Enemy Cake

Keep your friends close, but your cakes closer.

In the Eighties, after my young and innocent (jaundiced and anaemic) eyes had witnessed police horses mowing down hordes of unemployed coal-miners, while twenty-one year old Essex boys who could barely string a sentence together posed for pictures sitting on their slut-red Ferraris, having made another bundle of cash on the ‘stock exchange’ (a phenomena quite new to most working class people, even though it had been keeping the rich wealthy for nearly two centuries) and comedian Harry Enfield had us in fits of somewhat awkward laughter with his character ‘Loadsamoney’, where the set-up, pull-back and reveal, punchline – entire act essentially – was that he had ‘loads of money’, there was, what at first could be seen as a moment of resistance. Something initially at least, wholesome. Something that didn’t involve money, or ambition, Something of an anachronism and void of the evil finger of Thatcher. Something that didn’t involve being an utter wanker and not giving a toss about it, which otherwise defined the Eighties. That thing, was The Friendship Cake.

It was a normal Saturday afternoon in our house, nothing much happening, telly on, Dad flaked-out in his chair after a week of twelve-hour days not earning loadsamoney using his exceptional skills making other, rich people’s houses look lovely, and me and my brother complaining we’re hungry every twenty minutes or so, having had only a packet-soup for dinner (a packet soup, for those who missed this culinary insult, was a packet of powdered flavouring, 0.5 grams of dried vegetable matter per serving, and hot water. Less food, more the illusion of food, or at least the illusion of eating.) Mum would reply to her spawn’s natural, frequent demands for food with her not so natural - and no thought required - response ‘Have a sandwich’.

Now, if there was a nice fresh baguette, some Pastrami, some Gouda cheese, maybe some ripe, blood-red tomatoes, crisp iceberg-lettuce, and mayonnaise, ‘Have a sandwich’ would have been a wonderful suggestion. But none of that had been invented yet and a sandwich in our house was Mother’s Pride sliced, white bread (the only mother who would give that nutritionless, tasteless, floppy wheat-based panty liner to her kids with any ‘pride’ would have a crack pipe in her other hand) Stork SB (which was to margarine, what margarine is to butter – third order simulation, wow!) a kind of polymer made from palm oil and water, which, when you spread it on the (we’ll call it ‘bread’ for reasons of expediency) would flatten it to about two millimetres, squeezing out all the air and returning the slice of ‘bread’ back to its dough-like origins. Fillers were limited to salt (yes, salt sandwiches were common in our house), salad cream (which is to Mayonnaise, what Stork SB is to butter) sugar, Golden Syrup (acid treated sugar) or simply nothing: a bread sandwich. But when you know you’ll be waiting five more hours before mum gets busy heating up canned vegetables and a frozen Chicken Kiev (imagine a slice of salty carpet that wet its pants when you cut into it) you’d eat a sandwich, however it came.

And there’s a knock at the door. It’s Susie, who lived down the road – nice she was – would wear a lot of lace clothing, tight skirts and make-up, a little bit of glamour in an otherwise sexually semiotic wilderness. Her strapping fireman of a husband Jack kind of put to bed any ideas of me (eleven years old) and Susie getting together, but it’s a dangerous job putting out fires, so I always had a bit of hope, and it didn’t stop me snuggling up with her at street parties, bar-b-ques, house parties, and literally any other situation where I could basically press my slither of a penis against her bare or occasionally lacy stockinged legs.

So, in walks Susie and she’s got a bowl of muck with her. And she’s got this mucky set of instructions, pre-computer, pre-typewriter, hand written. All covered in muck. Not good muck either. Muck, as we all know can be good, I would have enjoyed getting mucky with Susie, for instance, but this was bad muck, and there was something peculiar about the expression on my mum’s face that made me feel kind of vulnerable, like the muck was somehow being passed on to us like a disease. A few minutes ago, there wasn’t a sense of muck dominating our day, and now there was.

So, she’s got this mucky bowl, with cling film wrapped suspiciously in many layers around the whole bowl, as if a spillage would be a disaster, or worse, she was hiding something. I saw how tight people were with cling film, such technologies being an expensive luxury, so even I knew we were dealing with danger – or at least deception. She unfolded the page of instructions; the sound of little clicks as it came unstuck in various places. ‘It’s a Friendship Cake’ she explained, my dad taking the opportunity to look at her legs for far too long, and actually pulling his jeans down at the knee to make room for shape-changing elsewhere. ‘Just read the instructions and every week you’ll get a cake, a friendship cake.’ Said Susie.

