It was my dream, and I didn’t get there entirely by throwing cheese on the wall. And unlike many of the other winners in the Michelin lottery, I didn’t get there through Paris, France. My story begins a couple of hundred miles north of London, in Leeds, where I was born on December 11, 1961. Don’t be fooled by the first two names. I am neither from Italy nor France, but a Yorkshireman born and bred.
TWO
Blue Skies over Leeds
DAD WAS A chef too, and the son of a chef. I can’t tell you much about the old man’s abilities because I never saw him cook in a professional kitchen, but at home we always ate well. We’d have steak and kidney pie, shepherd’s pie, boiled beef and dumplings. It was good traditional English comfort food. For tea on Friday, Dad would serve us pork chops and treat himself to a steak. We rarely had tinned food in the house because back in those days it was expensive, very much a middle-class thing. The usual sort of tinned foods—baked beans, soups, mushy peas—we made ourselves. Rhubarb crumbles would be made from the fruit in our tiny garden. The mint for mint sauce, again, came from the garden rather than a shop. Dad had lived through wartime food rationing, which had lasted into the fifties, and as a result I think his obsession was to ensure that we were fed well. When I was a hundred yards from my house, I could have closed my eyes and followed the smell of cooking to get me home. We might not have had much of anything else, but we always had lots of food.
As a professional, the old man would have had a good apprenticeship at the Griffin Hotel in Leeds, the hotel where he had met my mother back in the fifties. He had also worked at the Queens Hotel, that landmark beside the Leeds railway station. He would tell me stories of a brilliant French chef, Paul La Barbe, who worked in that kitchen but had trained in the grand restaurants of Paris. In the stories, Paul was a gifted chef who worked with speed and had that lightness of touch. I don’t remember specifics about Paul’s abilities but I was left with the feeling that cooking could produce passion. Other fathers might have told their kids impressive stories about American super-heroes but I got the stuff about the French supercook and I loved hearing about him.
How do I think Dad would have fared in the kitchen? Well, he was organized and routined in his daily life; cooking being an extension of the person, I’d say that in his day he was probably a highly competent, disciplined cook. He would not have been a creative man; creativity wasn’t a requirement in those days. Chefs rarely moved away from buffet work. In every professional kitchen there was that tiny book, Le Répertoire de La Cuisine, containing six thousand brief, concisely written recipes from hors d’oeuvres to pastries. There are no pictures in Le Répertoire to help the cook know how to serve a dish, but its recipes are invaluable. Written by Louis Saulnier and inspired by the great French chef Auguste Escoffier, Le Répertoire told you, for instance, dozens of ways to serve potatoes, from Algerienne (puréed sweet potatoes, mixed with chestnut purée, thickened with egg yolk, shaped into a quoit, dipped in egg and bread crumbs, and then fried in clarified butter) right through to Pommes Voisin (layers of sliced potato, bit of clarified butter, into the oven to cook and for color, out of the oven, grated cheese on top). Chefs did not stray from the recipes and were rarely adventurous. In Dad’s time most restaurants served the same food: Répertoire-type dishes like lamb cutlets and kidneys with mustard.
After the Queens he’d become the canteen manager at Jonas Woodheads in Leeds, and sometimes I would go to meet him with my brother Clive. His cooks and waiters would be quietly working away to feed hundreds of people every day. The place was always spotless and clean, the tables were lined up beautifully and not a single chair was out of place. It was regimented and perhaps, in this respect, he was a perfectionist.
WE LIVED—MY father, mother, two brothers and I—in a two-bedroom, semidetached house on a housing estate in Moor Allerton, about five miles outside the center of Leeds. It was predominately Jewish and working class, with a warm community spirit—one of those places where the women would stand outside the shops chatting about the latest developments in Britain’s favorite TV soap, Coronation Street. Hundreds of small houses lined the roads that were mostly named Lingfield something-or-other. If I came out of my house and turned left, I’d come to Moor Allerton golf course and, beyond that, the woods of the Harewood estate. If I came out of my home, turned right and strolled down to the bottom of the road, I’d reach the parade of shops on Lingfield Drive. There was the newsagent shop, which was run by two women who had lost their husbands in the war. There was the Jewish bakery and Tom Atkins, the veg man. There was the fish man and the butcher, whose afternoon custom was to sweep up the sawdust, wash the floor and then, and only then, give his dog a bone to chew on the pavement outside. The off-license was run by Harry Baker, and like other kids on the estate, I would sneak to the back of his shop, pinch the empties from crates and then go in through the front door with the bottles and reclaim the deposit. The parade is shabby today, but then it was the hub of our community.
