Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life. Keith Floyd

       Ferrets, Faggots and Fishing

      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