"When he came in from his night’s watching, his plate would be ready in front of him, and in front of it would be three bottles: HP brown sauce, Lea & Perrins Worcester Sauce, and Camp coffee; but the bottle which wasn’t there was as telling as those which were. His ritual was unvaried: I would sit opposite him, jaws glued together by my grandmother’s porridge, and he would tap the bottles with his eggy knife and remind me that all were supplied by appointment to His Majesty King George VI. More yet, he would bang on, HP Sauce was named for the Houses of Parliament: you can see that from the picture of Big Ben on the label. So not only our gracious King and Queen, he would explain, were smacking the bottom of their sauce bottles at the exact same moment as their loyal subjects, so were all our great, and democratically elected, leaders. God knows what bloody Hitler and bloody Tojo are sloshing on their breakfasts this morning, was his invariable coda, but you can be bloody sure it isn’t this...
That my grandfather saw British history in exclusively gustatory terms would finally be confirmed with the splash of Lea & Perrins on to the bread that he used to wipe his plate: he would observe, yet again, that the bloody Yanks could not pronounce Worcester. He was no fan of the Americans: he had waited three grisly years for them to join him in the Flanders mud, and well nigh as long this time around; and therein lies the significance of the bottle that wasn ’t there. He wouldn’t have Heinz Ketchup in the house. Not only was it American, the American who invented it, in 1885, had been born German. That my grandfather never pointed out that 1885 was the year Gordon was killed at Khartoum, where were the bloody Yanks that time, need you bloody ask, has often, down the long arches of the years, puzzled me."
Brilliant stuff!
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