by Rick Stein
The dot system ruled our lives as fags: if you got six in a term you were automatically beaten. Tim Dale and I were indefatigable in our efforts to keep boys who were on five dots out of trouble. I think in the process we must have impressed on the other house prefects that beating was barbaric. The term ended, and no one was beaten by us.
I’ve dwelt on the downside of life at Uppingham too long. The upside was considerable. For a start, the town is in a particularly beautiful part of rural England. The local building stone, ironstone, is similar to Cotswold limestone but the rusty presence of iron ore near the deposits of sedimentary rock means it’s not so much yellow but as the colour of dark honey. Uppingham is surrounded by the prettiest villages: Ridlington, Lyddington, Cotesmore. During my last summer term after A levels I spent a couple of weeks with friends bicycling out to local pubs like the White Horse in Morcott and the Gate Inn at Bisbrook. At the Cuckoo in Wing we drank pints of bitter, ordered cheese sandwiches made with Cheddar and thick slices of local bread, and smoked Players tipped. I have never tasted bitterer beer or so much enjoyed the farmyard aroma of a good cheese sandwich and the light-headed euphoria of a cigarette. This was mightily to do with the fact that what we were doing was completely illegal.
Bicycling along the country roads of Rutland is a happy memory. Another friend, Christopher Arnott, came from a family near Otterburn in Northumberland which was very keen on shooting and fishing. I spent many a weekend with him fishing for trout on the Eye Brook or the Welland. He was a really good fisherman who would set out to stalk a trout, whereas I only managed to catch two- or three-inch ones, but my inability didn’t matter because whenever I think back I am right there on those sunny stretches of river, the overhanging trees, the smell of cow pats and cows in the river, the gnats, the elderflowers and nettles and the wet mud. Christopher Arnott was nicknamed Nose at school. I was called Cat. If you go to a school where no one uses Christian names, then nicknames stick.
Arnott and I had similar tastes in music, except that he liked Cliff Richard and I liked Elvis. We shared a great enthusiasm for Buddy Holly. Buddy Holly looked like an office clerk in his thick-rimmed rectangular glasses but The Crickets’ ‘Not Fade Away’ is still one of my favourite songs. I can’t hear the syncopated rhythm of it without wanting to get up and throw myself about. It’s straight out of the blues. That’s why I love the USA.
One evening, Arnott asked me to go to his study to listen to something. He had a really smart record player. I don’t think it was a Dansette, it was even smarter, maybe an HMV, but more importantly it was an automatic, which we all coveted. That night, though, there was only one single at the top of the spindle that could hold ten 45s. It was a red and yellow 45, Pye International with R&B stamped on the centre. The song was Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’.
Ah, oh, smokestack lightning
Shinin’, just like gold
Chester Burnett, known as Howlin’ Wolf, sang with such swagger in his voice. Coming out of the darkness, so assured, so gravelly, so lived-in – and the harmonica-playing was like the wail of that train.
Recently I presented a TV film on the Mississippi blues in which I described that moment as an epiphany. Buddy Holly and Elvis were my bread and butter but early blues was the very heart of all the great American music which defined my generation, or certainly my side of it. The influence of everything American to me was almost as important as having been born in Oxfordshire and going for my holidays to Cornwall every single year.
But it wasn’t just the music. There was TV too. My dad wouldn’t buy a television, he thought it was all drivel. But Harry bought one early on. By then he and Joyce were married and lived in a bungalow on the farm, so Henrietta and I would go and watch theirs. They were our surrogate parents while ours were away and we adored them. Westerns were my myths and legends. The Range Rider, The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger and later Laramie and Bonanza, Tenderfoot and Rawhide. These simple tales of right and wrong were my great love. My parents visited America and brought me a real hide double holster with two cap guns and red wooden bullets. The farm over which I roamed was my ranch; the way the trees followed the bends of the brook at the bottom of the fields was the Rio Grande; the view from the front window of our house was not the rolling green Cotswold hills, but the shimmering distance of Texas. The Big Country. John took me to the Odeon in Leicester Square to see The Big Country. It is still the best cinema moment in my life. I can’t hear the theme music by Jerome Moross without becoming misty-eyed about Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston. Jean Simmons was, for me, the most beautiful woman in the world.
