by Rick Stein
Outside the cabin things were a whole lot better. The Ellinis, run by a Greek company called Chandris Lines, was a pleasingly proportioned liner. She had been built in 1932 for voyages between San Francisco and Hawaii so all the public rooms had names and decor like the Outrigger Bar and the Waikiki Dining Room. About two-thirds of the passengers were Greek immigrants. The food was not great: overcooked roasts and steaks and hard pieces of breadcrumbed fish, but I certainly enjoyed the Outrigger Bar and particularly a beer in a green and silver can called Victoria Bitter. I retain great affection for that beer to this day. The company in the bar was generally rather good. There were a group of nurses from Exeter emigrating to Melbourne, a young good-looking, half-American, half-English youth of my age called Guy and another boy, Tom, of 17 or 18 who was on his way to a job at a bauxite mine in northern Queensland. Most importantly there was a girl from Toorak in Melbourne called Kaye. Kaye is still the occasional subject of my dreams. She was very tall, probably six foot, slim and blonde with light blue eyes and an air of exclusivity about her. She dressed fabulously. She was just not part of that ship of fools: she was la belle dame sans merci, she was Ayesha. She was, I knew, unattainable for me but that didn’t stop me trying. For some reason I have kept my diary of 1966. Frustratingly, there are only three entries in it. One of them says, ‘I want her and I find myself delighting in her presence but not daring to speak to her. I can’t help but get the feeling that she is patronising me.’ Looking back, I see she was not patronising, she was just older. On the last night before we docked in Melbourne she dined with Guy. Did they do it? How I hoped not. Eighteen months later I rang her from a hotel. Even though I announced my name clearly on the phone, she said, ‘Who are you?’ Our evening together was strained. ‘She was beautiful I was lost,’ I wrote, with all the immaturity of callow youth.
I grew up a little on the Ellinis. I realised that my cabin mates, the spray painters from Manchester, were funny and that the forester from Devon was salt of the earth, and I guess I became a bit of an alternative because the brothers steadily increased their antagonism towards me. They discovered a way of upsetting me by treating the cabin steward as little more than a slave and using plenty of language like ‘wops’ and ‘wogs’. In the end the worm turned. Pierre addressed the steward as ‘a little dago c**t’, and I lost it, but with no real power behind what I was saying.
‘You shouldn’t behave like that.’
‘Like what?’ shouted Pierre.
‘Don’t speak to him like that,’ I squeaked.
‘Don’t you talk to me like that, you little runt.’
He didn’t attack me, just let it be known that I was going to be thrown overboard later. I was petrified for 24 hours, then mysteriously he started talking to me again as if nothing had happened, which I must have found acutely embarrassing because the note in the diary says, ‘I think my new friendship with Pierre is a dubious pleasure.’
Only since reading Rites of Passage by William Golding have I begun to realise what a spoiled prig I was then. It’s the story in three books of a voyage by a British frigate to Australia during the Napoleonic wars, seen through the eyes of an 18-year-old boy called Edmund Talbot. The novel is related in the form of letters from Edmund to his godfather. The reader is made very aware of the grim realities on board, but Edmund doesn’t grasp what is going on because of his youth and upper-class upbringing. Gradually he grows up and, though his arrogance and insensitivity irritate, his innocence engages our sympathy.
My rites of passage started on the Ellinis and continued for the two years I spent in Australia.
II
I arrived in Sydney on 6 October and spent a few months on the North Shore at Warrawee, living with a family whose father, Lister Ifould, was in the same business as my father. I remembered him and his wife Mary from their visits to Conduit Farm.
The night I arrived Lister said to me, ‘One thing you’ve got to understand about Australia is we’re an outdoor country. We don’t spend time sitting by the fire reading books and poetry. We play lots of sport and swim.’
I was suffering another bout of insecurity. Having got used to the ship, here I was again in a strange environment, feeling acutely homesick. I found most things about Sydney unfamiliar and hostile, even little things like the grass: though there was plenty of grass everywhere, it wasn’t the same as the grass at home, which was soft. In Sydney it was almost abrasive. Far from revelling in the hot sunshine, I got heat rash. I was bitten by mosquitoes. All the colours were too bright, not like the pastel shades of Cornwall. I stood out because the clothes I’d bought were entirely out of style with what all the young people were wearing in Sydney.
