Introduction by Katy Widdop

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Introduction by Katy Widdop

Hulwa of Carrots, or Carrot Cheese

A little nibble to welcome you.

Boil a pound of carrots until very tender. Then mash them perfectly smooth. Next, mix with a pound of sugar, a tablespoonful of butter, & the juice of a large lemon. Also add a few elaychee [cardamom] seeds. Cook over a slow fire until the mixture hardens into a paste. Add a little more butter just before removing from the fire. Press into shallow pans and cut in neat squares or diamonds like fudge. To be eaten cold as a sweetmeat. In India, guests are welcomed with trays of little nibbles, savoury or sweet.

    The Tamasha project started when Aunty Jen remembered that old tin trunk that Uncle Don had shoved in the garage. Well, more or less. By then, the interests of all us Widdop girls were pretty well developed, and our characters pretty well determined—at least, Cassie’s and Julie’s were, but I’ve never felt as if mine was. The word flou springs to mind, actually. Would caractère—as opposed to personnage—be masculine or feminine in French? I’ve forgotten. But anyway, that’s what I’ve always felt mine is. And don’t they say that character determines your choices in life? (That’s the great They with a capital T, by the way.) Cassie and Julie were both divorced by that time, but I’ve never managed to catch a man. Not that that’s said any more, these days, as opposed to, to name only one, in Great-Aunty Sue’s day. Or is it? Maybe it is, or a version in the modern vernacular, in the circles that think it’s crucial to a woman’s development (into what, exactly?). Probably development’s the wrong word, it doesn’t sound very New Age or Generation X. Sorry: my point is, when the tin trunk was disinterred, Cassie was already keen on cookery and had busted up with the unlamented Ken Babbage (rhymes with cabbage, who’d want to be called that in any case?) and had decided that life begins at fifty-five and she was going to finish that cookbook she’d started to write way back when, plus and learn real Indonesian cooking as opposed to what you get in the horrid Adelaide nosh shops, plus and learn real Italian cooking as opposed to ditto; and Julie had always been keen on history and had busted up with the unlamented Rod Darling (Darling by name and not by nature, and reading between the lines the “Rod” wasn’t too appropriate, either) and had decided that a middle-aged woman could do anything (and most things better than a bloke), so she was going to get a job at the uni that she’d given the flick to back when she thought that her and Rod were going to last forever as they attained a two-storey mansion in a highly desirable Eastern suburb of Adelaide followed by the complete tour of Europe, and meantime she would knuckle down to it and write that family history that she’d begun back when Darren had started school and just before the twins, Jerry and Petey, attained the terrible twos.

    Maybe I should just mention that Darren is now forty and living in London with a swish job as a cost accountant, whatever that is, and hardly ever emails his old mum, and Jerry and Pete (he made the family drop the –y when he was about eleven) are both thirty-seven and Jerry’s wife, Madeleine, who considers that our side of the family was holding him back for years, has long since dragged him off to Sydney where in spite of all that dragging he’s got a very successful career in corporate re-engineering (whatever that is), not to mention the huge modern two-storey house with everything that opens and shuts, and Julie only gets elaborate, useless and doubtless Madeleine-chosen prezzies from him on birthdays and Christmases. Or possibly Madeleine-ordained: I can just see her hiring a professional shopper, if they have those yet in Sydney. Yeah, they must have, anything glitzy, Hollywoodish and tasteless that Beverly Hills has, Sydney absolutely has to have—and wasn’t that what Jennifer Aniston did in that boring Nineties TV thing that went on and on and on, the cardies and twinsets getting narrower and narrower and the teensy-weensy earrings and tiny dangly things at the neck getting minuter and minuter? Um, maybe I’ve got that wrong, but I’ve seen it on some mindless Nineties thing on the box. A professional shopper. They do your shopping for you. Yep, Madeleine’d be up for that.

