Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life

Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life Keith Floyd Keith Floyd’s exuberant personality, as much as his cooking skills, has made him a favourite both as bestselling author and as television presenter. But here, for the first time, he tells his own story – and it is full of surprises.The stories from his childhood in Somerset are vivid and moving: his grandfather with his tin leg, his mother at the mills, and his uncle, the ferret keeper, and the black sheep of the family for ‘carrying on’ with married women.Keith Floyd spent a short spell on a local newspaper, and then, in a hilarious episode, joined the army. After he and the Ministry of Defence decided that they did not suit each other, he took his first cooking job as an assistant vegetable cook in a Bristol hotel. The great period of bistros and cafes had dawned and Keith Floyd was in the forefront, cooking in an open kitchen, with Pink Floyd blaring from the speakers.What is wonderful about this book is the vividness of the scenes he paints and the deftness with which he draws the characters – including his several wives. Those who have admired Keith Floyd’s way with a whisk will now be impressed to discover and enjoy his remarkable skill with words. Out of the Frying Pan Scenes from My Life Keith Floyd Copyright (#ulink_76e2c290-ac33-5e53-abae-27221c4f11d6) HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001 Copyright © Keith Floyd 2000 The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non–exclusive, non–transferable right to access and read the text of this e–book on screen. 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Source ISBN: 9780007122813 Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 9780007375295 Version: 2014–08–29 FOR POPPY AND PATRICK I hope you’ll understand some of this and therefore understand a bit of me Table of Contents Cover Page (#uc9eef5ff-eab3-5971-88d8-1482c3bc1e8f) Title Page (#u6ee37e5a-c629-55b8-abea-ebfc0cb5b593) Copyright (#uc9118b50-f166-5561-b6cb-97d48dc23150) Dedication (#u95d58ff5-e59e-509e-8d31-efaab604ee22) Ferrets, Faggots and Fishing (#u6c5ce006-5d83-5775-8593-333d67efcb7a) Typewriters and Burgundy (#ub4788a85-4baf-5c9b-a49c-29663396aee1) Floyd on Parade – Almost (#u6efc57da-7505-5e56-a7d8-710ae0e114eb) Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane (#litres_trial_promo) Bistros, Boots and Bentleys (#litres_trial_promo) Halcyon Days (#litres_trial_promo) Flirty and Freedom (#litres_trial_promo) Afloat on the Med. (#litres_trial_promo) Attention all Shipping (#litres_trial_promo) Draw Sword and Charge (#litres_trial_promo) Cameras, Fish and a Walk in the Garden (#litres_trial_promo) Food, Frying Pans and Fame (#litres_trial_promo) The Irish Period (#litres_trial_promo) The Leap Out of the Frying Pan (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Ferrets, Faggots and Fishing (#ulink_38264352-2cc7-52fb-bd5a-50dace3f8673) The outside lavatory at 16 Silver Street smelt of urine and Harpic, dampness and earwigs. The green, gold, blue and red transfers which were meant to simulate stained glass were peeling. A rusty chain with a much-handled wooden handle hung from the hissing and leaking cistern. The copper pipe of the water supply was mildewed green. The shiny hardwood lavatory seat slid to one side if you sat on it and both it and the wooden cover on its old hinges would fall down when you tried to pee in it. From the outside lavatory were six steps that led into a small, walled yard. At the end of the yard, beyond the red sandstone wall with its purple and red weeds burgeoning defiantly from the simple mortar between the stones, beyond the smell of wet privet hedges dank with the slime of snails, and before a fertile garden of voluptuous plum trees, bleeding raspberry canes, blackcurrant bushes and runner beans, was my grandfather’s workshop. My grandfather had a tin leg. Strapped across his shoulders by broad braces, over this thick brown trousers he wore a wide leather belt, and at precisely ten to one you would hear his huff, hiss, puff and his stomp as he clunk-clacked down the yard and down the six steps to the outside lavatory, the one o’clock news (previously, anxiously and obediently tuned in on the big, mahogany wireless that sat on a big brown sideboard by my grandmother) and his lunch. He stomped down the steps and clumsily crashed into the kitchen, with its grey and white speckled gas range the colour of a heron and its brightly burning cast-iron burners. The kitchen units were cream-enamelled with red piping, a large copper boiler with a massive gas burner fed by a rubber tube issued the odours of washday. The steam from the boiling sheets billowed and entwined with the little jets of aromatic steam from the big aluminium pot which contained the beef stew and dumplings. In the living room a Victorian mahogany table was laid with embroidered table mats and set with bone-handled knives and forks. Some of the little metal bands between the bone and the blade were loose. There was a large and softly chipped cut-glass salt cellar. There was a freshly cut loaf of burnt, crusty white bread from the Golden Hill Bakery. There was a weeping, golden yellow brick of salty farmhouse butter. There was a small, ten-year-old boy in a white shirt, tie, grey serge short trousers with a yellow and purple snake belt and sandals sitting, elbows off the table, waiting for his lunch which would have to be served and eaten in silence while his grandfather grumpily slurped his stew, as the announcer said, ‘This is the BBC Home Service…here is the one o’clock news.’ Sometimes my grandfather, noisily sucking Rennies, and smoking strong cigarettes always with a long drooping piece of ash on the end, which to my grandmother’s fury he would flick casually onto the carpet, would tell me stories of the First World War. He had lied about his age in order to join up, but he never communicated to me the horror of it, rather more the lighter moments like playing football with the Germans one Christmas, drinking wine on leave in France, which made them tiddly. Sometimes there were subtle allusions to farm girls. He said he knew nothing of the shell that blew off his leg until he woke up in a field hospital and wondered why he could feel a pain in a limb that was no longer there. He had given me a sort of illustrated boys’ Bumper Book of the First World War, which of course showed war in its glory and not in its shame and 1 could sometimes sit with him for hours as he explained the trench systems to me, how the artillery was placed and such like. Only once did he ever refer to his officers and generals in a mildly angry way when he quoted the title of Henry Williamson’s book (also author of Salar the Salmon and Tarka the Otter), Lions Led by Donkeys. We, my Uncle Ken, my grandmother, grandfather and I, eat the delicious stew as the grim events of the Korean War are placidly announced on the news. It is the first day of the summer holidays. My mother is at work in Fox’s Woollen Mills, my father is an electrician employed by the Electricity Board. My sister, Brenda, three years my senior, is washing up at the White Hart Hotel to earn money to buy a bicycle and a tennis racquet. At this time she is going through a period of religious fervour and attends Bible classes and frenetic Christian rallies organised by a trendy young doctor of medicine, who encouraged us to come to his Sunday Bible classes by offering lavish cream teas and lemonade. Later, his religion got the better of him and, in a moment of terminal madness, he blew out his brains with a twelve-bore shotgun. But during the short time that my sister was obsessed by all things religious, she made my life hell by continually correcting or criticising any act or utterance that 1 made which, in her view, were ungodlike. She also made me clean her shoes. And when I dallied over the drying up, a compulsory Sunday lunchtime task, she would often put dried plates back in the water again so I had to dry them again. But because she was old enough to have a holiday job and was a member of the tennis club, with its attendant social life, I largely saw little of her and I was blissfully free to go up to the Wiveliscombe Reservoir and fish for trout. My Uncle Ken, the youngest of my uncles and very much the roguish black sheep of the family, helped my grandfather in his shoe repairing business. He played both rugby and cricket for Wiveliscombe, drank too much and was having an affair with an older, married woman. This caused the rest of the family, an extremely conservative bunch, a great deal of distress; to be ‘carrying on’ in that way in the 1950s was not acceptable. I, of course, at the time, was unaware of all this and Uncle Ken, who was probably only twenty-eight or so at the time, was the person who came closest to being a hero to me. He kept ferrets, and on snow-covered winter days we would tramp across fields with nets, a canvas bag with a Thermos flask and cheese sandwiches, and drive demented rabbits from their holes. With fingers blue with cold and numbed feet we would paunch the rabbits, make a slit in one of the rear legs and hang them, sometimes quite frozen, from the crossbar of our bicycles. Sometimes, on summer days, we would steal worn-out 78s from my grandfather’s ancient collection of dance music, and to the annoyance of everybody (but no one could control Uncle Ken), we would spin the records in the air like Frisbees and blast them to bits with Ken’s shotgun. Some days I would sit on the edge of my grandfather’s workbench playing spaceships with the screw-down wheels of a red shoe-press while he, with a mouthful of nails, rhythmically resoled farmers’ boots. Outside in the yard was a rainwater butt and every so often the traveller from the tannery in Bristol would arrive with several large sheets of leather. This leather was cut into rectangles and left to soak in the rain butt. Every night, when my parents came home from work, we would have a cooked tea. Sometimes rissoles made from the remains of Sunday’s roast, sometimes fish and chips, sometimes a baked, soused herring. But very often it would be a lentil and ham soup with thick chunks of carrot and swede, or a green pea soup enriched with a pig’s trotter. Sometimes it was brawn and bread and pickled onions. Wednesday was always a make-do meal because groceries were only delivered once a week on Thursday, and often on Wednesday night my sister or I would be dispatched to the newsagent’s shop after it had shut with instructions to knock on the back door and borrow half a pound of butter until tomorrow. Sometimes I would wait by Arnold and Hancock’s Brewery and look across the field to the wool factory and wait for my mother to walk the half-mile-long lane and ask her for a shilling so that I could go to the pictures. Sometimes she didn’t have a shilling to give me. We lived in a tumbledown cottage which adjoined my grandparents’ house. My father spent every spare moment renovating the house. Floorboards in the bedroom were tortured and twisted and sloped alarmingly. He painstakingly lifted all the floorboards and carefully placed wooden wedges on the old joists to level the floor. He built a bathroom and a kitchen and knocked windows into walls three feet thick. My mother was able to buy remnants of pure wool cloth from the mill, and on her Singer sewing machine she would make school trousers for me and dresses for my sister. When I came home with my first fish none of us knew its species and I used my pocket money, earned by washing up and weeding the garden, to buy The Observer’s Book of Fishes. It was a firm fleshed, brilliantly coloured trout, which, because we knew no better, we filleted and deep fried in batter and ate with chips. My father was a very mild, patient and precise, modest man, who awakened my interest in literature at a very early age by reading to me such classics as Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities and Robinson Crusoe. He had been a lay preacher in Birmingham and was studying what was called an HND in Electrical Engineering when the war put an end to that. He met my mother in Wiveliscombe whilst on a cycling holiday and thereafter he regularly cycled from Birmingham to Somerset to court her. He was incredibly capable. He could lay a concrete path, repair a clock or, as he did, build me a crystal radio, which I would listen to in my bedroom at nights, although in fact I didn’t have a bedroom. I slept, screened off by a heavy curtain, on the landing between my sister’s and my parents’ bedrooms. In winter, once a week, my mother made faggots and peas. These are delicious balls of minced liver, lights and heart, flavoured with onion and sage, wrapped in fatty pigs’ caul and roasted in the oven. They are served with a rich gravy made from the stock in which the ingredients have been previously poached, and served with a mound of mushy peas. I have never forgotten when, some years later, I came home very late after a school rugby away game, one which we won, and elated, battered and starving, I was anticipating my steaming plate of faggots. Alas, Uncle Ken had unexpectedly turned up and was given my dinner and I had to make do with bacon sandwiches made from the offcuts of bacon that Murdoch’s the butchers sold for pennies a pound, mostly fat with thick rind. In fact, they were quite delicious, but they in no way compensated for the loss of my faggots! My parents’ philosophy was based on simple generosity and hospitality and visitors always came first, and although in those days the grocery order would only contain one pound of butter, it would be spread thick until it was gone and we would make do with dripping towards the end of the week rather than spread it thinly and meanly. (In 1993 my mother made me fifty portions of faggots and peas for my fiftieth birthday and I said, ‘Uncle Ken is not getting any of these!’) Until I was ten I attended Wiveliscombe Primary School, where country dancing, singing and maypole dancing made up a strong part of the curriculum. I was a spotty, skinny kid and hated every second of those activities. I seemed to spend an awful lot of time fighting in the playground with a pair of really rough, tough kids who, because I didn’t have a strong Somerset accent, thought I was a bit of a snob and needed teaching a lesson. Luckily, I was a tough little bugger and seldom lost my fights. And apart from being ridiculed by the Headmaster for not knowing how long a jet liner took to travel to America the only other outstanding memory I have of my time at Wiwy School was when, in the milk break one autumn day, I placed a dozen shiny brown chestnuts on the potbellied stove in the corner of the classroom. I