by Rick Stein
The parties in the coach house were wonderful and my confidence and serenity unassailable. I went out with Jill virtually every night. Then at August bank holiday I asked her whether she was going to the Farmers Arms on the Saturday and she told me she was going with somebody else. To say that I didn’t see that coming was an understatement. I had been massively intrigued by her enigmatic quality and completely overwhelmed by her beauty. When I discovered that she was going to the pub with someone whom she’d met before she met me, and who also proved to be an excellent piano player, my humiliation was extreme.
The scene in the Farmers Arms is forever etched in my mind: Jill next to the piano with him effortlessly playing a selection of Beatles songs. When he’d stopped there was ‘Hey Jude’ on the jukebox. I wrote a little two-line poem soon after:
Perhaps it was the leisure of interminable days
That makes it seem so funny that it’s gone
When I ‘ran away to sea’ I had no desire to go to university. I’d flunked my A levels not once but twice and my father’s suicide had left me lost and uncertain. But Australia and travelling on my own had helped me grow up. I returned with a sense of confidence in myself. When the latest lotus-eating summer of delights in Cornwall was over, and the nights were getting longer and autumn descending, I made up my mind to try for Oxford. It was a long shot, but I’d done a lot of reading while I was away and I was encouraged by various people saying that my experiences abroad and my age might help because mature students were favoured. I had lots of private coaching.
My English tutor John Hall was one of those people in their mid-twenties who find it hard to adjust from the gloriously sociable and valuable aesthetic life of university to the much more mundane business of finding a job. They maintain a connection with the golden era by teaching A levels and university entrance exams. With considerable entrepreneurial flair, John had also established a summer school in Venice, teaching fine art and visiting museums and churches. He staffed his operation with similar graduates, one of whom, Bill Baker, was to feature in my life as a restaurateur. John had a keen eye for what Oxford English dons would be looking for in a mature student. He taught me in a flat in Cheyne Walk, overlooking the Thames. Driving over in my brand new Hillman Imp, which my mother had given me as a late 21st birthday present, from my sister Janey’s house in Crouch End, calling some days to Kensington for Latin or Belsize Park for French studies, I took to the prospect of life at Oxford with enthusiasm. At last I was discussing Thomas Wyatt’s They Flee From Me with someone near my own age – noting the lurking danger in the poem of the illicit liaison at the court of Henry VIII. Was she perhaps Anne Boleyn we wondered, this delicious woman with the pale deer-like limbs? Drinking tea and eating buttered crumpets overlooking the Thames I felt I had moved back into a comfortable middle-class life.
My sister Janey had married an actor, Shaun O’Riordan. When she met him he also had a bric-à-brac stall in Portobello Road market. Challenging, keen on constructive arguments and twenty years older than me, he was at the height of his considerable success as a TV director at the time that I was trying for Oxford. He had style. His collection of shirts from shops in Jermyn Street included Harvey and Hudson big shirts with thick double cuffs which came in subtle shades of grey or mauve or yellow with white stripes. He had floral ties from Liberty and suits from Jaeger, and expensive colognes and aftershaves. He used Eau Sauvage and joked that savage water should be for young strutting men with big libidos but the only people who could afford it were over-paid TV directors and aging poofters. He scared the pants off most of my friends, particularly girls, as he demanded that everyone who came to his house gave an account of themselves and wouldn’t let them get away with silence. He could usually be guaranteed to have a contradictory point of view about any opinion. His greater experience of life invariably won the day. I loved him to bits, still do. He had a workshop in the basement of his large house in Crouch End and let me have a corner of it, where I built two speakers to go with the Thorens GL68 turntable I had bought. I was saving up for an amplifier, in the meantime playing Love, The Doors and the Rockbuster through an old radio. He constantly pulled me up for failing to make the edges of the sides of my speaker boxes 100 per cent true. His attention to detail often made me frustrated at my own inability to get it right. He was completely thorough in everything he did, even the washing-up.