We would take family holidays to Bridlington, the seaside resort in Yorkshire, which was windy and damp but heaving with people who couldn’t afford to go abroad for a break.
My mother was Italian. She was tall, beautiful and elegant. She spent her days cooking and making patchwork quilts with her cherished Singer sewing machine. She was one of those women who always looked good. If she was wearing cutoff jeans and flat-soled shoes, she still seemed chic. When she got dressed up, she’d wear a cameo brooch in her lapel.
I had holidays with my mother in Genoa, where her side of the family lived and where she had grown up—before coming to England and being chatted up in the bar of the Griffin Hotel by a young chef called Frank White. I have happy recollections of those Italian vacations, picking fruit from the trees, fishing in the streams, making early-morning walks to collect goat’s milk from a nearby farm. I remember sitting in the kitchen at home in Moor Allerton, watching her cook simple but delicious pasta dishes: sweating onions in olive oil, adding tomato purée, adding a little more olive oil—the comforting scent warming the room.
At lunchtime she’d collect me and my best friend, Geoffrey Spade, from school and take us back to our place for lunch. She’d make us treats of chunky banana sandwiches and then treat herself to well-sugared Camp coffee, the closest thing to espresso that England had to offer. She was a compassionate woman, a good mother.
IT WAS, I suppose, a childhood just like anyone else’s: neighbors, family, food, sport, the outdoors. If it had gone on as it started, I might not have grown up tough enough to excel in the kitchen, and you might not be reading this book. But it didn’t. One Saturday, February 17, 1968, when I was just a lad aged six, things changed and life would never be the same.
Dad and I had spent that morning in St. James’s Hospital. A few weeks before, I had run into the door handle at the newsagent’s just down the road and cut myself near my eye. We’d had the stitches removed and gone back home. We were sitting there in the front room when Mum came in, complaining that she felt unwell. Ten days earlier she had given birth to her fourth son, baby Craig, and up until that moment she had seemed fine. There had been no noticeable symptoms, no obvious signs. Now, suddenly, her head was splitting and she could hardly stand. My father called for an ambulance. What followed remains a vivid picture in my mind. I remember it better than I remember yesterday.
. . . I am standing at a windowsill in our council home. My brother Clive, six years my senior, is at my side and we are looking through the glass, down onto the pavement below.
The ambulance is parked. And there is my mother, a blanket is wrapped around her and she is sitting in a wheelchair. She is being put into the ambulance. An ambulance man turns to my father and says, “Bring the baby.” A baby needs a mother.
My father is standing there, dressed smartly in a gray suit. He is holding Craig, the youngest of the family. Ten days old.
Crisp, blue sky. Bright sunshine.
“Bring the baby,” the ambulance man repe
ats. “He’ll need feeding.” My father climbs in with Craig, who looks very snug and warm, wrapped up in a cozy white blanket.
Bang! Doors close, engine starts. The exhaust pipe pukes a dark cloud. The ambulance drives away, up the hill, out of sight.
EVERY NIGHT FOR the next few nights Dad would give us our dinner before heading off to the hospital to see Mum. After the visit he’d return quite late, bringing bags of sweets for his boys and telling us, “These are from Mum.” She’d had a brain hemorrhage, but if he knew she was going to die, he never let on.