I’m fond of saying I belong to the rock and roll generation. People like me were so influenced by everything American that our lives are defined by it. I’m definitely English, but there’s a big difference between me and the English characters of the Second World War and post-war generation described in novels such as Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series as I find myself at home in places like Australia and America. The power of rock and roll liberated me from the restrictions of being a middle-class Englishman. Buddy Holly and Elvis and Howlin’ Wolf, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were all my world. Before The Beatles and the Stones, British pop always seemed to be poor imitations of the real sex, which was USA. Cliff Richard almost broke out in his hits ‘Living Doll’ and ‘Move It’, but there was almost no one else; records like Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger on the Shore’ dominated the charts for months. Then along came The Beatles. They sang about their own lives and the real people they knew and, for all its grey drizzle, the real place called Liverpool, England. In their first album Please Please Me, they were largely covering blues songs but we hadn’t heard ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Money’ before, so the music seemed to be ours. Blues music was powerful. The Beatles, the Stones and The Yardbirds found in those rural songs with African rhythms a language with which to speak of the reality of the frustrating urban lives that they were living – and we schoolboys went right along with it because, privileged though we were, we could see that this was a language we could understand and communicate with. We speedily got Beatle haircuts and took to wearing black turtle-neck T-shirts and elastic-sided boots. Speedily, too, the authorities at school began to oppose what we were doing, but the cat was out of the bag. Rebellion was in the air. Tim Dale and I formed a band. We started The Spartans, which then became The Screaming Ab Jabs, which morphed into Lightning Strikes. We suffered the perennial problem of young, noisy and out-of-tune bands: trying to find somewhere to play where we wouldn’t disturb too many people. Our welcome in the school boarding house was short-lived, and we moved to a social club in London Road. We left there because they wanted money for rent and finally we hit on the idea of borrowing the local cinema, the Rutland, outside screening times.
In the early days our equipment was rudimentary. My bass guitar had cost £24; I’d bought the amp from a company advertising in Practical Electronics. Tim had a 30-watt valve amp, also from the ad pages of the same magazine. He kept the speaker that went with it in a cardboard box, meaning to house it in some sort of cabinet when he got home for the holidays. The caretaker, Mrs Flood, had a couple of cats in the cinema to keep down the mouse population so it stank of cats’ pee behind the screen. She was remarkably kind to let us use the cinema and actually we didn’t abuse the trust much … well, at least, not until our one and only concert. We used to leave the equipment there and unfortunately one of Mrs Flood’s cats took to sleeping in Tim’s 18-inch speaker and destroyed the cardboard. We discovered this when he opened with the first bars of ‘Apache’ by The Shadows and only a buzz came out. We were due to play a couple of numbers before the school’s Saturday afternoon screening of The Great Escape. Being of a practical bent, Tim wired his amplifier to the cinema sound system which included two 15-inch speakers and tweeters. The noise was electrifying – much louder than The Beatles in 1963 at Finsbury Park Astoria, where you couldn’t hear anything because of the screaming from a
ll the girls in the audience. Sadly, however, at our own rather more modest cinema extravaganza, all you could hear was Tim’s lead guitar on ‘Saturday Nite at the Duck Pond’, a rather vulgar take on Swan Lake which we opened with. You couldn’t hear any of the other instruments at all, including my bass guitar.
Mrs Flood not unnaturally got a little aerated and that was that. Lightning Strikes did a mini tour of some Christmas parties of our friends and that, as is so often the case with school bands, was about it. We were dogged by the appalling ineffectiveness of our equipment. A Donovan-inspired folk singer called Jake Walton and some other boys from Uppingham tried to resurrect us as a band in Cornwall in the summer of 1964. Our last booking was at Wadebridge Town Hall. Our sound was so bad that the manager of a local band called The Vigilantes actually loaned us two Vox AC30s, changing over the amps as we were playing. The improvement in sound was what we had needed all along, but I’m afraid it merely showed up how bad a bass guitarist I really was. Jake went on to become a well-known folk singer and dulcimer player. I was only in it to pick up girls. I recently found a picture of me playing the bass in Uppingham. I guess I felt I looked rugged and cool because, I see, I had several prints made at the time.