At that time specialist food shops were beginning to appear everywhere and Sainsbury’s had the sort of cachet that Waitrose has today. All its packaging was plain – just one colour, orange, green or red, with a minimalist sans serif typeface on it – and it seemed to me to be very stylish. Janey patronised good food shops all over London: sausages from Baker Street, ice creams from Marine Ices opposite the Roundhouse in Haverstock Hill, Paxton & Whitfield for cheese. Janey followed Constance Spry because she was our mother’s favourite, but she read cookbooks like novels.
Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden. The ability to flavour dishes with depth was something I learnt from Janey. She had the most beautiful handwriting. I tried to copy her precision with forming the letters, but could never get the satisfying roundness of her E. Everything she did – writing, organising her kitchen, labelling food for the deep freeze – was done with an attention to detail which affected her younger brother no end. Given that my father had made rather a mess of being a role model, I needed someone to look up to and aspire to – and they were Janey and Shaun.
I worked hard all that autumn and took my entrance exam in early December. I have a suspicion that what got me into Oxford was my answer to a general question about landscapes. I wrote about the outback in Australia, the red landscape of the Simpson desert and the rock formations rising out of the flat land where the balls of dry, spiky spinifex rolled around in circles in the wind and the little dust cones called willy-willies followed them.
Just after finishing my entrance exam I met – at a twenty-first birthday party in Kent – a friend of Henrietta’s called Frances Pick. We rolled home to London in a train with no corridors and my behaviour was amorous and enormously confident. I just knew she would respond with equal fervour and she did. I was completely captivated by her, so much so that when I knew I had been accepted by New College, Oxford, I moved into a flat in Ditchling Road, Brighton, to be near her at art college in Worthing. I went to work for Robert McAlpine as a labourer building a bypass round Shoreham.
I wasn’t much liked by the ganger, because I was not at all interested in working weekends or evenings because I wanted to be with Fanny. The best way to define our relationship would be tempestuous. I have described myself as lacking in confidence but that doesn’t imply any lack of spirit underneath. Shy people are often also in something of a rage with themselves for being so unable to give account of what they are really like. What am I really like? Well, I think it takes a very close relationship to discover that, and also one that is over. I have kept all the letters from Fanny, in fact I’ve kept all the letters from all the women I’ve cared for. I like women. I find them much easier to talk to than men.
Fanny Pick’s letters often say things like ‘I was so happy you were in a good mood’ or ‘pleased you are feeling less depressed now’. It’s hard to own up to being a moody person, hard to say that a lot of the time you see the skull beneath the skin, but she understood this and her letters illustrated it.
I loved the way Fanny dressed. She possessed an array of miniskirts, some tweed, some pleated, some tartan. The shades of pastel in the tights she wore, her neat shoes and tight jumpers only just coming to the top of her skirts. Dresses in the summer of lightest pale cotton, tight and short. I don’t think she possessed a pair of jeans. She had a rather languid way of speaking and a way of looking at men with a sort of secret smile if she liked them, as if she was saying, ‘This is the conversation now but it could be so much more later.’ She had warm brown eyes and she was very sexy and drove me wild. Looking back now, I just couldn’t cope with her. It w
as doomed almost from the start but while it lasted it was so strong.
I remember once returning to my small but nice room in Brighton after an evening at the King and Queen just down the road. The company in the pub had been stimulating. Both my flatmates were students at Sussex University and there was lots of lively chat. Fanny and I got back full of joy and sat on the end of the bed in our coats and kissed. It was a moment of being as one. There were a couple of LP sleeves on the bed: Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66, memories for me of Sydney, or maybe Also Sprach Zarathustra because I’d just been to see 2001, or maybe Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland with the original cover with all the naked women looking a bit grey, or perhaps an Oscar Peterson album borrowed from Graham Knott across the hall who was reading maths at Sussex and was so bright he had plenty of time to get a 2.1 while listening to lots of Oscar.
