The Kitchen Front Read online

  The Kitchen Front is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Jennifer Ryan

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Ballantine and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ryan, Jennifer, 1973– author.

  Title: The kitchen front: a novel / Jennifer Ryan.

  Description: First Edition. | New York: Ballantine Group, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020026377 (print) | LCCN 2020026378 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593158807 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593158821 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: War stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3618.Y33465 K58 2021 (print) | LCC PS3618.Y33465 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020026377

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020026378

  Ebook ISBN 9780593158821

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Sara Wood

  Cover image: MW Collaboration/Arcangel (woman), Getty Images (gingham pattern, old paper texture, cookbook)

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Round One: Starter

  Mrs. Audrey Landon

  Lady Gwendoline Strickland

  Miss Nell Brown

  Miss Zelda Dupont

  Audrey

  Zelda

  Lady Gwendoline

  Audrey

  Lady Gwendoline

  Nell

  Zelda

  Nell

  Zelda

  Audrey

  Lady Gwendoline

  Round Two: Main Course

  Nell

  Lady Gwendoline

  Audrey

  Nell

  Lady Gwendoline

  Nell

  Zelda

  Lady Gwendoline

  Audrey

  Nell

  Lady Gwendoline

  Audrey

  Nell

  Zelda

  Round Three: Dessert

  Lady Gwendoline

  Audrey

  Gwendoline

  Nell

  Zelda

  Audrey

  Gwendoline

  Nell

  Nell

  Gwendoline

  Nell

  Audrey

  Zelda

  Audrey

  Gwendoline

  Nell

  Audrey

  Zelda

  Nell

  Audrey

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Jennifer Ryan

  About the Author

  Wartime food rations for one adult for one week

  4 ounces bacon or ham (around 4 rashers of bacon)

  Meat to the value of 1 shilling and tuppence (2 pounds mincemeat or 1 pound steaks or joint)

  2 ounces cheese (a 2-inch cube)

  4 ounces margarine (8 tablespoons)

  2 ounces butter (4 tablespoons)

  3 pints of milk

  8 ounces sugar (1 cup)

  2 ounces jam (4 tablespoons)

  2 ounces loose leaf tea (makes around 15 to 20 cups)

  1 fresh egg (plus 1 packet dried egg powder, making 12 eggs, every month)

  3 ounces sweets or candy

  Sausages, fish, vegetables, flour, and bread are not rationed but often hard to get. Canned food, like sardines, treacle, and Spam, are on the new Points Plan, and can only be bought using your extra monthly 24 points.

  Source: A compilation of Ministry of Food printed materials

  Mrs. Audrey Landon

  Willow Lodge, Fenley Village, England

  June 1942

  A glorious spring morning poured its golden splendor through the tall kitchen window as a whirlwind of boys raced in, shooting at each other in a ramshackle reconstruction of Dunkirk.

  “Get out of here!” Audrey whooshed them out with a dishcloth.

  The aroma of bubbling berries—raspberries, strawberries, red currants—filled the big old kitchen as a slim woman of forty added a touch of cinnamon, a touch of nutmeg. With a man’s sweater tucked into a man’s trousers, she looked hassled and unkempt, her old boots muddy from the vegetable garden.

  The wooden clock on the wall chimed the half hour, and she wiped the back of her hand on her forehead. “Oh nonsense! Is it half past eight already?”

  She strode to the kitchen dresser to turn up the crackling wireless radio, which sat among a jumble of pots and a pile of freshly pulled carrots. While most people kept their radio sets in the living room, Audrey had hauled hers into the kitchen when she began furiously baking to make a few extra shillings—that had been just after the war began two years ago, when her husband Matthew’s plane was shot down over Düsseldorf.

  No trace of him was ever found. In various moments, she tried to stop herself picturing his body—so intimate and dear to her—broken on treetops or burned by an engine fire, his lifeblood spilled over the enemy’s seventh-largest city.

  Ever since his death, she had been run off her feet.

  Audrey had long given up trying to be like a normal person. Every spare moment was given over to baking, anything to make extra pennies, and she often worked long into the night. With three needy boys, debt demands coming weekly, and an old mansion house falling apart around her, normality had flown out the dusty windows years ago. And that didn’t even take into consideration the pig and the hens, her sizable garden now given over to fruits and vegetables, the precious extra ingredients that made her pies and cakes.

  Exhaustion, disillusionment, and that panicky feeling that everything was running out of control had set up home in her heart.

