A bit pork and cheese

I’m one half foreign and that foreign is Portuguese. It is not that obvious, diluted by the Scots and Ulster on my father’s side and, of course, by the English culture that has surrounded me since birth (if London’s culture can be described as English). It took centuries of poverty and malnourishment to refine my typically short Portuguese body and I have brown eyes and hair.

If you have a foreign parent it is likely that somewhere in the family home there will be some reminder of their origin. In our house every ornament stood on an embroidered doily, there were plates and dishes painted in traditional Portuguese styles and we had the obligatory brightly coloured ceramic cockerel. My mother and her sister worked and lived close by so I heard the language everyday and there was a lot of contact with the members of her family who lived in London. One of my cousins always put on records of traditional music and danced to them. This mainly consisted of swinging to the right and then to the left and it is good to know that others are maintaining this tradition. In Australia. I swear it all sounds like this. Jingle jingle boom.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=g36oefvywtk

Everything my mother cooked, even if it was supposed to be a British dish, tended to be a bit Portuguese which rather annoyed my father. I think she regarded the indigenous cuisine as lacking in flavour. I grew up eating the home cured meat that was brought over from her village, smuggled through customs in suitcases. Sal picao was a favourite, a sausage that was sliced very thinly and eaten with bread. The chewy slices were a dark amber and garnet colour when held up to the light. Most school friends wrinkled their noses when offered it but some took the risk and found that they liked it. The food that had helped my ancestors to survive hungry winters was regarded as a delicacy in the UK.


On special occasions we ate bacalhau, salted cod fish cooked with finely chipped, fried potatoes, scraps of fried egg and olives. If most of the British visitors to the house had seen the cod soaking in buckets of water for days before being cooked they might also have wrinkled their noses, but once it was on their plates it disappeared fairly quickly. Cod was also used to make fish cakes which could be eaten hot or cold. My mother always made a lot of them but there never seemed to be enough.

Caldo verde, a soup made with shredded dark greens, was a challenge. I was never able to eat it without getting my chin slapped by hot potatoey cabbage. Summer meant green bean salad, the beans warm from the pan and thinly sliced onions in an oil and vinegar dressing served with hard boiled eggs. Puddings and desserts usually involved a lot of work so they didn’t come along that often but when they did the smell of cinnamon filled the house.

We didn’t have much to do with the Portuguese community apart from attending occasional events. I think my mother wanted to get more involved but it wasn’t something that interested my father. I wasn’t even expected to attend Portuguese school which seemed to be mandatory for the others of my age from that background. I wouldn’t have managed it and I think common sense was sacrificed to national pride by some Portuguese parents.

The other thing that set us apart was that we didn’t spend six weeks every summer on holiday over there. A great many of my mother’s contemporaries came over in the 1960’s and 1970’s to work hard and earn money, sacrificing much to save up enough to build a dream home to retire to in Portugal. Almost everyone we knew from that community lived in accommodation that came with a housekeeping job, which meant that quite a few people lived in ugly basements with exposed pipe work and were grateful for it.

Looking back, it is hard to believe that such a large population of very foreign people could live in London without being too obvious. I think the reason was that they just kept their heads down and got on with it, looking ahead to a time when they wouldn’t have to be here. Things began to change when some began to buy houses in the suburbs, but even then the plan was still to go home. I knew several people whose parents lived in the UK for decades but never learnt to speak more than a few words of English. At the time there was no need to and the truth was that many could not read in their own language. Education was not a priority in Salazar’s Portugal. Clever people were trouble.


We did visit my mother’s home occasionally. I went from being slightly foreign in the place I was born to being very foreign somewhere else. My grandmother was the typical little old lady in black and I really do remember her with affection. The whole place was so different from London. There was no flushing toilet, you parked your backside on a wooden seat and whatever you produced was composted. How green is that? My cousin used oxen to draw along a piece of agricultural equipment I had seen pictures of in a book on medieval history and I spent an afternoon watching him irrigate a field by using metal plates that he sliced into the ground, cutting off one channel then another, allowing the river water to run between rows of potatoes. I though they were covered in Portuguese ladybirds but they were actually Colorado beetles. I remember the smell of wood smoke, being taken to see some piglets and lots of sticky car rides as my father took advantage of all that history.

We visited every castle and church in the area and then went even further. We saw Alcobaca on a particularly hot day and I remember stepping from burning sunlight into the chill of the shade. The carved stonework looked like lace. My absolute favourite was a castle that had shallow steps wide enough for horses to be taken up them during a siege. I ended up with all the usual souvenirs, a boat and a doll with lots of petticoats from Nazare, hand embroidered aprons and earrings. I had my ears pierced, whether I liked it or not, by having a sterilised needle pushed through my lobes at around the age of three. This is when they discovered just how many rude Portuguese words I had picked up.


Forty years later I’ve forgotten them, along with most of the Portuguese I knew. I don’t regret it but I always mean to brush it up. When I looked around the house for things to photograph I found that there weren’t that many. I am far more English these days. Amongst the good things that I have gained from being a bit pork and cheese are a taste for embroidery and bean salads. I cry when I listen to Amalia Rodrigues even though I don’t understand most of what she is singing about. I have an insight into what it is like for those who come here from somewhere very different to earn what they think is a decent wage. I hope I am just that little bit more interesting because of it.

www.freguesiasdeportugal.com/distritoviana/09/portuzelo/fotos.htm