Anybody who has seen the first Mr.
Bean Movie will know what I’m talking about, but if not, this piece stands
alone. Courtesy of an in-flight movie, I very worryingly, found myself empathizing
with Rowan Atkinson’s alter ego. I now
know I have experienced at least two Mr. Bean moments in my life. The first one,
the subject of this posting, concerns the green leather inlay on a priceless
Louis Quatorze mahogany writing desk, belonging to my
English ‘A’ level, private teacher. The
second, which merits a blog in its own right, finds me in a ‘put on the spot
moment’ to end all put on the spot moments, in a monastery on Mount Athos in
Greece, where I found myself being forced to assume a false identity and
believe in my own bullshit. In the movie
Mr. Bean accidentally sneezes on a painting of Whistler’s Mother, which he is
supposed to be safeguarding. He goes on to wipe his snot off, but ends up smearing
the canvas with the blue ink stain on his hanky. He then locates some lacquer thinner to remove
the blue stain and the rest is history.
Now this is my own special take on
that scenario and I so very wish I had seen the film first; but bear with me.
We commence with a birrofa lengthy introduction to Auntie Polly who plays a
very important part in this comedy of errors. You might want to make yourself a
cup of tea at this point, or if impatient scroll down to the last few pages.
People demonstrate love in many
ways. Some write poems, others buy gifts, hug tightly, work to pay the bills,
stay up late putting the final touches to their child’s school project, run a
marathon or donate a kidney. Many people love in absentia. Some people love you
loving them. Some people do nothing at all, they are just there, they listen, they hold your hand.
My Auntie Polly cooked. She cooked
and cooked. She literally stuffed you with love. Zija Pawlina, killed off 18
dogs in quick succession, by waking up at the crack of dawn, to feed them steak
and milk. My parents left Jet, our svelte pet Labrador with her for three
months, whilst my mum showed me off, in my swaddling clothes , to our English
family. When we returned, I was told, Jet couldn’t get off his belly to greet
us. All he could do was wag his tail weakly, his front paws and hind legs, splayed
out, unable to support his girth. He was a yellow balloon with two pin holes for
eyes and he wasn’t in an apparent hurry
to return home.
Auntie Polly spent a fortune on
vet bills. Some of my earliest memories involve dogs with big sad humiliated
eyes, mournfully being lowered into a zinc bath tub outside my grandfather’s
boathouse at Marfa, subjugated to the rigors of a sitz bath and to the rough
pummeling (massaging) of my aunt’s calloused hands. Kidney baths preceded
funerals, in quick succession. I recall solemn doggie funerals, cousin Ian,
the eldest, holding aloft a cross fashioned from bamboo sticks, great
grandfather’s black silk tie doing the business as armband. Behind him; a procession of cousins ranked in
descending file, according to age carrying, joss sticks , a favourite bone, spade, shovel, pick,
broom (in fact any implement out of the tool cupboard-an excuse to rummage) and
the doggy itself on a wooden beer crate doubling up as a makeshift briar. The youngest,
bringing up the rear and struggling with the deceased doggy cushion. We looked
forward to those funerals in a perverse way. The ritual of choosing a grave
(the chance to destroy what was left of my aunt’s garden), the opportunity to overdramatize
and cry real tears and not be hushed, the mumbling of half recalled prayers, play
acting as adults and grappling with the mysteries of death.
Now Auntie Polly’s couscous was the stuff of legend. Cooked ,
year after year without fail, in honour of her older brother, our Nannu; the
family self styled patriarch. The occasion was ‘San Guzepp’ (St. Joseph) his
namesake’s feast day, who also happened to be the patron saint of Rabat, his
home town. Relatives as far as Canada
would book flights, a year in advance, to synchronise their visit with a
couscous feast up. A date with the calendar to salivate and drool, in
anticipation of.
Preparing the couscous and cooking it was a week’s long
ritual of love, toil, steaming cauldrons and colanders. Zija Pawlina had enormous
wooden and aluminum sieves, stowed under the beds in the spare room. These
revered utensils resembled the panning kits used by prospectors, sifting for
gold in Westerns on TV. Some of Auntie
Polly’s ancestry had emigrated at one point to Algeria, and thence she had
travelled on an epic journey in the 30’s to meet her cousins for the first time.
There are sepia, photos, curled at the edges, of her and her father on either
side of his Austin Riley, on the deck of a boat bound to the North African
shore. Talk about travelling lightly. In Algeria, segregated amongst the women
in the kitchen, she had learnt the art of authentic couscous cooking.
First step was sourcing the right
kind of durum wheat semolina, and a baker in Burmarrad was our pit stop.