Awful school food is legendary, but not true in my case. My memory of Uppingham is of standing outside the dining hall counting the seconds till the bell for supper, so hungry – so deliciously hungry – and then steaming in for roast pork with plenty of crackling, sprouts, apple sauce and thick brown gravy; or fish pie with mash topping and indifferent cod flakes made wonderful by a white cheese sauce with sliced boiled eggs and parsley in it and always soaked, boiled marrowfat peas. (If there is any legume more succulent I can’t think of it.) The roast beef was always over-done, not like at home, but with plenty of horseradish and really good roast potatoes it didn’t matter. Perhaps the most loved school dish was mince and potatoes. I wonder if anyone does this in a British pub somewhere? Maybe it’s just too simple, but writing this gives me the thought of putting it on in my pub in Cornwall. As far as I can remember it was just minced beef, fried with chopped onions and carrots, then stewed with beef stock, salt and pepper. It was always served with cabbage and plainly boiled potatoes slightly falling apart. It was the sort of food that foreigners like to cite as an example of terrible British cooking. Try convincing a 15-year-old teenager that it was anything less than splendid. Of course we ate cottage pie (minced beef) and shepherd’s pie (minced roast lamb left over from Sunday lunch). We also had steak and kidney pie from time to time, as well as kidneys and fried liver – and nobody complained about them. The puddings were the stuff of the Great British food revival, crisp-topped apple or rhubarb crumble, steamed treacle pudding with white plastic jugs of Bird’s custard. Treacle tart wasn’t as good as my mum’s – too many breadcrumbs – but I wolfed it down. In summer we ate strawberries and cream, and raspberries often, and large summer puddings. For reasons I can’t recall we were not allowed to drink tea after lunch or dinner in the houses. We just had water.
At breakfast there was a dish which I’ve never seen since – bread fried in lard, then smeared with Marmite or Bovril with hot tinned tomatoes on top. Scrambled eggs were always overcooked and a bit tough, like most hotel breakfasts. We brought our own jams, honey, spreads and sauces into breakfast. At home I’d never been allowed brown sauce, and I took to it with gusto. Even as a teenager, I could taste and identify subtle differences. A1 Steak Sauce a bit thin; OK sauce rather sweet; Fardon’s Flag sauce both hot and sweet. An ad for this in the 1950s was ‘What’s the sauciest sauce?’ ‘It’s new Flag, of course’. HP was sharper, Daddies peppery. Daddies had extra allure because it was the sauce served at the school buttery. The buttery sold the best cream slices I have ever eaten anywhere. The chef was an ex-Army baker called Sandy who made them every day. He used fresh whipped cream – not pastry cream – and his delicacy with puff pastry was peerless. On rugby match days Sandy cooked the fry-up against which all others were judged – eggs, bacon, sausages, fried bread, grilled tomatoes and baked beans with Daddies Sauce and mugs of hot sweet tea. You’ve had the communal bath in the pavilion. You’re aching and bruised. You smell of wintergreen liniment and carbolic soap, you’re warm and relaxed after the game which, though scary, you’ve won, and you and the whole Uppingham first XV and the XV from Rugby, Oundle, Tonbridge descend on the buttery for a ravening feast. Those are fond memories.
I was reasonably good at rugby. We public schoolboys called it rugger, but after two or three years playing the game with a bunch of farmers in Wadebridge in Cornwall some ten years later, I found that I could never call it that again. Being good at sport in a school like Uppingham gave you a sort of protection. If you played in the front five of the pack (I was a prop) you were decent, honest, a bit fiery and also jolly nice, but a bit thick. There was almost an understanding from the teachers – we called them masters – that you couldn’t be expected to excel academically because you were sporty. This gave me an opportunity not to have to do too well in the subjects I chose to do at A level – English, History and Geography. Actually, thanks to my mother, I’d been reading serious books ever since I learned to read, so O level English had been a labour of love. The dark poetry of the Jacobean dramatists particularly appealed to me because it was violent and emotional. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted to be the tough rugby star. The prospect of studying for a higher academic standard was daunting. And, indeed, I failed at it. At A level I was eventually awarded just two O level passes.
