by Rick Stein
The trips to the barn had me squirming with tension. Then a little joke appeared in the school satirical magazine edited by Piers Gough, now a famous architect, which said, ‘When out on your bike riding around Uppingham is a bell necessary?’ We had imagined we were carrying on our trysts unobserved. That was unlikely. But I think the masters were in a bit of a pickle with Isabel and Arnott. It had gone on for a couple of years unnoticed and the prospect of informing Arnott’s parents that their son had become entangled with a working-class woman was tricky one. The school, after all, was in loco parentis.
Nothing happened. But I was never promoted from house prefect to school prefect, and any other responsible roles for my final year evaporated. I stayed on one extra Christmas term to play rugby, and I renounced Maureen. Arnott didn’t renounce Isabel. He stayed with her, and married her a few years later. They were very happy indeed.
VI
I was required to re-take my A levels, in the hope of getting higher grades. I convinced my parents that I would be better off going to what was called a crammer, the theory being that if you had intensive lessons you could concentrate on improving your results. I chose a crammer in Brighton. I had read Brighton Rock, the first of a lifetime’s fascination with the works of Graham Greene. Looking back on it, there was no chance of me doing better in my exams at a Brighton crammer than at Uppingham. The teaching was not nearly as good and the distractions were magnified by a factor of at least ten. Academically, it was a disaster. But socially it was wonderful. For a start there were girls in the crammer – lots of them – and access to pubs, and to clubs too. I had digs in a house with a bunch of youths who had similarly got frustrated with the monastic conditions at their public schools. We had a ball. It was 1965. ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Substitute’ were on the radio. One of my flatmates, Clive Rowland, was also very in to folk and country music – Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton. We both went to London to see Johnny Cash and the Carter Family at the Albert Hall, but the star of all those stars was Bob Dylan. The following year we went to the Albert Hall to see him too. The first half of the concert was marvellous – he did his latest songs ‘To Ramona’, ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Mr Tamborine Man’. Then the backing band, called The Hawks, came on. Dylan reappeared in a black suit and didn’t look at all like the folky guy in jeans and a leather jacket huddled together with his girl against the cold as on the cover of The Freewheelin’. With the famously loud opening of ‘Tombstone Blues’, all the way to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, decibels ruled. Within minutes loads of people were getting up and walking out. Someone famously yelled out ‘Judas’. Clive was massively pissed off. But we stayed. I wouldn’t say I loved it, the shock of the new is always a shock, but I sort of liked being shocked.
This was the time that mods and rockers descended on Brighton. Gangs on Lambrettas and Vespas rode up and down the seafront every weekend, all wearing identical parkas with fake fur collars, all with identical short haircuts and all with a fake aerial on the back with a squirrel tail tied to it. I wasn’t attracted to them. I found their neat, cheap suits and button-down collared Carnaby shirts alien, except that The Who were wearing exactly those sort of clothes and I surely liked The Who. And I certainly wanted a scooter. Good reason to explore the warren of little streets just below the station called North Laine. To me, this area was much more atmospheric than the Lanes near the seafront. The tiny grocery shops and ironmongers and pubs were like front rooms, as were the antique and bric-à-brac shops. The sheer minuteness of them was a source of great pleasure. I was growing up, enjoying a seedy ambience that my parents just wouldn’t ‘get’.
Needless to say my A level grades were pitiful – two E passes – but it was summer again and Cornwall beckoned.
