Editor's Note: Nigel Slater reflects the adaptation of his food memoir by dramatist Sarah Daniels
As a teenager, I had always thought my aunts and uncles to be much more fun than my parents and in particular my father’s rather grand elder sister, Elvie. Something of a matriarch, she was always referred to as my Godmother rather than my aunt, and lived with her timid husband in a neat, suffocating house on the outskirts of Birmingham. Death by cushions.
Elvie was mostly benign, kind and exceptionally generous to her youngest nephew. We had a lot of things in common, from small mannerisms and physical resemblances (we both have big ears and get attacks of the giggles at inappropriate moments) to a similarly silly sense of humour. I thought of her as a safe harbor when things times at home became troubled at home.
Elvie had decided to leave her mother’s dark Handsworth home, with its outside loo and tin bath that had to be filled from a series of kettles boiled on coal fired kitchen range, and work at becoming a successful middle class lady. She studied books on etiquette and lost her midlands accent, she became rather prim and a little arch, and would rather have died than be seen without a brooch, or to be caught leaving the house without a silk scarf and gloves.
I had mentioned my godmother in my memoir Toast but she remained somewhere in the background, appearing only at Christmas and birthdays. Several readers had commented how much they wanted to know more about her. When the idea of illuminating her character in a drama was put to me, I was particularly keen, having felt she been previously overshadowed by my parents and stepmother. Having often felt she was worthy of an entire book to herself, I welcomed the suggestion of Eating for England wholeheartedly.
I loved Sarah Daniels’ script from the moment I read it. Sarah had spotted, behind all of Elvie’s faux grandeur, her extraordinary and occasionally ridiculous sense of humour. Yes, Elvie had a dark and it has to be said unpleasant streak, but she had been good to me throughout the difficult years and I was exceptionally fond of her.
I had hardly dared to mention whom I hoped would play my aunt, because to do so would have inevitably led to disappointment on all sides. The phone rang and my agent told me that Celia Imrie has agreed to play Elvie. Had the producers read my mind? Had I let my wishes slip? Who knows. And then, the news that Julian Rhind Tutt was to play my younger self. I couldn’t have been happier.
I was in the middle of filming a new television series for BBC1 when the invitation came to join the cast and crew of Eating England during recording. My chance to meet both Celia and Julian and to watch the scene where I take tea with my aunt being recorded. And let me tell you, dear listeners, they really did have tea. There were scones and jam and cream, pots of steaming tea and all taken at a laid table, exactly as it would have been. No sound effects of teaspoons in cups dropped into saucers by the engineers, but real steaming tea, being poured and, I seem to remember a glass of budget fizz. I wanted to stay longer.
Elvie ended her days in a rather lovely home for the elderly in Birmingham, looked after by kindly nurses. Her quaint, rather snobby ways lasted right till the end, barely speaking to the other residents whom she considered ‘not really my sort of people, dear’. She had warned me “and Nigel, if you even think of putting me in a home, I shall come back and haunt you.” And of course she has, every time I look in the mirror.
Nigel Slater
