by Rick Stein
Later that night the police came to the house. They took me to the cells in St Aldgate’s, where I was told she was dying.
Next day, Martin and I went to see her. We were both crying. Soon her family arrived. They were so non-judgemental of me, it made me feel even more distraught.
Jill had a fairly large piece of her skull removed and gradually recovered.
All that, and drinking too much, and fear of Finals, precipitated a kind of nervous breakdown – not helped by some of the stuff I was reading, which seemed to be all about the meaninglessness of life. Moby Dick stood for me as an example of the arbitrariness of the world. Edgar Allan Poe completely freaked me out with his tales of entombment and his raven calling ‘Nevermore, Nevermore’. I panicked at the idea of being trapped in a white room forever which I took to mean being trapped inside my own skull. At one point I explained the horror of this to my tutor John Bayley who pointed out that Poe was probably suffering from Vitamin B deficiency. It’s one of the symptoms of alcoholism: the skin becomes extremely sensitive and you start to hallucinate about the limits of your body. It was my Waste Land period. I could see nothing but death everywhere. Even hitherto uplifting music like Paul Simon singing ‘Paranoia Blues’ and ‘Mother and Child Reunion’ convinced me that everything was about the shortness of life. I couldn’t listen to the Doors’ ‘The End’, just couldn’t listen to it. Lost in a wilderness of pain, I couldn’t listen to it.
I started depersonalising. It felt like being in a film. I went on a brief trip to Paris and had a panic attack in the middle of the Boulevard St Germain. I was rooted to the spot thinking my death was imminent. Francis asked if I could possibly find somewhere else to collapse, it was bloody inconvenient in the middle of a main road. I became very irate. ‘You bastard,’ I said. ‘This is really serious.’ But even in my extreme anxiety I must have seen that my absolute certainty of a heart attack about to happen couldn’t co-exist with my anger at my friend’s lack of sympathy.
At Beauvais airport, waiting to fly back in a Hawker Siddeley 748, I was petrified in spite of the red wine I was drinking to quell my fears. The plane was going to crash. I became agitated that we were going to miss it. I asked a uniformed man with a handlebar moustache if the plane had already gone.
‘Don’t worry, I’m Captain Anderson, we won’t leave without you.’
I was oddly comforted by that. Maybe people could help me, wouldn’t let me down like my dad had.
On the way home we stopped off at a pub in Kent and I said to John Thompson, ‘I don’t know how you manage to get through life without worrying about dying.’
‘Look, sweetness,’ he said. ‘You’re going to live forever.’
IX
I had moved out of college and into the house that belonged to my brother John. It was a tall, thin, limestone Queen Anne house on Winchester Road. John had lived there for about four years, with his wife Fanny who was the daughter of the Master of Balliol, the historian Christopher Hill. John and Fanny were sociable, intelligent and good looking. Their elder child, William, was the most beautiful boy. I remember the excitement when he made it to the cover of a knitting magazine modelling a chunky jersey for tiny lads. His sister Polly had just been born, blonde and blue-eyed.
John was a new junior medical don at Magdalen College. The house was, to me, the last word in style, pale blue Laura Ashley wallpaper in the basement kitchen, crimson and white walls in the living room upstairs which they had converted from an original front room and kitchen into the long main room with windows at the front looking out over St Philip and St James Church and at the back over their very pretty garden with a gate straight into the Gardeners Arms. John had installed a stereo in the sitting room with built-in 12-inch tweeters and speakers. Every time I listen to the Stones’ Let it Bleed, with the outrageous channel separation of early stereo recordings, I’m back there in number 14 Winchester Road.
John and Fanny were very hospitable. I don’t think I ever went into the kitchen without finding someone seated at the big stripped-pine table talking about politics, music or hash. They took in lodgers, and people were always dropping by, most notably Howard Marks who read history at Balliol. He was precociously bright with a slightly sardonic Welsh accent. He always seemed to be carrying a cotton bag containing about a pound of hash from which he’d regularly cut off enough for joints all round. Neither John nor Fanny was much into dope. At the time John was enthusiastic about home-made wine so there were demijohns bubbling all over the kitchen. None of it was any good but wine was expensive in those days. They were always short of money, hence the lodgers. They had a friend called Peter who did all their DIY jobs for them and seemed to be there all the time; the children called him Hay Bags. He never seemed to be without a ratchet screwdriver. He made cupboards everywhere out of hardboard. Not great feats of carpentry but the Laura Ashley wallpaper made it all look great.
