by Rick Stein
I’d just read Orwell’s masterpiece Down and Out in Paris and London, and had wanted to present myself with something unfamiliar, to get away from the ethos of public school. In point of fact, the experience of sweeping roads was less than life-enhancing. I was appalled by the odour of most of my fellow-sweepers. I’d never known such a smell of stale alcohol – that and damp leaves and unwashed crotches and dog shit. No pitying thoughts of how these people came to be doing what they were doing – just plain boy-from-a-privileged-comfortable-home aversion. I was depressed by their dimness.
I was sweeping the road outside the Natural History Museum when my flatmate Tim drove up in his Land Rover. ‘I think you should get in,’ he said in a tight voice. He then told me that my father had died.
I often think I have no memory for detail but I can remember every colour, every hue of that moment. The greyness of the sky, the blue-green of the Land Rover, the darker green of its seats, the coat I was wearing, a brown raincoat, short and, I thought, Italian-looking, which I had worn with such swagger at school with the blue scarf which meant I had been awarded my colours for rugby. The coat was showing its age and I had tied it round with a bit of parcel twine to keep out the wind on London’s streets.
Tim told me in the Land Rover that my dad had been blown off a cliff. I’d actually heard it on the radio that morning – an incident in autumnal gales – but had made nothing of it.
Quite soon I discovered he’d dived off the cliff.
I’d had an argument with Tim only six months earlier about suicide. His father had just shot himself in some woods at his farm in Cheshire, driven to despair by memories of what he’d done as a soldier in France in the Second World War. I had said that it was cowardice to kill yourself. Tim had said that it was brave. I was horribly insensitive. But, curiously enough, I don’t look back on that with shame. There’s something reassuring about the callousness of youth; you haven’t yet learnt about the dark side of life. I see that swagger today in my own sons, but also see their innocence and their hope. Today, I can feel sorry for the memory of myself at 17 having to deal with my dad who leapt off a cliff at Trevose Head.
I don’t remember much about the funeral, just his coffin in St Merryn church and then a slow car journey to the crematorium in Truro. I don’t even remember if there was a wake. My mother received masses and masses of letters about what a great person he was. She was just broken. So sad, but angry too. She spoke of being furious and let down. I thought it was a little hard to be angry with someone who had just killed himself. Only later did I realise what an enormous strain it is living with someone with mental illness.
PART TWO
Rites of Passage
I
I started at the Great Western a couple of days after my eighteenth birthday. First I had to go to Denny’s in Soho to buy three chef’s jackets – white and double-breasted – check trousers; white scarves to be worn with a small knot at the front with one of the corners hanging down your back, and of course chef’s hats. Having worn nothing but jeans ever since I left school it seemed archaic to force myself into this old-fashioned uniform, particularly the hat, which flopped over: I knew nothing about starch at the time.
I had been given a case of Prestige knives by my brother Jeremy. They never made it out of the box. Within the first week I had been lent a 12-inch cook’s knife and a 3-inch knife by the demi chef de partie, Ricky Richards, and had gone to Leon Jaeggi in Shaftesbury Avenue and bought my own Sabatier steel knives and a 6-inch cook’s knife.