Driving there was a terrifying experience. Auntie Polly was stone deaf and
diabetic. She drove a pea green mini minor, the ones with sliding windows,
straight off the original 60’s
production line and used her walking stick which she would twirl out of the
window as an indicator. The brakes were wonky and a bent axle didn’t help
either. When I inherited her mini, some years later as a Uni student, my knees bent
up to my chin in front of the steering wheel, I remember I had to hit them
brakes at least 5 mins before I actually wanted to stop.
Invariably Auntie Polly would leave a trail of
destruction on the road behind her and was very often the culprit behind a pile
up and a crash or two. Miraculously she always escaped unscathed, sailing
forth, chattering, handing out sweets and hardly looking at the road ahead. As a teenager the embarrassment at being a passenger
was acute. I always sat, hunched up, very low down in the seat. Aghast, I once
witnessed her whacking a policeman on the head with her stick because she
wanted to get a move on and he wanted her to stop over some traffic
contravention which she had pronounced insignificant. I recall those trips with
terror, my eyes apprehensively peeking through the bars in my hands and my feet
digging in at the upholstery, clamping down on imaginary breaks on the passenger’s
side. The mini was a repository of sticky lucozade lozenges, kit kat wrappers
and melted chocolate covered raisins (supposedly there to deal with diabetic hypos).
Dried ful (broad beans), and twistees packets,
dead sparrows and mice.
Likewise her house was a treasure
hunt trail, for us cousins, of stashed
away goodies: in urns, under pillows, in shopping trolleys, in shoes and dressing gown pockets; that she kept hidden
from her Doctor brother who visited regularly to test her sugar levels.
Back to the couscous! Once sieved
and sifted, she would coat the grains with butter, and coax and roll them into
balls the size of marbles, not the tiny grains of sand you find in supermarkets
. The couscous would be steamed for an age above a broth of fresh vegetables
and chicken, the vapours of which it absorbed and helped swell with flavour.
“ L-Ikel lest!, kullhadt madwar
il-mejda” (the food is ready, everyone round the table), the couscous, would then make its way from the kitchen along
a chain of hands, where we the cousins, isolated on a ‘children’s table’ an
adjunct to the Adult’s dining
table, waited restlessly in pecking
order, forks in the air at the ready to
stab the mains. Heaped on individual patterned china plates, a pyramid of
gloriously buttery carbohydrate, swimming in stock at the bottom and jeweled with chickpeas, draped with steamed
vegetables and crowned by half a small chicken each!; I’ll never forget my
disappointment when years later, (following my great Aunt’s diabetic demise), spiked
by nostalgia, my well meaning father
bought a packet of ready-made -just pour
boiling water over– couscous. Smuggled in the early 80’s (when you had to make
do with locally produced goods) with a stash of chocolate over from Sicily, the
couscous proved to be a big letdown. It was bland and boring, but to be fair
there was no way that poor packet, could have ever measured up anyway. I craved
that greasy -cholesterol laden buttery film on my spoon and the musty/fresh
contradiction of fragrant steamedness.
Auntie Polly seemed to be forever
enshrined in early maidenhood. Her bobbed
grey hair, gabardine suits, and buckled shoes remained faithful to the early
30’s. Fiercely independent, she made us laugh with her bedtime story accounts
of all her efforts to foil and thwart a file suitors who were after her, not
for her looks, (in her own words she was short, plump and bow legged) but for
her dowry. Her father, having lost his wife young, was happy to comply with her
schemes and send them packing, whilst
retaining a doting nursemaid for his old age. She paid a high price for this.
Aged forty, she was not allowed to leave the house by herself after 4pm lest
the neighbours besmirch her spotless reputation with their idle gossip. Instead
she found a way to deliver messages by means of a breadbasket lowered from the
galleria (balcony) she would sit on a high stool in, either knitting or
reciting the rosary with her father , whilst surreptitiously checking out the
young tradesmen scurrying to and fro below. An incoming message was burrowed
into a loaf of bread (fil-qalba), an outgoing message zipped into the purse
sent down for payment. When her father died of kidney failure, her brother and
his wife took her on a foray into town for a much needed distraction. Walking
down Kingsway, the main thoroughfare in the capital city, Valletta at night,
she was awestruck by the bright light cast by the street lamps at night. The
equivalent for Auntie Polly, of first time stroll on a Las Vegas strip.
