The Devil in the Kitchen (4 page)

Clive, on the other hand, preferred motorbikes. For a while I shared a bedroom with the pair of them but they most likely didn’t want to spend too much time with a little nipper like me and I never felt a great sense of camaraderie. When Graham was fifteen years old, and I was seven or eight, he left school and went to work in the kitchens of the Griffin Hotel, where my dad had started out. A couple of years later, Clive followed a similar path. He finished school and became a chef at the Metropole Hotel.

*    *    *

I
F DAD WAS
looking for confirmation that he was the world’s unluckiest man, it came in 1972. “Your father is going to be home late from work tonight,” my teacher told me. “You are to wait in the playground for him to collect you.” I sat in the playground, the ten-year-old loner, waiting for Dad to arrive and eventually he pulled up outside. He was with David Hince, his work colleague, in Mr. Hince’s car, a Hillman. We drove the half mile back to the house and once inside Dad sat in his armchair. He had some dreadful news.

“I’ve been to see the doctor today,” he said. His delivery was emotionless and to the point. “The doctor told me that I have lung cancer.” For a second or two I tried to absorb the statement. What did this mean? What would this mean? And then the sledgehammer statement: “He has given me five months. The doctor says I’ve got five months to live.”

From then on, a crushing fear preoccupied me every night as I lay in my bed. It was a fear that come morning I would wake up and discover my father had died. Insomnia got me, and I couldn’t shake it off. I had to learn to live on little sleep, which would later serve me well as a chef.

Weeks after Dad had broken the terrible news, I saw him in the bathroom one morning, coughing up blood into the sink. The doctor was right, I reckoned. Dad was definitely on his way out.

FOUR

I Delivered (the Milk)

T
HERE’S SOMETHING TO
be said for requesting a second opinion.

Dad’s doctor may have been right to diagnose lung cancer, but he was way off when he predicted my father, then aged forty-five, would be dead in five months. Five months later the old man was still there. Five
years
later he was still there. He would live through his fifties, into his sixties and wouldn’t reach the finishing post until he was in his seventies. He’d be around to see his children grow up and his grandchildren be born.

But in the meantime, family life continued in the belief that he would soon be dead. He jacked in his job on the grounds that he was terminally ill and we discovered quickly that his greyhounds could not be expected to bring in an income. He dabbled in “antiques dealing,” and though we had never been wealthy, we now plummeted into poverty, which brought new fears that my existence was simply an extra cost for my father. I prayed that Dad wouldn’t notice my shoes had holes in the soles because I reckoned he couldn’t afford to buy me a new pair.

He lost weight quickly, dropping from fifteen stone to about eight. On doctor’s orders he stopped smoking and kicked the bottle, then he reevaluated the situation with his gambler’s mind and concluded that, as he was at death’s door, he had absolutely nothing to lose by returning to the fags and booze, so that’s what he did.

To compensate, he went on a health kick of sorts, eating vegetables and fruits he’d grown in the garden. I was dragged into the kitchen action, to peel potatoes and chop tomatoes and mushrooms with Dad breathing down my neck—I was frightened that I’d slice off too much of the vegetable. I was sent out to pick blackberries for jam and to pick apples, which we’d store in between layers of newspaper. My chef ’s training began at an early age. Sure enough, Dad regained the weight he had previously shed, but he would never be 100 percent and just climbing the stairs left him breathless.

Although he was apparently at death’s door, it did little to mellow his mood. One day I was four doors down at my friend Barry Wells’s house, play-wrestling in his garden. It got out of hand when Barry hit me and I hit him back. Barry’s hefty father must have spotted the scrap from the house and suddenly came bounding into the garden, picked me up by the ears and started swinging me around in the air. I felt like I was preparing for takeoff.

“I’ll tell me dad,” I screamed, my ears burning with pain.

“Tell ’im,” shouted Mr. Wells. “And tell ’im if he wants some to come round here and I’ll chin ’im.”

I scampered home, in through the door and into the front room, where my dad was sitting. “Dad,” I screamed, “Barry Wells’s dad just hit me and he said he’s gonna chin you as well.” I’d hardly finished the sentence when Dad leapt from his chair and set off, sprinting down the road faster than one of his treasured greyhounds. When he returned a few minutes later, he looked victorious. “We won’t hear any more from him,” said Dad, and we didn’t.