  For the sake of the children, she worked hard to keep her anguish at bay, hugging them through their grief while thrusting her own down into her belly until the middle of the night. It was deemed bad spirit to show tears—Mr. Churchill had drummed that into them: Collective despair could bring the nation to its knees.

  Things weren’t going well for Britain. Even with the propaganda, the BBC radio news couldn’t hide the desperation. The British hadn’t been prepared for war. Her cities had been pounded by the Luftwaffe, her troops were fighting hard in North Africa, and Nazi U-boats were blocking imports of arms, metals, and—most crucial—food.

  The upper-class voice of the presenter, Mr. Ambrose Hart, drawled through the high-ceilinged old room. “Presenting The Kitchen Front, the cookery program helping Britain’s housewives make the most of wartime food rations.”

  “Let’s hear what nonsense Ambrose Hart has to say today,” Audrey said to herself,
tasting a drop of her bubbling berries. They oozed with ripeness. The tang from the red currants pulled the sweetness back, and she had added a teaspoon of sugar to help it along. The government let you have extra sugar for “jam making” if you chose to forego your jam ration. Most of this went into the pies Audrey made to sell, much to the boys’ dismay. Often they had to go without sugar and jam for weeks at a time.

  But she needed the money.

  A few months ago, the bank had called in the loans, threatening to repossess the house. It was a sum far beyond her means, even with her widow’s pension. She couldn’t sell the house, it was her home, and Matthew’s. And besides, it was in far too bad a state—part of the roof had collapsed.

  In the end, she had been forced to seek help where she least desired—and ever since she had been nudged by regret as to what it had cost her.

  “A bread omelet,” Ambrose Hart on the wireless explained, “will stretch a single egg to feed a hungry family of four for breakfast. Soak two capfuls of breadcrumbs in milk made from powder for ten minutes, stir them into a beaten egg—or the equivalent in egg powder—and then cook as usual.”

  “Bread omelet? Is that the best Ambrose can come up with?” Audrey said as her eldest son, a gangly fifteen-year-old, strolled in, his nose in a book.

  Alexander was the eldest of her boys, the A of the ABC Landons, as they were known. B was Ben, a boisterous eleven-year-old, and C was eight-year-old Christopher, who’d been petrified of everything since a bomb came down over a neighbor’s house a year ago. The other boys had recovered from the shock, but little Christopher still slept with her every night. He showed no interest in altering this arrangement, even with the nightly air raids dwindling. Their fraught trudges down to the makeshift Anderson shelter in the garden, armed with a few oatmeal buns, were subsiding into memory, where Audrey hoped they’d stay.

  Audrey knew she relied on Alexander too much, and that it was only a matter of time until he would be called up, too. It was impossible to stop him from going. He would follow his father’s footsteps into the air force—she prayed not also to his grave.

  She unthinkingly etched his face into her memory.

  “Darling,” she said, chopping scrubbed carrots, including their feathery greens. “Can you fetch the ration books and tell me what we have left for this week?”

  Alexander pulled four small black booklets out of a cloth bag. Since everyone in the house was over six years old, they had identical “adult” ration books, issued from the local Food Office in the nearby town of Middleton. The boys got extra milk, concentrated orange juice, and an orange when available—it was illegal for an adult to eat an orange. Less popular was the cod liver oil all children also received, although Ben patently refused it. Audrey had heard that some mothers used it to fry fish when cooking oil was very low.

  Leafing through each book, Alexander found the right week and checked the boxes that had been stamped or cut out. “All used except margarine and some of that nasty dried egg powder. Thank goodness we have the hens.”

  Audrey strode over to check. “Oh dear, I need more butter. The Women’s Voluntary Service needs homity pies for the mobile canteen. I can’t use margarine. That stuff tastes dreadful now they’re putting whale oil into it.”

  “No one will mind, Mum. It’s only the WVS.” He picked up the margarine. “No one expects haute cuisine for snacks from a van. In any case, everyone knows homity pies are just vegetables and leftovers in pastry.”

  “They still need to be edible.” A thought occurred to her. “How much milk do we have left?”

  He looked in the pantry. “Two pints, although one smells a little sour.” His head poked out. “We should get a refrigerator. Apparently the one at Fenley Hall is massive.”

  “Where would we get the money for one of those? We barely have enough to keep going as it is. Now, find a jam jar—there are some on the dresser over by the wireless—and pour in the cream at the top of the good bottle, then screw the jam jar lid on properly and shake it.”

  Alexander followed the instructions, and it was only when he got to the shaking the bottle part that he asked, “How long am I supposed to shake this, Mum?”

