by Rick Stein
Shortly after they bought the farm, my parents joined the two original cottages into a rather well-proportioned limestone house, creating a large room between the houses and a floor above with two bedrooms. We called the room the Hall. It had an open fireplace, the wrought-iron grate was made by Rathbones, the blacksmiths in Kingham, and had two posts at the front topped with two heavy steel balls which were smooth and warm when you held them. We burned huge beech logs on the fire and it smoked incessantly. There was a large comfortable sofa facing the fire and, under the windows, which stretched the length of the hall, a bench seat with cushions, under which we kept games and jigsaw puzzles. These had all spilled out of their broken boxes because it was damp, so there was a confusion of jigsaw pieces and Monopoly money, all smelling of spiders. My dad had installed two 12-inch speakers at either end of the Hall, and he would play Beethoven, Wagner and Tchaikovsky as well as the musicals My Fair Lady, Carousel, South Pacific and Oklahoma. Later my mother told me how much she hated Brahms because my father always played it when he was depressed, but I can’t listen to the last movement of the First Symphony without reliving the comfort of those days as a child, those safe Sundays and the smell of roast beef and bubbles of Veuve Cliquot in wide shallow glasses which my mother would sometimes let me have a small sip out of.
The Hall was always filled on Sundays with my parents’ friends. Many were artists, writers, painters and colleagues of my dad’s, including the Ifoulds and the Vernons from Sydney and Karl Finsterbusch from New York. England was rather grey in the 1950s, and Henrietta and I were impressed by the worldly confidence of these rich businessmen with their suntanned wives from California, Australia and South Africa.
Sometimes there would be German relatives: Tanta Brunhilda, who looked about a hundred to me; Walter Flender, who looked like a bear, but apparently this was only when he came for the last time and was dying; Tanta Alla, who complained to my mother that I was fat and lazy and did nothing but listen to Elvis Presley songs. Some of her nephews came too, Fritz-Eric, Martin and Alexander Schmitt, who were a bit older than me. My dad asked the teenage Alexander to mow the lawns. He spent the rest of the day doing it, mowing even under the copse of beech trees that surrounded the house. ‘No wonder the Nazis took over,’ my dad said. ‘Give the Germans a command and they’ll carry it out without question.’ Not the greatest fun, having the young German second cousins to stay. They came from big houses in Dusseldorf and didn’t quite ‘get’ our simple country life, though when I was older I met them again and found them unexpectedly humorous.
There was a rather unnerving formality about the German relatives; decent people, but a bit stiff. My ancestor, August Stein, expanded the family wine and spirit business in the nineteenth century. He bought vineyards on the Rhine and took the business into mining and shipping. He was clearly successful and sensible. His cousin, Siegfried Stein, joined the family wine business but didn’t like it and gave it up in favour of an academic life. There is a book about the Stein family published in 1921 which says, ‘Siegfried was a good academic but couldn’t translate his knowledge into practical industry. Bad in maths, he was far too trusting of people.’ A bit worthy and correct they may have been, but after a successful expansion of the production of gin and vodka, the family opened the first hostel for alcoholics in Europe. Boring, maybe, but also good people with a conscience.
The German relatives might have found our farm a long way from home but, to me, the view from the farmhouse window was the frame of my early life. In the far distance was the tower of Churchill Church, modelled on the tower of Magdalen College chapel in Oxford. In the centre, our fields sloped down to Kingham brook, which was the boundary of the farm. Across the stream the land rose to the village of Sarsden and, to the left, the view was the dark green mass of Sarsgrove Wood. My earliest memory relates to that wood – a gate and two large pigs on the other side of it. I can recall the pink pigs, the grey of the gate, the green of the grass and the darker green of the trees. I must have been carried by my mother because I was looking over the gate down at the pigs. I was two at the time. Just a bubble of memory, but it’s that road and those woods whenever I read Kipling’s poetry:
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods.