Of Dad’s various life-enhancing cautions, he had two that concerned the subject of punch-ups. The first came shortly after my mother’s death, when he sat me down to give me some fatherly advice about fighting. “It doesn’t matter if they beat you,” he said. “As long as you hurt them more than they hurt you, they’ll never come back for more.” The second piece of advice was simpler: “Don’t argue, just hit ’em.”

He practiced what he preached. One day I was walking into town with him when we saw two men taunting a tramp. Dad told me to wait for him while he went up to the two yobs. I thought he was going to tell them to stop teasing the poor homeless vagrant. Instead, he simply punched each man in the face and strolled back to me and then we continued our walk to the shops as if nothing untoward had happened. As one of Dad’s mates had said of him, “Frank was the only man I know who could start a fight in an empty room.”

The old man must have reached a stage where he acknowledged the cancer was dormant but still he worried how I would fend for myself if he died. So when I was about twelve or thirteen years old, I took on a few jobs. In fact, I became obsessed with work and did quite nicely out of it too. In the mornings before school I had a milk round, delivering the pints with a milkman called Stephen Sharpe, who was also kind enough to take me rabbiting. I loved doing the round, even though in the winter months my fingers would freeze and stick to the bottles as I picked them up. Stephen would stop the milk truck and then we would race against each other to see who would be the first to pick up the empties and get them back to the truck. It made me terribly competitive. Sometimes Stephen would take me to school in time for my first class. You’ve heard of rich kids being dropped off by the chauffeur in a Rolls; I was delivered by Stephen on a milk truck.

After school I did a newspaper round, which brought in thirty bob a week. On Saturdays I was a caddy at Moor Allerton golf course or at Alwoodley, charging golfers £1.50 a round. I was skilled at finding golf balls that had been lost on the course—for which I earned a tenner per hundred, as well as the nickname Hawk Eye. The great Leeds United FC manager Don Revie was one of my “clients.” When I first caddied for him, he hit a ball that disappeared into the trees. “Don’t worry, Mr. Revie, I’ll find it,” I said, and went scurrying off to retrieve the ball. I did indeed find it, and when I picked it up, I noticed it had the words “Don Revie” imprinted on its dimples. Class act that he was, Don had personalized golf balls. I put the ball in my pocket and ran back to tell him it was lost, then I sold the ball for a pound at school, a marked improvement on the fifty pence I’d charged for Dad’s greyhound. I handed most of my income to my father, supposedly for safekeeping. “I’ll give it back to you, Marco, when we go on holiday,” he’d say, though when we trundled off to Bridlington I don’t recall receiving the cash in its entirety.

When I wasn’t working, I used my spare time to enjoy the countryside. I was happiest when I was outdoors with my whippet, Pip. I fell in love with fishing, hunting, shooting and poaching. When there was a teachers’ strike in the seventies, we finished school at midday and my brother Graham took me fishing for the first time. He sat me down by the side of a bridge and cast for me while he and his mates went and fished the best spots. I caught a trout of about a pound—the first fish I ever caught—and from that day on I was hooked, so to speak.

Graham also introduced me to poaching. My early poaching days involved chucking logs at the pheasants when they were roosting. The birds would fly down from the trees and land on the ground, and then I’d have to run after them and catch them by hand. I remember Graham taking me to Eccup, part of the Harewood estate, to shoot for the first time, but he was mean about sharing the air rifle. Graham shot four heavy hares and made me carry them across the plowed fields, rain pouring down on us. I was his chief gofer. In some ways, my childhood was idyllic because I spent my time lost in the woods or the fields, or on the riverbanks catching trout and crayfish with my hands. That is where my passion for food began. As I will doubtless mention a dozen times, great chefs respect nature, and as a child I fell in love with nature, which, in turn, would enable me to fall in love with food.

