Yesterday’s News

Yesterday’s News
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 2, 2014

The three of us, former work buddies, were ensconced in a Mexican cantina in Northbridge. It was so dark we couldn’t tell our duck tostadas from our chicken tortillas. But no-one cared. We were absorbed in a discussion about generations.

One of my girlfriends, a senior executive, was recounting how a week earlier, she’d called an underling into her office for some constructive criticism, only to have the young woman burst into tears.

We two listeners were taken aback: “She cried in front of everyone?”

“Yep! All the girls in the office were hugging her and I was suddenly the Wicked Witch of the West!”

“I don’t ever remember crying at work,” I announced. “I’ve fled the newsroom and sobbed in the loo. I’ve cried in the car park. But I’ve never let anyone see me upset in the office. I wasn’t into career suicide!”

“That’s the point,” said my other friend. “We were always trying to prove we were just as good as the blokes. We weren’t about to handicap ourselves by crying!”

We decided office protocols must have changed and we’d failed to notice. Maybe we’re entitled to a group hug and a good howl at the coffee station when the boss berates us for missing a deadline? We launched into a muddled debate about whether the coming generation has been over-indulged. We traded stories about our pampered young colleagues, born in the 80s and 90s. Are they more driven, harder working, more ambitious than we were at their age? “Impossible!” one girlfriend said.

At 46, I’m old enough now for the next generation to dismiss me as yesterday’s woman. But from now on, I will co-exist, (uneasily I expect), with those up-and-coming aspirants I never dreamed could one day supplant me.

Sliding towards 50, it’s sobering to realise that more of my life is behind me than in front. I can look back and see the turning points in my life, the happy accidents, the mistakes averted, not because I was smart or prescient, but by dumb luck.

As a skittish Uni student, what if I’d never sat down next to that beautiful woman in the library cafe? She told me her husband was the boss of a radio station. What if she hadn’t urged me to try out for a voice test? Rigid with nerves, I flunked the test with my breathy falsetto. I swallowed my pride and agreed to mind the switchboard instead.

In 1988, when Gen Y’s were playing Donkey Kong on their Game Boys, I was making endless cups of Maxwell House for disc jockeys with voices like velvet. I put my hand up when they needed a barrel girl to draw the weekly winners. I was told to act ditzy. (There was no acting required). I practiced rustling envelopes at home. And then the boss called me into his office again, and I figured my envelope-rustling career was doomed. But instead he said: “The newsroom’s looking for a cadet reporter. Wanna give it a shot?”

Two decades later, I’m sharing my line of work with newcomers who think they know it all. Just like I did once. To me, they’re kids; such eager recruits with their sharp fashion sense and the smarts to match. I admire them: they already know what they want. I was 30 by the time I’d grown their kind of confidence.

Will those Gen Y’s look down on my generation the same way I’ve pigeon-holed my mum and her friends? She still teases me about the day I was cradling my first-born son and I said to her: “I won’t do the wooden spoon or the naughty chair – I’ll just talk it out quietly and calmly with him.” How did she restrain herself from laughing out loud? Instead she replied: “Never say never to the naughty chair! You sure spent enough time on it!”

I wrote last November about how women are tormenting themselves trying to ‘have it all,’ aiming for perfection and arriving at frustration. In response, I received a polite letter from a woman in her seventies, a mother-of-five who’d worked for forty years as a school teacher.

“Do you really think you’re the first women on earth struggling to manage work and children?” she wrote. “For goodness sake, you young ones need to get over yourselves!”

In the Mexican darkness, we middle-aged youngsters hailed a waiter, put generational rivalry aside and spent five minutes trying to divide the bill.

We waved each other goodbye and I walked to my car, wondering how history will paint my generation. As uptight overachievers? Or overworked and underrated? And then I remembered there’s no loo paper at home and we’re out of milk.

Tasty Treasures

Tasty Treasures
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 14, 2014

I lifted the metal lid of our circa-1958 shamrock-green letterbox. Small daughter handed me with a wodge of envelopes, clamped with a fat elastic band. “Bills!” I groaned.

Four-year-old was now scrabbling behind the rickety mailbox post. “Something fell out!” she shouted and flapped her discovery above her head.

