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