Two students in my year were what my friends might have called ‘a bit spastic’. One was fat and stuttered, and the other spoke too much in a high-pitched voice and was ‘weedy’. Both tried to avoid sport and endured sneers all round. But they excelled at English and both took part in school plays and were transformed by acting and drama. Looking back, I regret not having thrown myself into something cultural, but having made my rugby bed I sort of had to lie in it. The net result was that I became more and more disenchanted with school the older I got because I wasn’t prepared to use what Uppingham had to offer – excellent music, drama and English. I had learned the cello at my previous school and continued in the first couple of years at Uppingham, but in my rugby role I felt that playing the cello was uncool. My father loved the warm sound of the cello, but I thought classical music (apart from the guitar and trumpet) was nerdy. I hated having to lug the cello back to school on the train: it was cumbersome and so not me. I imagined that boys on the train joked about the cello, but if I’d had a guitar it would have been a different matter.
I gave up the cello, and allowed my academic career to drift into the B division. All me and my friends wanted to do was listen to rock and roll, get in a band, learn to drive, smoke cigarettes, drink beer and pick up girls.
Girls were becoming a bit of a problem. There’s no doubt that spending most of the year in an all-boys boarding school disadvantaged you in terms of behaving naturally in the company of the opposite sex. Which only made the earnest desire to remove their clothes even more disturbing. We all bought a magazine called Parade which had centrefold pin-ups of topless girls in knickers. My parents still had a flat in London – they’d moved to Kensington – and sometimes I took friends to stay there. We used to drink espresso coffee in The 2i’s in Old Compton Street and another coffee bar called The Heaven and Hell Lounge. The Soho strip clubs were places of enormous tension. Total nudity was banned, so the strippers finished their acts with strategically placed plasters. They were not allowed to move, either.
When I was 15 I took a local girl into the sand dunes at Constantine Bay near our house on Trevose Head. It was in early September, a season of poignant tension in Cornwall with the summer just over and most of my friends gone. There was a melancholic sense of change; there seemed to be just me and Sally on the beach but, as is so often the case in early autumn, the weather was blue skies with a chill in the air. We kissed lots and I put my hand down her jeans and into her knickers and played with
her vagina. It was unbearably exciting and I was aroused and the inevitable happened. We walked back to the golf club in silence, me feeling overwhelmed by the closeness and power of it and a dark patch on my jeans. She was quiet too. I think I was in shock. I had a strong desire to get away from her and to meet up with local lads in the Farmers Arms to talk about cars and beer, and to forget the physical reality of my first serious sexual encounter.
I didn’t progress the relationship with Sally, but once intimacy had occurred it became quite regular with other girls, but there was never an opportunity to go the whole way. Indeed, I didn’t lose my virginity till I was 17 when, in desperation at never being able to do it, I picked up a rather tarty girl in a pub – or rather she picked me up. I took her to the grounds of Dartmouth Royal Naval College where I was doing a diving course. I thought anxiously about my brother Jeremy who had been a midshipman there, and I had her in a completely shambolic manner against a tree trunk. I was appalled for weeks afterwards and formed the opinion that I had caught a venereal disease. I forced myself to go to a clinic in London where, needless to say, they told me there was nothing whatsoever wrong with me.
The enormously complex issue of, as the Americans say, getting laid as a teenager caused me anxiety and terrible feelings of inadequacy. Towards the end of my time at Uppingham, I befriended a girl from Liverpool who had a job helping in the kitchen and cleaning dormitories. Her name was Maureen and she was best friends with another maid from Gateshead called Isabel. Isabel was, I discovered, having a seriously dangerous liaison with my friend Arnott, and it was Arnott who suggested I might take up with Maureen. My natural caution was very much working overtime. But it was a long hot summer term, and Isabel and Maureen walked up and down the street outside my dormitory on many a night when thoughts of leaving that oh-too-restrictive school were strong. The warm breezes of an English June caused me to succumb. We four would meet in a barn outside town, smoke a number of low-grade cigarettes called Olympic tipped, listen to a transistor radio and indulge in lots of kissing and quite a lot of removal of underwear. Me and Maureen were screened from Arnott and Isabel by a couple of bales of hay. But Maureen was a Roman Catholic, and I was petrified of getting her pregnant and having to marry a serving maid from Liverpool. I was a horrid little snob, really. But when – years later, in London – I found Maureen in bed with one of my friends, I was mortified.