Julian Vere was a couple of years older than me but light years ahead in coolness. He wore tight jeans, moccasins and blue denim shirts, and drove a souped-up Ford Anglia at a ferocious speed. Riding with him was completely scary; he took on the Cornish lanes like Dean Moriarty. He smoked Embassy cigarettes and when he’d finished a packet threw it nonchalantly into the boot, intending to pick out the gift coupons when he’d got the time. The boot was always half-filled with empty packets. He wore tight leather driving gloves – the ones that don’t cover your finger tips and have sweat holes on the backs. My mother said they made him look sinister. She disapproved of Julian and my other friend Chris Ghazillian. He arrived at the golf club in a three-wheeler called a Reliant Robin which had been given an extra carburettor and was really dangerous because it would spin with even a modest touch on the accelerator. Chris’s dad had a garage in Macclesfield. His father plainly had plenty of cash because he owned a Bentley with a boot filled with diving gear and wet suits, and would drive it illegally over private land to good diving spots on the headlands around Constantine and Treyarnon. Chris had great Beatles-influenced clothes including a pair of soft leather Anello & Davide elastic-sided Chelsea boots. He also had an Epiphone lead guitar. Not only that, but he knew most of the repertoire of The Beatles and most of the songs sung by everyone in vogue in Liverpool and Manchester: Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Hollies, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. He knew both words and chords. Naturally, I told him of my attempts at bass playing. Then it transpired that Julian occasionally played drums. We got talking about forming a little band, and I mentioned that at the back of my parents’ house there was an old slate barn where we could practise.
My parents had moved from the Art Deco holiday house, Polventon, out on Trevose Head, and had bought a rather plain Victorian house called Redlands, built on the isthmus of land between Booby’s Bay and Mother Ivey’s Bay. The barn was actually a coach house, a building that had previously housed a horse and a carriage with a loft upstairs for hay for the horse. No electricity, but I bought a hundred feet of twin-core lighting cable. I had my bass and amplifier from school, Chris had a small practice amp and Julian just had a bucket to start with. Within a couple of practices, the atmospheric qualities of the coach house started to fill us with ideas. Why not have a party there and invite the six girls we had just met at the golf club? We were a bit stumped by Julian’s bucket but then we heard about Roger Hawke from St Merryn village who had drums. We hoped to borrow his kit, but we could not avoid having Roger too. He arrived with a little sticker on the face of the bass drum which said ‘The Astronorts’.
Preparation for the party went on for some days. I helped myself to my parents’ account at the off-licence, Henwoods, in Padstow. Cans of Long Life beer and gallon jars of Merrydown cider. We didn’t bother with any food apart from crisps. I managed to get hold of a couple of red fire-glow bulbs and we borrowed two table lamps from the house and covered the shades with red crêpe paper. I persuaded my sister Henrietta to lend us her pale blue Dansette record player. On the walls I hung a load of bark paintings, brought back by my parents from a trip to Fiji on the P&O ship Orsova, and I also stuck up a devil mask from the same trip and put a light behind it. And stuck up some LP covers too. We acquired a bed from the house and took some car seats out of a couple of cars which some local boys had pushed over Trevose Head. It all looked very sexy. In a blanket box in the house I had found some thick green curtains which we tacked up.
We’d gone out and pinned handwritten notes in the Farmers Arms and the golf club to say I was having a party. Imagine doing that as a 17-year-old today! Loads of people came – Australian life guards, Dave and Ray from the chippie in St Merryn, some of the locals from St Merryn, a few farmers, some fishermen’s sons from Padstow. Euphoria was in the air, as we all tried to get off with girls, one hand leaning against a beam above empty glasses and bottles and drinks piling up on the top of the sandy walls under the eaves. At about midnight my father made an appearance and said he thought it would be a good idea if we stopped and we did.
My dad liked a good party as much as I did. I have very fond memories of the parties he threw every Christmas at Conduit Farm. I recently met the daughter of one of my parents’ friends, El
izabeth Archibald, now a professor of Medieval Literature, who described these parties as perhaps the most memorable thing about her childhood in Oxfordshire. I think it was a combination of the house, which was friendly and comfortable, and my parents, who were sociable and interesting and interested in their friends. My father made a point of always serving really good drink. I once found a bill from Berry Brothers in an old filing cabinet: red and white burgundy, Gewürztraminer, Veuve Cliquot and Rheingau. For their parties, my mother prepared boiled then roasted ham with mustard, cloves and brown sugar, roast beef and two salads (a chunky potato salad with homemade mayonnaise and finely chopped shallots, and a salad of beetroot, apple and celery). I remember how jolly my parents were – and how welcoming. The centre of my comfort zone, in retrospect, is my mother a bit tight with a gin and tonic in one hand and a cigarette in the other, smiling at me, full of pleasure in having me there.