Fanny was one of those women who cannot help but attract the young. She had an instinctive understanding of how to make people feel at home. When she talked to me, I felt like she knew everything about me in a humorous, slightly bossy, older-sister way. She was very attractive – blonde with unforgettable green eyes. I had known her since I was very young: she used to come to the farm and trounce Henrietta and me at jacks. She was also very intelligent and a brilliant cook. Fanny and my sister Janey were significant influences in my later career. In both their houses there would inevitably be Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food and French Provincial Cooking, chopping boards, glass storage jars with wooden tops and striped aprons from Habitat. If Janey’s dinner parties were organised and relaxed, Fanny’s were loud, drunken and stuffed full of cigarette smoke. But both gave me a deep sense that eating was about having fun.
I’m reminded of a poem by Thomas Hardy called ‘During Wind and Rain’:
They are blithely breakfasting all –
Men and maidens – yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee…
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.
Both are dead now. Janey died of cancer in 1984. Fanny drowned in Spain in 1986. Janey’s death was shattering for all of us. After my dad died, she became the central strength of my family. She was very supportive of us all. The last time I saw her in a cancer ward in the Middlesex Hospital, I felt bad afterwards because I talked about buying an old Range Rover simply because I knew she would think it a ridiculous thing and we could talk about something not connected with her imminent death. She never said she knew she was dying, she just told my mother minutes before she died that she did feel very ill. She was like that in life – absolutely protective of her children, her brothers and sister and her mother, but completely private about herself. We all coped with her death badly. Shaun was devastated. She was such a strong person in his life. It took him years to come to terms with it but in the end he married a head teacher called Maggie McLean, and moved to Yorkshire where he has lived very happily for over 20 years.
When my mother died of heart failure, all within the space of a morning at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, it was a sad occasion but she did it so easily and at 89, it was to be expected and the rest of us were capable of organising everything quite sensibly. When Janey died it was as though our lives had been ripped apart.
There are photographs of my mum with Henrietta and me as children in Cornwall. In one of them my mother is looking at me with protective affection and, looking at the photo, I can see that I was with the person I then loved most on earth. I must have been about eight. Henrietta looks blissfully happy too. My mother adored Henrietta but treated her as a friend. It was almost as if she expected her daughter to be less vulnerable than her son. Certainly she guided me and guarded me. Henrietta could get a bit wry about my ‘special relationship’ with our mother.
Both Henrietta and I were there at the John Radcliffe when
my mother died in 2000. And, in the final moments before she slipped into unconsciousness, it was to Henrietta she turned.
John and Fanny’s marriage didn’t last very long. It seems always to be something in childhood which spins people off course. Fanny had been neglected as a child – her father was too busy making his name in academia and her mother Inez was really quite selfish. Inez was very attractive. What made everything a little tense in my family was that Inez had had an affair with my father. My mother found a receipt for the Russell Hotel in London’s Russell Square in my father’s jacket pocket. Since, in those days, wives usually emptied their husband’s pockets and hung their suits up, she concluded that he probably had left it there on purpose. I can well understand that he might have subliminally wanted to be found out and stopped, because Inez would have driven him wild. She wasn’t malevolent like du Maurier’s Rebecca, just slightly psychopathic. I have to say, I enjoyed her company. She was bright and very funny. In her latter years, she was a successful garden designer for people such as Diana Quick and Albert Finney and Jeremy Irons, who all adored her. I don’t think her mother, Madeleine, was much of a mother to Inez either. Philip Larkin says it all. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. Fanny was damaged, certainly. When she first started going out with John, my father was vociferous in his opposition to her but of course that just made John dig his toes in. She became pregnant with William and they married in their early twenties. By the time I arrived in Oxford the marriage was on the way to disaster. Fanny was having an affair with a close friend which everyone except John knew about. When he finally found out, she moved out of Winchester Road with the children to a house in Leckford Road, North Oxford. John, after living on his own for a short while, moved into Magdalen College and I moved into Winchester Road with two friends, Martin Leeburn and Al White.