For the first three months I worked as a larder chef and learnt how to make mayonnaise by the gallon. In those days, we had few labour-saving mechanical devices and I learnt how to finely chop onions and parsley, dice potatoes and swedes for Russian Salads and mix up vinaigrette with salad oil, white wine vinegar, mayonnaise, white pepper and salt. I washed hundreds of lettuces and dried them, and sliced cucumbers. I made thousands of sandwiches using triple-length white tin loaves. My main job was to look after the hors d’oeuvres: about 30 dishes, called raviers, on a tableclothed trolley. There had to be two of everything, so every day I made up 15 different hors d’oeuvres. The dishes included egg mayonnaise, potato salad, beetroot vinaigrette, salted rollmops, tomato and onion salad, anchovies, cocktail onions, smoked herring, sweetcorn and diced red peppers, sliced tongue with persillade sauce, and stuffed olives. After a month, I was given free rein to put new dishes on the trolley but I didn’t know what. I went to Foyles and bought a book on hors d’oeuvres but I didn’t really go for its rather luridly photographed ideas. Actually, I was happy turning out the regular things. I enjoyed making the mayonnaise. My mother had only ever made it with olive oil and Orleans white wine vinegar. I liked tasting and testing the new flavours. I was experimental with groundnut oil, English mustard, malt vinegar from an oak barrel in the store room, salt and white pepper. I took great care to cook the ingredients for the Russian Salad perfectly. Green beans had to be cut into quarter-inch pieces and cooked for four minutes in salted water, then refreshed in iced water, then strained. Swede, carrot and potato had to be cut into quarter-inch dice. Each had to be briefly boiled separately; the potato needed especially careful watching so that it was cooked but not gone too soft. I combined all these, plus peas, with some mayonnaise but not so much as to make it too rich. Most of the ingredients for the trolley came from tins or jars but the quality of everything was good. I was being introduced to stuff I hadn’t tried at home. I was always sneaking a rollmop out of the jar in the cold room. I grew to love the smoked herring in oil too and formed a passion for tongue. It was my job to cook the tongues in salted water and skin them, leave them to cool, then slice them for the hors d’oeuvres trolley where I served them with a parsley vinaigrette. Once I’d got used to the sight of the lolloping look of whole raw tongue with all the muscle below the tongue itself, I became very attached to the taste of the pink flesh and its texture which was slightly resistant. Apart from the hors d’oeuvres, the tongue was used by the sauce section for Sauce Reform which went with grilled lamb chops, the sauce being a beef stock, port and mushroom mixture with julienne strips of tongue, egg white and gherkin.
The kitchen was organised traditionally, that is, there were five sections (each called a partie): larder, veg, sauce, roasts and pastry. The larder prepared all the fish and meat. It also made the salads and any other cold first courses as well as the many sandwiches for drinks parties, and canapés. The sauce section made all the sauces and cooked the fish. The roasts did all the roasting and grilling of the meat but not the fish. The veg section prepared all the veg and made the soups and looked after the stockpots, which were vast and constantly simmering. The pastry section was not part of the main kitchen and was quite different from the rest. It was presided over by an Irish pastry cook called Pat who wore his apron very short and on the diagonal so it gave him a swagger. He kept asking me if I was ‘getting any’ and thought it hilarious when I didn’t understand what he meant. The daily running of the kitchen was, as is normal, down to the sous chef, Jeffrey Taylor, who shouted a lot, as is normal. In charge of the larder was a ‘Garde Manger’ called Harry who had smoked so much he had difficulty breathing and used to gulp in air rather like a fish expiring at the bottom of a boat. He and Ricky, his demi chef de partie, did all the fish filleting and butchery. A lot of the fish came in whole. I wish now I had concentrated then on what Harry and Ricky were doing because both had skills which most chefs would not be taught these days.
I was transferred from the larder section to sauce after about three months. The great thing about British Transport Hotels in those days was that the training scheme was very thorough and included a period in the kitchen cooking classic French cuisine. On the sauce section, I learnt how to make béchamel and velouté sauces, how to grill and pan-fry Dover soles, and how to put together cod and parsley sauce. The other superb thing about BTH was that it had a really good wine cellar. Shamefully, I wasn’t into wine when I worked there, although I was
overly interested in beer.
My problem was I didn’t really like being at the Great Western Hotel. Looking back I can see why. My father had died, I was in turmoil, I couldn’t work out who I was. I just didn’t know how to feel at ease with these chefs who lived in what seemed to me to be far-away working-class places like Walthamstow or Acton or Balham. Many of them came to work in suits which was weird when all my friends were wearing jeans. In truth, you couldn’t meet a nicer bunch of people. Ricky Richards was endlessly patient with me, a perfect foil for Harry, the boss in the larder, who was apt to get bad tempered from time to time but who was underneath soft hearted too. It was a kind kitchen. The head chef was not a bastard; the sous chef was noisy but not sadistic. I can still remember him yelling at the pass when I was taking my time delivering a salad, ‘Dépêchez-vous, Mr Stein, if you please!’ His voice was fierce but his words were polite, and the laughable mix of kitchen French and East London English was ironic and formal. Quite often we’d all go to the pub, the Pride of Paddington, in Praed Street for a couple of pints. They welcomed me into their chefs’ lives. But I just couldn’t reciprocate. Around them, I felt even more of a failure than usual, confused and with nothing to say.