    Pete has remained relatively normal, in that he’s still living in Adelaide, making a good living as an accountant, and still married to the same woman he married when he was twenty-four, Glenys, though according to her they’re going through a rocky patch. And their kids, Belle and Corinne (thirteen and eleven) are relatively normal apart from Belle’s insistence on being called Belle when her name is actually Arabella. Out of a book, so Glenys must be able to read, though there are no books in their horrid modern two-storey cream-rendered house except for the kids’ schoolbooks. On second thoughts maybe it was one of those books of names. No? You must have heard of them: books of names! You buy them when you’re expecting a baby. Or maybe that’s all done on the Internet these days, come to think of it.

    Cassie’s kids, Juliette and Charles, are also relatively normal. Juliette is thirty and runs a Wellness Centre (gym for ladies) and is married to one, Cas, thirty-two, who does sports announcing and public appearances in the wake of a fairly successful football career and is seriously considering going into the car-sales business with a mate who is also retired from the football biz. No kids, Juliette plans to start a family when she’s thirty-three. Charles is twenty-five and is living at home off his old mum while he finishes his Ph.D. I did try to point out that our generation supported ourselves through our degrees, or, if male, at least married someone of the same generation who slaved to put him through them, that or gave the bloody things away because we had to earn a crust, but Cassie merely retorted that my other theme song is “What do people have kids for, if they don’t want to give them the dough at the stage in their lives when they actually need it, instead of leaving it to them in their wills when they’re ninety and the kids are seventy?” She was right, too, drat her. See? Flou. Or molle, if you like. (Think I might have the genders of those adjectives wrong, actually, but too bad.) Anyway, she can afford to support Charles, she is fairly well off, because Ken Babbage is a rich lawyer, belongs to the flaming Adelaide Club and all that shit, and she did quite well out of the divorce. Astonishing? Well, not all that, when you consider that what the nit did: he told her he was off to a conference and then accidentally emailed the holiday snaps of him and the twenty-four-year-old bimbo in the Cook Islands to everyone in his email address book, not just the ruddy male mate they were meant for.

    The old tin trunk—yes. I’m getting there. They decided democratically that I had to write the intro because I’m used to writing reports, hah, hah. (And also possibly because I’m the eldest, though neither of them would admit to that, or any of its implications.) Well, yes, at one stage I wrote quite a few reports, before my extremely boring job in a library was canned because the Powers that Be decided that we were vastly over-staffed and it could all be done by computers. As they’d cunningly put us all on short-term contracts there was no massive redundancy payout. After that I didn’t write any reports, I just signed on with Centrelink, who very kindly told me that they didn’t find people jobs, which I always thought was the point of them. But no, they merely dole out the dole and make you sit through immensely boring two-hour interviews while they blah on about absolutely nothing, eventually revealing that when you’re whatever age—I forget, but I qualified, I was well over fifty—you can volunteer for the dole (not what their website calls it, so don’t attempt to look it up there), but not revealing, though the phrase “until you reach superannuation age” was trotted out several times, that for women of my generation the age of superannuation wasn’t sixty-five at all, like I always thought, that was only for men, but for women— Forget it. What happened was I got this terrible shock about a month off my sixty-third birthday when Centrelink sent me this absolutely draconian letter ordering me to cease volunteering for the dole and go onto the old age pension. So I ceased. The cycling organisation I was volunteering for was quite upset because they’d been making me do all their Internet research for them, regardless of the fact that my job had never required me to do any research, because they’d seen the word “librarian” on the résumé they’d made me bring along to the two-hour interview. Research on topics about which I knew absolutely nothing, such as grants available from state or federal governments, or tourist facilities in the Grampians—not the Scottish ones, no. Fortunately their browser apparently knew to direct me to the Australian ones. –No, of course I can’t ride a bike, I’ve got absolutely no sense of balance. They reckoned that didn’t matter for an office job.

