Sarnies

Last week in London I heard for the first time in years the endearing English shorthand term for sandwiches, the diminutive “sarnies.” Time: approximately 1:00 p.m., Wednesday, July 8. Place: The English Tearoom, Brown’s Hotel, Albemarle Street, Mayfair. Speaker: My colleague Gillian Forrester, Curator of Prints and Drawings here at the British Art Center. Host and eyewitness (for whom sarnies were until then a closed book): our Director, Amy Meyers.

The odd thing was that over lunch almost exactly forty-eight hours after this, unprompted by me or anyone else, our London colleague Kasha Jenkinson, said it across the table to Gillian: “sarnies”!

Interestingly in both cases the reference was not to what we were actually eating, but what under radically different circumstances we might have been eating had we not been so lucky as to find ourselves where we were at those particular moments.

On the other hand, the term was on each occasion applied with much affection, so I am not quite sure what it really denoted, except that so often unusual words and expressions crop up in twos, threes, and even (for the especially attentive) fours. Perhaps this is because after the first time you notice something like this, your ear is far more likely to register it again soon afterwards. In any case, there we were—and here we are.

Indeed, I’m not quite sure why sarnies struck any sort of chord with me, because I have no recollection of ever having heard this word uttered at home in Australia, where “sambies” and, hair-raisingly, “sambos” were once fairly widespread—though not, I think, among Borthwicks and Trumbles of this and previous generations. I am told that “sangers” is sometimes also said, but I have never heard that one either.

When I was little I don’t think Mum said anything other than sandwiches—hers are still delicious—and Dad never mentioned them at all, so evidently we four boys followed suit. Perhaps this is as it should be.

Then why did sarnies strike me as somehow deeply familiar? Could this be a case of some vestigial remnant in the brain of something concocted by Mike Leigh, or indeed Alan Ayckbourn (though certainly not Noël Coward)? No doubt the answer lies somewhere on the internet, but let us not be distracted, deflected, or bogged down by trivia.

The Standard of Living

If you are experiencing a certain slackening of the midriff as you bustle as carefully as possible through your fifth decade, you may take heart, as I do, from the brilliant opening paragraph of Dorothy Parker’s story “The Standard of Living” (1940):

Annabel and Midge came out of the tea room with the arrogant slow gait of the leisured, for their Saturday afternoon stretched ahead of them. They had lunched, as was their wont, on sugar, starches, oils, and butter-fats. Usually they ate sandwiches of spongy new white bread greased with butter and mayonnaise; they ate thick wedges of cake lying wet beneath ice cream and whipped cream and melted chocolate gritty with nuts. As alternates, they ate patties, sweating beads of inferior oil, containing bits of bland meat bogged in pale, stiffening sauce; they ate pastries, limber under rigid icing, filled with an indeterminate yellow sweet stuff, not still solid, not yet liquid, like salve that has been left in the sun. They chose no other sort of food, nor did they consider it. And their skin was like the petals of wood anemones, and their bellies were as flat and their flanks as lean as those of young Indian braves.

The petals of wood anemones (Anemone quinquefolia), also known as nightcaps, are—surprise, surprise—soft, white as snow, and, incidentally, native to Connecticut. Any anxieties arising from the hint of excess at this date may be dispelled by the fact that the story first appeared in The New Yorker four months before Pearl Harbor. The prose style is, of course, brilliant. Who has not observed “beads of inferior oil,” or at one time or another eaten pastries that are undeniably limber?