It was a postcard. A striking botanical drawing stood out against an inky background. It pictured the life cycle of a sunflower, drawn in exquisite detail in every incarnation, from bud to bloom to seed.

I turned over the postcard and immediately recognised the handwriting – straight-limbed but slanting slightly backwards. The text was a recipe from a friend in her 70’s, a magnificent cook. She appreciates my weakness for chocolate and our shared love of baking. So she’d sent me a copy of her latest triumph – a delectable chocolate cake using sour cherries, ground almonds and rum.

I was touched. Some of my most treasured recipes were originally hers. Over the years, she has transcribed them onto handsome stationary, adding tips and tricks she thinks will help me, her less-seasoned protégé.

To make her famous cumquat chutney, I begin roaming the neighbourhood in May for trees festooned with fruit. I beg stripping rights from owners, then lug my golden cargo home. I’ll spend an hour chopping the bitter fruit, extracting pesky seeds. By kilo’s end, my fingertips are pruned and the juice is biting into the quicks of my nails.

My friend’s recipes are reminders of raucous dinners at her place in the 90s. Her table was always laden: slabs of salmon and rollmops washed down with schnapps, curries made from scratch, ripe cheeses and her renowned chilli jam. Her family’s prized dishes have become firm favourites amongst mine.

I’ve been collecting my trove of recipes since I was a teenager. The recipe for Mum’s signature dish, Pineapple Chicken, sits atop a bulging file in the top drawer of my desk. Still rich with evidence of its original owner, Mum’s handwritten page is dog-eared and spotted with greasy thumb-marks. But it’s not the recipe I covet, rather the remarks that live in the margins. “MUCH POSHER THAN APRICOT CHICKEN,” Mum has written in capitals, then underlined it, in case anyone should doubt her.

From her notes, I can track her attempts to combine fruit with fowl. They date back to the 80s, when her kitchen had glazed orange tiles and a clinkerbrick pantry. She has scribbled on the recipe in red biro: “1st time – used fresh pineapple – try tinned.”

“2nd time: Golden Circle Pineapple Rings work best. Check for rust.”

“3rd Time: Delicious served with rice and frozen peas.”

As a child, I anointed Mum’s Pineapple Chicken (and defrosted peas) the birthday dinner of choice.

My grandmother’s surviving recipes are frustratingly terse. Her buttermilk scones require ‘enough flour to make a soft dough’ and should be baked ‘until done.’ She needed only the bare basics to jog her memory. Her cooking was instinctive, a repertoire of corned beef and baked custards learned at her mother’s elbow in the 1920s, recipes she mentally fine-tuned each time she made them.

I have no such confidence in my productions. I like my baking instructions precise and foolproof. On a whim, I might vary the ingredients, but that’s when the dish flunks. I blame my catastrophes on the recipe. “Hopeless!” I’ll scrawl across the page, having wasted six eggs and a pat of Danish butter on a rubbery sunken sponge.

I still remember the first cookbook I fell in love with. I was 28. The Sydney restaurant critic Terry Durack had written a rhapsody to food. (On the cover was a woman wearing nothing but a skirt strung with garfish.)

I took Terry to bed every night for a week. “It was the slippery, silky, mother’s nightie feel of it that got me at first, a reassuring and arousing smoothness of impossibly luxurious proportions.” That’s how he described the taste of his first smoked oyster. I went to the fish shop, hoping I, too, would be overcome with mother’s nightie raptures. Sadly, my first smoked oyster tasted like an old slipper, plus grit.

Recipes are rich histories for swapping between friends and passing between generations. The internet has made recipe-sharing a furtive pleasure. I can waste an hour browsing through litanies of slow-cooked beef cheeks and self-saucing puddings when I’m uninspired by a kilo of mince and a limp head of broccoli.

But my laptop’s cold, plastic interface is no match for Mum’s butter-stained school recipe cards, relics from compulsory domestic science. Sometimes I’ll flick through the cards and marvel at how unappetising 1950s food now seems. (Rock cakes feature heavily). Other times, I just want to see Mum’s girlish handwriting, alive on every page. Satisfied, I’ll put the cards back in the drawer, reach for the can opener and make a start on tonight’s Pineapple Chicken.

