every food in: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Originally published 2013
So I wrote this several years ago, prior to us collectively canceling Neil during his divorce from Amanda Palmer (who, it ought be said, truly sucks in her own right). I know that it is not always possible to separate the artist from the art, but Ocean at the End of the Lane was a book I read during several specific difficult times in my life, and I want to revisit it now, after getting over the illness I had earlier this year.
In 2016, I was two or three days away from quitting one of the worst jobs I’ve ever had, and had driven and saved up to stay in an Airbnb for the first time ever by myself. I arrived in the middle of the night, after several flat tire repairs, and hours of driving through small towns with Trump signs and white supremacist slogans painted on billboards. I am extremely white looking, but my carpool buddy was more obviously not, and we were both extremely, screamingly obviously queer. The entire trip was terrifying and exhausting, and I dragged my yoga mat, bags of groceries, and assorted random road trip purchases up 4 flights of stairs to find…. a perfectly fluffy white bed with tea and snacks set out in the kitchen, a gigantic clawfoot tub with bath products to borrow, and a copy of the Ocean at the End of the Lane sitting on the bed. Having an invisible host take care of me in a very, very old Victorian building after a horrible week and extremely horrible year felt very appropriately parallel to the narrator being taken care of by the Hempstocks, and I can’t think of a better book to have been left to read. For that reason, I’ll always consider it a comfort book, despite not being able to relate to the narrator for most of the book.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is in general a literary callback to a lot of classic Western childhood literature and English myths - a lot of other publications and blogs have covered that topic already, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a very in-depth analysis, at least on first google attempt. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of material to cover there. Perhaps a topic for its own blog post.
Fittingly, it’s also got a pretty satisfying (if brief) selection of food, and Neil Gaiman uses the meals the narrator receives at the Hempstocks versus the food he eats at home to underline that they exist out of modern time/reality/normal constraints on reality. Because of that, I’ve noted after each one which location it was served in. I’ve also linked to foods readers may be less familiar with.
Chapter 1
Jellies and trifles (home)
A birthday cake with seven candles on it and a book drawn on in icing (home)
Chapter 2
Peanut butter on the burnt side of each piece of toast (home)
Brown bread (mentioned by narrator)
White bread, sliced and storebought (mentioned by narrator))
Porridge with a lump of homemade blackberry jam and cream (hempstocks’)
Tea (hempstocks’)
Chocolates and sherbet lemons (mentioned by Lettie)
Chapter 3
Blackjack and fruit salad sweets (mentioned by narrator)
Pancakes cooked on a griddle (Hempstocks’. ”They were paper-thin, and as each pancake was done Lettie would squeeze lemon onto it, and plop a blob of plum jam into the center, and roll it tightly, like a cigar.”)
A lump of honeycomb on a chipped saucer with cream poured over it (hempstocks’)
Chapter 6
A bowl of cereal (home)
A plate of peanut butter sandwiches (home)
Apples, oranges, hard brown pears, 3 bananas (home)
A thick vegetable soup, roast chicken and new potatoes with frozen peas (home)
Chapter 7
Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and gravy (home)
Chapter 9
Soup from the black pot on the stove, drunk in the bath (hempstocks’)
“A joint of beef with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now they might have been nettles, roasted carrots all blackened and sweet (I did not think that I liked cooked carrots, so I nearly did not eat one, but I was brave, and I tried it and I liked it, and was disappointed in boiled carrots for the rest of my childhood). For dessert there was the pie, stuffed with apples and with swollen raisins and crushed nuts, all topped with a thick yellow custard, thicker and richer than anything I had ever tasted at school or at home.” (hempstocks’)
Scraps of meat for the cats. (hempstocks’)
Chapter 10
A bowl of porridge, golden honey comb, and fresh cream (hempstocks’)
Toast cooked beneath the grill with homemade blackberry jam (hempstocks’)
Tea (hempstocks’)
Buttered toast with golden honeycomb crushed onto it (hempstocks’)
Raw peas eaten off the vine (home, but with Lettie)
Chapter 13
“A portion of shepherd’s pie, the mashed potato a crusty brown on top, minced meat and vegetables and gravy beneath it.” (hempstocks’)
A glass of water (hempstocks’)
Spotted dick with yellow custard on top (hempstocks’)
Epilogue
A cup of tea and a cheese and tomato sandwich