Kipling was much in evidence in my childhood. My mother used to read Puck of Pook’s Hill to me; she particularly liked the story of the Romans on Hadrian’s Wall. Kipling’s tales made British history come alive for children before TV and video. My mother used to wonder how cold the native Romans must have felt in their tunics. She went to Italy often with my dad; looking through the photo albums recently, Henrietta and I were filled with a sense of how many holidays they had. Boarding schools were very convenient for them with five children.
We were lucky in that our parents were unconventional. They both loved pubs – indeed my dad went to the pub every night, and he always favoured the public bar over the saloon bar. He enjoyed chatting to fishermen, farmers and builders and found their conversation a refreshing change from people from his own background. Perhaps because he had experienced anti-German taunts as a child, he didn’t fit into the British Establishment. He relished the company of artists, composers and writers, and he didn’t like the ‘County Set’. He was a magnetic presence, very attractive to women, and very difficult to live up to. My father instinctively knew how the world worked and what was important about humanity: he always went straight to the truth of stuff.
III
My mother married a fellow undergraduate called Alan Stewart in her last year at Cambridge, in a desperate bid to get away from her Dulwich home where my grandfather and grandmother were living in some disharmony. She became pregnant with her first child, Jeremy, but her marriage to Alan turned out to be as unhappy as the home she had fled. I came to know Alan quite well because later he lived near my school, Uppingham, and took me out on the occasional weekend. He was kind but there was nothing to do at his house except listen to his collection of humorous records by a singer called Paddy Roberts. This didn’t appeal to a soon-to-be-rebellious teenager. One refrain I recall ran ‘He went quite white and sloshed her right in the middle of a cha-cha-cha’. I didn’t enjoy it very much.
My mother met my father while on holiday in Cornwall with her brother Charlie. My father was tall, about six foot four, and extremely good-looking, with dark hair and pale blue eyes. He was one of four children. His parents, Julius William and Clara, were Anglo-Germans, originally from Dusseldorf. His grandfather, Julius Otto, had come to London in 1870 to open a branch of the Stein Brothers firm which by then also had a branch in Bordeaux. The Steins had once been grain farmers but had branched into distilling alcohol and selling vodka and gin. As the business grew they moved to Dusseldorf and built large cellars, and then bought Fuchsberg vineyard at Geisenheim. They appear to have been markedly commercially-minded since their interest in the vineyard was not so much the fine Rheingau wines, but in selling a mass-market sparkling wine called Stein Trocken, which they marketed in a champagne bottle with a French-looking label.
In London they lived first in Baker Street, then moved to Walton-on-Thames in Surrey and built an imposing house called Rhinelands. But the First World War found them in a hostile country with a German name and a big house that was an obvious target. My father’s sister, my aunt Zoe, who would have been four or five at the outbreak of the war, never forgot bricks being thrown through the windows. My father, too, was traumatised by the animosity. My grandparents bought a house in Constantine Bay in north Cornwall called Treglos, now a hotel. Cornwall at that time was somewhat remote from the rest of England and, at least early on in the war, the anti-German fervour was less pronounced. I can’t find proof of it, but I believe my grandmother, Clara, was a friend of D. H. Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, who was also German, and it may not be a coi
ncidence that when Lawrence and Frieda first arrived in Cornwall they rented Porthcuthan House near my grandparents. Later, they bought a house in Zennor where Lawrence wrote Women in Love. I also believe that Clara was a friend of Emily Pankhurst and a member of the suffragette movement.
The Stein connection with Cornwall continued after the war and by the time my mother met my father, the family had been having summer vacations there for years. My memories of my father have been distorted by his bipolar disorder. The bouts of mania followed by depressions became more frequent as I grew up, so now I find it difficult to imagine how he must have seemed to my mother, on holiday in Cornwall, long ago in the 1920s, but I guess he was irresistible – intelligent, keen on art, architecture and music, and a good painter too. In any event, she parted from Alan. My dad’s charms must have been considerable; it took a lot of courage in those days for a woman to break up her marriage. Mum lived for the rest of her life with the stigma of being a divorcee. As was the convention of the time, she was the ‘guilty’ party, and she had to suffer the misery of not seeing her first-born child for several years.