    The trunk was disinterred because Aunty Jen had the inspiration that it was going to help Julie with her family history research! As Julie’s expressed opinion of “Aunty” Jen (not a relative at all, she’s our uncle’s wife) is that the woman’s got a brain like a hen, this didn’t go down too well. However, the contents of the tin trunk made up for it. More than made up for it. Fortunately Aunty Jen isn’t the sort of woman to say “I told you so.”

    God knows how the tin trunk survived. Because Uncle Don’s a hoarder? Well, yes, most blokes are, apart from the most relentlessly anal—never get mixed up with one of those, by the way. On the other hand, it wasn’t in the sacred male shed (yep, of course he’s got one of those!), it was in the garage to which Aunty Jen is sometimes allowed to penetrate. To park the car—right. And haul the shopping out of the boot—right again. The trunk itself is quite a historical item and I dare say could get onto that Collectors programme on the ABC all by itself, it’s so spattered with torn, browned, scarce-legible bits of labels. Inside it there was a great pile of papers and assorted junk, including an elephant’s foot (it’s quite a large trunk) that reduced both Cassie and Julie to the shuddering horrors. This is the same Cassie who rips into duck carcases with a bloody great boning knife à la Julia Child, mind you, and serves up kangaroo meat at the drop of a hat, plus and the same Julie who warmly recommends kangaroo meat as being much leaner and better for you than beef. Which she also eats (in moderation, for its iron content, is the story.) Oh, well.

    It was the big bundle of books and papers parcelled up together with lots of string and a big sheet of paper on top with a handwritten note “The Tamasha Cookery Book” that was the most exciting find, however. Though Julie was disappointed at first. Until we discovered that large parts of it weren’t recipes at all. The bundle also included an actual manuscript, someone had already had a go at writing a family history—Julie practically exploded with excitement over that one. Plus lots and lots of letters and a couple of journals, as they seem to have called themselves in those days, we’d call them diaries, like Bridget Jones, all from the 19th century. In one case some enterprising hand had used one of the journals as a scrapbook to stick recipes into—you know, sticking them over the writing. Julie was very upset about that, in fact hysterical, until we discovered that with only the flick of a thumbnail the things’d flake off. Cassie then had hysterics because she was getting them out of order but Julie shouted: “Recipes don’t have PROVENANCE!” and they had a big fight, one of the many.

    Once Julie had decided that there was real historical evidence here I thought we ought to do it properly: you know, like an archaeological dig. (Well, I’ve seen them on TV, and my old friend Una, that I haven’t seen since her kids were about the same age as Pete and Glenys’s two are now, did archaeology at uni and got all keen and went on digs in the Outback until she realised that the prof didn’t notice grubby students and was very happily married to a charming woman much prettier than she was). Not actual bits of string, it’s hard to apply a string grid to a tightly tied-up bundle of papers, but recording the layers and the exact position of stuff within them. There were an awful lot of layers so this was unanimously vetoed by the both of them. Then Julie unilaterally decided on a modified version of the archaeological approach—not calling it that or conceding that it was my idea in the first place, naturally. Everything had to be sorted into correct piles and dated. Hah, hah. Lots of it didn’t have any dates on it, they didn’t have helpful email programs that automatically dated the crap you wrote to your sisters back in the 19th century. So Julie decided she was gonna have to rely on internal evidence.

    Just at first Julie said the stuff wasn’t Widdop family history at all, but pretty soon she realized it was: some of the letters were signed by a Widdop. Horrible handwriting, but the scrawl at the end was just decipherable. After a bit it dawned that at some stage some of the stuff had been sorted, not chronologically but by the writer, so this was a bit of help, in that she didn’t have to sort out ten million pieces of paper by the handwriting alone. Only five million—you got it.

