David Mitchell: Back Story (8 page)

The other food which I was encouraged to try was lobster. At one point in the holiday, as a special treat and to make up for the fact that they couldn’t afford to eat in any of the nice French restaurants, my parents decided to buy and cook a lobster. A lobster that was alive. I know that’s the only way fresh lobsters come, but it seemed to me a perverse way to buy food. I was aware that much of what I ate had once roamed free and careless, but my instinctive response – and one that I stick to – was not to think about it: to avoid contemplating the fact that my dinner may once have been a lovable, cuddly, helpless thing.

I discovered that lobsters didn’t fall into that category when my parents purchased what I can only describe as a small monster. I am not saying lobsters are evil. The fact that they are hard, cold, spiny and viciously armed, rather than large-eyed and soft-furred, is not, I realise, a moral failing. It is arbitrary, maybe even prejudiced, that humans tend to lavish affection on fellow warm-blooded mammals and quite right that those who choose to keep spiders, snakes and scorpions as pets should not be run out of town as twisted perverts but respected as animal-lovers.

But lobsters definitely look evil. And, while I admit that I have never met one under conditions likely to bring out the best in a crustacean, I have yet to see evidence of their goodwill. It is human nature to be repelled by such creatures – just as it is human nature to think, quite wrongly, that it might be a good idea to cuddle a lion cub.

As a four-year-old, I was even more hardline about this than I am now. In this weird country where no one could speak comprehensibly and we were living in a strange stationary yet wheeled shed, the two people charged with my care had located and purchased a sort of giant aqua wasp, brought it into our cramped living quarters still alive and now proposed to make it the focus of dinner. At this point I would have settled for a croquette potato.

But what could I do? I argued, I moaned but, deep down, I figured my parents knew best. They seemed all-powerful and all-knowing. Which shows you how stupid four-year-olds are, because now I realise that they were 31 and broke. When I was 31, I don’t think I had a credit card. I was living a studenty existence in a council flat with no candles. The idea that, with only such a brief span on the planet as preparation, they felt able to make a four-year-old, take it to France and obtain a miniature monster for dinner is breathtaking. Why weren’t they just hanging around London getting pissed?

And, as if to prove the very point that our four-year-old hero might go on to make 33 years later if he survives his encounter with the monster of the deep (I’m trying to build suspense), it soon transpired that my parents didn’t have the first clue what to do with a live lobster other than release it back into the wild via a long, agonising and smelly death in a bin.

Actually, that’s not fair. They had several clues – as I imagine you do if you’re one of the many people who’ve never cooked a lobster but have been hanging around in a world where that’s the sort of thing some other people do. You’ll have vague notions about plunging it into boiling water, or maybe sticking a pin into it in a very precise way that kills it but doesn’t hurt it – or, according to some, agonisingly paralyses it but stops it from wriggling around, which amounts to the same thing. You’ll be simultaneously thinking about what’s most humane and also what might preclude getting your finger snipped off by one of the beast’s terrifying claws. What they, like you, didn’t have was any facts.

But they had a secret weapon: my mother is a woman and is consequently able to ask strangers for advice and information. And my father, being a man, is able to sidle up while she does this and vaguely listen. So they formed a plan: they would ask the French couple in the caravan next door how you cook a lobster. Brilliant.

My parents don’t really speak French. There is no transcript of their exchange with the French couple but, having concluded it, they returned to the caravan firmly of the opinion that the way you cook a live lobster is to put it straight in a pan of cold water, making no attempt to poke it with a pin or anything, and slowly bring it to the boil.

When I’ve told people about this since, reactions have varied. Some say ‘Oh my God, how barbaric!’ Some give a nervous ‘Oh, right …’ in expectation of the horrors to come. Others say, ‘Didn’t they mean
boiling
water? Don’t you plunge it in
boiling
water?’ and still others say, ‘Yes, that is how you cook a lobster.’ I’ve noticed that responses of the last kind go up proportionally to the age and life-experience of the people I’m telling the story to. Therefore, sceptical though I have long been of the French couple’s knowledge and my parents’ linguistic skills, I’m forced to contemplate the possibility that that is genuinely how you cook a lobster. If so, let me tell you it’s no picnic. No idiomatic picnic. It may circumstantially be a picnic but one which you will come away from humorously saying, ‘That was no picnic.’ If you do, may that shaft of levity help you come to terms with the horrors.