Eventually, Alan was forced to admit that his own household wasn’t suitable for a little boy, and mother and son were reunited. Jeremy always said that the day that his life began was the day that he arrived at Conduit Farm. He was seven.
Despite my father’s precarious mental state – or perhaps because of it – our parents gave us a secure childhood, and surrounded us with love, culture and friendship. The farm was our world. There was nothing there that failed to delight. We felt safe.
My maternal grandfather was a farmer’s son from Stourport in Worcestershire who made his fortune in London manufacturing telephones. He ran a company called Telephone Rentals. I have a picture of him wearing spats and a wide-brimmed hat, one foot on the running board of a white Lagonda coupé. They called him Fred T. Jackson. My grandmother, Marie Henrietta, whose father was a missionary in China where she was born, suffered in her marriage, I guess, from neglect. My grandfather was ambitious and successful and, almost true to type, had a mistress called Margaret whom I remember as being rather plain. My grandmother, as they say, took to the bottle. But not uncontrollably – she always appeared well-dressed and when she wanted to go to thé dansants in Kent, she paid a good-looking man to accompany her. Indeed, many years after her death this man – his name was Robin – appeared in my life. He came to live in a cottage in Swinbrook, just down the road from Burford in Oxfordshire where my mother spent the last 25 years of her life. He was magnificently queenie by then, portly and often dressed in a kaftan or a vast mauve Kashmir sweater with a large gold medallion. He referred to my grandmother as Mrs J. We all loved his outrageousness, except my mother, who got cross with him from time to time, particularly on one occasion when he invited me to his house for dinner. I must have been about 25 and should have been more sophisticated. He plied me with whisky, then said, ‘You remind me of a young lion. Can I come and lie down between your paws?’ I was so pissed by then that I said yes. And then realised more was expected of me and fled laughing from the house, leaving a large purple walrus lying on the carpet.
Henrietta and I occasionally went to The Philippines, the estate my grandparents bought near Sevenoaks in Kent. It was a bit boring, but my grandfather had a room in the attic where he made 12-bore cartridges, which was fascinating to me. Equally fascinating to me now is the memory of being taken into the kitchen for a glass of milk and realising from the taste that it was really weak. Only later did I wake up to the fact it had been watered down. Why, I wonder, did the maid do that? Perhaps she thought that strong milk was too much for a child. Maybe she was playing a joke, or stealing milk from my grandparents. I remember that, and walks in the woods of the estate with my mother in autumn with brightly coloured mushrooms everywhere, particularly the red-and-white spotted Amanita muscaria or fly agaric. Mushrooms, watered-down milk and a gun room – oh, and a horse on wheels that you could sit on when you were very little.
My brother Jeremy is responsible for why I’m called Rick rather than Christopher, which my mother really wanted. My mother had been reading aloud Rikki-Tikki-Tavi from Kipling’s Jungle Book, and Jeremy dubbed me Rikki. I would have been three or four at the time and was as inquisitive as any mongoose. I had dark red hair and freckles and perhaps he thought I Iooked like a mongoose too. I can see how the name would have stuck. My son Jack also has dark red hair. When he was little I thought he was not unlike his pet chipmunk Dave – always nosing into things.
I re-read Rikki-Tikki-Tavi recently and decided that, after the visceral humour of Roald Dahl’s writing for children, it suffers from a dated sort of decency, but it does describe the natural world of an Indian garden with charming attention to detail. The story also has a dark side, in the shape of the venomous cobra Nag and his mate Nagaina. Does every idyllic garden have a dark side, I wonder? Mine certainly did, in the shape of my father, or more correctly my father’s manic depression.
My mother spent much of my childhood trying to hide the worst from me. I merely knew that my father was someone I was scared of. Most of the time I was uneasy in his presence. Years later I did a television programme on manic depression with Stephen Fry. Stephen, who is himself bipolar, said in that programme that in his depressive stage he felt completely useless. I think that’s how my father must have felt. Most of my life I have had to fight against a creeping conviction that I might be completely useless, too, and at such times I can understand that my father wouldn’t have wanted me to be like him. But the result was that he could be very tough on me.