I was so jealous, so possessive, that I hated being apart from Fanny. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach whenever I saw a girl wearing a dress like hers or smelt perfume like hers. The last time I saw her she came to my rooms in New College. She was dressed in yellow. But we couldn’t go on, not at that age. I was just starting at Oxford, she lived miles away in Worthing.
The letters came as frequently as before, then they stopped. There was a reticence about her on the phone. I was in denial. Eventually I realised that she never telephoned me, and I was always ringing her. Finally, just after the autumn term ended and I was staying at Janey and Shaun’s, I decided I would drive to Worthing and meet her walking from the art college back to her lodgings. I bought a bunch of blue paper flowers. When she saw me in my long black coat with the silly flowers she looked shocked and said, ‘Oh Ricky, that’s very sweet of you, but I want you to go.’
VIII
Two sad songs were my companions that Christmas back in Cornwall: Jethro Tull’s ‘Reasons for Waiting’ and Tim Hardin’s, ‘How Can We Hang On to a Dream’. But at that age things don’t stay blue for long. I had made a new bunch of friends that summer in Cornwall. Word of my parties in the coach house had by then reached quite far afield and that included the Bude lot, who were lifeguards and ex-lifeguards from Widmouth Bay. One of these, Graham Walker, had become a student of landscape architecture in Cheltenham and he brought down a friend called John Thompson and his friend Francis Bowerbank. They were sleeping on a mattress in the back of a green Commer panel van in Constantine, and appeared at one of my parties.
The first thing John Thompson did was to help himself to Henrietta’s cigarettes which were on the ledge under the roof.
I went up and said, ‘Look, can you stop nicking my sister’s cigarettes? She’s very pissed off.’
To which he replied, ‘Want one?’
And I said, ‘Yes. OK.’
And so began a friendship.
I saw a lot of the three of them, zooming around London in the back of Francis’s van, crashing other people’s parties where you could always find us in the kitchen because most of the time we didn’t know anyone. We crashed parties because in those days the pubs shut at 11 p.m. The form would always be the same: closing time, and you’d buy a couple of large cans of gruesome beer like Watney’s Red Barrel. Someone, mostly Francis, would have heard of a party somewhere like Hendon or Acton. I can’t remember a specific party because they were all the same. I don’t think any of us – and we would normally be seven or eight – would strike up a conversation with anyone who was legitimately at the party, but we so enjoyed each other’s company it didn’t matter. I don’t recall anyone getting stroppy: we always brought our own booze. We’d all tried hash but could leave it out. What we couldn’t leave out was the alcohol. We all drank a great deal of beer. Even then, we were seeking out real ale pubs such as the Prince of Wales in Highgate which sold Courage Best and the Surprise in Chelsea which sold Bass. German Riesling wines such as Blue Nun and Three Crowns were still popular, as were blended wines like Hirondelle and Don Cortez but these were generally a bit on the sweet side. The wine of choice for us was a French brand, Nicolas, and the one I liked was Vieux Ceps which came in a litre bottle with a foil cap and with stars on the neck. It was the sort of wine you bought for a couple of francs in the corner shop in Paris. The fact that it cost ten times as much in Great Britain was not welcome.