Once a week she would drive down
to Sliema where we lived, bundle my brother and me and our teddies into her
mini and take us to the local playground. Mum caught up with her housework on
these eagerly anticipated Auntie Polly
days, and we stocked up on coconut mushrooms, cola bottles, toffees, twistees (
a cheese based local snack) and rock hard scones that went by the name of
‘Auntie cakes’. The latter, together with gritty sugar granulated egg nog, were
an Auntie Polly staple; a type of scone, sandwiched with Jam. At the bottom of
our white paper bag full of goodies, despite my mother’s entreaties not to spoil
us, we would find money for another week’s purchase of cavity inducers. Auntie
Polly days rocked!
Heir to a direct line of firstborn
male, affection transference, father to brother to nephew to son, Auntie Polly
spoilt me especially.
Years later, once a week, I would
catch bus number 80 to Rabat. There I would lunch with Auntie Polly and she
would engorge me with food as though it was my last supper. A brief siesta
later, I would then make my way onto Mdina close by, Malta’s Medieval
ex-capital, where my ‘A’ level English Teacher resided. No sooner had I entered
Chez Polly, she would shoo and shuffle me into her holies of holies. The ritual
went something like this:
“Poggi bil-qedgha!” (Sit Down!)
I am literally shoved into my
sheet
“Ha Kull!” (Here eat!)
A napkin is tucked under my chin
and a giant plate of pasta, splashed with enough sauce to sink a rat, appears
pronto, as if by magic out of thin air, below my rather prominent nose. The
ragu has been simmering for an age awaiting my arrival.
I eat, turning the lumps of mince
over in my plate, warily, to see if they have been cooked through.
Auntie Polly stands over me, one
hand on hip, the other holding a ladle aloft.
“Tajjeb?, Tajjeb?” (Good?, Good?)
My reply has no options.
If I say no, she will be
mortified. If I say yes –“Iva”- which I do, the last vowel still forming on my
lips and she is already splattering my as yet barely touched platter with
another serving.
“Kull, Kull, ha tikber!” (eat,
eat, so you’ll grow!)
Auntie Polly is now keeping half
an eye on my consumption progression whilst attending to the frying of a pork
chop. I watch in horror as I observe her gluggle in the oil.
I am 17 and a half, spotty and
gangly. I so do not want to get any spottier.
Besides as she had aged, auntie’s hygiene standards, left something to
be desired (when she is not looking, I inspect
for mould and decay in the fridge )and her cooking skills had deteriorated in
tandem with her sight.
Thus I devised a plan, every time Auntie
Polly wasn’t looking my way, no doubt concentrating on frying my second pork
shop, I would surreptitiously scoop spoonfuls of sauce, chunks of meat , globs
of fat into a plastic bag I had placed
out of sight , under the table on my lap. It would have broken her heart to
know. Refusing seconds would have constituted denying the only way she could
communicate her love. I cheated to avoid bursting at the seams in the circumstances.
“Hi kemm kiltu malajr!, ha
naghmillek iehor”, (Oh how quickly you’ve eaten that, let me cook you some
more, you must be very hungry)
OH NO!
After this ordeal, it was siesta time and sacrosanct.
Heaving my tummy onto one of her lumpy brass beds (despite my height, I still
required a footstool to get onto the princess and the pea pile up of stacked
mattresses and bedding) I would lay my head
upon one of her ever changing, starched and ironed, pristine white, Egyptian
cotton pillows, laced and hand embroidered, but, each with different joint monograms.
There was ‘P’ and ‘M’, ‘P’ and ‘J’ and so the bed linen inventory went on. I
could imagine Auntie Polly, a Maltese Penelope, weaving and unweaving her web,
but in this case, stitching her trousseau, whilst plotting how to get rid of
the present suitor. Once trapped into revealing their true intentions, she
would present this catalogue of unlucky suitors with a cadeux of all their
trinkets and gifts, given to her throughout their brief courtship, and triumphantly
dust them off. Somehow she kept the embroidered sheets and pillows, as a sort
of bed post notching or little black book. A record for posterity, to keep her
company in her spinsterhood of what might have been.
I was then woken
up (talk about being spoilt) for tea and scones to help fortify me (just in
case, I hadn’t eaten enough) on the 15 minute journey to my private lesson.
Nowadays, however, you could kill someone if you threw one of her ‘Auntie Polly
cakes’ at them, or break a tooth biting
into them, such was their rock hard consistency and invariably every other one
had been scorched black beneath. Following a hurried scoff, I would kiss my
goodbyes, and leave with two doggy bags; one official (again: “Jekk tifjakka” –
in case I felt faint and needed brain food; like I had only just been force fed
two steaks) and the other, obviously not.