Naturally, as a little boy, I did lots of wrong things. I had a friend on the farm called Les who was the son of the farm manager, Harry. Les and I were inseparable. We constructed a sort of tractor and cart from what was called an Allen Scythe, a petrol-powered finger-bar mower. We simply tied its handlebars to a metal wheeled cart that had been part of a water pump. We used it to travel round the farm, and were shouted into abandoning the really sharp mower at the front. We were skilful at removing nuts and bolts from an early age; you just are on a farm. Eventually, the throttle jammed and we careered down a steep bank – and the scythe, the truck, me and Les turned over. After that we gave the scythe a miss, but there were always things like climbing on high roofs then falling off, and a fabulous game of building a network of tunnels and rooms in the hay bales in our Dutch barn. Our tunnels ran up to the roof and down over the edges with drops; we made pits and stuffed everything with spare straw so that it was totally dark. Then we’d invite neighbours’ children into the hay to scare them, and quite often Henrietta too. I’m sure we always had boxes of Swan Vesta matches in our pockets. Leaving aside the danger of conflagration, the tunnels and rooms could have easily collapsed.
The day after 5 November, we were playing with firework cases, fascinated by the brightly coloured boxes and the smell of exploded gunpowder in the damp morning air. Les struck a Swan Vesta and dropped it into a rectangular jumping jack case with green and blue snakes painted on it, just to see what would happen. There was a hiss of smoke … and the next thing I saw was his yellow jersey, blackened at the top, and him screaming, and then going with Joyce and Harry to see him in hospital in Chipping Norton and getting really ticked off by my mum who told me he could have been blinded. Les’s father, Harry, used to say (in his Oxfordshire accent), ‘You boys are so naughty it just makes me cry.’ I don’t know if we were any more mischievous than other boys. Some of the things my sons did at that age make me blanch now just thinking about them. They poured petrol into an old pram, lit it and pushed it down our drive into the main road and the path of their mother, Jill, driving home from the restaurant. Another time a neighbour reported being overtaken by my son Edward on a go-cart with another boy on the back doing 65 miles an hour on the road into Padstow.
My dad didn’t just shout: he created an atmosphere which went on for days. I think he must have been in his London flat in Mecklenburgh Square with my mother wh
en Les was hospitalised after the fireworks, otherwise I would remember a low moment being even lower. Once, when I was really small but old enough to wield an axe, I chopped down a beech sapling in the copse of trees which surrounded our house. It must have been during harvesting because afterwards I was sitting on sacks by the combine harvester, in the field we called the Hollerback, when I told Harry and Charlie who worked on the farm. They laughed and part of the joke seemed to be how angry my father would be with me. Then I realised they weren’t joking. He never, ever, hit me but on this occasion brandished a hazel switch at me which was completely shocking.
It must have been a little after then that I really overstepped the mark. My father had created a garden, lovely but simple – which is still, for me, the way all gardens should be planned. He used plenty of the glorious assets available to everyone in the Cotswolds, the local lemon-coloured limestone. Right in front of the house was a terrace where we would congregate before lunch in the summer and at Easter with glasses of champagne or Gewürztraminer, and ginger beer for me and Henrietta. In front of the terrace was a walled flower bed in which he grew celandines. These have slightly oily green leaves and their yellow flowers at Easter smelled of woodlands, as if he had captured something wild. Below the terrace was a large lawn with wide herbaceous borders; particularly wide was the one at the back, beyond which was a limestone wall which he had built over the years during his manic phases, and beyond that the fields and the Cotswold hills that surrounded us. In that wide border I made my camp. I created a little tunnel so that I could crawl from the lawn through the flowers, then I flattened a large area behind, squashing down the sweet williams at the front and the lupins and hollyhocks and foxgloves behind. Of course he saw the damage and of course he found the camp. It took a while, but he did. His rage was awful. It wasn’t just the discovery, but the days that went on after that. This episode was made much worse because he decided that I was so naughty I would have to board at the school I was then attending, Brandons in Oddington.