Part of the problem was my extreme love of Cornwall. I worked one weekend on, one weekend off, and every Friday I longed to go home on the sleeper to be where I really wanted to be. The hotel kitchens were below Praed Street. On the weekend of Easter when I was stuck down in this basement I was almost panicking with frustration, knowing that all my friends would be streaming into Cornwall for a glorious holiday week. It was a bright Easter Saturday and I saw a little ray of sunlight on the floor and looked up at the bright day through a window high on the wall. The feeling of imprisonment was almost unbearable. I had just bought an LP by The Who called My Generation, and one of the tracks, ‘The Kids Are Alright’, was me:
Sometimes I feel I’ve got to get away
Sometimes I know I’ve got to get away
The longing to get back to Cornwall was what I read into the words.
I had felt like this a couple of years earlier when I went to Majorca during the holidays with a schoolfriend, Martin Robinson. We stayed with David Moorehouse, a friend of Martin’s family, in Moorehouse’s villa in Calle Major. He was much older than we schoolboys. We intended to work there for most of the summer. I got two jobs, one washing up in a cafe in the main street during the day, and the other in the evening in a nightclub called Haimat which had an Egyptian theme so we all had to wear fezzes. My job included refilling the Gordon’s and Smirnoff, Johnny Walker and Bacardi bottles with very cheap imitations from large basket-covered glass flagons kept in the cellar. I was massively hung up about only meeting nice girls who you couldn’t have sex with, and David, in his role as laid-back mentor, suggested a visit to a prostitute. I went to the red-light part of Palma in my prized torn jeans and the blue leather jacket I had saved up to buy with my cafe and nightclub earnings. The assignation did not go well. I was so nervous that I picked up the first girl on the street. She was a bit plump and had quite bad underarm BO. She took me to her little rented room and made me wear a condom, probably because I looked so rough in my jeans. It lasted all of 20 seconds, and I returned to David’s house full of remorse. I then suddenly realised I was dying to get back to Cornwall, driven by The Animals’ ‘We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place’.
I abandoned Martin and fled to Cornwall, where I went directly to Trevose golf club to be met at the front door by the owner, Peter Gammon, who said, ‘You’re not coming in here in that blue leather jacket.’
I had decided to go to Australia because of the lifeguards on Cornish beaches. These Australians were charismatic characters, young, mostly blond, fit and good surfers. They were exceptionally attractive to the local girls and we all loved their accents and their openness. They came from a young sunny world altogether more optimistic than ours. I almost got the feeling that people didn’t die suddenly in Australia, let alone throw themselves off cliffs.
By this time I was sharing another flat, this time in Aynhoe Road in Hammersmith, with Christopher Arnott and Clive Rowland and a couple of others. Everything had started to come together. I’d escaped from the hotel basement, and Christopher had got me a job with the Clerical Medical and General insurance company in St James’s Square, right opposite my father’s former offices. The job involved updating records manually, then delivering them to the computer room where people converted them into holes punched into cards to be fed through an early computer. I had started cooking for myself and my flatmates. Nothing too adventurous, spaghetti Bolognese like my mother cooked.
Clive Rowland argued incessantly about how I was making a big mistake taking off for Australia; how I had a great future in the Clerical Medical and General; how, if I left and came back two or three years later, all my friends would have advanced up the ladder and I would be at square one. I certainly wasn’t unaffected by this train of thought, and it would be wrong to think that the prospect of warm weather, surfing and the company of those trouble-free lifeguards and their blonde female friends was more tempting than a career in insurance. But what really stiffened my resolve was a letter from David Moorehouse who had looked after me in Majorca. He was twenty years older than me. He had a refreshing amorality and a loveable Spanish lobo dog called Yogi. Moorehouse told risqué stories about his upbringing in India. I looked up to him.
