The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone: The Secret Ingredient of Unforgettable Food Is Suffering - Softcover

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Will Storr is a journalist, novelist, and photographer. His features have appeared in numerous newspapers, including The Guardian, The Times (London), and The Observer (London). He has been named New Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year. The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone is his first novel.

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Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone

1

I was born crying on an early day of frost in October 1965 and the first words that my mother ever said to me were “skin and bone”. The nurse who had placed me in her arms gently chided her, “Oh really, Mrs Lone, he’s perfectly healthy.”

“Well, he is breathing,” said my mother, with a reluctant nod. “I suppose that’s a start…”

She told this story repeatedly throughout my childhood. I’m not entirely sure why. But I know the thought that lay behind those words. After nine and a half months of pregnancy and thirty-six hours of labour, it wasn’t me that she wanted to see at all. It was her best friend Margaret’s baby, born nine months before me. Margaret had a swimming pool in her garden and the best extension on our cul-de-sac. Everything she wore, drove in or commented upon was discussed jealously in our home. When Margaret gave birth to Mark, he was commonly described as a “belting, strapping little thing”, and that is exactly how he was to grow up. Mark House, with his fair hair and his wide shoulders and his handsome smile that triggered a hundred coos from a hundred envious mothers as he was paraded around the Tonbridge Sainsbury’s in his John Lewis pushchair. Mark, with his football playing and his athletics medals and his fighting.

To my mother’s endlessly replaying disappointment, it was clear that I would never be Mark, even as a newborn. I instinctively turned my head when someone peered down at me with their huge grown-up face, and I cried and cried and didn’t stop crying for three weeks following my birth. Doctor Feiglen assured my parents that there was nothing wrong with me, insisting to my sceptical mother that I was “just a bit colicky”. Nevertheless, my wailing continued. It did so until the day I was taken on my first visit to my great-aunt Dorothy’s peculiar old cottage deep in the Sussex Downs. Dorothy had spent the morning baking loaves and the moment the first warm, woody wafts of the bread leaked from her oven and stroked my nose, I finally stopped bawling and broke out into a gigglish grin.

And so it began. As a little boy, I was only happy when I was eating, cooking or shopping for food. When my mother was in one of her rare good moods, she’d spoil me – sometimes to the point of nausea. My most wonderful memory of her, in that period, was the evening she arrived home early from work and confessed that, as a young girl, she had loved Peach Melba Angel Delight. We drove to the shop and bought packets and packets and packets of it, then made it up in huge serving bowls, sprinkled with hundreds and thousands and Jelly Tots and glacé cherries. We gorged until she was sick. Her vomit, as I held her hand in the bathroom, smelled of the acid-sweet Martini she’d been drinking all afternoon. That night, she insisted that I go to bed with her and hug her until she fell asleep. I lay there, rigid, with my arm around her waist, until I heard her snoring, at which point I climbed over my similarly comatose father and hurried to my room.

But those were the rare times, and they grew ever more infrequent as I became older. From toddler-hood and towards double figures, I remained skin and bone, pale and nervous and rarely far from tears. I learned to do my crying in private, during the long grind of the chores which my mother – exhausted from her work as the manager of a large team of social workers – would set me on. I found it particularly hard to hold myself firm during the last twenty minutes or so of every day, when she would conduct her brief tour of the rooms I’d been working on. The bony pad of her finger would be pressed along fridge tops and down toilet bowls and my punishment for its gathering any grime would begin with me having to suck that finger clean.

For the aspiring bullies of suburban Tonbridge, I was a mobile amusement park. I was regularly hounded by a pack of boys that lived up our cul-de-sac, led by Mark House. And at school? Well, there’s someone like me at every school. Do you remember me? I was the one with his back to the playground’s chainlink fence at break-time. I was the one whose dirty coat the popular boys would dare the skipping girls to touch. I was the one whose hair was a greasy thatch because I couldn’t stand to look in the mirror and because Mum never had time. I was the one full of tears and piss who could crumble under the force of an unsympathetic comment.

The only times I felt truly safe were when I was in my favourite place with my favourite person – the kitchen of Dor Cottage with my Great-aunt Dorothy. She was a retired cookery teacher who had long since left her small school in the nearby village of Herstmonceux. Having lost her girls for ever, she had taken to lecturing me instead. I loved her lessons. I loved the food we cooked together. And, more than anything, I loved being in her kitchen. Never before or since have I felt so powerfully that I was in an enchanted bubble, floating above the jags and bumps of real life.

Dor was the subject of an eccentric and rather eerie family legend. I listened to Dorothy recount it as she worked at the table, the flames from the fire burning in her eyes – which were long and lipped with so many folds and bags they seemed like knots in an ancient oak. As she spoke, I could sense something like fear in her, and something like awe as well. It made her stories wonderfully beguiling. It made me love her even more.

“Have I ever told you, Kill, that this place has been in the family since 1676 and it can never be sold?” she asked. “It was built for Mary Dor, your great, great, great –well, a lot of ‘greats’, believe you me. Mary was the cook for Thomas Lennard, who lived up at the castle. He was the first earl of Sussex.” And then she whispered, as if it was all still too dangerous to say, “What a rogue he was! He loved gambling and cricket and eating, of course. Eating more than anything. He loved Mary’s food. Declared she was the greatest cook in England. That’s why he built this place for her, so near the castle. But it all went wrong, Kill. They began talking about her, down in the village. Saying her broths were so delicious that there must be some sort of devilry involved in it all. They said her recipes could turn anyone who tasted them mad with uncanny desires. The earl didn’t listen, not even when his courtiers started whispering. He was too batty about her cooking to care. But then something happened. Something to do with his pretty wife, Anne. Well, you’re too young to hear about that part. But anyhow, it was all blamed on poor Mary and they had her burned as a witch. It’s still there, in the elm forest – the place where they got her. There’s a stone post, about as high as my knee, with strange runes carved all over it. I’ll show it to you one day. The tourists who go past that thing, eating their ice creams and walking their dogs, they’ve got no idea what happened there. No idea about any of it. Anyway,” she turned away and said, more quietly still, “just promise to remember what I said. This place cannot leave the family. Under no account. Not ever.”

My mother always insisted that Dorothy was crazy, and that the stories about our witch ancestor were ridiculous. And, as in most things, I agreed with Mum. But in a vague and quiet place, I couldn’t deny my fears. Even as a very young boy I could sometimes detect an atmosphere of brooding or...