Toast by Nigel Slater Read Free Book Online

the summer holidays I wait around for him to arrive so that I can get at the dandelion and burdock before my brothers do. The bottles are heavily embossed and havescrew caps that are almost impossible to undo. Favourite: D & B; second favourite: cream soda; least fave is plain lemonade which I leave for everyone else. I think my dad drinks it.
    I like dandelion and burdock because it makes me burp really loudly, but the best flavour is actually cream soda. I don’t know how they get something clear and pale green to taste creamy but they do.
    â€˜I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,’ says our daily, Mrs Poole, grimacing like a haddock eating mustard. Mrs Poole has long grey hair tied in a plait round her head. Bits of hair, dry and floaty, splay out at all angles so that her plait looks like a viper in a nest. She is fat with a big bottom, actually a vast, flat bottom that sways as she hoovers the sitting room and seems to have a life of its own. You always knew when Mrs P. had been, the house smelled of lavender polish and stale Hoover bags and there was the faintest whiff of armpits. I don’t know what my mother would do without her, even though she does smell of tinned tomato soup.
    â€˜That stuff’ll give you wind,’ huffs Mrs P.
    â€˜Actually, everything gives me wind.’
    â€˜Like you needed to tell me that. I hear you aburpin’ an’ ablowin’ all the time. If your father was to hear those noises you make he’d ban you from drinking all that pop. Sometimes, I’m surprised you don’t go bang.’
    â€˜Well, if I do, then you’ll just have to mop me up, won’t you.’
    Cream soda never seems as cold as the other drinks. The bubbles are softer, and don’t get up your nose and make your sinuses burn like dandelion and burdock or orangeade. Cream soda looks as if it is going to taste of lime but is instead rather more fleeting, vanilla perhaps. Whatever flavourings they use it is rather like drinking a sponge cake.

Setlers
    The most forbidden of places was my father’s bedside drawer. I had never been told not to go there; I just knew it was out of bounds. A secret place. An ivory-coloured drawer set in a glossy black table, gold handle, its perfect patina interupted only by a ring burned in the top by a hot mug. My mother’s, on the other hand, was an open book. A jumble of tissues and hairpins, powder compacts and violet cachous. Home to one of the many Ventolin inhalers tucked discreetly around the house.
    His drawer was neat, and smelled of the cortisone cream he smoothed into his hands in the autumn when each year a weird rash would flare up. There were several opened tubes of Setlers, a little blue Masonic book with dashes where some of the words should be and a fat grey-and-maroon packet of Durex. There were several menus from dinners he had been to, often with the signatures of those who attended on the inside and some strange badges that I guessed were something to do with his Masonic uniform.
    Setlers were as much a part of my father’s DNA as his pipe and his Daily Telegraph. The chalky white tablets went everywhere with him; half and quarter packets were in every jacket pocket, including the one in his suede waistcoat, and in the glovebox of the car. Ten times a day he would rub his sternum and tear another strip of wrapper off his indigestion pills. He would nibble them when he drove and when he watched television. I have even known him take one after supper, ‘just in case’. Setlers were my dad’s worry beads.
    If indigestion presented itself as a side effect of worry, it might also be taken as a symptom for coldness, short temper, impatience and deceit. He suffered all of these, as did we.
    The filthiest of Dad’s stomach medicines was kaolin and morphine. A thick and creamy white crust that floated on a thin transparent liquid, he called it K et Morph. He would shake the glass bottle for a good