On February 20, the Tuesday after she had been taken to the hospital, the doctors turned off the life support machine. That night Dad came home and he woke us all up and told us to climb out of bed and to go downstairs. We gathered in the front room, where a few days earlier Mum had said she hadn’t felt right, and Dad sat in his chair. I stared at his face and the tears on his cheeks. Then he told us, “Your mother died tonight.” His words came thundering at me. Our mother had gone. Maria Rosa White—my father called her Maro—the woman who gave me so much more than my Italian name, was only thirty-eight years old.
After the funeral I don’t think I went home to play or be with my family. Instead I was dropped off at school and stayed in the playground with my friends. I had a toy car, a gift from someone or other, and my classmates were enthralled by it. It wasn’t a Matchbox car but something quite substantial and to me it was like a trophy. I think I was in the playground for about ten minutes and collected by I-don’t-know-who and taken to a strange house, where I stayed for two, maybe three days. I still don’t know where I went. It was a strange house with strange people who were obviously helping out Dad and who had kids the same age as me. It was as if I had been taken from my world into this other world.
THREE
Gambling, Greyhounds and Grief
A FEW DAYS after my mother’s funeral, I returned home, home to a different way of life. I’d find my dad sitting up late at night, drinking along with a Shirley Bassey record. He rarely spoke of my mother’s death but just got on with things, trying to cope with his damaged brood and apparently ignoring his own pain. But the bitterness of it remained with him. When he was a kid, his parents had separated and divided up their four children, and he seemed determined not to let that happen to his family. Somewhere along the way I learned that he had made a promise to my mother to raise her sons, rather than put us in a children’s home. If he had put us in a home, it would have been acceptable, even expected, in the late sixties. For Dad it was totally unacceptable. He’d have hated finger-pointing people saying, “Poor Mr. White, lost his wife, had to put his kids in a children’s home.”
He was a disciplinarian, born in the twentieth century but raised with Victorian principles and values. He may not have been a religious man but he programmed me and my brothers religiously and he was a stickler for standards. He was punctual as hell. Each morning he would wake the family at six forty-five and we would get up, dress and have breakfast in time for his departure right at seven thirty to catch the seven forty bus that took him into Leeds city center. Off he’d go to work, wearing a smart suit, a trilby, and shoes that were polished with military precision. Even if he was feeling unwell, he would still head off for the bus stop, saying, “Never call in sick.”
The thing about Dad is that he was a one-dimensional man, and like most one-dimensional men, he believed in correctness. On those occasions when I could neither conform nor live up to his high standards, he could not contain the impatience.
“Put on these clothes,” I remember him saying once after I had answered back on a day when he was lacking patience. I looked at the pile of garments that he was pointing to, and they were my Sunday best. I changed into the clothes. Then he packed me a suitcase, took me to the front room, pointed at the sofa and said, “Sit there and wait.”
I asked, “Why, Dad?”
“The taxi is coming to take you to the children’s home,” he replied.
Petrified, I sat waiting and thinking, am I going to be the next one to be taken away? But there was no taxi. It was simply Dad’s method of punishment. The old man’s failings were outweighed by the goodness and decency within him, but it would take me a long time to realize that. It’s a demanding job, being a single parent.
MY FATHER THOUGHT, deep down, that he was an extremely unlucky man, and my mother’s death only reinforced that opinion. But if you met him, you got a bloke, the working-class Northerner with a dry wit who talked betting nonstop. Dad was a gambler, and he turned to that, too, for solace. He did the dogs, the horses and the pools. He was hooked on the adrenaline that comes with gambling.
Inevitably, his love of the horses and the dogs also became a major part of my life. On one occasion Dad had some leave planned and he sent me off to school with a letter for my teacher. He had written something like, “My annual holiday is coming up and I would very much like to take Marco away for a week.” I was excused from Fir Tree Primary and when I returned after the break, my teacher asked if I’d had a nice holiday.
I said, “Very nice, thank you very much, miss.”
“Where did you go, Marco?”
“York Races for a week, miss.”
Like many gamblers, my dad let superstition play a major role in his life. An early-morning sighting of a robin redbreast, for instance, would bring him good luck for the rest of that day. So on Saturday mornings our semi-detached house was filled with the wonderful smell of sizzling bacon. Dad wasn’t doing a fry-up for his sons—he cooked the meat to entice the robins. The fried bacon went onto a plate, which then went out to the back garden. Dad would gaze out of the window, hoping a hungry robin would fly by 22 Lingfield Mount and swoop down for the meat. The size of the bets depended on the sighting of a bird.