No wonder I loved that party in the coach house. Actually, it wasn’t just one party – we went on having them all that summer and the summer after. The wire that ran from the house was always a problem; it was lighting flex and on rainy nights was lit up with blue sparks all the way. We finally bought a heavy-duty cable but it wasn’t the only safety concern – the loft floor used to sag alarmingly. We never thought that the whole floor, weighed down by maybe 60 people, might crash down on another 30 or 40 below, we just fixed it by dragging a couple of driftwood logs up from the beach and propping it up. As the parties grew in popularity we started doing food, mainly just bread and cheese, but on one occasion we tried roasting a pig. It was raw in the middle, so most of it was eaten by Claud Holman’s Alsatian, Porky. Claud had a garage in Lostwithiel. I bought a diesel Land Rover from him with some of the money I had inherited from my grandfather’s brother, great-uncle Otto. Claud himself bought one too and so did my sister Janie. Claud became a leading light in the party organisation – not least because he had an uncle in Lerryn who made cider.
I see now that all this activity was an early foray into the world of restaurants. I realise that I really enjoyed setting the scene and making other people animated, whether in conversation or dancing or eating and drinking.
Living vicariously – that’s where success as a restaurateur lies. Our farm home was isolated, and school had been all boys. I was subdued by my father and suffered from the feeling that I wasn’t very good at anything. As a result, I was constantly trying to please others, so they wouldn’t notice how ordinary I was. I had to run the parties, I had to run the disco, I had to get satisfaction from other people enjoying themselves. Now, I had lots of friends and something to offer – my barn, Rick’s barn.
I’m not always criticising myself. I know I’m good at cooking, that I can pick just the right tune to urge people to get up and dance, and that I can find the words to express myself in writing. I love nostalgia. I used to listen over and over again to ‘Theme from a Summer Place’ by Percy Faith at my aunt Zoe’s house at Treyarnon. At school there was ‘Sealed with a Kiss’ by Brian Hyland and the Shangri-Las’ ‘Remember (Walking in the Sand)’. But my two favourites are ‘The Boys of Summer’ by Don Henley and ‘Night Moves’ by Bob Seger. They both play on the sweet tension we all feel as effortless summer days move into an almost imperceptible chill in the air with autumn arriving.
‘Time’s winged chariot’ as Andrew Marvell puts it.
But it wasn’t just the parties, the girls and the songs that made Cornwall my summer place. I loved the ruggedness of north Cornwall; high cliffs, endless beaches, gales in the winter so that the trees all leaned one way, the romantic bleakness of the headlands. Short tough grass, pink thrift, yellow gorse. I loved the gnarled endurance of the fishermen, the dangerousness of the pubs in Padstow. I adored the Cornish accent. I tried to copy it but I was no good. In the Farmers Arms in St Merryn, there was a landlord called Derek Cripps who you just couldn’t understand. He was the originator of the word ‘directly’ meaning ‘very slowly’. He told tales of life as a farm labourer in the era of steam-driven threshing machines and horse-drawn corn binders, when the corn fields were filled with poppies and butterflies. It gave you some idea of what story-telling was like before there were books. Derek used to have his own beer mug which held two pints. He was a very large man with rather a red face and white hair and a large stomach. He always wore a white shirt rolled up to the elbows and a wide leather belt with a big buckle, which he wore tightly round his trousers, but there were no loops on the waistband so the belt was slung so low it seemed to prop up his stomach. He had a well-dressed and slim wife called Edie who came from the East End of London and who probably gave Derek a hard time when the pub was shut. But during opening hours it was Derek’s show. He would shout greetings as you walked in. There was a garden at the back with a few barrels sawn in half as tables and St Austell Brewery beer crates as seats. There were chickens in the garden and a damp all-slate gents which had moss growing out of the walls. My parents described Derek as a reprobate but that was almost a term of endearment. To me he was a total hero. To have Derek notice me was a warm glow. The pub had a favoured table near the fireplace with high-backed settles on either side so that you were cut off. I came in once to see Rod Stewart sitting there dressed in a suit. He was with a beautiful girlfriend. I was there with the composer Malcolm Arnold.
