Pomegranates

 If you ate pomegranates as a child does that mean you were posh?

When I was in primary school I was teased for being posh. I remember a blond-haired boy called Michael being obsessed with how posh I was. Michael lived in a huge house on Stock Road; his dad drove a fancy sports car; they had more than one holiday a year to places like the South of France in Summer and skiiing in Switzerland in the Winter. He had never had mixed tin goulash, cooked over a calor gas two ring burner in a leaky tent in the middle of a freak summer storm. If you looked at our wealth then you would have concluded that Michael was more posh than me. However, because I pronounced the ends of my words, had read lots of books and knew how different fruit and vegetables tasted then he concluded that I was posh and posh was an insult to tease me with.

I couldn’t deny it, really. I didn’t want to be posh, just as I didn’t want to be a ‘virgin’ because even if you don’t know what the word really means or if it applies you you, you can definitely recognise it as a playground insult. Your mum laughing and saying, “But you are a virgin, darling, it’s a good thing,” didn’t really help. You still knew you were being laughed at. 

The dictionary defines posh as elegant or stylishly luxurious so you would think it would be a compliment but we all know that to have been called posh in a state primary school in Essex in the Seventies meant that you were unrelatable and very definitely not cool.

It is true that I spoke well. I read loads and I knew that certain words had consonants in. I saw the words spelled out in my head as I said them so it would have been really weird to start saying, “I ate your wawah bo-allI fink you goaw i’ from Saafend,” when I saw the words I hate your water bottle. I think you got it from Southend.

The worst teasing, however, came at the end of October. We weren’t a really wealthy family but we were aspirational middle class. My dad had a good job and we lived in a nice semi detached house with a mortgage. We took camping holidays rather than going to a holiday camp and we had spare money for a Thursday present.

I don’t know why my Mum did this but it was something we all looked forward to. A Thursday present was a little gift that would come back from the shops with her. It was a small thing that showed that she was thinking about you. It might be a cream cake, a colouring book, a pair of scissors, new socks or something from the greengrocers. She would write and draw on the bag or box the gift came in, making Thursday the day we couldn’t wait to get home from school.

I particularly loved it when the gift was in a brown paper bag from the greengrocers in town. It would always be something seasonal or unusual. It might be a russet apple, an avocado pear, a clementine (heralding the start of Christmas), big fat dark cherries or, if we were really lucky in October, a pomegranate. When pomegranates became fashionable later in the eighties and people discussed eating them with a pin I was totally surprised that people wanted to miss out on the joy of ripping open the tough skin, pulling back the fine membranes to expose the juicy jewel-like seeds. They would miss out on licking the juice from their wrists.

Anyway, it was a Friday in October and I had half a pomegranate in my lunchbox. Michael peered in.

“What’s that?”

“A pomegranate. Have you you had a pomegranate before?”

“Nah, don’t be silly. I ain’t posh.” 

Then to his mates. “Ere look, Posh ‘as a pomegranaaa.”

“Pomegrante” I corrected.

Everyone laughed and shouted, “P.O.S.H. Posh!”

My daughter brought three pomegranates home the other day. She had met her friend for a walk and they had decided on a fruity picnic. 

“He says that we were posh if we had pomegranates growing up,” she tells me.

“Yes. Yes we were. He’s right. I’ve always been posh.”