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