I had felt sixth form was a waste
of time, so I decided to study for my ‘A’ levels privately whilst doing odd
jobs in the morning. My English Language
‘A’ level teacher, as recommended by the
Joneses, lived in Mdina There was a certain romance, making my way back home, on
a bitingly freezing and windy evening, through the lantern lit,
convoluting streets and alleyways
of this medieval silent city. It was
easy for the imagination to play tricks, and for me to fancy myself a character
in ‘Macbeth’, or the ‘Eve of St Agnes’ scurrying illicitly, chasing shadows at
night.
Our lessons were always held in PT’s
(Private Teacher’s) dining room, crowded with antiques, chiaroscuro paintings
(more a result of the layers of lacquer than technique) family heirlooms and
ancient rugs. Being very clumsy, shy and awkward and a long way away from
comfortably inhabiting my body vehicle, I was in awe of my surroundings and
unsure of how to maneuver my gawkiness and slouch suitably on Queen Anne Chairs
without breaking a leg (not mine).
“ Please don’t lean back on that chair Warren!”
At the time I remember feeling
very hip for purchasing a Stefanel , (Italian designer chain store) denim
satchel with leather buckles. It cost me weeks of ‘pocket money’ but as I was
earning it by working ‘voluntarily’ at my Dad’s textile factory, learning the
ropes, in the mornings, I felt I had some purchasing power.
Anyway, I recall on one occasion
exhuming my set course textbook of Keats’s poems from my bag, and finding that
in the heat, a ‘Prinz’ box of chocolate biscuits, my Aunt had doggy bagged into
my satchel, had opened, melted into and framed his ‘Endymion’ with a sticky
border, quite fittingly I thought (literature, chocolate and a cup of tea
always go well together I maintain). Un-sticking the pages, scraping off the
chocolate and then licking my fingers greedily, however, didn’t go down too
well with my tutor who tut- tutted but did not say anything.
Two weeks later and disaster
struck. Rummage, rummage, but I just couldn’t find my homework, so I decided to
tip my bag upside down. Big mistake. I completely forgot that as per routine, I
had stealthily been swiping the spaghetti Bolognaise off my plate into a
plastic bag, which in my haste necessitated by subterfuge, I had apparently, omitted
to tie and seal. Furthermore, conspiring to dramatic conclusion, was the fact we
had both overslept the allotted siesta time span. Compensating by catching the
bus, another fatal omission was my failure
to remember to dispose of the offending and incriminating doggy bag in a
dustbin, which I normally did en-route on foot to Private lesson.
The ensuing swoosh of paper,
clattering pencils and pens, and slop of glutinous spaghetti tendrils and
meatballs in an evil spreading tomato sauce, will forever be played in slow motion
in my memory. That brief instant of sudden acute awareness, as I tipped the
haversack and heard the rustle of cellophane plastic. That sick to the gut
dizzy feeling, like premature ejaculation, knowing that you have overstepped the point of no
return. Forget correcting the HW. I used THAT to mop up the mess.
Next week, I was demoted to a sort
of study cum passage way in between dining room and kitchen. No comments were
made, it was understood. The study desk however, was a Louis Quatorze
Scriptoire with an embossed gold motif on a green leather inlay. You think PT
would have pre-empted. For some strange
reason, I remember the conversation, a digression my teacher made before our
lesson started. It has nothing to do with my Mr. Bean moment, Auntie Polly or
over feeding. It simply springs to mind because it is, and will forever be
associated with that green leather inlay in my weird mind. People have always
found it easy to talk to me about their most intimate private matters. I must
have a neon sign on my forehead that goes off subliminally at intervals,
unbeknown to myself. The sign says confess, spill the beans, your secret is
safe with me. I have always thought I‘d have made a fortune as private
investigator, interrogator or psychoanalyst. Anyway all my private teachers
spoke to me about sex. On this particular occasion, I do not recall what this
had to do with Keats (If I’m not mistaken, he left this world a virgin). It may
have had something to do with those figures, forever frozen, frolicking on a
Grecian Urn or all the unrequited love he had burning for his beloved Fanny. Whatever,
the gist of this digression, has something to do with watering holes and the
lack of foreplay. Well we’re back to cumming quickly. So Mr. Caveman is
thirsty. He sees Mrs. Caveman bent over at the watering hole drinking. He
thinks preservation of the species. Is excited by sight of splayed buttocks in
the air, gets a hard on. Doggy style (this blog does have a doggy leitmotif
running through it, you must concede) is the way cavemen did it. So he knocks
at the rear. Slight problem. According to PT (private teacher) a man is at his
most vulnerable during orgasm. Thus the deed must be done fast, hungry
lion might be prowling nearby, ready to pounce on exposed backside. When Mr.
and Mrs. Cavemen graduated to face to face ( not as the Discovery Channel do)
the erogenous buttock zone got transferred to breasts - butt cleavage, breast cleavage, same shape
geddit. What this had to do with Keats again and much more to the point my
narrative, baffles me and much as it must you my dear reader.