I went up to Oxford in October 1969. My tutors were John Bayley and Christopher Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien’s son, who took me in Anglo-Saxon and Old English. I was a rough diamond. I suppose I’d expected to feel somehow superior with my maturity, but I didn’t, I just felt dumber. I was 22. My fellow undergraduates, all male at that time, were from public schools and all had just left them. This, I felt, put me at a disadvantage. I was distanced from quiet, scholarly, bookish work. My appreciation of English literature was as someone who had lived it. My brother John was a junior don at Magdalen while I was an undergraduate. I said to him at the time that it seemed impossible to me that someone aged 18 could write authoritatively about literature, having not had experience of most of the adult situations described. He answered simply, ‘Some people just do understand, however young they are.’ Looking back, I was partly wrong and partly right. People with the sensibility of a Mozart or a Shakespeare will always have instinctive understanding. People like me have to live it. I liked Robert Browning, whom I didn’t discover till Oxford. He filled me with a sense of what the Victorians were really like. His dramatic monologues drop you into the middle of somewhere like the red-light zone of fifteenth-century Florence where a monk is discovered leaving a brothel, and you have to pick up what’s going on and what the character is like from what he says to the police. I responded positively to these vignettes and John Bayley appeared to enjoy my enthusiasm. His tutorials took place in his pleasingly cluttered rooms in New College with pipes on the mantelpiece and books on a table behind the sofa. He smoked a highly aromatic Dutch tobacco called Amphora. I read The Waste Land with him and we got to the phase in the poem showing a slight colour to the grey land:
Oh city. I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street
The pleasant whining of a mandolin
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fish men lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
I described walking past a bar in the City near the Thames on a sunny spring morning and the door of a pub opening. I could hear a piano playing. There was no church interior but the sun reflected off the water. I felt the reality of the piece and John Bayley said that my joy in the everyday was very infectious. It really heartened me, because mostly I felt like a fish out of water in the academic environment of Oxford.
John Bayley’s wife was Iris Murdoch. I had actually read a lot of her books and loved the early ones especially Under the Net and The Bell but I couldn’t think of anything to say to him about them that would be remotely interesting.
Being good at cooking changed this inhibition. Many years later I even dared to believe that my monarch might be interested in recipes. I had been asked to lunch with the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh. It was like a return to Oxford, but this time the company assembled for drinks beforehand were discussing Uganda, where the Queen was going for the twentieth Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. Someone suggested it could be dangerous which, I remember, got short shrift from her. Finally we went into lunch.
When we got to the main course I said, ‘Ma’am, I think this roasted beetroot is absolutely excellent. Is there any way I could have the recipe?’
A surprised little silence.
‘I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the chef.’
I did and here it is.
The chef takes a kilo of beetroot, boils it in salted water, peels and cuts it into cubes then he sweats a medium chopped onion in butter with a tablespoon of red wine vinegar. He then adds the chopped beetroot and seasons with salt and black pepper. In the version I have adapted for my own use, I add
a tablespoon of tiny capers and very nice it is too.
In my second term I started working for the undergraduate newspaper, Cherwell. The offices were in a shed behind the Oxford Union building off Cornmarket. They were irredeemably scruffy and numbingly cold, alleviated by a one-bar electric fire charged by a 10p meter funded by the students rather than the newspaper. Cherwell was not assisted financially by the university and was much despised. I recall happening to mention it to my tutor Christopher Tolkien. He looked at me with what I took to be extreme scorn. I suffered for my art. I was doing this voluntarily and sometimes I was forced to ask myself why I was traipsing around junior common rooms, college porters’ lodges and the Oxford Union Bar, looking for scraps of stories. I’d hoped that journalism was to be my career but the reality was proving mundane. Being a reporter for an unloved newspaper was like any foot-in-the-door job – excruciating.
I don’t have a thick skin and most of the stories seemed hardly stories at all. This was one of mine:
Girl in Rustication Row
Found with a girl in his room early in the morning of the Saturday of Eights Week last term, Mick Watts (Mansfield) was rusticated for a term.
‘We had crashed Lincoln and Jesus Balls and the chick couldn’t go back to Somerville, she didn’t have a late key,’ said Watts. ‘The usual fine is about ten shillings so I think this a bit rough.’
I was sent to interview the girl in question and she pleaded with me to drop it because her parents would be so upset. I fussed about this and got back to our dingy offices and gave the story to the news editor, Keith Jenkins.
‘I really don’t think we should use this. The girl’s very worried about her parents finding out.’
‘Who are her parents?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, go and find out if they’re famous. Ring Bill Potter.’
