My mother was a domestic goddess in every household art except culinary. She cleaned, polished, decorated, painted, gardened, sewed, knitted and embroidered to Chatsworth-type standards (we lived in a pre-fab in Lancaster). She had my baby brother and me turned out like Shirley Temple and Little Lord Fauntleroy but she had no interest in cooking anything but fairy cakes. I never blamed her. She'd been a waitress before she married; cooking was what Chef did. Also, she'd been in Mr Churchill's citizens' army for five years, eating snoek (whale meat), Woolton pie (turnip/ swede) and the National Loaf (which was grey. That's why Mother's Pride, white as laundered flannel, was so prized by the war generation.) Anyway, as a Fifties bride, dressed in home-made homage to Dior's tight-waisted New Look, she was forever on a (highly effective) diet of 40 Senior Service a day and black Camp coffee. Apart from fried Spam, bread and jam and HP Sauce, the only thing I remember putting in my mouth before the age of five was in my Aunty Betty's back kitchen. My Uncle George fetched in a great slab of pale, floppy stuff, laid it out on the table and started cutting it into strips. Dipping one strip into a bowl of vinegar, he said: 'Right, monkeh, that'll make thy hair curl.' Tripe. It was like gnawing on your baby brother's forearm.
Shortly after that my mother packed up everything we owned in wooden boxes marked WD (for War Department) and took us to join my father in Tripoli, where he was garrisoned. All I recall being fed for the next four years is oranges, with theirleaves attached, and hard dates. Also, broken slabs of army chocolate, which came out of big gold tins (also marked WD). There was no fridge. The ice-man staggered upstairs with a dripping block every morning for the zinc ice-box where we kept the butter, and the 'milkman' was a goat-herder. You took a jug downstairs, he stuck it under the nearest nanny-goat and milked you a pint. My mother couldn't be doing with goats and gave us Carnation Evaporated instead.
Our flat, above the camel market, was leased from Signora, an old Italian lady who lived downstairs. She liked me but thought I was too skinny, and often beckoned me into her flat to give me plates of curious, aromatic food: coils of glossy white worms, or a little heap of glistening shells. I liked the worms best. Signora showed me how to separate the coils and twist them up on my fork. They were scattered with tiny white curls of some salty stuff that tasted like belly-button detritus: I loved the sweaty tang. Years later, back in England, my mother would open tins of Heinz spaghetti when we got home from school. They smelled of copper and damp dishcloth. 'You ate nothing but spaghetti when we lived in Tripoli,' she would remind me crossly. But I couldn't connect her tinny slop with Signora's coiled worms.
We were only back in Blighty for a couple of years before being posted to Singapore. All I remember being fed there is lychees and monkey-bananas, and cool slices of pawpaw. My mother, who had ideas above her station, sent me home to a very Sloaney, very expen sive girls' boarding-school in Middlesex. She had a vague idea that it would teach me how to talk proper, eat nicely and end up marrying a brigadier. I arrived there at teatime, three days after term started, and asked the girl next to me: 'Can you pass me a tea cake, please?' My short Lancastrian 'A' cracked out like a walnut, and everybody fell into fits of giggles, only hushed by the house mistress, who said: 'Gels! Do pa-ass Victoria the Ba-ath buns - and the batter.' I shut my mouth tight for a week until I'd learnt to mimic both the long A and the short U and mastered the vocabulary ('lunch' not dinner, 'supper' not high tea, 'napkin' not serviette, 'silver' not cutlery, et cetera). I was there two years (until the money ran out) and got really good at the Sloaney drawl.
It wasn't until I was 17, and working the A-level summer as a commis waitress in the Ristorante Portofino in Morecambe, that I learnt about food. The Portofino was the only place in town where 'dinner' was a) eaten in the evening, and b) didn't involve batter. I was sick of working in the seafront caffs, where the menus ran to only six items: pie and chips, pasty and chips, cod and chips, hake and chips, plaice and chips and best plaice and chips.
The Portofino was dead posh. Popular with tough, well-dressed guys who ran the north-west's fruit-machine syndicates and drove Jags, it was all candlelight and entrecôte diane and veal marsala, with pancakes flambées for afters, and a coupla them Irish coffees to follow, Mario. He was the head waiter. He wouldn't let me speak English to the flasher customers: I had to say ' Encora caffe, signori ?' to give them a bit of a Continental-type thrill. I was doing just that one night when there was an argy-bargy at the door - Mario had refused entry to a bunch of 'gypsies' who weren't wearing ties and they shouted up the stairs at him. Tino the sommelier told me later: 'They were very angry, those Rolling Stones,' and I bent double with chagrin.
At midnight, when we'd cleared the tables, the staff would get their meal. Leftover veal, if there was any, but better when there wasn't, or when Chef (a heroin addict) had passed out in the kitchen, because then one of the staff would have to cook for us, in a huge pan that took up all four gas rings. The first time Emilio slapped down a plateful of glossy white worms crusted with the tiny salty curls of childhood memory, I nearly passed out. What was it called, this dish? ' Pasta poverina ,' he said. He shrugged; there was nothing else; Chef had locked himself in the kitchen again; he couldn't get hold of so much as a shrimp for the salsa. ' E tutto, bella. Mangia.' Pasta con aglio e olio - still my favourite food ever, and I still can't cook it like Emilio.
When I ran away to London, I took my impressive silver-service waiting skills with me. My mother packed my best apron (fine lawn, double frills) in wads of tissue in the faint hope I'd fetch up somewhere classy like The Savoy. Alas, I ended up on a magazine I'd never heard of. I told her it was quite posh, though. It was Harpers & Queen and the puny salary covered a) bus fares; b) Biba sales and c) rent. It never quite stretched to d) food, but there were press launches every night where you got fed. The best launches were for new restaurants, obviously. The worst were for pop groups, because they had to give you the LP (expensive), so canapés were thin on the ground. The picture shows me glazed with hunger at the launch of Dark Side of the Moon ; it was at the London Planetarium; it was stiff with music people; there were no Rolling Stones; the only person I recognized was H, a heroin dealer who lived in my road. A photographer shouted, 'Nice and close - that's great, lovely!'and an arm snaked round my back. When the picture came out, somebody said: 'Ooh, look at you and Freddie Mercury.' For months, I thought he was in Pink Floyd.
Vicki Woods is contributing editor to American Vogue