    Eventually she decided that the only way to track the stuff by both writer and date was to use a database and as I was the one who’d been using databases in my work I was appointed. And—loud screech at Cassie—no-one was to write ANYTHING on anything! This had me and Cassie both stumped for a bit but the brilliant Julie produced the words: “Plastic sleeves.” Oh, yeah. Right. Mm. Whose money would be spent on those? Julie unilaterally decided that Cassie’s could and she cheerfully agreed, not having realised that the bloody woman meant archive-quality, acid-free plastic sleeves, not just ordinary— Forget it. In any case it was Ken Babbage’s dough, wasn’t it? She let us stick ordinary labels on the fronts of the plastic sleeves, I suppose that was a plus.

    Yep, the whole sorting thing was a nightmare.

    True, I just designed the database, entered what Julie told me to, and kept my head down as much a possible, but—yeah. A nightmare. The two of them kept finding really exciting things and reading them out to me, that was interesting, though. Well, usually. More or less. If you’re deeply into cookery or family history. But after a while—the whole process took several years—I began to get really interested in the actual people. Not as figures in a family history or cooks—or rather, recipe collectors, they were the sort of people who employed cooks—but as people. So did Julie—hah, hah! She stopped referring to them by their alpha-numerical positions in the bloody family tree she’d drawn up all over my sitting-room wall and started using their names!

    Don’t ask why my flat was unanimously voted by the both of them to be the ideal place for the “project”. Possibly because it’s a dump that I never do anything to? While Cassie’s house of course is beautifully decorated and cared for—she’s got a Mrs ’Arris—plus and has Charles in it, plus and is regularly infested by a lot of other divorced, middle-aged would-be gourmet chefs or even still-married gourmet chefs that don’t want to experiment muckily all over their own kitchens—and Julie’s place is merely pristine, fullstop. While it wouldn’t matter if the walls of my flat were covered with charts and family trees and lined with filing cabinets (to take the plastic sleeves—you got it). And I did have a scanner-printer, which somehow seemed to clinch it for the both of them. Because the originals weren’t gonna be handled, see? And Julie would (loftily) pay for the paper. No! Not the paper for the scanned recipes, if Cassie wanted to bother to scan them: who was gonna want to read a cookbook of semi-British, semi-Indian recipes from the flaming British Raj, for Heaven’s sake? The things were neither one thing nor the oth— They had another screaming row.

    The rows went on for ages and ages and got worse and worse. Julie maintained that there were far too many cookbooks on the market as it was and no-one would want to publish a book of semi-British, semi-Indian recipes from the flaming British Raj. Cassie got really riled up and pointed out that there were far too many family histories on the market as well and they were all potty in any case, stupid little self-published things with rusty staples in them that only family-history nutters ever wanted and in most cases only the immediate family concerned and often not even them. Ruddy Charles put his foot in it good and proper by agreeing that he certainly wouldn’t want to read our family history, and actually he wasn’t a Widdop. Julie then had a go at the Babbage side in toto, that didn’t help. In any case Julie’s magnum opus was far too bulky to turn into a self-published folded A4 thing held together by staples, rusty or not. Finally—and I honestly can’t tell you how it happened—we decided that the best thing would be to combine the two, and use more of a novel format, because otherwise there’d be a lot of gaps that Julie didn’t have hard evidence for. The Widdop Family History and Cookbook, see? And never mind if nobody wanted to publish it, Julie would publish it on the Internet! Or at least in a blog.