I have a vivid memory of sneaking into the bedroom I shared with Graham and Clive and rummaging around for Graham’s .22 pellets. Suddenly I heard his footsteps and quickly dove under his bed to hide. Graham came into the room, undid his belt, dropped his trousers and then lay on the mattress, while I quietly waited underneath. His masturbation was interrupted by the sound of my dad coming up the stairs shouting for me. As Graham struggled to pull up his trousers, my dad came into the room. “Have you seen Marco?” he asked.

Graham, flustered, replied, “No, Dad, I’ve not.”

If I could find the time, my mate Briggsy and I would take the bus to Otley to fish a trout stretch. We would roll up our trousers and walk into the river with a maggot bag containing a loaf of bread for bait. We used to catch sixty or seventy trout in one day; we’d keep a lot of them, kill them, and on the way back to the bus we would knock on doors and sell them for ten pence each. This was my first experience of being paid for pleasure.

In between my jobs and the life of a young adventurer outdoors, I managed to find time for school. Life at Allerton High followed a similar pattern to my stint at Fir Tree Primary, in that I distinguished myself as perfectly unacademic. In my first week at Allerton I upset the PE teacher, who was known (though not to his face) as either Smooth Head because of his baldness or Toby because, I imagine, he was as handsome as a Toby jug.

During our first lesson I was mucking around and Toby told me to lean over a bench. He then hit me very hard, several times, on the arse with a sneaker. It was a deeply disturbing experience. Dad had given me a slap in the past, but I had never had a beating like the one administered by Toby.

After the thrashing, I was sent off with the rest of the class on a cross-country race, and as we were running, I kept pulling down my shorts and asking my mate Mark Taylor to examine my swollen flesh. “Christ, Marco,” he kept saying as he studied the skin while trampling over the mud, “it’s bloody terrible.”

The minute I got home, I found a mirror and examined my backside. The skin was mostly maroon, purple in places. I showed my bottom to my brother Clive and then, during dinner, Dad noticed that I was distressed. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Before I could respond, Clive chipped in, “He got whacked at school. You should see his . . .” Dad made me pull down my trousers and was horrified by the sight of my maroon arse. The next day a prefect came into the classroom and said that I had to go to the deputy head’s office. I knocked on the door, entered, and there was the deputy head, Mr. Richardson, with another man who had his back to me. Then I saw the trilby on the table. It was my dad. “Show Mr. Richardson your backside,” he said. Once again I had to suffer the indignity of pulling down my trousers. Mr. Richardson was horrified. For the next three years Toby didn’t lay a finger on me.

Despite my fraught relationship with Toby, I excelled at cross-country, but not because I was desperate to win. The thing is, I was determined to be the first person back to the changing rooms because I was terrified my hairy classmates would see that I didn’t have any pubic hair. I set cross-country records purely so that I would be showered, dried and back in my school uniform long before the rest of the breathless bunch had finished the run.

In those days you were allowed to leave school without taking your final exams and so that’s what I did. I left Allerton High on Friday, March 17, 1978, and as the other pupils went off to see
Star Wars
and enjoy the Easter holidays, I was gearing up for my first job. My final lesson on my last day was Games with Toby. Everyone else changed into their shorts and T-shirts but I was having none of it. The teacher said, “Where’s your kit, White?”

I turned surly. “I didn’t bring it. I don’t want to do Games.”

He went into his office and emerged with a spare kit, which I promptly told him I would not wear. My intention was to remind him that he could not intimidate me. Dad had always said to me, “Never forget what people do
for
you or
to
you.”

Toby gave me some paper and told me to copy out of a textbook while the Games class continued, but when they returned from the field, I hadn’t written down a single word. Minutes later I would be out of school, never to return. “White,” he couldn’t stop himself from saying through gritted teeth, “you’ll be nothing, lad.”

D
AD WAS NOT
fussed about me leaving school before sitting my exams. Getting out there and finding a job fitted in nicely with his programming and, after all, Graham and Clive had done the same before me. “Become a chef,” Dad had told me. “People will always need feeding.”

He instructed me to go and search for work in Harrogate because it was less than ten miles away and crammed with hotels. The final stage of the programming was drawing near. One morning he made me sandwiches, gave me the bus fare and sent me off. I arrived in Harrogate, went to the Hotel St. George and knocked on the kitchen door.