Another of Havelock’s obsessions that so plagued him throughout his life was the sandwich, that masterful construction of, at its simplest, two slices of leavened bread containing within the perimeters of its doughy surfaces a filling, commonly comprising a meat or cheese product as its working base, although the myriad possibilities for gastronomic development on this most simplistic blueprint of convention (comprising condiments, salad articles etc.) were what became a matter of extensive contemplation for our hero, one Charles Phillip Havelock III – Pippin to friends and nemeses alike.
The obsession began in childhood, when the young Pippin accompanied his father to one of their many local taverns (of which Norwich has always had something of a plethora) for a night of gambling and drinking with some family associates. Largely uninterested in the proceedings of the men, the eleven year old Pippin was more intrigued by the [in his own words] “ladies of the night, who careened about the premises in all of their painted finery, the flesh of their breasts moved with tantalising waves so apparently directly to an inexperienced lad such as myself, and I blushed with an erection of such ferocity that even cold water could not dislodge it from its prominence within the fabric of my trouser.”
He goes on: “As they moved about the room, with their feminine ejaculations of sonorous laughter and their shapely volumes, their heavenly posteriors like the spheres themselves, I felt the spirit awaken within me, as though a candle had been struck alight in the very depths of my human soul. It was a candle that would burn strong and bright for the whole of my life, and that only the most delicate flower of the female form might ever satisfy, enshrouding me in the moisture – like morning dew – of its scarlet folds. How many times I took my leave to the lavatory that night, refuting the angels whom so pulsed their energies through the length of my stiffness, expelling my silk into the liberty of the free world!”
It was these same ‘ladies of the night’ – although whether he is referring to prostitutes or simply to the tavern barmaids is unclear, and Havelock himself seldom makes a distinction between the two professions throughout the entirety of his life’s writings – who, during the course of the evening brought a plate laden with sandwiches to the table of the gambling men, as was often the case amongst hungry drinkers demanding effectively self-contained food of convenience and efficiency.
This bountiful plate had a further profound and lasting effect on the man Pippin, often swamped by the little things, who had this to say of his first sandwich, eaten with devastating gusto amidst the belching of gentlemen in the Norwich tavern that night:
“And so drained by my independent carnal sins of the evening, there I saw it in approach, before the full ripe breasts of a nubile maid that so inflamed my already beaten loins, the plate of sandwiches. And my how I gasped, in mixed horror and delight, at the sheer scale of the sight I had never before seen. This was my first trip to the tavern, and never before in my personal life had the sandwich entered my consciousness, but now that it had – and before I took even my first bite of the delicious foodstuff – I knew that it would never again leave it, for it is truly a masterpiece of culinary design, a wonder of intelligence and creation that only the finery of man could conceive. Simple, yet with the capacity for an incredible brilliance impossible in the lesser food forms. The night had made a man of me at last!”
As Havelock took his first bite into the freshly prepared sandwiches – off-white bread with thick slices of gammon, smeared with an unspecified fat spread and local Colman’s mustard – on which his elder companions gorged themselves without hesitation, appreciation or decorum, he underwent something close to epiphany.
“I swooned,” he wrote later, “devastated to near unconsciousness by the deliciousness of the interweaving flavours, the magnificence of textures, the unadulterated play of the imagination at work within the food. It was something so [...] very subtle in its construction that I at once had little doubt about its power. With eyes clasped shut I swallowed, chewed and chewed and swallowed again, myself swallowed into the marvellous potential of the food I had consumed. I felt tears of joy streaming down my cheeks as I ran from the table, upsetting the cards of my father’s gamble, and shouted with the delights of one possessed by the holy ghost, much to the amusement of the gathered ladies. As they pulled me sobbing into the sanctity of their bosom, and I wept delighted in the natural perfume of their bodies, I took my final bite of the food and, immersed deep in the beauty of sex and sandwich, I let fly my seed once more into the very trousers I stood up in, without shame, without horror, with nothing but love for the world and its ways, for the one pure truth of the sandwich!”
Here then began a love affair between man, leavened bakery product and suitability formulated fillings devised in concordance with an appropriate interplay of flavour combinations. In many places throughout his notes, Pippin makes recurring reference to his own ‘epic’ poem, “The Day of the Sandwich”, a vast text which evolved consistently into a sprawling linguistic existence parallel to and alongside Havelock’s own life. Commencing that very night of revelation, in 1898, Havelock’s writing of the poem continued as an ongoing project throughout much of his life, a constantly updated record of the passion he felt towards the sandwich (although it would eventually fall by the wayside as the magnitude of his Mandrake obsession claimed the acuity of his reason). The poem grew with him and lived with him, almost taking on a life of its own for Havelock, who refers to it very much as a person, a sentient being of its own action.
Alas, despite a conservative estimate of the poems length to be within the region of three thousand pages (of varying size and quality), very little of the poem exists today, or rather very little has fallen into my possession. Throughout the entire case of Havelock’s papers which I have acquired, I could find only a handful of tatty excerpts, each page numbered but in no corresponding order with the last, and each exhibiting a large area which has apparently been torn from its bottom. The sentiment of the piece, however, loses none of its potency in its alienation from the unabridged – near mythical – whole, which may well never be appreciated in the length of its almost gratuitous entirety. It is, at the very least, an ode, a pledge of love and the deepest, most profound affection, a heartfelt statement of the very physical lust that one man feels for his food.
I reproduce here the first excerpt of the poem (best described, I suppose, as free verse) “The Day of the Sandwich”, by one Charles Phillip Havelock III:
“I spoke – at length – to a baker friend of mine
he who had told me of his ‘special batch’
and winked as the words formed from his thick Semitic lips
his beigel-scented fingers adept in the arts of dough
“Supposing,” says I, “I want a loaf of this” –
and I whispered – “Special batch?”
A conversation swamped in gestures.
He writes an almost illegible time on the smallest scrap of paper
and a place beneath it. “There,” he says
“Come alone and don’t be late”
A fair request, authoritative – meaningfully so.
The deal struck
a deal among gentlemen
of liaisons in the dark, of bakery passions, of petty cash.
It occurred without complication or error
I an hour early and he an hour late
the bread still warm between my fingertips
he wept in the few streaks of light that broke in
through the boarded former windows
like a parent kissing their first-born goodbye
pawing his eyes dry with a floury hand.
He smelt reassuring in his gingham trousers
and neither of us spoke, not a word
*
At this point the page is torn.
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