I wrote to him and told him my father had died and that I was thinking of travelling to Australia and that all my friends had said it was a bad idea. This was his reply:
‘No one ever regretted running away to sea.’
I applied to Australia House for an assisted passage which cost £10 but my mother decided she would pay the fare which cost £195. Perhaps she hoped I would come home sooner than the two years you had to stay if you were a ‘Ten pound Pom’. I was in such a muddle about myself, running away from my emotions, that I didn’t at the time appreciate the sacrifice she was making in letting me go. Heaven only knows what she was going through herself – grief, guilt, regret, rage. And loneliness. Having mental illness in a family puts enormous strain on everyone. In our case, this was mostly on my mother because she hid the reality from us all as best she could. Only after my dad died did she reveal that twice she had intervened to stop him killing himself – once at our farm she took a kitchen knife from him and once she caught him trying to climb out of a train window.
All through her life my mum had a soft spot for the underdog and I think she saw me as that person in our family. My father thought I was like him – and this similarity made him very uncomfortable. I’m no psychiatrist, but it seems to me now that during the depressive stage of being bipolar he would have been full of self-loathing, so that everyone who reminded him of himself would have been part of his dark world. It wasn’t as if he was particularly hard on me; it was more that he deprived me of confidence in myself. I passionately believe now that the best thing you can do for your children is make them feel loved and make them feel special. To live the first five years of your life feeling that you are valuable is a wonderful thing and, if you don’t have it, then you spend the rest of your life trying to find it. I think my mother realised this and tried to compensate for my father’s extreme preoccupation with himself.
The day I left for Australia, I went to the Old Swan in Notting Hill Gate for a last pint with my schoolfriend Tim Dale before we set off for Southampton in his Land Rover. As we emerged from the pub in the September afternoon sun we were under a high mackerel sky.
In Cornwall a mackerel sky is associated with stormy weather to come, and now it only increased the butterflies in my stomach. This feeling was magnified as the ship, the RHMS Ellinis, edged away from the dock leaving my friends waving on the quay. Ship departures were so much more heartfelt than going through the departure gate at an airport. There were your friends, getting smaller as the gap between you widened, and in my case the enormity of what I had done was given ph
ysical reality.
My parents had often talked about the pleasures of travelling by sea – to New York on the Queen Mary, to Sydney on the P&O’s Orsova and to Cape Town on the Union Castle Line, all first class. Here was I – with two leather suitcases that had belonged to my dad with ES embossed on them, and a nice Daks blue suit and pink shirt bought from Simpson’s in Piccadilly with my mother a couple of weeks earlier – in a cabin full of working-class immigrants. Even after the months in the Great Western, my ability to get on with my cabin mates was limited and their willingness to get on with me was the same. We shared a six-berth cabin on one of the lower decks with no porthole. My companions included two painters from the north of England who spray-painted factories and had brought their equipment with them. There was a forestry ranger from Devon and two fat dark-haired brothers from London called Pierre and Eugene, half-French, half-English, who were not keen on me at all. They had short dark hair, brown eyes and puffy white skin, and both were prone to sweating. They wore rather old-fashioned clothes – big vests and underpants, and suits. As it got hotter out came the short-sleeved nylon shirts and baggy slacks and the shorts with turn-ups. They sort of reminded me of the Kray twins. They clearly came from a very close family and their conversation was always about father and mother and relatives. It was almost as if not much existed for them outside their world, certainly not a nineteen-year-old with a posh accent. They dominated the conversation in the cabin and the others were almost only given leave to speak if they did so as the character that the brothers had ascribed to them. I like to be liked and will do much to ingratiate myself, but Pierre and Eugene weren’t interested. I was simply ignored.