But what could I do? I argued, I moaned but, deep down, I figured my parents knew best. They seemed all-powerful and all-knowing. Which shows you how stupid four-year-olds are, because now I realise that they were 31 and broke. When I was 31, I don’t think I had a credit card. I was living a studenty existence in a council flat with no candles. The idea that, with only such a brief span on the planet as preparation, they felt able to make a four-year-old, take it to France and obtain a miniature monster for dinner is breathtaking. Why weren’t they just hanging around London getting pissed?
And, as if to prove the very point that our four-year-old hero might go on to make 33 years later if he survives his encounter with the monster of the deep (I’m trying to build suspense), it soon transpired that my parents didn’t have the first clue what to do with a live lobster other than release it back into the wild via a long, agonising and smelly death in a bin.
Actually, that’s not fair. They had several clues – as I imagine you do if you’re one of the many people who’ve never cooked a lobster but have been hanging around in a world where that’s the sort of thing some other people do. You’ll have vague notions about plunging it into boiling water, or maybe sticking a pin into it in a very precise way that kills it but doesn’t hurt it – or, according to some, agonisingly paralyses it but stops it from wriggling around, which amounts to the same thing. You’ll be simultaneously thinking about what’s most humane and also what might preclude getting your finger snipped off by one of the beast’s terrifying claws. What they, like you, didn’t have was any facts.
But they had a secret weapon: my mother is a woman and is consequently able to ask strangers for advice and information. And my father, being a man, is able to sidle up while she does this and vaguely listen. So they formed a plan: they would ask the French couple in the caravan next door how you cook a lobster. Brilliant.
My parents don’t really speak French. There is no transcript of their exchange with the French couple but, having concluded it, they returned to the caravan firmly of the opinion that the way you cook a live lobster is to put it straight in a pan of cold water, making no attempt to poke it with a pin or anything, and slowly bring it to the boil.
When I’ve told people about this since, reactions have varied. Some say ‘Oh my God, how barbaric!’ Some give a nervous ‘Oh, right …’ in expectation of the horrors to come. Others say, ‘Didn’t they mean boiling water? Don’t you plunge it in boiling water?’ and still others say, ‘Yes, that is how you cook a lobster.’ I’ve noticed that responses of the last kind go up proportionally to the age and life-experience of the people I’m telling the story to. Therefore, sceptical though I have long been of the French couple’s knowledge and my parents’ linguistic skills, I’m forced to contemplate the possibility that that is genuinely how you cook a lobster. If so, let me tell you it’s no picnic. No idiomatic picnic. It may circumstantially be a picnic but one which you will come away from humorously saying, ‘That was no picnic.’ If you do, may that shaft of levity help you come to terms with the horrors.
The caravan was narrow. At one end were two bedrooms, the bathroom and the door to the outside world; at the other, the main seating area. In between were the galley kitchen and dining table booth. This formed a bottle neck – you could only walk on one side, the galley kitchen side, of the table if you wanted to get out. This wasn’t usually a problem. (See map.)
My mother was twitchy from the start and hovered as nervously over my father’s shoulder while he put the lobster into the saucepan as he would over hers if she’d asked a stranger about local restaurants. She was, I remember clearly, on the door side of him and the hob. I wasn’t – I was in the sitting room bit. At this stage the creature was docile, no doubt traumatised by having been out of water for a while. Consequently, on arriving in the pan, it relaxed. This has been a weird day, it was probably thinking, and things are still far from normal but this water, albeit under-salinated and in an unfamiliar steely environment, is definitely an improvement. I tell you what, if that really is what the lobster was thinking, I’m never eating whitebait again.
‘Why can’t you spare a thought for the poor creature?’ you’re probably screaming at the page by now. I’m sorry. You’re right. Above all, this was a bad day for the lobster. I accept that intellectually. I just couldn’t feel sorry for it at the time – it looked too alien and terrifying, too nasty. I was too frightened to feel mercy. Also, I ate meat. I always have and I suspect I always will. As incidents where you’re brought face to face with the reality of that go, the demise of a heavily armoured, dark, eyeless, snapping creature is a lot less likely to make you reach for the nut roast than seeing a bewildered and affectionate lamb gambol past a mint sauce factory towards some rotor blades.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. You don’t know what happened yet. The lobster might win. So, the lobster’s in the pan, my father’s at the stove, my mother hovering by his side, I’m in the sitting area, moaning about this whole ill-conceived plan, and the Calor has just been ignited under the crustacean’s new home. This is the calm before the storm, the phoney war.
The spell is broken by the lobster. It has begun to smell a rat. My parents had added one for flavour. Not really, I’m speaking metaphorically. The lobster is starting to suspect that the apparent improvement in its fortunes was no more than a dead cat bounce. (It’s massively into animal metaphors.) It has noticed that the water has begun to get warmer.
I don’t remember the details of the next few minutes. I assume my dad held on to the pan as the lobster inside moved around in an inquisitive, then concerned, then agitated and finally enraged and panicked fashion. I only remember the last stage. The pan is now full of very hot water and the lobster is throwing everything into a dramatic bid for escape. The phoney war is well and truly over. My mother breaks like the Maginot line and runs out of the caravan.
I would gladly follow her, but my father, struggling with a boiling hot pan containing an enraged mini-monster, stands in my path. I make a few hesitant steps towards him, and a furious and steaming claw flails from under the saucepan lid sending searing splashes everywhere. A droplet lands on my knee. I know, with all my heart, with a terrible, chilling certainty, that the creature wants me dead. There will be no appeasing it if it escapes.
I refuse to eat any of the lobster. I think I’m making a point, but I imagine my parents were happy enough to polish it off themselves.
Now I come to think of it, almost half of the memories I have from family holidays come from that trip to France. I remember the children’s roundabout outside the hypermarket, where, if you were lucky enough to be in one of the helicopters, there was a lever you could pull that would make it rise AS IF YOU WERE REALLY FLYING A HELICOPTER – I still feel this ride is the crowning achievement of French culture.
I remember the doctor who gave me a series of injections in my arse because, with a child’s unerring instinct for inconveniencing his parents, I’d developed the first symptoms of asthma while we were on holiday (and the French will inject you in the arse on pretty much any occasion when a British doctor would go for the shoulder; the arse is apparently the better place for it and the French believe, quite wrongly, that optimising health is more important than avoiding embarrassment).
I remember the ferry trip there and back which, in my view, was more enjoyable than any other single part of the fortnight.
But one of the few things I don’t remember from that holiday is arriving home again – that feeling of being glad to be back in Britain, which I remember from all my other trips abroad.
In general, you don’t see Britain