The caravan was narrow. At one end were two bedrooms, the bathroom and the door to the outside world; at the other, the main seating area. In between were the galley kitchen and dining table booth. This formed a bottle neck – you could only walk on one side, the galley kitchen side, of the table if you wanted to get out. This wasn’t usually a problem. (See
map
.)

My mother was twitchy from the start and hovered as nervously over my father’s shoulder while he put the lobster into the saucepan as he would over hers if she’d asked a stranger about local restaurants. She was, I remember clearly, on the door side of him and the hob. I wasn’t – I was in the sitting room bit. At this stage the creature was docile, no doubt traumatised by having been out of water for a while. Consequently, on arriving in the pan, it relaxed. This has been a weird day, it was probably thinking, and things are still far from normal but this water, albeit under-salinated and in an unfamiliar steely environment, is definitely an improvement. I tell you what, if that really is what the lobster was thinking, I’m never eating whitebait again.

‘Why can’t you spare a thought for the poor creature?’ you’re probably screaming at the page by now. I’m sorry. You’re right. Above all, this was a bad day for the lobster. I accept that intellectually. I just couldn’t feel sorry for it at the time – it looked too alien and terrifying, too nasty. I was too frightened to feel mercy. Also, I ate meat. I always have and I suspect I always will. As incidents where you’re brought face to face with the reality of that go, the demise of a heavily armoured, dark, eyeless, snapping creature is a lot less likely to make you reach for the nut roast than seeing a bewildered and affectionate lamb gambol past a mint sauce factory towards some rotor blades.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You don’t know what happened yet. The lobster might win. So, the lobster’s in the pan, my father’s at the stove, my mother hovering by his side, I’m in the sitting area, moaning about this whole ill-conceived plan, and the Calor has just been ignited under the crustacean’s new home. This is the calm before the storm, the phoney war.

The spell is broken by the lobster. It has begun to smell a rat. My parents had added one for flavour. Not really, I’m speaking metaphorically. The lobster is starting to suspect that the apparent improvement in its fortunes was no more than a dead cat bounce. (It’s massively into animal metaphors.) It has noticed that the water has begun to get warmer.

I don’t remember the details of the next few minutes. I assume my dad held on to the pan as the lobster inside moved around in an inquisitive, then concerned, then agitated and finally enraged and panicked fashion. I only remember the last stage. The pan is now full of very hot water and the lobster is throwing everything into a dramatic bid for escape. The phoney war is well and truly over. My mother breaks like the Maginot line and runs out of the caravan.

I would gladly follow her, but my father, struggling with a boiling hot pan containing an enraged mini-monster, stands in my path. I make a few hesitant steps towards him, and a furious and steaming claw flails from under the saucepan lid sending searing splashes everywhere. A droplet lands on my knee. I know, with all my heart, with a terrible, chilling certainty, that the creature wants me dead. There will be no appeasing it if it escapes.

I refuse to eat any of the lobster. I think I’m making a point, but I imagine my parents were happy enough to polish it off themselves.

- 7 -

Civis Britannicus Sum

Now I come to think of it, almost half of the memories I have from family holidays come from that trip to France. I remember the children’s roundabout outside the hypermarket, where, if you were lucky enough to be in one of the helicopters, there was a lever you could pull that would make it rise AS IF YOU WERE REALLY FLYING A HELICOPTER – I still feel this ride is the crowning achievement of French culture.

I remember the doctor who gave me a series of injections in my arse because, with a child’s unerring instinct for inconveniencing his parents, I’d developed the first symptoms of asthma while we were on holiday (and the French will inject you in the arse on pretty much any occasion when a British doctor would go for the shoulder; the arse is apparently the better place for it and the French believe, quite wrongly, that optimising health is more important than avoiding embarrassment).