Susie didn’t stay long, which was a shame, in fact she seemed to get out of the place rather sharpish, like she’d placed some kind of bomb (she had, some kind). Her and my mum discussed the details in the kitchen for a bit, and then she was gone. So, mum puts it in the fridge, puts the mucky instructions on the shelf next to the refrigerator and sat down in her seat looking none too pleased. I was intrigued. I’d like to lie and say I was about six at the time, because I’m embarrassed at being eleven and intrigued by a cake, especially one of the ‘friendship’ variety. That wasn’t going to score me any points with the girls at school who avoided me anyway.

Every other day my mum had to feed this thing. She had to feed it with sugar. Every day the swamp monster grew a bit. And then, by the last day of the week, you’d take this big pot of blurgh out of the refrigerator and you’d divide it into three bits – and this is key to why my mum said the cake was good and, in the next sentence said it was a nightmare – one of these pieces, you’d chuck in some bits and bobs, walnuts and things, and you put it in the oven. That will become a cake. Cake is good, better than a salt sandwich. But you divide the rest into two pieces, one of which you put back in the fridge to start the growing schedule again. The other piece you lumber someone else with, so they can feed and bake, and give away, and cake.

The Friendship cake is a kind thing, a generous thing. But you’re still going to run out of friends to offload the surplus section on pretty quickly, especially in those days. Remember, most, if not all of your friends lived on your street. Susie came to my mum’s that week, but the next week she probably went to Barbara and the week after to Pauline. But Barbara has been to Yvonne, who has been to Joyce. And Pauline has tried three people all who already have a house that stinks of fermentation; yup, they’d all been caked. Much like pyramid schemes, when there’s not enough people in the world to make it work by about the seventh layer, so the Friendship Cake had run out of friends in a matter of weeks. The street has been done. So, if you want to get rid of that third bit, you’ve got to start thinking about vehicles or public transport, and at that point the Friendship Cake is becoming a hassle cake.

So, one bit you put in the oven to make a cake, one bit you put in the fridge to feed and grow, to keep the cycle going. But the third bit, the bit that defined the ‘friendship’ nature of the exercise (and why my mum described it as a nightmare) goes in the bin. You guiltily chuck it out with the packet soup packets and empty salad cream bottles. You throw away life – yeast – you abort it. You look left and right and then, ‘Fuck it’ and you chuck it away. You hastily scrape the vile sludge into the bin. ‘No one put sugar in the bin!’ says dad, laughing ‘or this things gonna climb out and smother us in our sleep’

And inevitably after the initial excitement of a cake every week, you start getting sick of the smell of it, sick of the taste of it, sick of the way it haunts you every time you open the refrigerator and get the ghosts of all the bits you’ve binned seep into your skin. Because whatever nuts, or fruit, or anything you put into it, it always tastes the same, like a yeasty, fermented, cake. Mum’s sick of cooking it, we’re all sick of eating it and one week the communal unconscious of the family just agrees, no more. Kill the fucker. Bin the lot. Just lie when Susie asks how it’s getting on (which she won’t because without a doubt she murdered her one months ago.)

And for a few months there’s a kind of general deceit thriving in the street as Friendship Cakes are discussed like they’re still being eaten, improved upon, passed on, loved. But slowly, and thankfully, it just fades away, and like all good communities that have a secret, it becomes the stuff of legend, to have the piss ripped out of it by people like me, forty years later.

The strange thing is, they’re still about. I’ve had a look on YouTube. Apparently, they’re started with fermented fruit. Some actual witch decides to condemn a community to the whole damn cycle again with rotten fruit, probably some insect blood, feet of sparrow, eye of newt, etc.

I mentioned it to my mum just a few weeks ago, brought up the ghost of the yeasty monster. And she said these things have been going on for decades, if not centuries. She said there was a spate of ‘Friendship Ginger Ale’ when she was a kid, which followed much the same pattern in her street when she was a toddler. Only they had the added ingredient of ‘Old mad Molly’ who was so batty, and with advanced Alzheimer’s, she’d make up about ten lots of the stuff and take it to everyone in the street twice weekly, who’d thank her and then pour the lot down the drain. ‘In fact,’ said my mum, my grandma got so sick of the smell of ‘Friendship Ginger Beer’ lingering in the drains, she warned my mum and her two sisters, ‘If you see a mad woman coming up the garden path with a pot of muck, tell her I’m not in.’

The End

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Chris Dangerfield