There were four children in the Ifould family – three girls, Pam, Marion and Frances, and one boy, Edward, who was the same age as me. Ed was welcoming to me but I found it difficult to reciprocate. The Australians have directness, possibly only shared in my country by some Yorkshire men and women, and some Geordies. For me in those far-off days it was purgatory. I’d always found it difficult to say what I wanted, and I shared with many inhibited English people the slightly irritating way of expressing myself – almost a language of self-effacement, understatement and indecision. Ed Ifould’s personality was like a hot knife cutting through the butter of mine.
Ed: ‘I’m going to Newport for a surf. Want to come?’
Me: (thinks) Does he really want me to come or is he just saying it because his parents have been telling him: be nice to Rick, he’s over here, his father just died.
Me: ‘Well … if you don’t mind …’
Ed: ‘It’s fine.’
Me: (thinks) Does he really mean that? Wouldn’t he prefer to be with his friends rather than with me? I’m so boring to him because I don’t act in any way like them. I’m just the irritating Pom staying in his house …
Me: ‘Look, I really don’t mind if you’d prefer just to be with your friends because …’
Ed: ‘Look, do you want to come or not?’
Me: ‘OK.’
Needless to say, I hero-worshipped Ed. He was very fit, a brilliant surfer, an amusing raconteur and unfailingly popular with the girls. On the way out to Newport in his beige VW Beetle, when it was wet he would always swing round the bends through Ku-ring-gai Chase in a controlled tailspin just for the pleasure of it. Wherever we went everyone was delighted to see him, so why would he bother to spend time with me? What I didn’t understand was that he was in his element, he was just being Ed. I, on the other hand, was floundering.
When my father died, his sister Zoe was with him. He’d been in a state of agitation all morning, and she had persuaded him to go for a walk to calm him down. They left our home, Redlands, and walked up the small road towards the lighthouse on Trevose Head. Three-quarters of the way up, they turned right, into the grey bumpy drive of Polventon, intending to walk along the cliff path. At the narrowest point, beyond a herring-bone slate wall with a tamarisk growing out of it, where the track runs very close to the edge, my father turned to Zoe and said, ‘I told you I’d do it,’ and dived on to the rocks beneath.
The Ifoulds had two houses. One was at Bay View which is on Pittwater, a stretch of calm water which lies behind the ocean beaches of Palm Beach, Whale Beach, Avalon, Bilgola and Newport. Their main home, at Warrawee, was in a smart suburb not dissimilar to where my sister Janey and brother-in-law Shaun lived in Highgate in London. Nice people, good schools. Children going off to them every day in similar uniforms, albeit with bigger hats. Tidy streets, good cars. But the northern beaches were different. It was there that I had discovered the burger shop in Newport. Its hamburgers were like nothing I’d ever tasted. Back in the UK we just had Wimpys. A Wimpy burger was probably three ounces of overcooked minced beef with lots of onions and shoestring chips. The only accompaniment was tomato ketchup. We teenagers loved a Wimpy. But here, a burger meant a much bigger piece of meat in a bun with cheese, sliced tomato, sliced beetroot, onions, lettuce, bacon, a fried egg and ketchup.
On top of that, and almost more memorable, was a chocolate malted milk shake. It was this hamburger and this milk shake that made me realise that Australia was a good place to be. Food has always been a comfort to me and an inspiration, and as I became enthusiastic about Australian food I became more enthusiastic about Australian life. It suddenly dawned on me that these people were enjoying extraordinarily good times. Every weekend there was a party. The Newport Arms was the best pub in the world. My own experience of beer gardens had been the Farmers Arms in St Merryn, sitting on a beer crate with a few chickens clucking around. Newport was open-air drinking on a scale and sophistication that I could never have dreamed of. For a start the pub was enormous, with two or three outdoor bars and parts of its garden overlooking Pittwater. What intrigued me above all was the pouring of the beer from what looked like petrol pumps. For some time I was nervous about asking for a schooner or a midi, because the punters used to call out, ‘a schooner and you,’ which I took to be some sort of compliment to the always-pretty barmaids, in other words, ‘a drink for you, too.’ Only subsequently did I find that what they were actually saying was, ‘a schooner of new,’ new being Tooheys new as opposed to Tooheys old which was dark beer and not to my taste. I loved the lagers of Australia.