I remember the ferry trip there and back which, in my view, was more enjoyable than any other single part of the fortnight.

But one of the few things I don’t remember from that holiday is arriving home again – that feeling of being glad to be back in Britain, which I remember from all my other trips abroad.

In general, you don’t see Britain at its best when you re-enter it after a holiday. Places such as Heathrow airport and the docks at Portsmouth are fairly unpleasant. One worries what it looks like to foreigners and wants to make excuses for it. It’s like you’ve just introduced an old friend to a group of people and then noticed he’s got a damp patch round his crotch.

Gatwick airport is the worst. It’s been there for decades and yet it never seems to be finished. It won’t settle into being a mere scar on the landscape, however brutal. It remains an open sore. It also insists on putting up posters advertising how much money it’s spending on all this building work, which simply make you think: 1. You should have spent that money ages ago – before you opened the airport perhaps. Or: 2. The charlatans, incompetents and security hysterics who run this hellhole somehow have lots of money – there is no justice on earth.

But in spite of Gatwick airport, or whichever unlovely point of entry to the UK I’m trying to negotiate, I always feel, and have always felt, a huge wave of pride and patriotism when I come back to Britain. I’ll happily sit in traffic on the M25 contemplating how much nicer our crash barriers and motorway signs are than those in France/Spain/the USA/Italy. I’ll find the drizzle atmospheric. I’ll admire our number-plates, our skips, our yellow road grit containers, our keep-left signs, our pylons.

And it isn’t just a fondness for the familiar. It feels like I
know
that they’re better, that this is a better country, whatever its inadequacies, than anywhere else. This sounds tremendously jingoistic and doesn’t, for a moment, stand to reason. But I think it’s a common inclination. In its most developed forms, it leads to extremism. But I’m hoping the mild case of it that I suffer from is harmless enough and just results in my being broadly pleased with where I live.

There’s an opposite and balancing prejudice from which, judging by my circle of friends, just as many people suffer. That is to be inclined, in the same knee-jerk way, to
dislike
the attributes of your own country, to find French/Mexican/Indonesian light switches/police hats/parking meters better than our own.

This is no more based on reason than my patriotic inclination, but I reckon it’s more socially acceptable – or, at the very least, deemed cooler. I feel slightly bitter about that. As prejudices go, surely it’s worse, more misanthropic, to be inclined unfairly
against
the country where you’re brought up than it is to favour it?

Patriotism is a weird thing. I don’t know whether it’s at all positive or useful, but it seems pointless to suppress it. It can’t be any worse than supporting a football club and probably isn’t much more likely to lead to terrible violence. (I never supported my local football club, which was fifty yards from the house where I grew up – partly because I wasn’t encouraged to feel rooted in my home town, partly because home games fucked up the local parking and put my parents in a bad mood, and partly because I find football intensely dull, which is why I’ve never supported any other football team either. But I can’t deny I always hope Wales will win the rugby.)

Like following a sports team, being proud of your country allows you to take credit, or at least derive pleasure, from successes that you’ve actually had little or nothing to do with, like winning the Premier League or the Second World War. But unlike supporting a sports team, patriotism also involves complicity in events and activities that are downright dastardly. Britain’s history provides plenty of examples: the slave trade, the potato famine, imperialism, child labour and so on. You have to find an answer to the question: ‘How can you possibly support and be proud of an institution that has been responsible for these terrible acts?’ (as Billy Butlin’s wife used to ask as they watched the redcoats).

Different sorts of patriot have different answers to this question. I get the feeling that the French – having had so many different constitutions and regimes, as well as the discontinuity caused by German occupation – are more distanced from their country’s past. They think: ‘Our politicians, the country’s official actions, our former empire – they’ve not got much to do with what France really is. We’re all about café culture, baguettes, art and injecting people in the bottom.’