There used to be singing nights. A contingent would often come from Padstow, including Johnnie Murt whose tenor voice was clear and tugged at the heart. His repertoire included ‘Pleasant and Delightful’. Henrietta was always enchanted by the way he sang the word ‘melodious’ – it sounded like ‘melodieuse’ – ‘the larks they sang melodious at the dawning of the day’. He also sang ‘The Nightingale’, which was my father’s favourite.
For to hear the fond tale of the sweet nightingale
As she sings in the valley below?
I tried to learn that on a mouth organ some years later. I was working in an abattoir in Roma in Queensland, so lonely and so homesick, and that song made me feel better. It made me feel that one day I would get back to my beloved Cornwall, where my father helped Johnnie Murt financially when he needed to buy a fishing boat, where you knew everyone and everyone was your friend. Where Johnnie Murt sang ‘The Wild Rover’, ‘The White Rose’, ‘Little Eyes’, ‘Lamorna’, ‘Goin’ up Camborne Hill, coming down’ and ‘Trelawny’.
Derek used to sit in the settle and sing what was definitely my favourite Cornish song:
Eating and drinking is so charming
Piping and smoking there’s no harm in
All such things we take delight in
When we meet together
Whack for the leero, leero, liro
Whack for the leero, leero, liro
All such things we take delight in
When we meet together
On each whack he’d thump the settle with his elbow. Lots of things look better in retrospect but those were glory days.
VII
My A level results came in July. I had squeezed passes in only two, History and English. I was entirely uninterested in going to university. My father made me attend a vocational guidance test which came up with the answer, ‘There is no doubt that you are best suited to working in the Sales Division of a large manufacturing or retail firm.’ The report said that my emotional stability was average, self-sufficiency very low, extroversion (whatever that was) average, dominance low, confidence low, sociability above average. Armed with this personality profile, my dad persuaded me to go for a sales job at British Petroleum. He had friends in BP because his company, The Distillers, at that time not only produced whiskies, such as Johnnie Walker and Haig, and gin, including Gordon’s, but also made chemicals whose production was closely linked with BP. I went for an interview and did embarrassingly badly. Finally, in a sort of desperate bid to please my dad, I suggested maybe a job in hotel management would sort me out. Without the cocoon of Cornwall and the parties in the barn, my confidence was very low and at the time I felt a failure
in everything. Catering seemed to me to be just about what I was capable of, bearing in mind that catering was not the sort of job that the careers master at my public school would have advised. Fifteen years later, a friend of mine, Philip Minty, asked me what I was doing in a third-rate job like catering. The joke was that he was in catering, too. We came to the joint conclusion that it was because we hadn’t done well at school.
I went for an interview with Trust Houses whose flagship was Brown’s Hotel in Albemarle Street, London and with British Transport Hotels, which ran all the railway hotels at the main stations, including the Midland in Manchester and some hotels near stations at popular Edwardian holiday destinations such as Gleneagles, Turnberry and the Tregenna Castle in St Ives. Trust Houses was a bit fusty – all wood panelling and afternoon teas – but I landed a job at the Great Western Royal Hotel in Paddington station, as a management trainee, to start in early January the next year, 1966.
I was sharing a flat in Finborough Road with my two best friends from school, Tim Dale and Christopher Arnott, and another chap from the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which he called the Honkers and Shankers. It was a long wait for the Great Western job, and I didn’t do anything much for month after month and got steadily more despondent. Finally, in a fit of bravado, I took a job as a road sweeper.