Ironically the split-up with Fanny was the beginning of a much closer relationship between John and me. In a large family like ours, the six-year age gap had meant that we split into two groups – John, Janey and Jeremy, and then Henrietta and me – so I didn’t really know him before. He was desolated by what was happening to him. I persuaded him to come along to all the parties that I was going to and to meet all the people I was frenetically trying to get to know. I hate to admit it but I was rather using his position as a junior don to give me a bit of cred. He now says it helped him to get over Fanny. It makes me feel guilty about wanting him to be an asset to me rather than the liability I thought he was. He was no liability really. He’s always been more sociable and confident than me and, as he came out of his depression, he took to dressing flamboyantly in blue velvet suits and flowing scarves and enjoying himself as much as anyone with a mind like my brother’s can ever enjoy himself. He is far and away the cleverest man I’ll ever know. He combines a prodigious memory and power of reasoning with a bleak humour about the impermanence of everything. With a bottle or two of wine you can talk to him almost on a telepathic level down into the deep valleys of thought.
Behind our house in Winchester Road was the Gardeners Arms. Martin, Al and I would go there most lunchtimes. It had a jukebox and, while I still couldn’t listen to ‘Mother and Child Reunion’, ‘Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard’ lifted me up a little and Lindisfarne’s ‘Meet Me on the Corner’ started to break the clouds. Music and eating. Even at my lowest ebb, I had consoled myself with food in Paris. We had found a hotel on the left bank called Le Grand Hotel de l’Univers which had a spiral staircase up the middle painted red with the steps sloping inward, and tiny toilets with curved doors painted on the outside. Nearby was a place that sold moules marinière and steak frites with bottles of Beaujolais or Cabernet Franc from Saumur and Chinon. It also had a Gewürztraminer which they sold over the bar in tiny thick glasses with long green stems. Those steaks were a massive cheer-up – so deliciously salty, thin and bloodily rare and the chips thin and crisp and the salads made with a creamy dressing clinging to the bitter leaves. The problem, though, was always that in red wine I found calmness but the huge amount I drank eventually made things worse. I cooked the odd dinner party with Martin and Al at Winchester Road. On one notable occasion we did prawns with aïoli and a civet de lièvre from Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking.
Perhaps more importantly, I began to realise that the covered market in Oxford was really quite special. I had become used to having breakfast at George’s Cafe after a heavy night. The pleasure of the full English, George’s style, and a giant mug of tea was considerable. There was no question but HP sauce was essential but, for me, the crowning glory of the bacon, sausages, eggs, tomatoes and baked beans was the fried bread. Everything was fried in lard which permeated the whole cafe in a blue haze. I still find the hot pork smell of lard deeply comforting. Yes, for breakfast it had to be George’s and, in the afternoon, tea at Brown’s and mushrooms on toast. Almost as important to me as the architectural beauty of Oxford was that market. It was handsome too. Over 200 years old, it had very high ceilings with curved steel roof trusses and large lanterns hanging down. The food stalls added to the sense of occasion – from a large fishmonger’s near the Market Street entrance with lots of whole fish on display to two or three butchers in the middle aisle. Hedges specialised in game and in the winter there would be whole venison carcasses hanging up as well as hares, rabbits, pheasants and partridges. The greengrocer’s, Bonners, was an inspiration to get cooking, while Palm’s delicatessen was a source for the sort of things you really could get nowhere else in those days, including saffron, Spanish olive oil, feta cheese, palm hearts and bamboo shoots. I bought mackerel, cod and crab from the fishmonger and took them back to Winchester Road for early forays into fish cookery. For someone with a growing appreciation of food, Oxford was a good place to be. I think that market gave me a real sense of ownership of Oxford. To me there’s something very reassuring about being in a place where there’s good food.
