My strict Baptist foster parents, who were white and based all their decisions on religion, lived in Atherton [in Lancashire], which I loved, with its Wednesday market, Mrs Jolly’s corner shop, Mr English’s Chippy and the butcher’s where I got my first Saturday job at 11, scraping clean the butcher’s block with a metal brush.
My foster mother was the food-maker and I remember a lot of stress in the kitchen. She guarded the hob with her stress. She’d often get burnt with spit from the frying pan and I didn’t like her getting hurt. I loved it when she offered the cake-making bowl to scrape clean. The height of sophistication was an arctic roll on Sunday, when no TV was allowed.
There was a lot of tension at the dinner table – it was increasingly a place of manipulation, law and order, observance of my behaviour and the laying down of family narrative: “You are the problem.”
When I was 12, by which time they’d had three children of their own, my foster parents put me in a children’s home 20 miles away and vanished from my life. The big symbol of why this happened is me taking biscuits without saying please and thank you. They tested me by making me think I’d been locked in the top room of the house, then they left a cake out in the kitchen, which I cut thin slices off. They believed this was the devil working in me.
My first memory had been of the Scottish Highlands and my “grandfather” in his cottage there telling me that haggis flew and were hunted. I remember us getting hazelnuts off trees to roast and collecting mussels in the loch, and I’ve kept a lifelong love of mussels. But none of these relatives ever contacted me again after I was sent into the children’s home. I lost everything. I was suddenly hidden in plain sight, with no past, like this pepper in this pot, which has travelled round the world and been handled by many people and yet we don’t know or even think about all that as we grind it onto our bloody food.
The children’s home was a big Victorian house and we slept seven to a room. Food came in municipal-size containers – huge Nescafé tins, bulk butter, giant tin teapots, massive bags of potatoes, large metal trays of chips. We were on a rota to lay tables and to peel the spuds – something we hated doing, although we’d just have to throw them into a peeling machine that whirred loudly. At meal times a triangular bell would sound and we’d converge, sliding down the banister and then forming a line until allowed into the dining hall.
The kinder, more fluid-minded staff members were the kitchen staff. They seemed to have the time and inclination to connect in little ways. They liked to joke with me and I would gather any morsels of un-institutionalised affection that came from them.
I remember us boys sneaking into the larder one night and having a midnight food fight. We got in deep shit for doing that, but there was something very slow motion and beautiful about it. It was a rebellion against the institutionalisation of our youth and a kickass celebration of our nature as adolescent boys. I want full disclosure, so I’ll also say that some of us broke into a chocolate factory near the children’s home and stole a few boxes. Just because it was there, really. We’d all had our own personal Hiroshimas of being detached from our families, but we loved each other. No one else was going to love us, so we kind of gave it to each other in play.
When I was 21, I tracked down and met my biological mother in Gambia. Mum was very international, very stylish. I didn’t eat with her but every morning she would make me an American breakfast of pancakes with maple syrup before going to work for the UN.
I didn’t get to eat Ethiopian food until I was 25. I met my sister on my first visit to Ethiopia and she gave me this thing called gursha, which is feeding food with your hand to someone you love. It’s very beautiful, almost biblical, and was shown in an episode of The Simpsons, bizarrely enough, in a restaurant called Haile Delicious. The national dish in Ethiopia is called wat – a kind of curry – and that became my favourite dish in the world. Whenever on Caledonian Road and I smell doro wat, which is chicken wat, I feel it awakens something deep in me.
The last time I sat around a dinner table with a family was three Christmases ago with a girlfriend’s family. Doing such a thing is really difficult for me, because I’ve had no real experience, or rather those experiences I’d had before 12 were traumatic. Most people get stressed about dinner parties but for me it’s that, times 1,000. It’s an alien environment and the rules don’t feel normal and I have a real feeling of inadequacy about what to do and a hyper-sensitivity about people being aware I don’t know. At the banquet when I [recently] became Chancellor of Manchester University, I didn’t eat a thing. It’s a shit-storm of dysfunction but I think I’m starting to be all right now.
Christmas dinners back in the children’s home were unmemorable by design and over quickly. The staff wanted to be home eating with their families. So what I’ve done for the last few years is help arrange a special Christmas dinner for 12 care-leavers aged 17 upwards. We get a professional chef involved, everything’s to the highest standard, famous people pop in and it’s in a beautiful secret Christmassy environment. It’s about giving people real visceral memories that they’ve missed in life and if I’m totally honest I do it for myself really.
For more information on Lemn Sissay’s Christmas Dinner Appeal go to crowdfunder.co.uk/the-christmas-dinner-2015
