Claire Mabey on how to map a life according to one of our culture’s most ubiquitous baked goods.
This essay contains descriptions of disordered eating – please take care.
After my child was born too early I was possessed by an inhuman hunger. Nothing could touch the sides of it. I ate every plate of the homogenous hospital food that was placed on the plastic tray in front of me but remained starved. Until a friend, an angel in plain clothes, delivered to the ward a cookie time bucket full of cheese scones. At the time I remember assuming they were for both me and my partner. But with hindsight I suspect she knew. She knew that I’d eat the entire bucket single-mouthedly and in one sitting. Which I did. The smell of flour, salt and cheese called forth an animal response in my alarming new body. I ate with the desperation of a wolf emerging from a harrowing winter.
Those scones live in some parallel world in which I am still in that hospital bed hooked up to a catheter called Cathy and a breast pump called Will Robinson. My new boobs erect, bulbous and weeping; my new baby severed from me and sleeping in an incubator, glowing; a constant feed of podcasts in my ears to block out that indescribable hospital clamour. Anchoring it all there are the scones. Plain, familiar, comforting, and cold. The cheese had hardened and was perfect. I chewed them on the white bed of thin linen while bracing myself for the next instalment of pumping yellow. The same buttery aesthetic as the baked goods on my swollen lap.
As with so many things in my life so far it wasn’t until I read a book that I began to truly consider the persistence of scones. How they quietly decorate occasions of both private and public life. In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 story of a middle-aged witch, Lolly Willowes, there is this brief but memorable passage:
“It was only by chance that she had stayed indoors that afternoon, making currant scones. To amuse herself she had cut the dough into likenesses of the village people. Curious developments took place in the baking. Miss Clarloe’s hedgehog had swelled until it was almost as large as its mistress. The dough had run into it, weaving a great hole in Miss Carloe’s side. Mr Jones had a lump on his back […] and a fancy portrait of Miss Larpent in her elegant youth and a tight-fitting sweeping amazon had warped and twisted until it was more like a gnarled thorn tree than a woman. Laura felt slightly ashamed of her freak […] But Mr Saunter ate the strange shapes without comment, quietly splitting open the villagers and buttering them.”
In this vivid passage the act of baking and eating scones is deeply charming, deeply amusing and decidedly weird. Sylvia Townsend Warner makes us stare at the ubiquitous baked good until we have to reconsider it completely. Her kitchen witch toys with tradition and by extension with the quirks of society around her. It is a paragraph both ordinary and extraordinary: revealing that like an extra in a period drama, the scone is a constant, but unpredictable feature. It never fails to fill a gap but the quality, the impact may vary.
The maternity ward wasn’t the first place that saw me cling to a scone as a familiar in an unfamiliar world. In my early twenties I developed an attachment to the sensation of emptiness and the pain of not having eaten enough. Somewhere between university and professional life I got lost in a monstrous worry and the only thing that I felt capable of was controlling how my body felt under intense pressure.
I would run hard and fast at lunchtime: at the parliamentary gym on wet days and up Tinakori hill on fine ones. When I should have eaten to replenish the energy expended I refused. I observed the impact as though the person in my head was separate from the skin and flesh I was living in.
While my friends and family whispered between themselves about what to do, I only had eyes for the wholemeal date scone from John’s Kitchen which was close to number one The Terrace where I worked a job wholly unsuited to me. The scone was large, studded with dark fruit, and mealy. And after the lunch rush hour it was only $3. I cradled it like a precious on the walk back to my desk and spent the afternoon carefully nibbling at the edges until the pain in my gut was dulled. And no more. I am lucky and powerfully grateful to have found a way out of that state of mind. But like the cheese scones in the days after birth, there is a world in which I am still adrift on that raft of date scone from John’s Kitchen.
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel is about freedom born from pain and struggle. Lolly is a spinster aunt in London, exhausted, and forever transformed, by the trauma of the first world war. In a sudden (to her determinedly oblivious family) and uncharacteristic move, she leaves the city and life as she has known it and moves to a village: travelling on a whim and driven by instinct. Once there she unravels the habits of the past and spends her time as her body and mind instruct: she sleeps outside when mood demands, wanders the woods and fields at midnight, befriends a ferocious black kitten.
Before long, Lolly realises that she is a witch and always has been. As a witch Lolly finds release from the pressures of time- and role-based living and the stress of having to behave in a way that is expected of her. The scene with the currant scones, which takes place in her new home, is symbolic of her transformation: familiar and comforting, but radically changed, freshly playful, at the same time.
Like in Lolly Willowes, the scones in our lives are symbols of domestic ritual and the drama that can unfold within such spaces. They witness your private conversations, your moments of freak and your knotty interactions. The ritual of the scone can be a throughline between periods of small and great change.
My earliest significant scone was a conceptual one. Once upon a time I was drawn to the theatre. Shy by nature and scared of being loud around crowds, theatre let me be both brave and mouthy. One summer, the first one home after a year away at university, my high school drama teacher roped a batch of us together to put on a play called The Rising Scone. I remember it in a series of surreal images: my character was called Lilith and was full of snark; our theatre was some kind of trailer with a tarpaulin for a roof; and in the end I think the growing scone overwhelmed us and our town (it was some kind of existential crisis Becketty type thing).
For us, amateur actors between our teenage and adult years, the Rising Scone was an exploration of our togetherness in a strange new world, both the one of the play and the one we were trying to make for ourselves. The show and its absurdist truths held us warmly in the exploratory space that the ritual of performance can offer at a time when we were hungry to be rising, slowly becoming who we were.
People can be quick to judge a scone. Yet, in the passage in Lolly Willowes, the warped village people are sliced and buttered and eaten without comment. A relief for Lolly who learns she can serve her quirks on a plate without fear of consequence. Sylvia Townsend Warner orchestrates something much bigger than a meal between acquaintances. She shows us that the devil is in the details; that small things build up to make big things and much can be lost along the way if we aren’t careful; and that sometimes we need to adopt small but radical adjustments to free ourselves.
My web of scones maps a series of metamorphosis from the existential to the physical and profoundly emotional. Sometimes, when I mix flour and butter and salt and milk, work the knife quickly, I consider the shape of the ritual: the kindness of others and the remarkable persistence of the self.