So we get to the point where I
have to produce my HW yet again. Mr. PT, takes a break from Caveman sexual
politics and offers me a cup of tea, which I decline. I dive back inside my bag
but my fingers touch something wet. It can’t be, I tell myself. I disposed of the ‘doggy bag’ on my way here.
I’m sure of this. I turn slightly so that my PT can’t see me and slowly remove
my hand out of the bag and up to my nose for inspection and a sniff. OH MY GOD,
my fingertips are white! And I can hazard a guess at the culprit. (An addendum:
this is now the summer term and temperatures hover in the upper 30’s -Celsius
–even though you always subtract one or two degrees in Mdina, it being on a
high exposed hill and always chillier and damper than the rest of the country).
I turn my Stefanel satchel upside down, and horror of horrors there is a white
patch. Shit! the Tippex (correction fluid) has exploded (leaked is less of an
exaggeration) in the heat and seeped through the fabric . I don’t believe it.
Shit, fuck, shit, fuck!. Big shit!, Big Fuck!. I curse and curse under my
breath. I begin to sweat and my face goes clammy. Levering the satchel ever so
slightly, I notice a splodge of correction fluid on the leather inlay, which I
had been previously studiously studying, in my embarrassment listening to this
story explaining the origin of premature you-know -what. I urgently need to get
PT out of the room and undertake some damage limitation.
I try to restrain my voice from
squeaking. Big breath. ‘Yes’ Mr. PT, “I
do feel quite thirsty after all, actually would it be too much of a bother to
take you up on that offer of tea?. As soon as the coast is clear, I remove the
offending backpack and attempt to blot the droplet of Tippex. I thought a quick
swipe would do. To my increasing anguish, I merely succeed in smearing the Tippex
beyond its original radius. Unfortunately, blotting is not proving to be the
quick fix I had envisioned. The leather seems to have absorbed the paint and
there is an obvious stain.
I hear PT shuffling in with the
tea. I quickly hide the evidence with a spread of loose papers. “Could I have
some sugar please”, I ask when I have sipped gingerly at the tea, desperately
trying not to spill any with the juddering of my nerves. Now, I never take
sugar in my tea, but I hope PT doesn’t think it odd. Quick thinking. I recall, I have some correction
fluid thinner in my pencil case -and
this, dear oh so patient reader, is my Mr. Bean moment finally. Stupidly, but then
everyone is wise after a mishap, I figure that well; you use paint thinner or
paraffin to remove paint from brushes and acetone to remove nail polish. Bingo!
Therefore it follows that correction fluid thinner should do the job and make
the stain disappear. Now at the time, Tippex (this was the 80’s) was sold in a
square carton box, containing the white correction solution in a nail polish
sort of bottle with brush and another bottle to dissolve any dried up and
hardened correction fluid.
Wrong move. Fatal. What I hadn’t
included in the solvent equation; was the green leather. Heaving a sigh of
relief at my supposed on the spot genius, I set about squirting a couple of
drops on the stain and using pieces of tissue paper, began rubbing away. Such
was my overzealous haste, that I failed to notice the tissue paper was
colouring green and that the flakes of white debris, a byproduct of the
friction , where interspersed with flecks of green leather. The more I
scrubbed, the worse it got.
By the time I became aware of the
hole I had rubbed through the leather, it was too late. The solvent in the
correction fluid thinner had completely eaten up the fragile and antique fabric
covering the scriptoire.
I lamely covered the hole with
Keats and accepted the tea which I let go cold without ever bringing to my
lips. Defeated, desolate, I was now beyond redemption. The room started
spinning. After what seemed like an eternity, PT asked if something was wrong ,
as I hadn’t responded to a question he had posed. I literally wanted to die,
for the clichéd ground to open and swallow me whole. To be anywhere, in the
fires of hell, condemned to the eternal dyeing a new strip of leather green, in
those awful sulphurous tanning vats, anywhere, punished already and doing my
penance. Anywhere but here, having to go through the awfulness of revealing my
irreparable act of destruction.
Needless to say, it was in the
kitchen for me, from then on and lessons resumed on the condition my satchel
stayed outside. PT never made me pay for the damage I had wreaked in his house.
I’m sure any revenue accrued from my student fees ,didn’t even come close to
offsetting the cost of re-upholstering
that Louis Quatorze desk . I still have that chocolate eared copy of Keats on
my bookshelf.