    By this time Bob and Terri Darling, Rod Darling’s brother and his wife, who’ve always been friends with Julie, and in fact have seen more of her since the divorce than they have of him—understandable, considering the stuck-up bitch he’s now married to—had got really interested in the project and kept coming over to read new bits Julie had written and sample the recipes Cassie was trying out in my kitchen. Fortunately it’s like most modern Aussie flats, the kitchen area’s quite large and it’s got a huge family-size oven, though the actual lounge-room’s too small to swing a cat in and there’s barely room for a two-person sofa with my desk in it, though actually I don’t own a sofa, which is why there was room for the filing cabinets. Well, the kitchen isn’t large with the three of us plus the Darlings crammed into it to eat, plus quite often Cassie’s Charles as well, but fortunately the bedroom is quite roomy and I've got a double bed and there’s room for a couple of chairs as well, so we usually just eat in there. Well, heck, when you look back, we've known Bob and Terri most of our lives, and in short, who cares? We were chewing over titles, sort of during and after Cassie’s fabulous pakoras and miraculous rogan josh, and it was Terri who said it was all centred on Tamasha, really, wasn’t it, and it wasn’t just the Widdops, by any means, there was the Lucas family and the Ponsonby family as well, and really it might be better to have Lucas in the title, it did sort of all start with them, only we tried it out and none of us thought it sounded right, and then Bob said “Well, ‘Tamasha’ instead?” Charles got carried away—he’d brought a bottle of dry white, one of those Aussie ones that are horribly over-oaked, though everyone was kind enough not to say so, and as we’d let him drink most of it, it had gone to his head—and bounced up and started writing on the wall, trying out the look of various titles. His mother screamed at him but I didn’t mind: well, it’s one of those retirement units where you pay a lump sum (all I had—right) and then have no equity in the dump whatsoever but it is nominally yours until you croak, and when you do the so-called charity that manages it, at the same time somehow affording to employ a huge admin staff and publish a huge, far too frequent shiny mag about their own admin concerns, renovates it from top to toe regardless of whether it needs it or not. And finally—we had to open the bottle of red that Bob was holding in reserve—finally we had it: Tamasha, or The Great Tamasha Cookbook and Family History.

    “Tamasha”? Well, thereby hangs a tale. At this stage let’s just say it was a house in Kent, and tamasha is an Indian word that means a spectacle: one can say “a great tamasha.” And how did the house’s family history end up in Uncle Don’s shed in Adelaide, Australia, in the twenty-first century? Apart from the hoarder thing, yes. Well, we did finally manage to find that out—naturally the letter was right at the bottom of the trunk. It was so yellowed and crumpled that Julie assumed it was only another loose recipe and almost didn’t look at it. It turned out to be from our Granddad’s sister Mary—she’d’ve been our great-aunt, yes, but we never met her. Our Granddad, Stan Widdop, came out to Australia from England in the 1920s. He worked as a jackeroo on an Outback station for quite a while and our Grandma, who was an Adelaide girl, went with him, working as a cook. But by the 1930s the family had settled in Adelaide and he was a civil servant. They were lucky, he was employed all through the Depression. Well, he was quite bright, but when you consider what proportion of the country was out of work! He stayed with the Department for the rest of his working life and in fact rose to be its head. We couldn’t make out what the exact date of the letter was, it was torn, but it was nineteen-thirty-something. This is what it said:

The Vicarage,

L[ittle Shre]mpton

[illegible].......... 193...

 

Dear Stanley,

    It was lovely to get your last and to hear about the family’s doings. Give dear June my love, won’t you?

    I hardly know how to tell you this, old boy. Tamasha is gone! It burnt down in the night! You knew that it was sold, of course—so sad, to see the last of the old family go. That horrid industrialist man bought it, of course, but he was never there. Julian did say—and it was most uncharitable of him!—that perhaps he’d be ruined by the horrible Depression, but no, he seems to have positively thrived. Or is it thriven? Black market profiteering, I dare say. Then we heard that he was having it done up. I ask you! A beautiful old house like that? The last thing it needed! But at least it gave some local men employment. But that was the thing, you see: they said it was all that paint and varnish and so forth. It caught fire in the night and though they had engines come from as far as Folkestone, it was impossible to save it. Damaged beyond repair, they say. Most of the roof has fallen in.