A Matter of Honour

A Matter of Honour
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 26, 2014

Socialising with the school fraternity is a test of my people skills. As our five-person family veers into the car park overlooking the oval, I can see Sunday night’s Year 8 barbeque is already a mash of teenagers and parents. My 13-year-old wrenches open the back door and gallops away on his giraffe-legs, fearing someone might link him to the mutant herd who just pulled up in the ute. I watch as he camouflages himself amongst a clump of boys grazing from an enormous bowl of chips.

My children’s father bails on me next. He calls over his shoulder as he peels off towards the playground: “You go mingle, Blossom – I’ll give the two small ones a run around before it gets dark!” I heave the picnic basket and a blanket thatched with grass clippings over the tailgate. Schlepping them up the embankment towards the pavilion, I scan the throng for a friendly face.

I recognise my son’s housemaster bearing down on me, his beefy arms toting towers of plastic cups. We’ve met just the once, a brief handshake, amid the melee of new parents at the start of the school year. As he strides towards me, I wonder if I should stop and say hello, or spare the poor man the ignominy of trying to remember whose mother I am. We make eye contact and he nods at me politely. My mouth drops open to greet him, and I squeak like a skittish schoolgirl: “Oh hi Mr Smales!”

He cocks his left eyebrow as he barrels past. I cringe. Mr Smales? What was I thinking? Since when does a mature woman call a grown man Mr? I squirm with embarrassment.

Later, under cover of darkness and emboldened by the sugar hit from my second wedge of pavlova, I recount my faux pas to a seasoned high school mum. “What’s the protocol for parents addressing teachers these days?” I ask.

“First name basis, always” she says matter-of-factly, then titters. “Geez, you are funny! I haven’t called anyone Mr since I was sixteen! How he’d take it?”

“I dunno,” I said. ”But I feel like a halfwit!”

In the 80’s, when I grew up, it was unthinkable to address my friends’ parents as anything but Mr and Mrs Clarke, or Dr and Mrs Potter. The title was proof of the insurmountable distance between us. Such formalities bred respect. Dr Potter and his lofty moniker guaranteed we teenagers were too scared to sample the Dunhill Reds he kept stashed in his office. We nicked our mothers’ Virginia Slims instead.

As a schoolgirl, a teacher’s Christian name was prized information. Huddled in the library, we’d marvel at the chain of events that led Lizzie’s mum, Mrs House, to tell Wendy’s mum, Mrs Downs, who told Wendy, who earned celebrity status by revealing that the ‘real’ name of our favourite Human Biology teacher, Mrs Fisher, was Topsy. Yes! Topsy! Breathlessly we’d whisper “Guess what!” up and down the Year 9 corridor until we converged on Mrs Fisher’s class that afternoon. Our frog dissections were well under way when the smart-alice, back row, stuck up her hand. “Mrs Fisher – is it true your real name is Topsy?” she asked. We froze, scalpels in mid-air. “Don’t you wish you’d married Mr Turvey?!” It was a lame joke, but by now, we girls were hysterical. Mrs Fisher, bless her, was grinning too.

I would do a double-take if anyone called me Ms Thomas. My children’s friends all call me Ros. Or often, Ross (“How come your mum has a man’s name?”)

It infuriates me when tele-marketers from Mumbai call the house and tack a fawning ‘Well Ms Thomas…’ onto the front of their every sentence, presuming their sycophantic charm will persuade me to part with my money.

I try to recall the last time I used someone’s title in greeting. I interviewed Marcel Marceau eight years ago in Sydney, and was firmly instructed by his minder to address him as Monsieur Marceau throughout. I needn’t have been warned, I was already quaking with nerves. I heard later a scribe from a rival outfit had been overly chummy beginning a question with “Marcel…” His interview ended abruptly in an angry flash of white glove.

Driving home from the school barbecue, I asked teenage son if I’d goofed up by addressing his House Master as Mr?

“It depends, Mum. Did you say it in that girly sing-song voice that you get when you’re nervous?”

I was cornered.

“I might have, but if I did, at least he’ll respect me in the morning.”