had spent the previous Sunday knocking them out of the trees by the reservoir with a stick with the intention of roasting them and eating them before class started again. Unfortunately I forgot, and halfway through a writing exercise, where only the scratching of nibs on paper disturbed the heavy silence, the chestnuts suddenly exploded like a burst of machine-gun fire. The teacher was panic-stricken. After she regained her composure and restored order after the pandemonium that my intended snack had caused, I, of course, spent the rest of the lesson with my hands on my head, standing in the corner. She was, of course, convinced that I had done it deliberately. But on the whole, with the exception of a very slight incident when a couple of other lads and I somehow got caught shoplifting, nicking Mars bars from Mrs Vickery’s corner store, which resulted in a sound thrashing, a suspension of pocket money and no play for a week, I had a happy and trouble-free time. In their wisdom, my parents took a dramatic decision on my higher education. A decision which later I was, unjustly as it turned out, to criticise and complain bitterly about. My sister Brenda was a very bright child and passed her eleven-plus with ease and gained a scholarship to Bishop Fox’s Grammar School in Taunton. However, for some months before I was due to sit my eleven-plus, I had been very ill with some mysterious stomach upset, and for weeks the only food I was allowed to eat, something which I love now but hated then, was natural Bulgarian yoghurt. My parents thought my chances of passing the eleven-plus were slim, if not nonexistent, so they arranged for me to sit the Common Entrance exam at Wellington School, a small, independent, public school. Happily, I passed and was given an assisted place, although this did mean my mother and father both taking on part-time jobs over and above their regular employment to earn enough money to pay the fees. Hitherto, I had been fairly popular with my peer group, but from the first day when I stood at the bus stop in my thick, short-trousered grey suit, grey socks, black shoes, pale blue cap, school tie and satchel, my standing with the lads changed dramatically and terminally. My first day at school was a nightmare of mixed emotions. I had not previously encountered middle-class boys, I had no understanding of the difference between day boys and boarders, but above all, the fact that I had to wear chunky, moulded-soled Tuff shoes, whereas the other lads all had highly polished Oxford shoes, made an impression upon me which influences me to this day. I have to have the best shoes I can possibly afford. I can recall nothing of the first couple of terms. The pressure of education and the variety of subjects, especially Chemistry, Physics, Maths and Latin, left me hopelessly bewildered. But then I settled down and I can say, with my hand on my heart, that I proceeded to enjoy the next five and a half years. For me, schooldays truly were the happiest time of my life. The Reverend Lancaster, known behind his back as Burt, quickly realised that Form 4b in general and Floyd, K., in particular had absolutely no interest in or intention of learning Latin. I was gazing thoughtfully out of the window across the cricket square, dreaming about the weekend when I could go fishing again, when suddenly a metre ruler slapped onto my desk in front of me with a resounding ‘thwack’. I jumped, startled from my reverie. ‘Floyd,’ he said, ‘I’d have more success teaching the school cricket roller.’ However, he was a kind and humorous man, and our Latin lessons became quite good fun because he did the decent thing and gave up teaching us Latin and turned our lessons into mock trials, public debates or a general knowledge quiz. My favourite subjects by far and away were English, taught to us by a brilliant man called Joe Storre, who we thought was great as he had suede chukka boots and a suede waistcoat, and History under the direction of ‘the Don’. Both these teachers could impart information with an ease which was genuinely pleasurable. In these subjects, along with French and Art, I excelled, but for the rest I was a total dunce. I joined the CCF and thoroughly enjoyed playing soldiers once a week, hated cricket and liked going to daily chapel. But the winter term was best because we played rugby twice a week, and although I never achieved any great success, I have a passion for the game to this day, and from the comfort of my armchair in front of the television set I am an expert on selection, tactics, and everything there is to know about rugby. In six school Somerset summer holidays, it never rained and for six years the eight or nine weeks of freedom were positively magic. The key to the joy of the long holidays was financial independence because my father insisted that once I was fourteen I should take on a holiday job. Although I had to contribute ?3 10s a week to the family fund, it still left me the amazing sum of just over four pounds a week to spend on fishing tackle, an alloy-framed racing bike and the essential just-released rock and roll records. It was easy to get a summer holiday job: our family was well thought of in the village. Before she married my grandfather, my grandmother had been in service with the local gentry and because of our parents’ insistence upon politeness, helpfulness and sense of duty, we had no problem finding ourselves work of various sorts. One summer I had three jobs. At half past six in the morning I would sweep the pavement in front of the newsagent’s shop, put out the placards, unpack boxes and clean the shop until half past eight. Then I would walk the few yards home for breakfast before going round to the Bear Inn for another hour and a half to sweep the cellar, clean ashtrays and bottle up. Then, as the pub opened I was, of course, being underage, obliged to leave. I would walk across the square to the Red Lion Hotel where, during mornings and at lunchtime, I prepared vegetables or washed lettuces, scrubbed pots and plucked chickens and ducks. In the afternoons I weeded the vegetable garden, mowed lawns and generally tidied up. After tea I would be on my bike with a Thermos flask and some sandwiches to the reservoir or river to fish until dusk. I didn’t work on Sundays, but there were family chores to do – depending on the time of year, picking watercress from the stream for Sunday sandwiches or getting up at dawn in the soft autumn mists to gather mushrooms or spend prickly hours picking blackberries for my mother’s jam or elderberries for my father’s homemade drinks, highly alcoholic and quite lethal. These were drunk only at Christmas. During the harvest I would join my Uncle Ken, who in exchange for shooting and hunting rights, was obliged to help out a farmer friend every autumn. We would stook corn as the tractor, towing its binder, inexorably moved into the final square of corn in the centre of the field. When that square was no more than twenty yards across the fun began. We would stand back in a circle, clutching sticks, around the square like slips round an anxious batsman. Then we boys were sent in to drive out the rabbits and hares that had taken refuge there. Some days I might get one or two, possibly three rabbits, one of which would go into one of my mother’s great rabbit stews; the other two Ken would sell to the butcher for five shillings and give me one and six. Happy days! Another bonus of working on the farm was that I was occasionally allowed to drive the Ferguson T20 tractor, with the corn from the harvest on board. Sadly, one day, disaster struck when I misjudged both the gradient and the angle of turn on the ramp to the granary and capsized six tons of corn, twisted the towing hitch and narrowly escaped serious injury. Anticipating a massive bollocking, I waited for help from the farmer, Mr Hawkins. All he said was: ‘Not drive tractor again, Keith!’ I didn’t enjoy milking time too much either. One cow, called Bessie, regularly kicked me from the milking pen into the cow shit draining trench that ran along the edge of the milking parlour. However, there were sublime rewards when, every time Mrs Hawkins made thick, crusty clotted cream, she gave me a jam jar full to take home. Oh yes, there was one other appalling incident when I misunderstood my instructions to weed the border in front of the verandaed farmhouse and destroyed climbing plants that had been there for decades. Amazing I wasn’t sacked, merely given the job of de-beaking hundreds of wretched battery chickens with a pair of electric shears. I didn’t encounter such an unpleasant scene until years later I watched Hong Kong market traders plucking live hens. At the time I thought all these activities, the mushroom gathering, the odd jobs and so on, were great fun and all part of a country childhood, but of course, there was in fact a genuine financial necessity for such produce as could be gathered for free, and such cash as you earned odd jobbing went into the family purse. Once a year there was great money to be earned, from a week’s potato picking, ten or twelve of us in line behind the tractors; more important to my parents, though, was the bonus of a hundredweight of spuds. My great boyhood chum was a farmer’s son called Linn Ransey. He too worked on the farm during the holidays, but all of our free time was spent at the riverbank. As farmers they were comfortably off and it was always a great moment when I was invited to stay for lunch or tea in the big farmhouse kitchen with the big scrubbed kitchen table. Stuffed fish, caught by Mr Ransey, an expert angler who also made our fishing rods for us, were hung on the walls. If I was asked to stay for tea, we would invariably have a game of cricket or rounders, and I did everything I could to delay the four-mile journey home, and for fear of being scolded for being late, I used to pick bunches of wild flowers, hoping to appease my anxious mother on my return. It was about now that I became aware that my new life at Wellington School was hugely different from my life at home, and I am ashamed to say, I went through a phase of being embarrassed by my parents’ modest means and lifestyle. Now well and truly into long trousers, other boys were sporting worsted blazers and finely woven flannels while I was having to make do with the standard serge blazer and thick grey trousers. Also I was growing dissatisfied, not to say resentful, that I never quite managed any of the school trips abroad. This growing resentment came to a head in my last term at school (I was to leave at sixteen, to my great disappointment – I wasn’t considered bright enough to justify the continuation of increasing school fees) when, without consulting my father, I ordered a fine double-breasted blazer, a fine pair of flannels and some Oxford-toed shoes from the school shop. I think my parents were a little disheartened when they read my final school report and analysed my four meagre O levels, but they were both furious and frightened when they opened the final school bill. My sartorial shopping expedition put the family finances under extreme pressure. I had, it turned out, as my ashen-faced father told me, spent more money on clothes in one hour than he earned in over a month. Not a happy start for an unemployed school leaver about to foray into grown-up life. Nearly forty years later I still have the same problem with tailors, shoemakers and shirt shops! I can’t resist shopping. During my last couple of terms at Wellington my father was made redundant in Taunton and was offered relocation to either Newton Abbot in Devon or Bristol. Although I think they would have preferred to stay in Somerset they elected to go to Bristol, where they thought both Brenda and I would have much better career prospects. Thanks to my father’s industriousness and careful management he was able to obtain a mortgage to buy a council house in Sea Mills from the Bristol Corporation. It was a great leap forward for my parents to own their own house. I, unfortunately, was devastated, for the most appallingly wrong reasons of social status. Despite their best efforts to be fair and tolerant my relationship with my parents deteriorated for the next three or four years and were amongst the worst in my life. I was angry and frustrated because the aspirations instilled in me at Wellington were at loggerheads with post-school reality. I needed a job quickly as I had to repay the money for the dreaded blazer. My parents, ever cautious, tried to persuade me to take a clerk’s job with the Bristol Corporation or the Electricity Board or the GPO, the sort of dull, meaningless job from which you could never be sacked, and end up with a silver watch and a modest pension. I spent two desperately unhappy months filing plans in the Bristol Corporation’s Department of Architecture for the princely sum of ?4 7s 8d per week. At the same time, at just sixteen, I discovered the alluring demimonde of a Clifton coffee bar – at that time in Bristol there were one or two very basic Indian restaurants, one or two appallingly basic Chinese restaurants, the aforementioned coffee bars and omelette bars. For the grown up and affluent there were restaurants just emerging such as the steak bars, started by the Berni Brothers. Bistros, brasseries, wine bars and so forth were still nonexistent, and as for pubs, which I as a spotty, skinny youth of sixteen was unable to enter, they served no food beyond crisps, pickled eggs and a pork pie. So my evenings were spent sipping a cold glass cup of frothy coffee whilst listening to the jazz and blues played on a record player, marvelling at the sophisticated university students and what I took to be painters, writers and artists discussing continental films that were shown at the Tatler Cinema, as they puffed on Gauloises and Gitanes. I was so young and they seemed so old. I could not see a way to cross the bridge that seemed to span the wide gap between me and them. I had somehow acquired a Vespa motor scooter and for some odd reason I had been persuaded to join a youth club favoured by the middle-class kids from the houses on the private estates that ringed my council estate. These kids all had driving licences and borrowed their fathers’ cars on Saturday nights. I was a fish out of water both socially and intellectually (I regarded myself as intellectually superior and socially inferior) so I left. Looking back on my life, I think I have been really quite a loner, and although the tabloid press has almost convinced even me that I am some kind of hell-raising party animal, or the hail-fellow-well-met in the bar, I have a fear of crowds and even now, at the age of well over fifty, am sometimes too shy to walk alone into a public place. There was