Lister Ifould got me a job on the newly formed TV Channel Ten, scenery-shifting in the studio. The main show was a weekly variety programme called The Barry Crocker Show. Barry, or Bazza as he became known, went on to star in two films based on Barry Humphries’ strip cartoon in Private Eye called Barry McKenzie. Crocker is a legend in Australia, as one of the last of the great variety performers. Also his name has slipped into the vernacular in rhyming slang – a Barry Crocker is ‘a shocker’ but also barking, as in ‘off your rocker’. The show was hard work for us scenery-shifters because it had a lot of different sets and none of it was pre-recorded, so there was a lot of rapid moving of stages, pianos, people and, on one occasion, donkeys. The main part of the job was putting up the stage walls which they call flats and which we had to join with cord and brace with sandbags. Our boss was a tough and wiry man called Harry Miller, who was scary. He had a difficult job to do and he didn’t take slip-ups well. He shouted at everyone except me. The more he didn’t shout at me, the harder I worked to avoid being shouted at. We all wore green cotton boiler suits and nothing on underneath except underpants because it was very hot. None of us looked good in them except Harry who wore pointed, light brown leather brogues with thin soles and walked across the studio floor with a swagger. He was consistent in his bollockings and I found myself very eager to please him. It’s actually bliss to be working under someone who knows what he wants. Harry had jaundiced views on politics, the Channel Ten management, and virtually everything else outside stagecraft. He’d been working in theatres all his life; he was probably gay but no one would have dared to ask him any personal questions.
In addition to the Barry Crocker show, we had daily promotional scenes to set, often for local furniture shops which exhibited five or six different bedroom or living room combinations of cheap and very nasty furniture. We also went on outside broadcasts, mostly to wrestling or boxing matches in RSLs (Returned Servicemen’s Leagues) in areas like Redfern, Manly or Parramatta. I’d never been in a working men’s club in the north of England, but I imagined these would be similar if a little more modern – i.e. lots of drinking and lots of shouting at the wrestlers who, it didn’t take me long to realise, were mostly not wrestling, just good at looking like it.
I’ve kept the best part of the job till last. Every week a young married couple would drive right into the studio in their pale blue Karmann Ghia car and take out pots, pans, plates, a refrigerated box of food and two or three bottles of wine. Looking after their set was an easy job because the small studio was permanently set up as a smart, wood-panelled kitchen. This cook was an Englishman called Graham Kerr, and his wife was Treena. I was aware at the time of Fanny Cradock, but wasn’t interested in TV cookery programmes. Graham’s show, Entertaining with Kerr, however, was fun. He cooked lovely food and he let us finish off the wine. If he was making something like scrambled egg, you just had the feeling it would taste better than any egg you had eaten before. It goes without saying that there was lots of butter and cream in his recipes, but who cared? He’d make a red-wine stew with a bottle of Penfolds and help himself to a glass while he was doing it. The programmes were engaging because he was so clearly enjoying himself. Two years after I left the channel, he moved to Canada and re-emerged as the ‘Galloping Gourmet’, a name which he and the late and much-lamented Australian wine maker Len Evans had come up with.
Shortly before I started working at Channel Ten, I had moved into digs near the station in Roseville, a few stops down the North Shore line into Sydney. My room, a tiny bedroom with communal cooking and washing facilities, was at 28 Archer Street. It was a pleasant federation house with a big garden at the back. I don’t remember many of the other residents except a woman in her thirties. She was slightly overweight and a bit too theatrical for my liking. And yet there was something about the peachy softness of her lightly dimpled thighs which made me wish I could join her in her bedroom. I think now that she wouldn’t have minded, but then, I had absolutely no experience in making such a suggestion. I had retreated into myself. I read Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One and Scoop and, most notably, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I had been influenced into reading Dostoyevsky after a glass or two with my mum in our big upstairs sitting room at Redlands which had picture windows looking over Booby’s and Constantine Bays. It was the room where my mother spent a lot of time after my father’s death. She’d ask Henrietta and me to join her for a sherry in the late morning so she could share her sadness with us. She described marriage as a huddling together in the dark, and recommended Dostoyevsky for his unwavering clarity of the realities of human existence, made more stark by his time spent as a political prisoner in Siberia and his addiction to gambling. I could hardly claim that 28 Archer Street was like the tenement building in St Petersburg where Raskolnikov, the penniless student, murders his landlady. In Crime and Punishment this is a building of tiny apartments inhabited by ‘tailors, locksmiths, cooks, Germans of every description, prostitutes, petty clerks and the like’. But lying on my narrow bed in my little room in Roseville with a landlady who was to me as foreign as St Petersburg, I didn’t feel too chipper.
