Afterthought
ALAN BRIEN By THE reason I have always preserved warm feelings to- wards the New and Latter House of Israel was slightly obscured last week by a last-minute cut in my
article. Though the founder, J. J. Jezreel, died in 1885, and, according to Chambers's Encyclopaedia, `after the death of Queen Esther, Jezreel's widow, in 1888, the sect decayed,' there were' still one or two , Jezreelites about in Sunderland when I was a be'w. The men never cut their hair but used to Mali it into long ropes which they wore piled on the back of the skull like Benin beauty queens. -12.heY usually seemed to have withdrawn, scep- tical,l, slightly superior expressions, like those Worn by policemen on point duty or attendants in museums, as though they were far above the silly, 143roPetitive pretensions of the people around them but were too polite to say so. In those days, there was still quite a lot of talk in sermons by Preachers of all denominations about hell-fire, the day of judgment, and a possible end of the work' sooner than we might think. The Jezreelites seemed to expect the Messiah earlier than most of the others, that was all. Or it was until a schoolfellow, whose parents were followers of the , sect, confided to me in awful secrecy what he alleged was its real teaching. The hour when immortality would be granted was only two or three years away-1940. And, as an extra bonus, 411 faithful members would discover then that ,the pleasures of sexual intercourse had increased I thought I had never heard such an appealing programme for a religious body. My informant, however, was peculiarly reluc- tant to introduce me to his parents so that I could check the details with them. Gradually, I lost the urge to form a youth branch of the New and Latter House in our grammar school and, by the Ime 1940 came, the world looked as if it were lore than ready to destroy itself without any oei-
P from Satan. Instead, I revived a moribund cell of the Young Communist League—an organisation with a talent for wild and in- accurate prophecy scarcely less fanciful than Jezreel's and which also provided incidental sexual oppqrtunities not found in church clubs.
These memories, by no very great leap of the mind, bring me to the subject of youthful enjoy- ments. Many of my friends claim that nothing has ever tasted, smelt, felt, sounded or looked so ecstatically and sensually pleasurable since they became adults. I am happy to say I don't agree. Anticipation is certainly no longer the restless, wriggling thrill it used to be. In the last seventeen years. as a professional drama critic, I have not missed a single great performance in the British theatre. Yet in that time I have never felt the tingling, tickling, almost unbearable massage of the nerve endings which used to flood through me two or three times a week in the front rows of the local cinema as the censor's certificate was projected on the transparent curtains, the lights went down on the dingy, finger-marked, luxury fittings, the soupy, soapy music poured out and the credit titles, usually hand-scrawled on bolts of silk, teasingly delayed the climax. I have seen, and enjoyed, many better films and plays since then. But I have never been able to recapture the excitement of waiting for them to begin.
Not even food seems to me to have deteriorated over the years—though many of my contem- poraries swear that everything today tastes syn- thetic. hygienic, artificially pure. I agree that there is nothing like the flavour of somebody's fingers to improve a dish, but many of my greatest taste sensations have come to me only after money and experience have made them easier to arrange. My mother, like all mothers should be, is a very good cook in the British home style. And I will grant that tea-time has never been as rich and varied a delight since I used to come back from Sunday school to see the table fortified by a regi- ment of tarts—great bronzed wheels of hillocky pastry, slashed like a visor at the hub, with tell- tale streaks of purply black or bloody red giving a clue to the warm, sweet, clotted berries inside. My diet would now prevent me from stuffing these in huge, dripping wedges, as I used to do in my lean, hungry adolescence, until the sugar intake made the blood sing and the palate throbbed and begged for a flood of hot, strong, neutralising tea. But when I have nibbled a large crumb of my mother's sultana loaf in recent years the buttery crumbling fruitiness has seemed as seductive as ever. Nobody bakes me such things today for a regular meal but I sometimes cook myself a dish—say, spare-ribs with sweet-sour sauce— which is better than anything I have ever eaten anyway. I know my own tastes and indulge them slavishly. I can now afford creams and spices and herbs and liqueurs and oysters and egg yolks on a scale that Mrs. Beeton would consider spend- thrift and I find (contrary to the bleat of most steaming housewives) that I enjoy food all the more because I have cooked it myself and recog- nise each flavour as it expands later on the tongue.
As a boy, I do not think I would have appreciated caviar. I was thirty before I really crushed those fleshy eggs full of heavenly slime on the roof of my mouth. My host was Onassis. Encouraged by him, I ate a large bowl which must have contained at least a couple of pounds in weight and who knows what cost in currency. At last I was sated—with caviar, and had to be restrained from flicking ten-shilling balls of it across the table at my fellow diners. Childhood holds no eating memory to shine beside that. And so with all pleasures of wise men. As grown-ups we know how to stage our enjoyments—to take them, whatever they are, with music and ice and silk sheets and champagne and the smell of croissant and the mountain across the bay and the counterpoint in memory of other vices, other rooms. The man whose pleasures are poorer and more meagre at forty than at fifteen has nt,..t• learned the art of enjoying himself.
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