    One of the firemen, a local man, one of the Carter boys, you might remember them, came over to see Julian in the morning with an old tin trunk that they’d salvaged. It must have been in an attic and fallen right into the drawing-room. He said it seemed to have family papers in it and so we might like to keep it. He was sure the owner wouldn't be interested and there was nothing of value in it. Julian was doubtful about it—after all, the man bought the house and contents—so he wrote to him. Would you believe, a lawyer turned up to inspect the thing! Honestly! But he said it was all worthless and frankly not worth his time, but as Mr B. was paying for it, so be it. I gave him a cup of tea with some of our little “narial” cakes. He said they were most unusual and asked for the recipe for his wife! He said of course we must keep the papers if we wanted them, and he’d tell Mr B. that. So Julian thought we had better send the papers to you, dear Stanley, as you and Dicky are the last of the Widdops. You know what Dicky is: he only laughed and said you were the elder brother, it was up to you. There are some souvenirs as well. Do you remember the elephant’s foot that stood in the hall at Tamasha when we were tots? I’m sure it must be the same one! And a brass knife. I was doubtful about it but the lawyer was sure it isn’t worth anything. So we’ll parcel it up and send it out to you. I dare say your Johnny may be interested in the knife!

    Goodness knows what will happen to the Tamasha estate now. I suppose the owner will try to sell it but Julian says it's unlikely he’ll find a buyer with the economy the way it is.

    News from Europe is still grim, I’m afraid, with that dreadful Hitler man rampaging up and down. Still, at home there’s the excitement of the Coronation to look forward to! But now there’s a rumour, which personally I cannot believe, that the Prince of Wales wants to marry that Mrs Simpson woman, but the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury say if he really wants to he’ll have to abdicate! It won’t happen, of course. He’s been brought up to do his duty to his country. Julian will only say that although the Church can’t approve of divorced persons marrying, we must be charitable and not condemn a person that we don’t know, but really! How many husbands has the woman had? I suppose it went to her head and she started imagining herself as Queen of England.

    Well, that’s all for now. Take care of yourself, Stanley, dear. Julian sends his kindest regards. Love to yourself, June and the children.

Your loving sister,

Mary

    Uncle Don can’t remember exactly how he ended up with the trunk. Just as well he did, because if Granddad had given it to Dad, who is the older brother and probably by rights should have got it, Mum would have biffed it out long since. We did ask Dad if he remembers it at all, or remembers Granddad getting it and the letter from our Great-Aunty Mary, but he doesn’t. All he said was “Eh? What old tin trunk? Never heard of it.” And when we said that Julie wanted to write the family history and the stuff in the trunk looked really exciting he said: “Eh? Well, do it if you wannoo, love,” without any interest whatsoever. Him all over. Admittedly he’s in his eighties, but he hasn’t got Alzheimer’s, so there’s no excuse for him, really. Well, he’s never been interested in anything all his life, why would he start now? Well, except lawn bowls. And cricket. Cricket played by other people—right. Whereas good old Uncle Don got really excited and came round and gave us a hand with the initial sorting. And would’ve let us use his garage for the project only Aunty Jen pointed out that that’d leave no room for his precious car. And had a giggling fit, bless her. And then gave us a marvellous afternoon tea with scones and homemade raspberry jam, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, and let Cassie foist the Tamasha papers’ Indian recipe for a carrot fudge on her. Though it was plain as the nose on your face that she didn’t believe carrots could be turned into fudge, if she did say that carrot cake is nice.

    Anyway, as I say we ended up with Cassie doing all the recipe bits, Julie doing the historical research and stringing stuff together and generally getting it right, and me sort of helping out with the more, um, story bits. Well, Julie wrote out what should be in them but they were pretty inhuman, you know? So I started sort of humanising them and Cassie reckoned that was much better and Julie had better let me. So in the end she did. But all the hard work is theirs. We have tried to make it flow, and it was a great help having that early effort at a family history to base all the first part on. Written about the turn of the 19th century, Julie thinks, and based on someone’s notes from the mid 1860s. Anyway, here it all is. As true to what happened as we could make it.

Next chapter:

https://tamasha-aregencynovel.blogspot.com/2024/03/on-verandah.html