Of course, I wasn’t depressed all the time. I went out with Ed – lots of schooners of new and Marlboro reds, and on one occasion at the Greengate pub in Killara, the Supremes on a very loud jukebox singing, ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. I liked the job too. If I’d stuck with Harry and scenery-shifting, I would have probably ended up as a TV director. But I wanted to write. I coveted the journalists’ jobs on the channel but didn’t know how to manipulate this. I was censorious about most of the girls at Ten who seemed to spend their time flirting with the producers, directors and presenters, but I know now that to get on in TV, that’s how it works. God, I was serious in those days.
It was shortly after he retired that my father killed himself. He was only 58. I don’t know whether he was made to retire, or whether he did so of his own volition. His firm, Distillers, had been involved in the marketing of thalidomide, the drug prescribed for pregnant women suffering from morning sickness. It had the side-effect that many children were born with deformities. I don’t know if the shame and horror of this scandal had anything to do with either his retirement or his depression. But I do know that he was not cut out for a life of idleness. He found retirement difficult. After he died, I discovered a filing cabinet in which he had carefully labelled everything in his own hand. I imagine that in his heyday as a successful businessman, Miss Screech, his secretary, would have done such things for him. Sitting in his room at home obsessively labelling his own files, his life had become devoid of meaning and empty of decision-making.
III
Jobs were easy to come by at this time. Before I began at Channel Ten, I had worked in one of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company’s chemical factories sweeping up powder which would become polythene by some complicated chemical process. But young people always think the grass might be greener and now I wanted to travel.
I spent the holiday at Bay View with the Ifoulds surfing, listening to The Monkees interminably singing ‘I’m a Believer’, the song of that Christmas, 1966, and eating hamburgers and chocolate malted milkshakes from the takeaway in Newport. Three days after my twentieth birthday on 4 January 1967, I set off for far north Queensland.
I latched on to two schoolfriends, Jake Walton, who had played in my bands, and his chum Bill Heath. In those days everybody hitchhiked. Today most people are too scared, or they discover that flying is cheaper. I speedily learned, when I got out on the road and stuck up my thumb, that Australia is overwhelmingly large. Hitch-hiking was like some big lottery. I never knew who would stop. There was an instrumental single at the time called ‘Cast Your Fate to the Wind’. That’s what it was like. And it was also like that for the drivers who gave me lifts, too.
One hot day, a pale blue VW Beetle stopped. Its driver, Steve, was a printer from Newcastle, New South Wales, who had decided to quit his job and go travelling. He didn’t know where he was going any more than I did. He was in his early twenties, wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, a sort of uniform for most youths in those days but within that were myriad nuances in style. Steve’s shirts were just a little too patterned, the shorts just a little too tight. I looked frightful too. I wore an over-tight blue-and-white shirt in blocks of colour, with a little button on the narrow turn of the sleeves, and unfortunate pale blue shorts. At least nothing could be read into the flip-flops we were both wearing. They’re called thongs in Australia, which means g-string to us, which can be confusing of course, but in those days everyone wore flip-flops. Except, that is, Jake and Bill. Jake had cowboy boots. Bill’s summer clothes were conservative: brimmed hat, Viyella shirt, khaki trousers and desert boots. I know this because I have a picture of us in Brisbane taken for the local paper, the Courier-Mail, the story being three Englishmen hitching around Australia. News must have been thin on the ground that week, even for Brisbane. The caption reveals that, by then, I so wanted to be an Australian I had started trying to talk like an Aussie.