Speaker’s corner

IN MY boyhood, as the modest L*E*A*D*E*R of the Yellow Six Patrol of the 1st Streetly Boy Scouts in the English Midlands, I perceived few rivals when it came to other people in uniform. In those days, seeing there was a world war on, everybody wore uniforms – not just meter readers. There was the army, navy and air force, just for a start.

And there was the St John Ambulance Brigade whose members knew how to set bones and carry survivors from weekend friendlies using the fireman’s lift, which meant carrying the injured over one’s shoulders like sacks of potatoes. The St John girls wore grey skirts and white blouses and white gloves, and affected our minds.

Boy Scouts – once they’d earned their first aid proficiency badge – could also set bones of course, and not too badly either; a quick tug here, a bit of a twist there, listen for a click and hey, Bisto!

We could also do the fireman’s lift and we used it often to help old ladies cross busy roads.

In our perceptions of other people in uniform we recognised no superiors except perhaps the Royal Marine Commandos and the RAF’s Fighter Command.

We, of the Yellow Six, kept our chins up through those grim years of war when, because of food shortages, we were often forced to eat our crusts.

Some might think that our almost daily, typically English fare of boiled cabbage, was tantamount to suffering, but that can only mean they know nothing of English cuisine. Boiled cabbage comes high on England’s list of culinary delights.

English cooking has never been elaborate and certainly, earning one’s cooking badge in the scouts was not too difficult. The most imaginative thing we made was “twist”. Here is the recipe for you to cut out:

Mix flour and water into a dough and make long worm shapes of it – grubby, finger-thick worms. Wind it, snake-like, around a green stick so that it can be turned over red-hot coals. That’s it. Oila! as a French chef would say – that’s twist.

Nowadays, before scouts go off to international jamborees, they have to learn to prepare national dishes. This would hardly faze the French of course. They have to roast a Canard à l’orange or do a filet de boeuf Richelieu to gain their cooking-proficiency badge (second class); nor would it faze the Italians who can grill a bistecca alla Fiorentina while pitching a tent; or the Hungarians who learn to cook a Klasszikus gulyásleves before they are out of the cubs.

I just hope the international scouting body has learnt to make an exception for the English because, to entertain foreigners with English cooking is like trying to entertain a ladies’ flower club with a demonstration of prolonged burping.

When the Yellow Six took part in the first big jamborette after the war we were told by our scoutmaster, Thistlethwaite, how to prepare a traditional English recipe in case any foreign scouts were stupid enough to want to eat it. (I suppose the word “prepare” is a little pretentious. So, in fact, is “recipe”.)

Thistlethwaite had a fairly low opinion of our cooking abilities and dining habits. Eating with the Yellow Six, he said, was tantamount to joining a chimpanzees’ tea party, only less predictable. We were greatly flattered by this.

It took us 10 minutes to learn how to boil cabbage and anything else that was lying about. And we half came to grips with learning how to make custard which, we knew, went nicely with almost anything and, if one had unexpected guests, was good to fall back on (so to speak). Thus, drooling and slobbering, we earned our cooking-proficiency badges with flying custard and were ready to entertain the French, our main targets. But that’s another story.