewhat remarkably, his digestive system. He seldom ate this at home because it was an indulgence rather than an everyday pleasure. But on the rare occasions when we ate out as a family, usually when we were traveling somewhere, it was what he would order in whichever restaurant we’d stop for lunch, probably feeling, and with some justification, that after sharing a car for several hours with five squabbling children and a not noticeably long-suffering wife, he deserved something of a treat.

       Invariably, this request would cause confusion to the restaurant’s waitress. To be clear, we never encountered the hard-bitten diner broad who so frustrated Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces; and nobody – not even my late and sainted mother, who, had she felt so inclined, would have galloped the track as the odds-on favorite for the trophy – ever swept the cutlery from the table to the floor in a fit of fury. This was England in the oh-so-polite 1960s, and the waitress our family would reliably encounter would be a sweet-natured, somewhat anxious lady, who would already have been made a little nervous by the family at Table Ten, who had just a few too many children, with names that were just a little not quite Anglican enough, for her comfort (it is strange to remember, in these happily more diverse days, that there was a time when to be Irish-descended Catholic in England was to be something of a curiosity); and when the gentleman at the table – a grown man, no less – asked for two accompaniments to his dessert instead of the standard one, it would throw her into a tailspin of uncertainty.

       Two accompaniments, the gentleman must understand, were simply not possible: as the menu clearly stated, the apple pie came with either ice cream or custard, not both. Yes, she had both items in ready supply in the kitchen, but, no, was only authorized to serve either the one or the other; no, she was unable to add an extra item and charge extra on the bill because the prices were what the prices were, and you couldn’t go changing them, now, really. And, no, there was no actual physical reason why the kitchen couldn’t pour custard on top of ice cream on top of apple pie, it was just that, oh, dear, no one had ever asked for it before, and she didn’t know what, or how, or where … and if everyone started to … and oh, dear, the manager … and oh, dear, the chef … and … and …

       Which was when my father would put the good woman out of her misery. He would draw himself up in his chair to his far from unimposing height and look her directly in the eye.

       “That,” he would declare firmly, “is how they eat it in America.”

       Immediately, the waitress’s brow would clear. The gentleman at Table Ten had dark hair and good teeth, and was visibly not of Anglo-Saxon extraction: he looked like someone who might have been to America – might even, thrillingly, be actually from America. Sensible English people were expected to follow the rules; but if she could remove the gentleman at Table Ten from the sensible English category into that of the barbaric American, then surely an exception could be made.

       “I’ll see what I can do, sir,” she would beam broadly before scuttling to the kitchen to confide to the kitchen staff this outlandish request and its transatlantic provenance, returning with a proud smile, an expanded world view, and the desired dessert, and everyone would be happy.

       “And the crazy thing,” I concluded years later, recounting this tale to Mr. Los Angeles one sleepy Saturday morning under the Californian sun, “was that she’d only have had my father’s word for it that he’d been to America at all!”

       “And he sure hadn’t eaten dessert here,” returned Mr. Los Angeles, yawning luxuriously over the comics page.

       “What do you mean?” I said.

       “Hadn’t you noticed?” he asked. “We don’t have British-style custard in America.”

       To be honest, I hadn’t. You only notice the absence of what you’ve been looking for; and a lack of the desire for custard on my dessert was low on the list of the ways in which I differed from my father.

       “What, nowhere?” I pressed. “Not even in New York?”

       “Not even,” he confirmed.

       And so it proved. My father had lied. My moral, upright and law-abiding father, who never, ever missed Mass, never, ever swore, and was known to check his money in shops in case the shopkeeper had returned him too much change, had looked directly into the eyes of  waitress after waitress, in restaurant after restaurant, clear across southern England, and had told them, straight-faced, a big, fat, unabashed lie. A falsehood. A fabrication. A flat-out fiction, told in front of his wife and all five of his impressionable and unsuspecting children. And all for the sake of custard on top of his ice cream on top of his apple pie.

       I was quite impressed.