While supposed to be revising for my Finals, reclining on a chaise longue looking out of the window with a glass of port, maybe thinking about Coleridge, I developed a passion for chorizos which, inexplicably, were sold in a deli next to the Rose and Crown in North Parade just round the corner from Winchester Road. I had had no idea what they were, but Martin, who was reading modern languages at St Peter’s Hall and had spent some time in Spain, had put me on to them. The smokiness and deep orange colour, the garlic and chilli spiciness were a glimpse into a world of robust flavours. I used to waste plenty of time wandering round to North Parade, perhaps for a pint in the Gardeners Arms and a chat to Cyril, the landlord, then back to the chaise longue for some more Coleridge, but before that I’d make myself a lunch of sliced chorizo with tomato and onion salad and crusty bread. Food was much more interesting than studying English literature.
My last year at Oxford, though wobbly at the beginning with my mental turmoil, ended quite peacefully. I got a third in English, which was about what I was worth. It didn’t make me feel any better about myself, though. Jill always maintained that my breakdown was due to fear of doing badly in the exams but I think it was more to do with a delayed reaction to my father’s suicide coupled with the realisation that we all have to come to terms at some stage with the fact that we aren’t going to live for ever. These fears, of course, are deep in our subconscious – and I had done a good job of burying them even deeper – but I was terribly afraid not only of sudden death, but also of going crazy like my dad.
So I left Oxford with a definite improvement in my culinary knowledge but no knowledge of what I really wanted to do. I made a couple of desultory attempts to get into journalism. I applied for a BBC general traineeship but was turned down. I thought of having a go at advertising. But, after the accident, I knew I wanted to be with Jill and, after Oxford, what I wanted in the short term was to drive to Greece in The Purple Tiger disco van, with Jill and a gang of friends. It wasn’t the endless breakdowns of that old van nor the not-always-friendly relations in a slow vehicle w
hich I remember best, nor the fear of travelling down the main road in Yugoslavia which we got to call the crystal highway on account of the horrific traffic accidents we saw all the time. No, the abiding memory of that trip was the food.
There is a popular view that Greek cooking is cold and greasy. The first time I tasted Greek food was in 1966 in Athens on my way to Australia. I ordered a plate of fried aubergines with Greek oregano and a glass of retsina. I found the aubergines too bland and the oregano and the wine too strong. In 1970, I’d got off the ferry from Brindisi to Igoumenitsa and entered a dirty kitchen to choose lunch. There was a giant, rectangular, shallow bain-marie filled with big dented aluminium pans. The first lid I lifted exposed a number of goats’ heads in a watery-looking broth. I had something of a hangover: I had been playing cards with the ship’s engineer and drinking Fix beer on the ferry late into the night. I formed the opinion there and then that I would starve to death, because Greek food was going to be all eyeballs and oregano. In point of fact, on my post-Oxford trip it was the glorious shock of the new. I grew to love it. The fish – red mullet, cooked outdoors on a little charcoal grill and served with a Greek salad scattered with dried rigani and some sliced potatoes fried in a black pan in olive oil. The ubiquitous green beans in a rich tomato sauce and the same sauce with giant butter beans. The lovely potato, olive oil and pounded garlic skorthalia, so good with grilled fish. The locally made ewes’ milk yoghurt in shallow earthenware containers, always with a soft crust and always with Greek honey. The memory takes me to Matala on the south coast of Crete and an old Bal-Ami jukebox in The Mermaid Cafe where you had to make your selection by turning a big wheel. Here I first heard a Greek song called ‘Gelmenden’ sung by a pin-up, Rena Dalia, and Ioannis Papaioannou, who was a famous composer of bouzouki music. I played it every day. I took a copy home with me and played it in my disco, where people didn’t get it but I didn’t care. The tune sparked memories of great times in Lindos on the island of Rhodes, with the bedroom window wide open and the silvery courtship calls of Scops owls in the warm, pine-scented darkness. Jill and I loved Greece: the light, the ‘wine dark’ sea, the dry sunny climate, the emphatic people and the robust cooking. For my generation, it was like discovering Thailand is for young people today, our own place, not the Florence, Venice and Rome that my parents went to, but Monemvasia, the central market in Athens, the waterfront at Simi. Studying ferry timetables in Piraeus was our guide to the galaxy. The Evangelistra, which did indeed have a worrying list and which eventually sank. The Mimika, a converted English cross-Channel ferry plying from Piraeus to Rhodes. These were the old ships in which we traversed the Aegean with the disco van hoisted aboard on ropes.