an awful time when I was fourteen or so, back in Wiveliscombe, and I was invited to a fancy dress party to celebrate some boy’s birthday. I was mortified when I discovered that I was the only one in fancy dress. I left the party in tears of embarrassment, roundly ridiculed by the others, and have had difficulty attending parties ever since. And the youth club experience had a profound effect on me too, with the result that I have a completely prejudiced and irrational scorn for golf clubs, darts teams, yacht clubs, Rotary clubs or committees; and even though I thoroughly enjoyed occasionally playing club rugby in Bristol – and we would always rush down after our game to the memorial ground to catch the last fifteen minutes of another Bristol victory – and, sure the few pints in the clubhouse were great, once the singing started I lived in fear of being called upon to perform. Worse still was the appalling way we behaved in the Indian restaurant later. The lads would go to the lavatory and escape through the window without paying, leaving the more timid of us protesting our innocence and insisting on paying only our own share. After a while I washed up a couple of evenings a week in the coffee bar for ten bob a night and later I spent another two nights serving coffee and cleaning tables. In a few months I was hanging out with the students and the gap between my aspirations and my home life was further exaggerated. I wasn’t old enough to have the house key and after several nights of my parents waiting up for me, they had, as my father said, ‘to draw a line’. If I wasn’t home before they locked the door, I would have to sleep in the garden shed. My sister was also living at home. I think she had a job demonstrating cooking appliances in an Electricity Board showroom. I seldom saw her. She, as in Wiveliscombe, had joined tennis clubs and other worthy associations and to my mind was appallingly middle class. Our paths very, very seldom crossed. Handsome young men with MGs or souped-up Minis vied to take her to dances and balls. I think she thoroughly enjoyed this time, I was desperate to leave home. Sometimes I was ashamed at the anxiety I was causing my parents and my father, who was such a fair and balanced man, doing everything in his power to discuss my adolescent problems, but I found I was unable to communicate with him. Later, when we became the closest of friends, he explained the hurt I had caused them and reminded me that while perhaps I didn’t know what I was doing, neither did he. ‘When you were sixteen,’ he said, ‘it was the first time I had been father to a sixteen-year-old boy, and I had no experience to draw on.’ Although my Bristol life in the coffee bars and folk clubs was good and the conversation was of Jack Kerouac and Woody Guthrie, I strangely still had a hankering for my boyhood time in Wiveliscombe, playing French cricket in the back yard with my handicapped Aunt Eva, or sitting with my grandfather, turning over the pages of a book called The Great War in Pictures while he, to the fury of my grandmother, flicked the ash from his chainsmoked cigarettes straight onto the lino, or eating boiled pigs’ trotters with salt and vinegar in front of the fire on winter Saturday nights. Sometimes my grandfather, a rather clumsy man, would take a sudden interest in cooking and he spent days bubbling vast cauldrons of tomato sauce. At other times he would gather snails from the privet hedge in the dank back garden and roast them on a shovel in the fire. I suppose he must have known how to clean them because we never suffered from any ill effects. I missed fishing, and I missed my Auntie Joyce, who once saved me from bleeding to death when I, running and sliding down the highly polished passage that led from our kitchen to the front door, put my arm through the window in the door, gashing my upper arm wide open. She heard my cries of panic, picked me up, and in bare feet ran down the street and frantically hammered on the doctor’s door. She, like my Uncle Ken, was young compared to my mother and my other uncles and so on Sunday afternoon walks she would sing folk songs, with a slightly risque rearrangement of the words. Some years later she was found dead in a snowdrift on a hill where once she had taken me tobogganing. It was her only exit from a private hell that, until too late, no one had been aware of. Then there was my one and only thespian performance, when somehow, after the nightmare of the fancy dress party, I agreed to be Mowgli in the Scout and Cub group’s annual jamboree in the Town Hall. My mother sewed me a loincloth of rabbit skin and my father improvised me a dagger from one of my grandfather’s leather-cutting knives. Painted from head to toe in cocoa and water I stood on the stage and said, defiantly, ‘I am Mowgli.’ To this day I cannot remember if I completed the performance or ran backstage. I missed my friends the Ranseys, not least Mrs Ransey, who, like my own mother, was one of nature’s intuitive cooks with a real, fundamental knowledge, love and respect for food. Sometimes, on my Vespa 125, I whizzed down the A3 8 like a mad wasp, flat out at 45 miles an hour, to Wiveliscombe for the day, but it wasn’t the same. Then I thought it had changed; now I know that I had. I was staying out later and later listening to blues, folk songs, monologues and poetry readings. The rows at home, no longer squalls, were now developing storm status and one day, with just a small duffel bag, I set off for work as normal, and instead of taking the bus to College Green, my place of employment, I caught another to the A4 and hitchhiked to London. I survived, somehow, in late-night coffee bars, railway stations and parks for three days and three awful nights before I was arrested for loitering, or possibly vagrancy, at four o’clock one morning somewhere close to Bow Street Police Station. I was tired, hungry and, worse still, I had failed. Contact was made with my parents, who assured me my safe return was more important than anything and there would be no retribution. As bad as this was, it proved to be a watershed in our relationship. I had decided I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and my parents, in a complete reversal of their crushingly modest ambitions for me, agreed I could have a go at it. I had no idea how you set about being a journalist but I had read a book called Headlines All My Life by a Fleet Street editor called Arthur Christiansen. He was, as Editor of the Daily Express, probably one of the greatest editors of this century. (He had also had a bit part in the film The Day the Earth Caught Fire.) I did not know that the accepted route into journalism was by joining a weekly newspaper as a copy boy. I, with a head full of Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway, James Thurber, Simon Raven, Somerset Maugham, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Graves and Jack Kerouac, boldly wrote to the Editor of the Bristol Evening Post and asked for a job. Despite my parents’ new attitude, they warned me not to be disappointed after aiming so high. I knew from films and novels that reporters wore bow ties, trench coats and trilby hats, so scraping together all my available resources, selling my fishing tackle and even my Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley LPs, I went to the nearest gentlemen’s outfitters and bought the aforementioned clothes for my interview with the Editor of the Bristol Evening Post. Can you imagine it? A seventeen-year-old with a shiny, acned face, dressed in such a way. I sat in the outer office while the secretary announced my presence. She returned after a few seconds and said, ‘When the green light flashes, knock and go in.’ A big, round-faced, smiling man with short cropped hair sat behind the desk, his fingers propped together forming a pyramid between his elbows and his chin. On his neat desk there was a Penguin edition of The Trial of Lady Chatterley. He wore a dark, well-cut suit, a white shirt and a bow tie. A bow tie! So they did wear bow ties. I was wearing a bow tie. He looked at me askance, not patronisingly, but he seemed to stare right through me. ‘Do sit down,’ he said. He rearranged his fingers to clutch the lapels of his jacket and leant back in his chair. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you some essays I wrote at school,’ I said. ‘We don’t write essays on newspapers,’ he said, reaching to take them from my trembling hand. I told him about my school days. I told him of my dissatisfaction of being a filing clerk in the Architects’ Department. I told him about the books I had read and lied, successfully, about one or two I hadn’t. All of a sudden, the interview, or perhaps the confessional, was over. He ushered me into the outer office and I realised for the first time how tall he was. There was no conclusion, and I stood, awkwardly, wondering how to leave. I suddenly decided to say, ‘Well, will you give me a job or not?’ He looked down at me, and his breath smelt strange. Later I was to know it was garlic. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact I will. My secretary will take the necessary details and you will report to the News Editor a week on Monday at 8.30 a.m. His name is Farnsworth: he will probably eat you alive, but don’t worry.’ Before I could utter a word he disappeared into his office. It was going to turn out to be the single most important day of my life. Not that I would know that for another twenty-four years. Typewriters and Burgundy (#ulink_e098bcbc-6c03-5a55-9903-5e694280c2e3) Now I shall tell you about my job at the Bristol Evening Post. This will be a short chapter because I wasn’t there very long! Joining the paper was a really exciting event. It was an unusual one because in those days the only way you could become a journalist was to do an apprenticeship on a weekly newspaper like the Somerset County Gazette. There you learnt to type, to do shorthand (it was compulsory) and you wrote the Births, Marriages and Deaths column or the Townsmen’s Guild column, or listed the results of the Agricultural Show, and you had to do that for about two or three years before you had a chance to get onto a daily newspaper. But I was a precocious little sod and without having done any of these I managed to get my job on the Bristol Evening Post which, curiously enough, was located in the centre of Bristol in Silver Street: I was brought up in Silver Street in Wiveliscombe, which I took to be a good omen. In the sixties the typesetting for all newspapers was done with lead and there was a massive sense of excitement as the editions came out, with the compositors working desperately against the clock to bring out each edition, the smell of ink and hot metal and a wonderful hum of huge drums with paper whirling round and all the vans queued up outside, loading up really fast. At that time Bristol had another daily evening newspaper called the Bristol Evening World and they were in serious rivalry to be first with the best stories, to get the exclusives and to beat the other in the race to be out onto the streets. My first day, I turned up, and I really can’t describe the atmosphere of the newsroom. I suppose there were thirty or forty people all sitting at desks with an amazing racket of manual typewriters being tapped so fast (usually with only two or three fingers) and copy boys (those were the boys who, when the journalist had finished typing his piece and shouted ‘Boy!’ would run over and take the sheet of paper downstairs to where the subeditors were) rushing around. The News Editor was a huge man called Gordon Farnsworth, a North Country man, shouting out instructions and demanding stories. The atmosphere was electric, absolutely electric. I just sat there, bemused, all day, because nobody spoke to you on your first day. Although Gordon Farnsworth did speak to me. He said, ‘So you’re another bloody student…I’m fed up with students, why can’t I have some journalists?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you mean, what are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Well the Editor keeps taking on these bloody students,’ and it was true because that day three other people of my age had joined the paper with no journalistic experience whatsoever. But the difference between them and me was that they had got temporary jobs because they were going to university and Gordon thought I was the same sort. I said, ‘No, I’m here to learn to be a journalist, that’s what I want to be.’ ‘Huh, we’ll see,’ he said. Terrifying, the first day was absolutely terrifying. They gave me my own desk and typewriter, an Olivetti Letra 22, and after a couple of days of being shy in the canteen and not knowing what to do I was sent out on my first story. I was absolutely petrified! I had to go to cover an inquest of a man who had drowned in the docks. I thought, ‘Oh, good, thank you. What do I do?’ So I asked another journalist what I should do. ‘Inquests are very simple,’ he said. ‘I’ll write it for you.’ He wrote the outline, leaving only the gaps to be filled in with the facts. He said, ‘You write: “Today at Yate Coroner’s Court a verdict of …was returned on…” and you either fill in death by suicide or death by misadventure or whatever and so on.’ So off I toddled and filled in the gaps. I was quite proud and I couldn’t wait to see the paper…of course it didn’t say ‘by Keith Floyd’ but I took it home to my mum and said, ‘I wrote that!’ After a couple of weeks of really just hanging around and not doing very much at all I was put onto what they called the Duty Desk. You were given a list of numbers of the Police, the Ambulance Service, the hospitals, all of whom had a press helpline. You would ring them up every hour and say, ‘Hello, this is the Evening Post, has anything happened?’ and they would say, ‘Well, there was a crash at Cribbs Causeway,’ or, A woman was found floating in the docks, apparently having committed suicide,’ or ‘There’s been a murder on Bristol Downs,’ or something like that. With that information I would go to the News Editor and if it was an insignificant story he might give it to me to write, or if it was an important story he could give it to a senior reporter to write. Sometimes I would be allowed to go with the senior reporter to see what he did and how he did it, which was really exciting. I remember from one of the helplines I discovered that the steelworks were on strike. The Editor told me to ring up and find out what was going on, so I phoned up the union representative and said, This is the Evening Post, can you tell me what is going on?’ and he said, ‘Well because we haven’t been paid properly we’re going on strike and this will disrupt things for as long as it takes.’ I reported this verbally to the News Editor, who said, ‘Well that’s OK, you can write that story.’ All these stories start with the word ‘today’. Today 600 steelworkers went on strike for better working conditions. A spokesman said…’ (you always have a spokesman and never a name and if you haven’t got a spokesman you invent one). Digressing a bit, I remember one occasion I was sent out to the scene of a stabbing. I didn’t know what you had to do at the scene of a stabbing, there was nothing there. So I went back to my News Editor and said, ‘Well I went there but what do I do now?’ He said, ‘Well, who did you speak to?’ I said, ‘Nobody.’ He said, ‘Yes you did, you spoke to a passer by.’ I said, ‘No I didn’t.’ He said, ‘Yes you did, I’m telling you, you spoke to a passer by who said…’ Anyway, I’m typing out my story about the steel strike slowly and painfully, although I have already improved quite a lot at the old two-finger typing over six or seven weeks, when I’m aware that the words I’m typing are being spoken by somebody. I look up and there is a senior reporter behind me reading out exactly what I’m typing, down a phone. This was one of Bristol’s celebrated journalist characters called Joe Gallagher and he was the Chief Crime Writer for the Bristol Evening Post and also what’s called a ‘stringer’ or a correspondent for the London Evening Standard or the Daily Express, so whatever stories he sold to them he got a fee from them. He was dictating my story and was going to get paid for it. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘I’ve sold it to the Standard, dear boy, you ought to get into that.’ ‘Well how do I do that?’ I asked. ‘You speak to me because I handle these things.’ So Joe and I became quite good friends. He was a small, bespectacled, pugnacious, slightly balding Irishman who always wore flamboyant waistcoats and a trilby hat. I have no idea how old he would have been because I was seventeen and everybody was very old to me. Over time I also got to know his great buddy, a Yorkshireman who was the Sports Editor, Bob Cooper. Joe and Bob were inseparable and were up to all sorts of scams, really dyed-in-the-wool ex-Fleet Street professionals of the old school. They made themselves an absolute fortune on the paper because they invented a game called ‘Spot the Ball’. This shows a photograph of a man kicking a football and you have to mark with a cross on the picture where you think the thing was. People had to send in, I can’t remember, two shillings or something like that to have a go and win fifty or a hundred pounds. This thing really took off and the management of the paper was totally unconcerned and hadn’t seen it as anything more than a bit of fun, completely unaware that Joe and Bob were making an absolute fortune. They were doing nothing illegal or wrong, it’s just that it was their business and the paper let them print it because they thought it was good for the readers. They didn’t realise that these blokes suddenly became very, very rich. Once the paper saw how rich they had become they thought, ‘Hold on a minute, we want to be having some of this.’ As far as I know they were obliged to buy out Joe and Bob, who both promptly retired. Joe, with all this money, went off to Portugal to buy a restaurant. But that’s another story. By now I was quite well integrated in the paper and even Farnsworth was taking me a bit more seriously and giving me more jobs. I was enjoying it very much. I soon realised we also had a morning paper called the Western Daily Press. When I joined the Evening Post, the Western Daily Press still had advertisements on the front page like The Times. Suddenly like a whirlwind a former Daily Express man came down to take over the paper and revolutionise it (it was a broadsheet paper in those days) and turn it into a campaigning, go-getting, sleaze-busting, hot, bright, brand-new newspaper. This, of course, shocked all the old hands who had been working on it for years because it really was a genteel paper that never looked for trouble and simply reported nice news. This was exciting to me because Eric Price, who had come to take over the Western Daily Press, had actually worked under the great editor Arthur Christiansen, so to me he was a hero. But he was like a film star newspaper editor: he didn’t actually have an eyeshield but I swear to God he had one really. He would march up and down with his waistcoat undone, shouting, ‘What the hell’s going on! Where’s my story, I need this now! Get off your arses!’ He was like a god to me and I contrived to meet him in the pub that we used to go to across the road in between editions (called the White Hart, I think). ‘Who are you, lad?’ he asked. ‘I’m Floyd, sir.’ I plucked up courage and asked, ‘Would it be OK if I came in and worked at night?’ because all the morning papers worked in the night. He said, ‘Yes you can.’ There was a lovely old-fashioned News Editor then on the Western Daily Press called Norman Rich, a gentle old man who was approaching retirement. He was such a gentleman that he wouldn’t say he hated Eric Price and the new paper. He would say he was ‘disappointed by the change and was looking forward to retiring’ because this wasn’t his style of journalism at all. So after I finished at 5.30, when the last edition of the Evening Post went out, I would go to the pub for a couple of hours and then come back and hang around the reporters’ room, unpaid because I enjoyed it so much, at night. In between I would talk to Norman when there wasn’t much to do and he would tell me tales of the old days of journalism. I learnt a huge amount from this kindly man and also from the Country Editor of the Western Daily Press, whose name, sadly, I forget. He too was on the verge of retirement and hated the way things were going. But seeing that I was excited about the way the paper was headed, clearly getting on very well with Eric Price, who was an authoritarian, albeit gifted, editor, known to hire and fire at the drop of a hat, he said, ‘I can see you’re doing very well here, lad, but I want to tell you something. As you climb up the ladder be careful who you tread on because you never know who you may meet on the way down.’ I have never forgotten that. Anyway, after a while on the daytime paper covering little stories such as charily fund-raising events or the presentation of a wheelchair or a guide dog, the evenings were eminently more exciting. One night Eric said, ‘Right, there are prostitutes living in normal houses down in St Paul’s. Go down and see how many you can find and then we’ll expose them.’ I would go on vice patrol and all sorts of exciting things like that. It was often after midnight before I finished on the paper and I would go to this eccentric coffee bar which was full of strange, bearded, artistic, intellectual beatniks and hang out in there until about two in the morning. Then from virtually the city centre of Bristol I would walk five miles home every night because I never had enough money for a taxi. My pay at the time was ?4 7s 6d a week. I spent most of it on beer in the interludes between press running and on bus fares in the mornings and I gave my mother a pound a week for my lodging, paid for my lunches and went out one night a week for a bowl of spaghetti bolognese and six half pints of lager and ten Nelson cigarettes, and walked home again! But what I was doing, of course, although I didn’t realise it at the time, was burning the candle at both ends. It wasn’t doing me a lot of good and I was extremely tired. I was unaware of my tiredness, I was on a roll and thought the whole thing extremely exciting. Little by little I go to know some of the other journalists and quite a lot of them took me under their wing. They were all a bloody nice bunch but there were a couple that I just stood in awe of. One of these sat at the back of the reporters’ room in a black leather jacket, black shirt and dark glasses and smoked Gauloises. Farnsworth hated him. This bloke didn’t write any news at all. The Editor had decreed that the Western Daily Press would have an arts page. This of course was anathema to Gordon, who thought newspapers should be full of news, not art; and not only that, it wasn’t even his paper – it was the Western Daily Press so this bloke was responsible to Eric Price, but much to Gordon Farnsworth’s annoyance he would work in the office during the Evening Post’s hours (it was the same newsroom for both papers). He and a man called Anthony Smith used to write a brilliantly funny column in the Western Daily Press called ‘Brennus and Berlinus’. The Western Daily Press was the most unlikely venue for this incredibly funny, witty, highly intelligent comedy piece (they would also cover what was on at the theatre etc.). ‘Brennus and Berlinus’ had to be, as far as I am concerned, the forerunner or the seeds of a very famous play called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead because this man with whom I played cricket, with his long black hair, hooked nose, scraggy face, black jacket, dark glasses and Gauloises was none other than Tom Stoppard! In, I think, the typesetting department was someone else who became outrageously famous. He was called Charles Wood and he wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade. There was another man on the paper lurking around there called Derek Robinson who wrote, amongst other things, The C’rec’ Way to Speak Bris’l, which was a parody on the way they speak in Bristol, and The Goshawk Squadron, and other wonderful books about the First World War. Then there was a man who wrote A Day in the Life of Joe Egg, a play about a paraplegic boy. The whole place was swarming with these people who were already brilliant but we didn’t know they were going to be as famous as they became. The best piece I ever wrote was under the guidance of the Assistant News Editor, Jack Powell, a lovely, gentle chap and a very experienced journalist. They sent me off to do a story on Cyril Fletcher opening the new gas showroom in Queen’s Road in Bristol. I came back and I said, Today[!] comedian Cyril Fletcher, sporting a carnation and a red bow tie, opened the new Gas Board showroom in [wherever it was]’. Jack said, ‘No he didn’t. I tell you what he did: “Today comedian Cyril Fletcher, dashingly dressed in a red bow tie and sporting a carnation, quipping merrily, opened Mr Therm’s new home in Queen’s Road, Clifton, Bristol.” It’s the way of putting it. Mr Therm’s new home, not the gas showroom.’ Gordon Farnsworth said, ‘That’s jolly well done,’ but I didn’t tell him that it was actually Jack who told me how to write it. Through that I learnt to look at words in a different way but still get the same information from them. So I was on a crest but I felt that Gordon Farnsworth was waiting for me to fall in some way. I don’t think he approved of the fact that I went to the pub quite so frequently. I don’t think he approved of the idea that I hung out with the older, experienced senior reporters and I think he was suspicious of my relationship with the Editor. And the fall did come. One of the important things to remember about the Bristol Evening Post was that Gordon Farnsworth was forever saying, This is a family newspaper,’ and every bit of local news had to be included. In fact, when the paper was founded it was created by the citizens of Bristol. Under the banner of the Bristol Evening Post it said: The paper that all Bristol asked for and helped to create’. They recognised that the citizens of Bristol felt they had a stake in the paper. Absolutely anything that went on in Bristol, the paper had to be there. Anyhow, I was sent one day to a hotel to cover a reception at which the Rotary Club were to present a load of wheelchairs from money they had raised for disabled people. Apparently there was to be a lunch as well, and all I had to do was list the names of the important people who had made donations and who the recipients were, and go back and write a very simple story. Once again the story would start ‘Today…’ as all stories did: Today, Mrs George McWhatters, wife of the chairman of Harvey’s Wine Merchants, presented three wheelchairs to so and so.’ I went back, filed my story and thought no more about it, until a couple of days later Gordon Farnsworth came up to me, screaming with rage. ‘You’re a disgrace, an absolute bloody disgrace. I’ve had Mrs McWhatters on the phone. They said you went to the reception, you had lunch and you had their wine and you didn’t even bother to write the story.’ I said, ‘I didn’t have lunch, I didn’t know I could have lunch, and I did write the story.’ ‘No you didn’t! You are fired?’ And he went off to see the Editor to complain about me and that was it! I thought, ‘No, this isn’t fair and it isn’t actually the case at all. I did write the story but where it’s gone I don’t know.’ So I went down to the sub-editors’ department and spoke to Ernie Avery. He said yes, he’d seen the story but he’d spiked it because he didn’t feel it was very interesting and he didn’t have room for it. So I went to the Editor and said, ‘Look, this is the case, I didn’t not write the story, I’ve been incorrectly dismissed and this isn’t at all fair.’ So anyway Gordon, a big, brash Yorkshireman who always found it very hard to be criticised or to be wrong, actually did a very kind thing and took me out for fish and chips and a pot of tea! He said, ‘I’m sorry about that, lad,’ in his lovely Yorkshire accent. ‘Sorry about that, but you know, you’ve got to take it a bit easier. You’re working in the day and at night, and quite frankly I think you’re overdoing it.’ I didn’t think I was overdoing it at all. I was in a trance, I so loved working there that I was drugged by the whole thing – by the noise of the presses, by the smell of the ink and the hot metal, by the clatter of the typewriters, by the shouting of the reporters, by the ringing of the telephones, by the hustle and the bustle and the whole thing. Two weeks after the first complaint Gordon said I could go to the Bath and West Show, a big agricultural show in the West Country, which in those days was held in a place called Ashton Park, within Bristol itself. I believe it now has a permanent home somewhere near Shepton Mallet. My job was simply to collect the results of best heifer, best flower arrangement, and all that sort of thing – a pretty easy job – and then phone the results back to the office. There was a press tent, which was great fun, and it was there that I discovered Tuborg lager. I evidently must have had quite a few, because I recall being woken up by the huge size twelve boot of Gordon Farnsworth, who had made just one concession to the hot weather. He had taken off his jacket but was still wearing his tightly buttoned waistcoat, collar and tie. He sat down beside me and said, ‘Come on, lad, you can’t be falling asleep on duty.’ We got chatting and he asked me what my hobbies were. I explained to him that I was in the process of restoring a 1934 or 1935 Austin 7 Saloon which I had bought for ?5. Every Sunday, on my day off, I would fiddle with it in some way or another. I would regrind the valves or put in new bushes in the steering department (I can’t remember any of the technicalities of it now, it was nearly forty years ago). I was quite obsessed by this car, and there I was sitting on the grass at Ashton Park, telling Gordon this story. A few days later, back in the office, he said to me, ‘How would you like to write a feature about your hobby?’ I was so excited and I wrote all about it, and at the age of seventeen I had a full-page feature with a byline ‘by Keith Floyd’ in the Bristol Evening Post. Things got better and better and I was then given a commission, a job to go to Stratford-upon-Avon, where a group of enthusiasts and volunteers were cleaning out and restoring the Stratford-upon-Avon canal. I started, again, inventing lines, things like ‘Mr Smith, the Director of Operations, said, “We’ll get this canal open or we’ll die in the attempt,” ’ which of course, he didn’t say at all, but it sounded better than what he had really said. I thought it was quite good journalism but they phoned to complain. I couldn’t understand that. All I was trying to do was convey their enthusiasm, but there I was, in trouble yet again! The paper did print the story, however, and it was my second byline in a month. People began to look at me rather suspiciously, wondering how I was apparently succeeding so well against the odds. Certainly the other young, temporary reporters who were just waiting to go to university were not getting anything like the breaks I was getting but that was really because, I think, although Gordon was a gruff old fucker, he really was on my side, and he wouldn’t give these boys jobs because he didn’t feel that they were at all serious. He felt that they were just killing time before university, which was something he did not approve of. I wasn’t paid any extra for these stories – they all came within my weekly salary. Then I was given, for reasons I can’t understand, a weekly column called Youth Notes, and I was bylined for it. It was really a resume of what the various youth clubs were doing in Bristol – for example who had won the National Speaking Championships. It was a kind of diary page, and for me at the age of seventeen it was incredibly prestigious. It’s important to remember, while I’m crowing about being so famous at the age of seventeen, that this was around 1962, when teenagers had no roles. People in positions of power were older – much older than they would be today. Today, in the year 2000, yes it’s quite normal for young people to be at the top of the tree, but it absolutely wasn’t the case then, so in many ways I was exceptional. But as I’ve tried to indicate, I was in a complete trance. At night after work I was going to a coffee bar with university students and other people older than myself and I was talking to them about Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, and it was a completely bizarre and unreal situation. I wasn’t, and I didn’t even know about it, but many of them were smoking pot. At the time I was blissfully naive about all of that, I was just drinking my coffee and sitting on the edge, enthralled by the way these people spoke, the books and the music they discussed. In fact I was in such a trance, it was only when, something like thirty years later, to my amazement I was accosted in Dublin by Michael Aspel and kidnapped onto ‘This Is Your Life’ that I discovered anything about these people. Before the guests come on to This Is Your Life’ you hear their voices and they say something which is designed to jog your memory of some past event. I heard this voice saying, ‘Floydsie, you still owe me for a suit!’ I sat there like a stoat under a snake, or vice versa. Who the fuck was that? Then I remembered. It was Jeremy Bryan, a brilliant reporter from the Bristol Evening Post, with whom one night I had set off to cover a fire or a plane crash or some disaster. In fact, it wasn’t even that. We were all in the pub, the White Hart, and as far as we were concerned, work was over and we had probably had a few too many. The phone rang in the pub and the landlord called Jeremy over and said, ‘You’ve had a phone call and you’ve got to go.’ ‘I want to come too!’ I shouted. ‘In fact, I’ll take you there, because I’ve got a motor scooter.’ Well, we crashed. Wrecked Jeremy’s suit, never did get to the disaster, and spent the whole night in the Bristol Royal Infirmary, not seriously wounded in any way, just with scratches and bruises. Another great This Is Your Life’ surprise that night involved a wonderful Evening Post journalist called Roger Bennett, who, a little bit like the Country Editor of the Western Daily Press, had always impressed upon me the importance of acknowledging people as you travel through life. Indeed many years after the time we are talking about now, Roger Bennett went on to become a very successful broadcaster at the BBC. Whenever I was in town he would always ring me up and ask me to go onto his programme and I always would. He said to me one day, There are some people we both know who are now very famous (much more famous than me) who don’t have the time to come onto the programme.’ Apart from being a brilliant journalist and broadcaster he was also a superb jazz musician. When I was first on the paper at the age of sixteen, I spent many nights listening to Roger playing with the Blue Notes Jazz Band down at the Old Duke or wherever they were performing in Bristol (a great jazz city). I didn’t know this at the time, but later I was to work for Acker Bilk and get to know all the jazz musicians, and I used to babysit for Roger. In fact, as I write this book roughly in 1999 (it might be the year 2000 when I finish, I’m not too sure) it was only a couple of years ago that Roger retired from broadcasting, and I was very pleased to be invited on to a special programme for him to pay a tribute. So many people like this came from Evening Post days, because – yes – it was a family paper but it was also a family in its own right. The people were very concerned and caring people and I owe that paper so much. Another crisis took place shortly after this. It was decided that I was overdoing things and I was called into the Editor’s office and told that it would be better if I worked on one of their weekly newspapers, in this case the Bristol Observer. I was gutted by that, but it’s what I should have done at the very beginning really. I had gone in too fast, too high and too quick, and, as they told me, I was only there half the time (although I was there all the time). I was actually working from eight in the morning to one the next morning, nearly every day of the week. I thought I was physically and mentally there, but I was only seventeen years old and I suppose I was dropping a few clangers from time to time. So they put me onto the weekly paper. I still had my weekly Youth Notes column. I had to go round to Alverston and I think somewhere called Pucklechurch and all the suburbs and villages of the surrounding area of Bristol to see the vicar to find out what had happened that week, and to the Townsmen’s Guild and the local planning committee. I was bored out of my brains. I really felt totally put down, although in retrospect it was a good thing. It enabled me to learn how to put a story together, under less pressure than I had been before. But I felt thoroughly pissed off. I was attached to a really worthy senior reporter who never came up with anything sensational but had his ear to the community all the time and understood what was going on. He taught me how to get responses from people because he was gentle and casual about what he said and personable in the way that he did it. He had the confidence of people and got all the stories. But I – and bearing in mind that at one or two o’clock in the morning I’m with all these intellectuals – am feeling very unworthy as a cub reporter on a weekly newspaper and I’ve got a really split personality and a fair degree of resentment. So I went to see the Editor, Richard Hawkins, to express my dissatisfaction and unhappiness with this position. He said, ‘Well you’ve only got yourself to blame really, I mean you burnt yourself out by doing too much and anyway it’s where you should have been in the beginning, it’s where you should have started. But,’ he said, ‘If you don’t really like that, and I do know you have some good points [he was a very sarcastic man, Richard Hawkins], I need a personal assistant and you can be that personal assistant if you want.’ He had a secretary anyway and I didn’t really know what it meant being a personal assistant. But he did also say that he would put my salary up to ?7 a week. That was a hike from ?4 7s 6d up to ?7 – absolutely massive! But then, as now, I was a shopaholic, a spendthrift and never able to hold onto money, ever! So what seemed to be almost a hundred per cent increase in salary did not result in there being any more pennies in my pocket on Monday morning than there were at the previous salary. Then, as now, I was obsessed with good shoes, silk ties, proper clothes (old fashioned they may be, old fashioned I am). In the sixties, in the week you wore a suit and on Saturday mornings a sports jacket – that was de rigueur. I always felt it was important to have a good tie, good shoes and a well-cut jacket. Even then, although I couldn’t afford it, I used to have my suits handmade. This was my mother’s fault because when she worked at a cloth factory, as I’ve already told you, she would bring home these bolts of cloth, these remnants that had a flaw in them, and she was able to get the finest West of England worsted and wool fabric for very little money. In Wiveliscombe there was a man called Mr Berry, who used to sit cross-legged on a wooden stage in the window of his house, hand-sewing suits, and even as a schoolboy I had handmade suits, because they were cheaper for my mother than anything at Weaver to Wearer, John Collier, Burton or something like that. So I had been cursed, and with my grandfather being a boot and shoe maker and repairer, I have this ridiculous fetish for handmade clothes and handmade shoes, and nothing will stop me from buying them. However, I am now the Editor’s personal assistant. In reality I am the Editor’s servant. In board meetings, on directors’ days my job was to go to Avery’s the wine merchants, to the actual cellars, and collect the exquisite wines they wanted. I was to bring up the Beefeater gin, not Gordon’s, and the particular sherries they liked and be on hand to take notes at the whim or requirement of my Editor. This put me in a curious position, because I was only seventeen but people like Eric Price and Joe Gallagher and all the senior people reckoned I had the Editor’s ear and they would ply me with questions to find out what was going to be happening within the company or what was going to be Editor’s policy, of which I knew nothing at all. I used to say, ‘I don’t know, all I do is fetch and carry, I’m just a servant.’ They thought otherwise. So my position was bizarre. I was intellectually crucified by the brilliance of my Editor, who inter alia would ask me, ‘By the way, have you read Brideshead Revisited or Lady Chatterley’s Lover?’ I would say no, but promptly go out and buy those books or whichever he suggested. As a consequence I was able to educate myself quite well. But equally importantly, Richard Hawkins was a gourmet: he lived for food. He would often have to have meetings with terribly famous people and I remember once having to go to London with him on what I thought was a business trip but it was to meet Peter O’Toole, who was a friend of Richard’s in those days. Although I can only say this is a rumoured story which I will go on with in a moment, I do remember when I met Peter O’Toole – and to this day he wouldn’t know who I was – whom I admire enormously but have not seen again from that day to this, in a pub in Chelsea or Kensington, he said, ‘Have you ever seen the head of a Guinness? It looks like the face of the man on the moon.’ He took a pen from his pocket and drew a face on the head of a pint of Guinness. Of course, Peter O’Toole at that time was very famous in Bristol at the Old Vic and he was also, by all accounts, a monstrous tearaway. I mean, he was Jack of all the lads! I do have an apocryphal story about him: I claim that I think, that I might possibly know, a probably totally untrue story – on the day that Peter O’Toole was appearing in Bristol Magistrates Court, alleged to have possibly been arrested for being drunk and disorderly, I happened to be in court. I didn’t think it was worth reporting so the story didn’t go any further. Just as well in view of the strict contractural obligations insisted on by the producers of his next film, Lawrence of Arabia. Working for the Editor really was bizarre. I was attending lunches or going to the then amazingly prestigious Thornbury Castle or Hole in the Wall restaurant in Bath. You have to remember, dear reader, I am seventeen years old and it’s 1961 and the world is very, very different from today. My position was an uncomfortable one: I would scribble notes down while the Editor talked to an MP or someone and I was told to go and collect things from the car and fetch and carry. I was a fag, if you like, in the public school sense, to the head prefect. I remember my first meal at the Hole in the Wall as if it were yesterday. It was partridge stewed in white wine with cabbage and juniper berries. There was a bottle of splendid Gevrey-Chambertin and the pudding was called Chocolat St Emilion. It was mouthwatering, it was breathtaking, and it was nothing to do with the Saturday nights I spent out with my ten shillings! The fact was that we were so ignorant about cooking at that time. We never knew how to cook spaghetti. How did you get it into the saucepan? It was hard and came wrapped in blue waxed paper. We soaked it in water to make it soft, we broke it up in bits. It was a long time before I learnt that you just pushed it gently down into the boiling water so that it curled around the pan. That’s how little I knew about food at that time. I went out probably two or three times a week with Hawkins – Mr Hawkins to me, of course, and Sir – to the White Tower in London and the Dorchester Hotel. At the age of seventeen I was eating beyond my means. Nothing has changed! Today I am eating beyond my means. It was an unholy