Jamie Oliver: King of the Kitchen - The biography of the man who revolutionised the way Britain eats. Stafford Hildred
Jamie Oliver: King of the Kitchen - The biography of the man who revolutionised the way Britain eats
write on the board, I would hear the furniture start to move around. They seemed to think it was a huge joke to swap seats, and in some cases even desks, while my back was turned. So I would look back at the class and home in on one of the more helpful members of the class, and ask a question to move the lesson on, only to find it was Jamie Oliver, or someone even dimmer, staring balefully back at me. The first time it happened it was most disconcerting. And as young Jamie appeared to be at the centre of it, I appealed to the class one day not to waste precious time indulging in what I described as the “Jamie Oliver Shuffle”. That provoked gales of giggles and the name stuck for a time, though I’m happy to say that from then on they seemed to think I had suffered enough.
‘I have to say that academically it was clear early on that Jamie was never going to be a high flyer. He was not without ability but he loved larking around too much for anything of any substance to remain in his brain. As a boy, he had a face that betrayed just about every one of his impish emotions so you always knew if he was up to something. Board rubbers had an unnerving habit of dropping off the top of doors as you started a lesson when young Jamie was around. He would try to look innocent but his face gave him away. For all that, there was no malice in the lad and I heard more than one story reported back to the staffroom of Jamie and his pals stepping hard on any outbreak of bullying.
‘There was one rather weedy young lad who came on the bus from a village not far from Clavering who was forever getting his sports gear pinched and ink flicked in his face. Today, that bullied youngster is a teacher himself and he told me that it became quite nasty and had him bunking off school to stay out of the clutches of the bullies. But when Jamie and his pals found out about it, they stood up for the lad and warned the older boys off. He didn’t hit anyone, he just stood up to them and issued a few embarrassing remarks about the cowardice of people who pick on people who are smaller than themselves. That did the trick.
‘I always thought Jamie was much brighter than his tests and exam results revealed. He had a gift for talking to people with the sort of honest, wide-eyed enthusiasm that is hard to resist. There is no side to him at all. I met him years after he had left school, just as he was starting to be seen on television, and he seemed to be the same sunny individual I remember shuffling round the classroom. Everyone needs some fun in their lives, even teachers. And Jamie could be relied upon to provide it.’
But Jamie’s knack for getting into scrapes was legendary. Friends used to joke that if you threw a cricket ball up in the school playground it would land on Jamie’s head. And the accident-prone side of his nature was never far away. Jamie had even knocked himself out on a third occasion as a child by crashing his tricycle into a wall. And, much later, he crashed a scrambling bike in a field near his home. ‘My parents didn’t know I was riding that bike as I was only 14 at the time,’ he said. ‘I passed out while I was on it. I think I was overcome by petrol fumes because earlier we had been adjusting the fuel mixture to increase the speed.’
Jamie was born bursting with energy and he has scarcely ever slowed down since. He loved to run across the fields near his home. His parents later moved from the pub to a luxury home three miles away. They wanted to get away from the relentless pressure of living over the shop and Jamie used the journey for regular exercise. ‘I suppose I am lucky that I have always had a lot of energy,’ says Jamie. ‘Running around has never been any problem, I enjoy it. But sitting still is very difficult.’
Once his generous parents introduced Jamie to the concept of regular holidays to spice up a hard-working life he has loved the feeling of getting up, up and away from it all. He loves a quickly-arranged break somewhere new that he has never been before. But even on holiday he found he could manage to land himself in trouble. Jamie remembers, ‘Holidays with my parents ended when I was 14, then school trips took over. I went on two skiing holidays with my class to France. I had already been skiing with my family when I was much younger so I wasn’t a complete novice. We went to a place called Brand in Austria when I was six. At that age, I didn’t seem to have any sense of danger or pain or disaster and my sister Anna and I were skiing in no time. But while Anna glided off elegantly across the mountain, as lovely people should, I just wanted to ski straight down from top to bottom as fast as I possibly could. Even really good skiers couldn’t catch up with me. The following year, Mum said, “You’re making me so worried, you go far too fast. I’ll teach you how to do an emergency stop.” And it was a good thing she did because the very next day I skied like a maniac through this red tape, which obviously meant “Danger”, and I managed to do an emergency stop only a few feet from the edge of a cliff.’
That frighteningly fearless side to his nature used to give his poor parents plenty of anxious moments. They would try to reason carefully with him that he was shortening the span of his natural life expectancy many times over if he continued to refuse to take even a modicum of care. Jamie would nod wisely in agreement and assure them that they were absolutely right – and then continue to live life to its dangerous full at all times.
Jamie sees things slightly differently. ‘By the time I went off with the school, Mum had bollocked me into shape enough to make me concentrate on what I was doing. We went out to France at Easter – 30 boys with a mission not only to ski, but to get hold of drink and fags and do whatever was forbidden, all of us fizzing with pure baby testosterone. It was a wonderful holiday.’
But one thing which Jamie did not instantly appreciate was the delights of European cooking. ‘One thing I learned was that “Continental breakfast” actually meant stale bread and disgusting jam. And on that we were expected to ski for five hours, in theory one of the most demanding sports in the whole wide world,’ he snorted.
As a teenager, Jamie preferred to start the day like most of his contemporaries with a traditional English breakfast – nice crisp fried bread to provide a platform for a couple of eggs and plenty of rashers of bacon alongside. This was definitely not on the menu in the budget accommodation used for the school trips, so Jamie decided to take direct and extremely popular action. ‘So the following year I secretly took a little cooker with me – an old camping gas one – and a non-stick frying pan. We bought bacon and eggs at the local supermarket and did wonderful fry-ups for breakfast on our balcony.’ He laughs loudly at the memory. The hotelier did not appreciate Jamie’s firm rejection of his catering facilities, but he did not find out that the young man had set up his own kitchen on his balcony until it was late in the holiday and he decided to dismiss it as ‘crazy English again’ with a shrug of his shoulders.
Many of the crazes which dominate the waking lives of schoolboys passed Jamie by. His hours were more often filled with hard work or scouring the countryside for adventure than playing with model railways or collecting stamps for an album. He laughs at the very idea. ‘I used to collect beermats as a kid, which wasn’t too much of a challenge for somebody growing up in a pub, but I pretty soon got fed up of that. I mean, what are you supposed to do with beermats when you’ve collected them? Apart from that though, I have never really had a hobby.’
All-action Jamie was never exactly deliberately rash as he hurtled through life, but at the same time he could never claim to be the most safety-conscious person in the kitchen as a young man. At 16, he damaged an artery in his hand in an accident that was very close to cutting short his career as a chef before it had properly begun. ‘I picked up a tea towel that had been used to collect some broken china and a sliver of it severed my artery,’ he remembers with a wince. ‘Surgeons carried out micro-surgery to repair the artery and a damaged nerve and fortunately everything was OK.’
Typically, Jamie chooses to make light of the accident, but it was a terrifying experience for both him and his parents and it has left him with a lasting horror of his own blood and a passion for safety in the kitchen. Jamie is not the least bit squeamish about all the blood and guts he encounters at work, yet certain things can turn his stomach. ‘I’m a bit weird,’ he smiles. ‘If I get a paper cut I faint but I can cut a pig in half and it doesn’t bother me.’
And being accident-prone didn’t just have repercussions for Jamie himself – others suffered on occasions, and did not always recover. He explains, ‘When I was about 13, I had a fish tank with about 250 fish in it. It was beautiful, and when I woke up one morning all the fish had been completely