  “About twenty minutes. Don’t move. A blob of butter should appear soon. You can watch it grow until it’s collected all the fat from the milk. Then you can strain off the extra milk—keep that for your brothers to drink—and I can use the butter for my pastry.”

  “How very makeshift!” He scooped up his book with his spare hand as he shook with the other.

  Audrey turned from Alexander toward the window of the kitchen, from which she could gaze out into her garden. She’d spent the previous evening picking the berries from her row of bushes, roping the boys in as usual, with the usual cheerful encouragement followed by threats and small bribes. Last night it was an extra slice of the gray, crumbly National Loaf. Universally deemed disgusting, owing to its unpleasant ratio of wheat husk to flour, at least it was off the ration, which meant that no one ever went completely hungry.

  The bushes were one of the first additions to her garden plot. Matthew had put them in the spring before the war—how he’d loved her berry scones—and they now produced well under her tender, sentimental vigilance. Apricots and tomatoes ripened nicely in a small greenhouse Alexander had built for her fortieth birthday. Their old lawn had been converted into lines of vegetables forming variated strips of color—big bright lettuces, purple beetroot leaves, gold and green onions. Newspaper articles encouraged unusual vegetables to add variety, and so she had rows of endives, salsify, and even Jerusalem artichokes, which usefully grew on the thinner soil in the front garden.

  The eight hens in the long coop laid half a dozen eggs every day, and the pig would feed the family well when it was fully grown. It wasn’t strictly hers; it belonged to the Pig Club she’d started with a few local women. There had been talk about raising rabbits, too—a line of broken-down outbuildings could be spruced up for them—but she knew that little Christopher would get too fond of them. The night that Peter Rabbit Pie graced the table would not be a happy one.

  Audrey’s homegrown food provided the basis for the pies and cakes she sold to locals for much-needed extra money. The local Food Office was also able to help with some ingredients, since she could prove they were going into products for sale, but not enough to cover her entirely. All things considered, though, the burgeoning business was doing quite well. The cook at Fenley Hall always took a few pies, as did the pub in the village and a café in Middleton. It was a pity though that the Wheatsheaf, the one village restaurant, had closed down. It had been a keen customer.

  She’d have to find new customers in Middleton—whenever she had the time.

  Alexander put his book down and began wandering around, shaking the jar and poking at the jumble of vases and ornaments on the dresser. He picked up an old silver picture frame. “What was Willow Lodge like when you lived here as a girl, Mum?”

  “Oh, it was heavenly! I would spend hours here in the kitchen making cakes with my mother.”

  She came over, and together they looked at the photograph. In it, Audrey was already tall for her fourteen years, grinning at the camera and squinting in the sunlight. Her mother was in her forties, and even though she was wearing the long skirt and high-necked blouse of an Edwardian lady, the likeness between mother and daughter was striking. Inside the pretty, heart-shaped faces were kind, sparkling eyes. They both had dark blond hair and the same wide, full smile. Beside them, her father appeared sterner than he had been in real life, and then there was Gwendoline, two years younger than Audrey and scowling with displeasure, her dark hair flat around her long, unhappy face.

  She felt a pang of conscience. Audrey had been her mother’s preferred daughter, and Gwendoline had always been jealous because of their mother’s favoritism. Even though Audrey had no say in the matter—she’d tried to make up for
their mother’s preferential treatment, giving Gwendoline her toys, playing with her, letting her win—but she knew that Gwendoline loathed her for it, and she always would.

  “The house must look very different these days!” Alexander laughed, looking around at the chaos.

  “It certainly wasn’t the mess it is now! But we’re incredibly lucky to still be here, even with all the bills.” A lump hardened in her throat. “Unfortunately, your father never earned much from his art.” The house had been left to her and Matthew outright, and in their happy, artistic world, they’d hardly thought before taking a mortgage against it, even less about the following extra loans.

  Alexander looked around at the various odd pictures hanging on the walls. “It’s the obscure shapes and colors, they’re not everybody’s cup of tea.”

  “To him, painting was art, not a means of making money.” A sigh escaped her. She hadn’t realized how dreadful the debts had become until Matthew’s death.

  “Are we going to have to move?” Alexander stopped shaking the jar.

  “Well, we’ll do what we can.” She prayed the makeshift business would hold them above water until she had time to expand her income. It was bad enough working all hours, without having to tramp around the countryside looking for somewhere else to live.

  “Can’t we do more cooking?” He began shaking the jar again, this time more vigorously. “You’ve been earning good money—”