relationship. I was too independent, too self-opinionated, too unformed, uninformed, unmoulded, but I knew that I was not somebody’s lackey. That isn’t where I was meant to be. So, kicking my heels one night, I bought a ticket for the cinema and sat spellbound in front of the great Stanley Baker and Michael Caine movie Zulu. The following day, without a thought, with what must have been irritating self-confidence, I bounced into the recruiting office in Colston Avenue, Bristol, and volunteered myself for a short-service commission in Her Majesty’s Land Forces. Floyd on Parade – Almost (#ulink_24a1a564-a2b1-524b-9d61-2349f773b65e) Had I got off at the correct station, I could have taken advantage of a ride in a three-ton truck to Catterick Camp, which the Army had thoughtfully provided to pick up the recruits. Unfortunately, after an awful ten-hour overnight journey from the West Country, just before my correct destination I fell asleep and, as a consequence, had to hitchhike with two heavy suitcases back from York to Richmond and then walk the last four miles to the camp itself. I reported to the guard room in a state of sweating and trembling anxiety, several hours late. The duty corporal noted my arrival in a ledger and courteously enough showed me to my room in the barracks. It had eight or ten tubular steel unmade beds, each with a plain wooden wardrobe and a bedside locker. Down the corridor there was a sort of common room, with Formica tables and chairs, a battered TV and a few dog-eared magazines and paperback novels. There was no one else there. It was Sunday, and I mooched around nervously for several hours, uncertain of what to do. Eventually a soldier turned up and took me to the store to collect some bedding, and then showed me to the cookhouse, where I devoured a mountainous plate of food, my first meal for almost twenty-four hours. When I returned to the dormitory, I found another five or six scruffy-looking lads who, with their duffel bags and suitcases dumped on the floor, were hesitantly introducing themselves to one another. I felt out of place in my suit. They were all wearing jeans and anoraks. None of us knew what to do; were we allowed out, should we stay in? Would someone tell us what to do? I elected to go to the guard room to clarify the situation. I reported back to the lads that we were free to go to the NAAFI and nothing would happen until we were woken the following morning, which was Monday. The next morning dawned like Pearl Harbor. The day exploded into a frenzy of form-filling, kit-collecting, hair-cutting, medicals, quick-fire instructions which left us, at seven o’clock that night, exhausted and bewildered. No longer civilians, yet absolutely not soldiers, we were in some kind of institutionalised limbo. I had difficulty sleeping, worried that I would sleepwalk or talk in my sleep, worried that I would make a complete idiot of myself in front of my roommates. After a couple of days we had more or less got to know each other and settled into a frenzied routine of basic training. This involved endless marching, parades, weapons training, bulling kit, spit-and-polishing the toecaps of your boots, cross-country runs, all the while and at the double desperately trying to avoid any kind of mistake. Only at the end of the eight-week training period would we know if the Army would keep us or not. I had the incentive to work really hard: not only did I have to pass my basic training, I had to excel in order to be selected for the Potential Officer troop which would ultimately lead me to Officer Cadet School and a commission. Should I fail, I would be condemned to a minimum of three years as a squaddie, something which was unacceptable to me. The eight weeks sped by like a hurricane. All the instructors knew I was headed for the PO troop, and consequently were tougher on me than on the others. That was no bad thing though. The challenge was essential and I took it head on and progressed without a hiccup into the PO troop, where I was assured I would find life very different. After our passing out parade, we had a farewell beer with our instructor, who assured us ‘we didn’t know nothing yet’ and now the real business of becoming a soldier would begin. ‘Except for Floyd, of course,’ he said, ‘who is leaving us to join the troop of potential gentlemen.’ Our main instructor was a man called Sergeant Linneker (RTR). He was an immensely fit thirty-year-old, always immaculate in his black denim tank suit, and had actually given us a fairly decent time, especially on the drill square because Tankies’ look upon the infantry with a certain scorn and don’t regard square-bashing as being of paramount importance. Also, in common with many other members of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, he was a West Countryman and consequently very slightly laid back. I had got on with him quite well, which, as it turned out, was quite fortuitous because I ultimately joined the 3rd RTR only to find he was my troop sergeant. But in these early days, still with the romanticism of Rourke’s Drift in my mind, I had requested to join the 11th Hussars, a cavalry regiment known as ‘the Cherry Pickers’ (during the Napoleonic wars they were attacked whilst bivouacked in a cherry orchard. One minute they were languidly munching cherries, the next they won a significant battle against all odds). Also, all ranks wore elegantly tailored maroon trousers, a dashing cut above the norm. So, feeling fit, accomplished and proud of my Cherry Pickers trousers, I packed my kit and marched to the far side of the camp to my new ‘home’. I had thoroughly enjoyed the previous eight weeks and I was bursting with confidence and optimism. The PO troop was going to be great fun! Or so I thought. I had not yet met Lieutenant William Bale or Corporal Maclver Jones or Corporal of Horse Higgins, a six-foot-three, moustachioed psychopath from the Royal Horse Guards. After weeks of sharing a dormitory with my motley mates, it was brilliant to have a room to myself. It was certainly a privilege, but a privilege that you had to work very hard to maintain. As instructed, I knocked on Corporal Maclver Jones’s office door and was summoned in for a quick lecture on the dos and don’ts of the PO troop. Looking back on it, although he was not, of course, so old, Maclver Jones was uncannily like Sergeant Wilson from ‘Dad’s Army’. He seemed to be too refined and well spoken for an NCO. He took me along to the common room to introduce me to the other members of the troop. The contrast from the previous eight weeks was staggering. There was Clive Smalldene de Rougement, Durant Hougham, Jamie Douglas-Home, Fergus Slattery, Heathcote Amory, and others I can no longer remember, all from Eton, Harrow, Stowe and Clifton; myself, from my minor public school, and two grammar school boys called Kirkham and Weir, who was rather cruelly known as ‘Weird’, and a larger-than-life character ‘Kim’ Fraser (AKA the Honourable, son of Lord Lovat). For a moment I felt a bit awkward, and very conscious of the differences in our backgrounds. But gentlemen are not snobs, and these guys were certainly gentlemen. The PO block had not been occupied for some time and our first task was to bring it up to standard. This involved hours on your hands and knees, scraping years of urine sediment off the porcelain troughs with razor blades. Hours spent bulling the copper fittings and kit in our bedrooms. The tiled floors had to sparkle and especially the oxidised brass window fittings, which had to shine like highly polished gold. Our personal kit, which we had spent hours preparing for our squaddie passing out parade, was not good enough for Lieutenant Bale. The whole, not just the toecaps of our boots, had to be bulled until they resembled patent leather. Rooms were inspected every morning and there was always something at fault. Once a week Lieutenant Bale would come for a grand inspection and you learned very quickly that there was nowhere to hide. You thought you had everything right, and then he would demand to see your comb. Woe betide you if it had any hair between the teeth! The day usually started with a three- or four-mile run, followed by gruelling sessions on the drill square, orchestrated by the good corporal of horse, who stood like a ramrod, the peak of his cap flat against his nose, barking high-pitched, clipped commands. Mistakes and errors would be rewarded with ‘That man there! Round the square, GO!’ and round the perimeter of the square you ran, your rifle held agonisingly above your head, until he saw fit to let you stop and rejoin the rest of your troop. There were lectures on tactics, military law, hygiene, current affairs, first aid, endless small-arms training and so on. Everything was conducted at the double, you never walked between classes. Lieutenant Bale was the archetypal officer. Blond, blue-eyed, elegant, detached and hard as nails. He was an army pentathlon champion, a consummate horseman and had, at some stage, been attached to the SAS. As a consequence, our physical training was tough. Fully clad in combat kit, we would be divided into teams of four. We would then carry a telegraph pole between the four of us. You would have to race upstream in a little river that flowed at the edge of the camp which, of course, was booby-trapped. The only way you could win, and win you must, was to be the first team to reach a 30-foot-long concrete tube. You couldn’t stand up in this tube and the water flowed fiercely through it. There was usually a tripwire that you floundered into that detonated smoke bombs. Sometimes you might race three or four times, sometimes, soaking wet and exhausted, you would be sent straight onto the assault course, or perhaps, instead of a coffee break at the end of your ‘physical’ period, Mr Bale would demand that you paraded, within five minutes, in your number one kit. Of course, you were never anticipating that, therefore your kit was never up to scratch, so you paraded in full battle dress instead, not the ones you were wearing, however. If someone failed to meet standards in the second dress parade, you would have a third. Sometimes, after work we were cleaning our kit after a hard, wet day and he would announce that there would be a troop run. A cool seven miles before supper. And as Sergeant Linneker said, ‘If this is life, roll on death and let’s have a crack at the angels.’ But there were glorious moments too. Map-reading or escape-and-evasion programmes on the beautiful Yorkshire moors. We would often spend three or four days in two-man teams, sleeping in bivouacs at night, trying to snare rabbits or shoot partridge, or tickling trout in fast-flowing becks to augment our compo rations. I had no thoughts of the outside world and was totally engrossed in this frantically physical life of the PO troop. At weekends we would go into Richmond and have a drink in each pub in the square. This rendered you completely legless by the end of the evening. A few of us formed a dining club, and once a month we would dress up in our finest civilian clothes and eat pompously at some country club or nearby hotel. We must have appeared a self-satisfied bunch, eating, smoking cigars and behaving loudly, but boy, did we have fun. The three-month course flew by and now it was time for us to be assessed to see if we were fit to attend the regular commissions board in Wiltshire. This was a three-day ‘trial’ where you were tested and scrutinised mentally and physically to see if you had that essential, magical quality of ‘leadership’. The only test I can still remember was the old chestnut of a ditch 20 feet wide filled with shark-infested water, which you had to cross with the aid of a 6-foot plank, a broom, a dustbin and a stepladder. Good lateral-thinking stuff. I completed my three days and returned to Bristol for two weeks’ leave, my first in six months, to await the verdict of the colonels and generals of Warminster. The crisp envelope from the Ministry of Defence popped onto the doormat. I could hardly bear to open it. The brief text curtly announced that I had won a place at Mons Officer Cadet School at Aldershot. I wondered how my fellow POs had fared. I hoped that they would be there too. After a few days at Mons, I realised that my time in the PO troop at Catterick with the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment had been a brief military honeymoon. The honeymoon was over. The pressure on us now was three or four times greater. Gone were the soft-spoken West Country instructors. They were replaced by fierce, shiny-red-faced, immaculate NCOs and staff sergeants from the Brigade of Guards and top cavalry regiments. Happily, in this large intake of unknown cadets, some familiar faces had made it through – Fraser, Douglas-Home, De Rougement and one or two of the others. The vast majority, however, had come straight from school or university, with the exception of a few young NCOs who had successfully passed the RCB. So it was back to basics and back to the drill square, where I met a man I shall never forget. He was slightly bow-legged, only 5 foot 9 inches tall, with a voice that could strike you rigid at 400 yards, and he clenched a highly polished pace stick. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, in his magnificent cockney accent, ‘my name is Corporal of Horse Clark. You will address me as Staff. I will address you as sir, simply because that is the tradition of the British Army, not because I have any respect for any one of you. Gentlemen, nobody calls me Nobby to my face or behind my back. I am known as the “Black Mamba” because I strike so fast. There is no room on this course for slackness, laziness or scruffiness.’ With that he sprang from his position and poked his pace stick into the chest of a tall, blond cadet, with his nose pushed into his face, and said, ‘You, sir, are already a scruffy disgrace! Report to the company barber immediately after this parade.’ He almost goose-stepped backwards and continued. There is no room on this course for mummies’ boys, because you are in the Army now and I am your mother.’ He paused and drew himself up to his full height and screamed out, ‘Is that perfectly clear, gentlemen?’ We all gazed steadfastly ahead as if hypnotised by the real Black Mamba. ‘I don’t hear you, gentlemen!’ he said. ‘Is that perfectly clear?’ Yes, Staff!’ we shouted in unison. Drill parades, kit inspections, lectures and weapons training filled our days. Our nights were filled with study and kit cleaning. The pace was relentless. We were dragged out of bed with no notice at midnight and sent crawling across the muddy training grounds of Aldershot. You never knew how long anything would last. After one long night in the pouring rain we were eventually sent, wet and weary, back to the barracks in three-ton trucks. Exhausted, we crashed into bed. An hour later our instructor burst into the ‘Spider’, immaculate in his drill instructor’s uniform, and announced a rifle inspection. Needless to say, no one had cleaned his weapon before going to bed. We had all assumed we would have time to do that before Reveille in the morning. The whole room was given an extra drill parade as a consequence, and I, considering myself one step ahead of the pack, thought long and hard how to prevent this catch-22 situation from happening again. The thing was, every time they made you fall flat in the sand and the mud, the breech of your SLR got filled with the same. So I acquired a pair of ladies’ tights and cut out a tube which would cover the breech and with the appropriate slits to clip the magazine in. Prior to a scheduled, impending night exercise (which would surely be followed by an unscheduled, out-of-hours weapons inspection), we were issued with two magazines, one containing rounds of blanks and one empty. Unfortunately for me, the platoon sergeant was a wretched little man from an ordinary infantry regiment who carried a huge chip on his shoulder because, unlike the rest of the instructors, i.e. the Black Mamba and others, he was not a Guardsman. He also resented the privileges that we officer cadets would eventually enjoy. In order to test the efficacy of my anti-sand-and-mud device, aiming my rifle at my bed, I clipped what I thought was the empty magazine onto my weapon, cocked it and pulled the trigger. The consequent explosion of a .76 shell in the confined space of our Spider was shattering. I had also blown a hole an inch wide straight through the blanks on my bed and my mattress! Sergeant Gibbon came roaring in. ‘You, that man there, Floyd, you are on a charge, you moron! Company commander’s orders, tomorrow morning at 0830 hours!’ Until that moment, I know I had irritated the good sergeant of infantry because I had been succeeding at everything that was asked of me and he was delighted that I had fallen so heavily and so disastrously from grace. He turned on his heels and strutted, like a crowing cockerel, from the room. The following morning, in best kit, I was marched at the double for the awful confrontation with our company commander, a blotchy-faced Major Edwards of the elite 22nd Cheshire Regiment. I was made to mark time on the spot in front of his desk while he languidly regarded me with cold, narrow eyes filled with contempt, disgust and loathing. The charge I was guilty of was read out before him, and he said, ‘And you hope to become an officer and lead men, yet you appear to have the brains of a child and the intelligence of a baboon!’ Corporal of Horse Clark flanked me on one side and our platoon sergeant on the other. Although I could not look left or right because I was at rigid attention, I know he smirked when I was awarded twenty-eight days’ restriction of privileges. Restriction of privileges meant, amongst other things, punishment drill parades before and after the normal working day, regular reporting to the guard room in whatever uniform they elected you should wear, and, of course, you were confined to camp twenty-four hours a day for twenty-eight days, plus you had, as the Army euphemistically put it, ‘lost your name’. This was a severe blow: not only might it jeopardise my chances of being commissioned, it also scotched my weekly dining club meetings and the odd late night and illicit trip to London to attend the Embassy parties and nightclubs that Fraser, De Rougement and Douglas-Home had open access to. As a penniless kid in Somerset, I used to make Christmas gifts because I could not afford to buy them. With rubber moulds I would make sets of three flying ducks from plaster of Paris, paint and varnish them, or, using the inner tray of a box of household matches, I would, with watercolours, lichen from the apple tree and balsa wood, create miniature glass cases of stuffed fish with cellophane for the glass held to the tray by black passe-partout. These I would glue onto a card upon which I had written with a copperplate nib the Angler’s Prayer, which was – indeed is: O Lord, give me grace to catch a fish so large that even I, when talking of it afterwards, may never need to lie. I now decided to do a similar thing with a matchbox tray and, using little corners of serge blankets and sheets from my bed, I mounted a miniature bed inside a miniature glass case and stuck it on a piece of card cut into the form of a shield such as you see bearing studded heads over the fireplaces of regal halls, and inscribed briefly on the card shield: ‘A rare bed, shot by Officer Cadet Floyd, Kohima Company, Mons O.C.S., Friday 13th June 196—’ and hung it over the head of my bed. At the following morning’s inspection, the Black Mamba, crablike, marched in front of us, tweaking berets, straightening ties and belts. Every day at our platoon morning parade, there would always be one cadet who failed to meet the approval of Staff. It was usually a tall, lanky aristocrat called De Villiers. Day after day he was bawled out for dirty brasses, a crooked tie or an incorrectly placed cap or beret. On this particular morning I think the good corporal of horse was suffering from a mighty hangover and was not in a good mood. He snapped to attention in front of De Villiers and looked at him from toe to head, stared into his eyes and thrust his pace stick into De Villiers, who, unbelievably after all this time, had his belt on upside down. ‘Mr De Villiers,’ he snapped, ‘there is a cunt at the end of this stick,’ and before he could amplify his feelings of utter contempt for De Villiers, the cadet replied, ‘Not at this end, Staff!’ Unfortunately, apart from Corporal of Horse Clark, I was the only person who heard him say it. I dropped my rifle and collapsed into hysterical, uncontrollable laughter. I was rewarded with ten laps round the square with the rifle held high over the head, and while the corporal continued to drill the remainder of the platoon, like the Duke of York marching them up the top of the hill and down again, my forage cap fell off my head. Without his instructions I could not stop running, so I had to leave it where it was, right in the path of the advancing platoon, who trampled it flat! After my ten laps I rejoined the platoon, hatless, and took my place at attention, waiting for the command ‘Platoon dismissed!’ Nobby Clark stood before us, took a deep breath and screamed, ‘With the exception of Mr Floyyyddd…who is improperly dressed on parade, Platooooon! Platooooon! Dismiss!’ The rest of the platoon ran off to the morning’s first lecture while I stood to attention, anticipating yet another charge. Clark marched up to me and said, ‘I saw your trophy above your bed, you’ll be all right, sir.’ Then he raised his voice and shouted, ‘Now, dismiss and rejoin the platoon at the double!’ One cold and wet morning after breakfast, we were back at the Spider collecting notebooks and textbooks for the scheduled morning’s lecture when Sergeant Gibbon strutted in unexpectedly, dressed in fatigues and rubber-soled boots. ‘Change of plan, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘In fifteen minutes you will be embussing for a map-reading exercise on the Aldershot plains. So all you will need are your denims and pouches, a picnic lunch will be provided and we shall return at fifteen hundred hours.’ I didn’t like the man. I didn’t trust the man and something told me he had given us too much unnecessary information. Something made me smell a rat. When he had left the room I pulled the trunk I had kept from under my bed, which contained my secret food supply – Mars bars, apples, biscuits, other objects including a sheath knife, torch, Zippo lighter, blocks of paraffin fire-lighters, hip flask containing brandy and a small but immensely powerful collapsible Primus stove. All of this, along with shaving kit, handkerchiefs, toothbrush and paste, I packed into the pouches and pockets of my kit, along with sixty Piccadilly filter cigarettes! No one saw what I was doing and if we did end up on a routine run or a map-reading exercise for an hour or two, what the hell! The excess weight wouldn’t worry me. I was fit! I knew I was right the second we got into the three-tonners. Instead of turning left to the training areas, it turned right and headed for Aldershot station, where we were rapidly marched onto a waiting train. Everyone was confused and desperate to know what was going on. The train pulled out of the station and neither the officers nor the NCOs who were with us would tell us anything. After a couple of hours we were issued with ration packs. A pork pie, a Scotch egg, an apple, a chocolate bar and a packet of crisps. Only then did Sergeant Gibbon gleefully announce that we were headed for Dartmoor. Most of the lads only had briefs and T-shirts under their denims; no one had any cigarettes or anything. (I have to say that this is a totally true story that I am about to recount, but it did take place over thirty years ago, and to be honest, I am not entirely sure if the ultimate destination was Dartmoor or the Brecon Beacons.) One thing I do know was that when we arrived in what I think was Tavistock in the late afternoon, we route-marched for several miles to a desolate army camp on the moors, where we were divided into teams of three or four, given maps, a radio, a machine gun, a roll of barbed wire, compass and Chinagraph pencils and told to rendezvous at a grid reference as soon as we could make it. By now it was dark. I can remember two members of my team. One was a hugely overweight, terribly jolly fellow called Brooking-Thomas and the other a tall, crinkly-haired blond fellow called Simon Hicks, who was hoping to get into the 21st Lancers. I don’t know how long the hike was. It might have been twenty-four miles, it might have been eight. But after a briefing and a big mug of vegetable soup laced with rum, we were dispatched on our ‘mission’. The radio didn’t work, the machine gun had no ammunition and the barbed wire served no purpose except to encumber us with unwieldy burdens. I know it was winter or late autumn. What started as a clear, starlit night ended in an icy downpour. Brooking-Thomas, who was fleet of foot on the dance floors of certain London nightclubs (Les Ambassadeurs springs to mind) and who kept bottles of whisky and port with his name on them at Danny La Rue’s club, was having great difficulty with his feet and soon developed blisters. But, although he was in terrific pain, he was resolutely cheerful throughout this appalling escapade. Hicks and I took it in turns to carry his radio, because we reckoned that the faster we could press on the sooner we would be in some kind of bed. We arrived at our destination around seven o’clock in the morning to be greeted by an immaculate, well-rested and sadistically cheerful Major Edwards of the 22nd Cheshire Regiment and our own platoon officer, Captain Kitchen. To our delight, we were the first group home. No one said ‘Well done’ and, bidding us ‘Wait here until the arrival of the others’ when the ration truck would bring us breakfast, the officers jumped into a staff car and sped off. Over the next two or three hours the other teams straggled in, tired, cold, hungry and seriously pissed off. The euphoria that my team experienced at arriving first was heightened by the fact that we were enjoying brandy, Mars bars and Piccadilly No. 1 cigarettes. Everyone was, to use army parlance, ‘ticking like meters’. But they all cheered up when someone spotted a three-tonner grinding across the heather. Captain Kitchen had returned. The three-tonner stopped and left us with an issue of rashers, sausages, and, I think, eggs and bread, and departed to its next drop-off zone. When we had unpacked the rations we realised that we had been left no means of cooking them! It’s like the old Ancient Mariner – ‘Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink!’ Even Captain Kitchen was clearly crestfallen. I don’t how to explain my feelings at that moment, but I would like you to know, I in no way gloated or crowed or enjoyed, in any shape or form, the position I knew I was in. The bloody little Primus stove and its little frying pan had rubbed my thighs sore on the marathon across the moors, but I did manage, in a six- or eight-inch frying pan, to cook breakfast for sixteen desperately hungry men. Later that day, we were issued with picks and spades and told to ‘dig in’. We were to spend the next two or three days playing war games, and although I was still under restriction of privileges, I was made company commander for the day and ordered to attack and take an ‘enemy’ position. We had not been prepared for this exercise, nor for the presence of the camp commandant and his staff. In the hurly-burly of the mock battle, I can remember Kim Fraser leading the attack and playing his bagpipes as we advanced up the hill, and I can also remember pushing a very senior member of the observing staff out of the way of a misfired mortar which was otherwise certain to have landed on him. As usual there was no indication of how well you had done, but some days later when we had returned to Aldershot, Fraser and I were invited to have dinner with the General! Once this became known, rumours were running rife that he and I were certainly in the running for the Sword of Honour, or at least Junior Under Officer for the last few weeks before our passing out parade! Heady stuff! But I knew in my heart of hearts that Kim and I had been both too good and too bad to be awarded that honour. As it was, the great event of the dinner took place. During the grand and pompous evening of generals, colonels, brigadiers, resplendent in their mess kit, with their elegant wives, both Fraser and I were too shy to start a conversation and too insignificant to be included in one. But we were at the same table and after the dinner and the toast to the Queen, after the port and cigars we adjourned to the anteroom where white-coated mess staff were rolling out a narrow green baize strip some 25 feet long on the floor. The strip was divided and numbered into segments from one to twenty-five, and like an indoor race track, it had plywood cutout fences and jumps. Six brightly painted plywood cutout horses were placed at one end of the carpet. The officers and their wives threw dice and if, for example, you threw a six, your horse could be advanced six places towards the winning post. Fraser and I, in our best mess kit, knelt on either side of the course and moved the wooden horses along the track. That was our reward! I am someone who has never kept a diary, made notes, collected press