Forced down your throat

For once, this isn't about the Welsh language, which is the usual context for this expression - as in, "I've got nothing against the Welsh language so long as it is not forced down my throat" (which being interpreted means, roughly, "so long as nobody speaks it in public or makes me see it on signs). I have something more literal in mind here.

Once only during my long stay in hospital did I see an agency nurse load a large spoon with a lot of food (veg, gravy and meat) and try to cram it all into the mouth of an elderly patient who had tried to decline it. Some of my shock must have shown on my face, as the nurse said, "well, what am I supposed to do? She is losing weight!" Two things were bothering me (apart from the fact that I thought it unkind and undignified): if she had done it to me I might very well have choked; and, where did the memory of our school dining hall suddenly spring from? I genuinely can't recall anyone doing this to me there, but perhaps they did and I had suppressed the memory?

Looking back, the generation born in the 1920s and 1930s has quite a lot to answer for in terms of coercion around food. By the time I reached primary school in the mid 1960s food was fairly plentiful (but not always very nice). Rationing had long since finished. This was hard for those who had lived through the war to adjust to, for to them it was a recent event, while to us it was a distant story about a time before we were born. Didn't they love trying to make us all feel guilty, though! "We would have been very grateful for that", "That's a whole week's ration of meat for a family you've got there", and, in a desperate attempt to get more up to date perhaps, "starving children in Africa would be glad of that". Hardly surprising that the whole atmosphere around eating was a minefield. Enjoyment was never expected: just non-stop controlling behaviour and guilt trips. (I don't pretend to understand the issues behind eating disorders, which seemed to burst out in the 1980s, but I can't imagine that all this would have helped).

If we had been genuinely hungry we would, of course, have eaten the food. The area where my school was was not wealthy, and the pupils were from various backgrounds, but most were certainly not going without at home.

The food really was horrible. We were not allowed to bring sandwiches, or go home for lunch, or ask for smaller helpings. There was no choice. We were usually not allowed to leave anything. (One girl in my year had a number of food allergies and was allowed to bring her own food from home. How we envied her! But another girl I knew actually had to leave mainstream education and go to a special boarding school for the same reason, incredibly.) Everyone on a table had to have finished before they were allowed to go, so a child could be made unpopular with the others who were deprived of their time outside if they made a stand.

Many people record similar experiences of school dinners. Here's a brief list of the worst:

Cabbage boiled for a long time (my memory says all morning, but that can't be right, surely? anyway it was tasteless and smelly).
All the vegetables overdone.
Cheap meat full of large stringy veins.
Corned beef hash! Bleurgh
Toxic dark gravy poured over all of it.
Endless tasteless piles of mashed potato with everything.
The puddings!
Sago. Tapioca.
Lumpy pink blancmange. Pink custard.
Lurid thick yellow custard, with lots of skin and lumps, again poured all over everything.
The very worst, something they called caramel pudding, which bore no resemblance to the real thing but was like the blancmange, only greyish brown.

For the record, I liked liver, the fruit puddings, rice pudding, semolina (just about - this came with very sweet rose hip syrup) and some of the stodgier traditional ones, but this was rather dependent on whether I could manage to grab my plate and run before it was swamped with custard.

I didn't come from a family which went on demos and defied authority, but I did actually organise a protest march, with placards, round the playground, and learned that while plenty agreed with me and were willing to join in at first, they would melt away at the appearance of anyone in authority. It was a more authoritarian age.

My finest hour came when we were served the dreaded grey "caramel" pudding twice in one week. Nobody liked it. (We even discovered that the teachers, who got the same food but in a separate room, were also not eating it.) I refused to eat it, the whole table was kept in for the whole lunch hour (thus ensuring that I was the most unpopular child in the school). They were allowed to go when the bell rang for the end of the lunch hour, but I was not, and so began a grand stand-off with dinner ladies who no doubt were due to go home, an echoing empty dining room, and me not budging. Eventually one of them had what she thought was the killer argument : "If you won't eat it you must take it to the headmaster and explain why". "Oh, yes", I said, and off I went with my plate to seek him out. I was obviously impervious to teacher/dinner lady sarcasm and empty threats, as it never occurred to me that she didn't mean it. Everyone was supposed to be terrified of the headmaster, an "old school" teacher from the Valleys who was rumoured still to be using the cane.

Alas, he was listening to a radio programme, and waved me away impatiently without hearing my grievances - but the dinner ladies had at last realised that they weren't going to win this one, and let me go. Around 20 years later my mother bumped into one of them in the town and heard the whole story again, still being talked about - "and we couldn't believe it, she went to the headmaster with her plate!"

So, while memories are one thing and might raise a smile when you're in need of distraction, please, please, don't make me actually relive eating some of this stuff when I am helpless in an institution and no longer have any control of the situation. For some strange reason this kind of food gets described these days as "comforting". It was unpleasant at the time, probably impossible to recreate now anyway, and the surrounding issues of guilt, bullying and control which went with it are anything but "comforting" to remember.