Our back garden was not only a canteen for robins but also a home to Dad’s cherished trio of greyhounds, which he raced on nearby tracks. Greyhounds were his true passion and each of the three dogs had a kennel in the garden. Two nights a week Dad’s mate Stan Roberts would pull up in his Morris Minor (Dad didn’t drive) and we’d head off to the racetrack. There’d be four of us in the car: Dad and Stan sat in the front while I shared the backseat with a greyhound.
At the track I would hover outside the bar while inside Dad enjoyed a drink with his friends. The door would open and a bottle of a pop and packet of crisps would be passed out to me. I’d sneak a glance into the brightly lit room (dimmer switches had yet to come along) with a haze of smoke lingering like a white cloud above the gamblers’ heads (air-conditioning was unheard of ). Coming home at eleven P.M., I’d fall asleep on the backseat. The greyhound was my pillow.
Dad was out one day when there was a knock on the door. A bloke was standing there and he asked me, “Do you sell greyhounds?”
We didn’t but I told him, “Yes.” I took him through the house and into the back garden to inspect the dogs.
“How much is that one?” he said, pointing at one of the animals.
“Fifty pence.” It was my first business deal. (I have done better ones since then.)
The bloke handed over the money and left with the dog. I treated a mate, David Johnson, to goodies from the sweetshop and then we headed off to play in the woods. When Dad found out what I had done, he went ballistic and sent me up to my room without any tea. That was his traditional form of punishment: “Off to bed. No tea for you.”
For Dad, greyhound racing was all about rigging the price and he had various tricks that he used. From time to time I assisted in this dastardly business. If you’ve got a dog that has won a couple of races in a row, then the odds of it winning the forthcoming race are going to be short. So with a dog that was, let’s say, black with a white patch on its paw, Dad would paint out the patch and enter it into the race under a new name, thereby achieving a good price at the bookies.
Another devious trick went like this: The day before the greyhound was due to race, it wasn’t fed. But then, last thing at night, it was given a
bone to chew on, which would keep the dog awake. The next morning I would take the dog for a brisk four-mile walk and later on, when it came to race, it would look pristine and might be a favorite but was too knackered to win. So now the next time it raced, it would get long odds because of its previous form but this time round it would be in tip-top shape. I think I’m right in saying that one of Dad’s dogs, the Governor, set track records at Halifax, Keighley and Doncaster.
When I wasn’t tagging along after my father, I would play by myself in the woods or down by the river, rediscovering the side of nature that I had been introduced to during those holidays with my mother in Italy. Out of school, I was a bit of a loner, I’d say. In school, I was doomed. I was not only damaged by the death of my mother but also suffered from dyslexia. In those days “word blindness” was considered a sign of stupidity rather than a condition that calls for a special-needs teacher. One or two teachers were sympathetic but others humiliated me. For a very long time I assumed I was an idiot. What’s more, I felt like a freak. Every pupil—except me—had a mother. Every other pupil—except me and a lad called Quentin, whose parents had divorced—was the product of an apparently happy home environment.
To cap it all, I had this strange name, Marco (my middle name, Pierre, remained a well-kept secret until I was in my twenties). I could only dream of what life might have been like had I been a John, a Peter, a Paul or a Timothy. I just wanted to be like everyone else.
CRAIG, THE BABY of the family, was just thirteen days old when our mother died, and for Dad, the prospect of leaving work to look after the family must have seemed an impossible one. Perhaps Dad was advised by friends; maybe he made the decision while sitting alone searching for inspiration from Shirley Bassey’s lyrics. Whatever the case, he had concluded within weeks of my mother’s death that he was in a horrific, no-win situation, and he could not see how he could bring up Craig as well as Graham, Clive and me. Craig, however, would not be going to the children’s home.
The Devil in the Kitchen Page 2