cuttings or retained photographs, so it is likely that I will get many of the events in this chronicle out of sync. But fresh in my mind on this blustery, Irish, December day in 1996 is the recent visit which my wife Tess and I made to Bosnia, as guests of the British Army and the 26th Regiment, Royal Artillery, where, in a bombed-out abattoir, we were invited to throw the dice for the selfsame horse-racing game and to back a horse called ‘Floyd’s Fancy’, which romped home after several successful throws of the dice, at 30 to 1, and won us enough money to buy drinks for the entire team. At that moment of the evening, after a week in Bosnia with IFOR, having seen the good and dangerous work that they were doing in the most appalling conditions, I experienced a frisson of d?j? vu, and I realised that in both instances I was, and had been, quite privileged. After the excitement of that evening, which, even though Fraser and I had been mere jockeys, was and still is a special time of my life, we came back to reality with a bump. The course was coming rapidly to a close and shortly we would take the final tests and examinations for our commissions. The pace was hotting up. We were at the stage of being interviewed for our suitability for our chosen regiments. I was still ‘badged’ for the 11th Hussars and I was summoned to an interview with Colonel Turnbull and asked to explain my reasons for choosing the Cherry Pickers. I told him that I had studied military history from the Hundred Years War right through to the Great War of 1914. I had read Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, every word of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; I had read All Quiet on the Western Front, I had read Lions Led by Donkeys, Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade and seen Zulu and much, much more. But, through my association with Fraser, De Rougement and many other fellow cadets, whose names I can sadly no longer remember, I realised that I did not have what was required for the 11th Hussars, to wit the ability to ride, to play polo or, indeed, cover my mess bills. The Cherry Pickers were an elite regiment. Amongst others, Prince Michael of Kent was a serving officer at that time. It was implied to me that the regiment had a fund available to assist desirable young officers of limited means but, despite the blind romanticism that drove me on at this time of my life, I realised that I would be more comfortable in an ultra-professional, modern-day regiment; one which was steeped in history and glory, albeit only since 1916; a regiment which eschewed the values of the historic cavalry but was not encumbered by its tradition. I elected to join the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and serve with the likes of Lieutenant Bale and Corporal Maclver Jones. Shortly before our commissioning parade, for some reason a few of us, including Douglas-Home, grandson of the former Prime Minister, found ourselves near Bristol and I took them all home to 50 Coombe Dale, where my mother cooked them homebaked bread, faggots and peas. Years later, when I was running a bistro in Bristol, I had the uncanny feeling that Douglas-Home had left the Army and attended Bristol University and, as a student there, was a customer at the bistro. Or if that wasn’t the case, he had gone into horse-training and had just turned up one day. Also at this time, on one of the final parade rehearsals, Major Edwards made a rare visit to the drill square. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘remove your hats. Last night, the greatest leader died. Winston Churchill is dead. It is possible that some of you will be selected to attend the state funeral.’ I know for certain that if I hadn’t shot my goddamned bed, not only would I have at least been a Junior Under Officer, I would have lined that funeral route. But curiously, there does exist a 35mm film that shows both Winston Churchill’s funeral and my commissioning parade. It was taken by David and Hillary Taft, who attended both ceremonies along with my mother and father, who once again caused me a wince of embarrassment when he, in his modest and courteous way, addressed my platoon officer, Captain Kitchen, as ‘sir’. That night, as blood brothers, my course comrades and I, at a celebratory dinner in the Hen and Chicken Inn (where we ate what we thought was a splendid dinner of corn on the cub, potted shrimp and roast duck with orange sauce, Stilton and port) ripped in half and signed pound notes which we swore, one day, we would match and commemorate this occasion. It never happened. We were all granted commissioning leave prior to joining our regiments. I took the Dover to Calais ferry and hitchhiked down to the Loire valley. One evening as dusk was falling, a battered, grey deux cent trois Peugeot pickup truck stopped to give me a lift. A man of about forty, gnarled, tanned, with black wiry hair, wearing blue denim overalls, was in the car. He was drunk and had a raffia-covered bidon of coarse, red wine on the floor of the cab which he offered me, and I slurped it gratefully. After several stops at ill-lit, scruffy caf?s, I was also drunk. I had no bed for the night and didn’t know where I was. His driving became more terrifying, but eventually we bounced into the drive of a small cottage surrounded by an unkempt garden full of manky dogs, squawking chickens, derelict farm vehicles and dirty, snotty-nosed children. He indicated to me that I could stay here for the night and ordered his fat, black-clad wife to throw the already sleeping young children off their urine-stained bed onto a tattered couch, to heat up some food in a chipped pale blue enamelled pot and remake the bed for me to sleep on after I had eaten a bowl of saucisson and lentils. When I awoke the following morning, he had gone. His dishevelled wife gave me some bread and apricot jam and a mug of bitter, grainy coffee. I washed under a pump outside the house, murmured my embarrassed goodbyes and set off down the road towards Blois, where, in an early-morning caf?, I breakfasted again on grilled river perch and a glass of red wine. I was twenty-one or twenty-two, I think, I held the Queen’s Commission and in four days I had to report to my regiment at Fallingbostel, the current headquarters of the 3RTR in between Hamburg and Hanover. I was brimming with confidence, feeling fit and full of pride, but, as they say, pride comes before a fall… Aware that freshly commissioned second lieutenants are bumptious and full of themselves when they arrive at their regiment, a series of elaborate practical jokes is played on the unwitting victim; also nobody speaks to you unless it is absolutely essential for at least two or three weeks. I arrived just in time for dinner after a five-hour journey by Land Rover from the airport. It was some weeks before I realised the airport was only in fact about forty minutes away and that that had been the first of many practical jokes. I ate my dinner in silence because that evening the other six or seven subalterns at the long, highly polished table spent the entire meal reading books or doing the Telegraph crossword. This was practical joke number two. The next couple of days consisted of interviews with the Adjutant, the RSM and the Colonel and guided tours of the camp. Apart from that I was left much to my own devices, collecting odd bits of kit and moving into my rather splendid room in the Kommandantur. I was then introduced to my troop and my three tanks. To my absolute delight my troop sergeant turned out to be no less than Sergeant Linneker, which was doubly good because, as yet, I hadn’t even sat in a tank, never mind knowing anything about them. As things stood I was an infantry officer and had not attended the complex technical course at Bovington in Dorset which was scheduled to take place in two or three months’ time. In the meantime I attended morning parade, inspected ‘my’ men and wandered off back to the mess for coffee break. I would return to the tank park and chew the fat with Sergeant Linneker until lunchtime. After lunch we might play five a side football, go for a run, or, on Sergeant Linneker’s suggestion and using his notes, give the lads a lecture on the art of tank warfare, something which I knew absolutely nothing about. And, except for dinner, I spent most evenings in my room listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles and reading The Great Gatsby while I sipped chilled white German wine. Occasionally the Colonel would decide to dine in, to entertain some high-ranking visitor. On these occasions we were required to wear mess kit as it was a very formal occasion. I took my place at the table and after Grace the mess stewards served dinner. It was, I recall, mulligatawny soup followed by poached grey fillet of fish in a lumpy parsley sauce followed by roast stuffed chicken, vegetables and roast potatoes. Not quite as disgusting as it might sound except that my own meal was served to me partly frozen! Practical joke number three. I had no choice but to eat it. The whole table was in on the blague and I reckoned any protest from me would result in some heinous retribution. After dinner the Colonel withdrew to the corner of the mess to play cards with his guests whilst the subalterns got drunk and played mess games. Well, actually I didn’t play any mess games, I was the mess game. First of all they played ‘canoes’. This involved me sitting in a cut-down tea chest with two poles running through it, rather like a sedan chair, whilst the other officers ran the canoe and me around the mess in some kind of grotesque relay race. The object being to tip me out as many times as possible, and of course each time I fell out, I had to pay a penalty, which was to drink some disgusting cocktail devised by my boisterous ‘chums’. When they tired of this, it was decided to play ‘aeroplanes’. This involved piling up the leather cushions from the sofas some feet away from the highly polished mess table, which had now become the deck of an aircraft carrier. The object of this jolly jape was for me to be held spread-eagled by half a dozen of the pranksters and swung backwards and forwards until I had gathered sufficient momentum to be launched from the table and hopefully land on the cushions. The senior officers, engrossed in conversation, chess and cards, paid not the slightest attention. Eventually the evening calmed down. Someone played the piano and sang, others played in a billiards tournament or a card school, none of which I was invited to join. By about midnight I was bored and not a little embarrassed at being so completely ignored so I decided to slide out of the mess and go to bed. Within seconds I was asleep. Suddenly I was woken by a heavy hammering on my bedroom door and the shouts of five or six subalterns demanding that I open the door, which I did. I was swiftly grabbed and dragged onto the mess lawn, where I was eventually overpowered and croquet-hooped to the lawn. The Adjutant, a captain, explained to me that officers never left the mess before the Colonel. After about half an hour I managed to struggle free and thoroughly angry, pissed off and furious at what I thought was their pathetic behaviour, I returned to bed. After the morning parade I was summoned to see the Adjutant, who with no reference to his own presence at the previous night’s fight on the lawn said, ‘I have been informed that you were on the mess lawn drunk and improperly dressed last night. This is unacceptable behaviour and you will do seven extra orderly officers.’ I saluted and left his office burning with a sense of outrageous injustice. Everybody took it in turns to be orderly officer: rather like a hotel duty manager, you inspected the camp guard throughout the night, visited any prisoners in the camp clink, did the fire rounds and toured the troopers’ mess at each mealtime. Seven on the trot is bloody miserable. The one consolation from the first few weeks of misery was that my fighting exploits had thoroughly impressed my troopers who, I discovered, had nicknamed me ‘Bomber’. After my extra stint of orderly officer there was a marked change of attitude and the other officers started to include me ‘in’ and life became rather good fun. Sometimes we would go clubbing in Hamburg; other times we would go on gastronomic safaris in Hanover. A starter in one restaurant, a main course in another, dessert in a third and so on. The summer passed away happily enough on the shooting ranges or on tank manoeuvres, although there were few of these owing to defence cuts which resulted in a shortage of fuel and ammunition. I was given all sorts of responsibilities like being appointed the religious officer, basketball officer – duties which held no interest for me whatsoever. In reality I was bored and I found some aspects of the training quite absurd. Once on exercise on the vast expanse of the Liineburg Heath, we came under imaginary nuclear attack, which meant that you had to batten down all hatches and proceed as normal. The tiny glass observation prisms in the turret quickly became obscured with dust and there was no visibility. Much to the amusement of my troop but to the fury of our squadron leader, I managed to ram his tank broadside on, putting us both out of the exercise. After a full season of training under the helpful guidance of Sergeant Linneker, I was finally sent to Bovington to attend my tank commanders’ course, which was quite absurd because I now knew all there was to know and consequently found the classroom instruction rather juvenile. I skipped as many of the lectures as I could and spent as much available time as possible in the casino and night club in Bournemouth. I returned to my regiment with an unflattering report. Phrases like ‘arrogant know-all’ and ‘too smart for his own good’ peppered the pages. Also they didn’t like me wearing bow ties with my civilian clothes and indeed my Colonel forbade me to wear them in the mess. Because of my interest in food and wine and also because I was the newest subaltern I was given the job of ‘messing member’. This meant I had to arrange the menus and functions for the officers’ mess with the assistance of the stewards and catering staff. For most officers it was the most unpopular chore; to me it was a godsend. My enthusiasm for hurtling around the L?neburg Heath in noisy, uncomfortable and cramped Centurion tanks was waning fast and I threw myself into my new role with ostentatious vigour. With the aid of our mess cook Corporal Feast and Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/keith-floyd/out-of-the-frying-pan-scenes-from-my-life/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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