Humble Pie Read Free Page A

plaster for four months. Once the plaster came off, I started training like a demon, but I was still in a lot of pain.
    At the start of the season, there was no getting away from it. My leg was just not the same. Jock Wallace, the club’s manager, and his assistant, Archie Knox, called me into their office one Friday morning. It was all over for me. I was not going to be signed. I remember their words coming at me like body blows. In those few minutes, all my dreams died. Part of me was wondering how I would manage to walk out of the room.
    Telling Dad was one of the toughest things I have ever done, but I wouldn’t let him have the pleasure of seeing me cry. On and on he went.
    ‘You carry on badgering Rangers,’ he said. ‘You prove to them you are fit again.’
    But far harder to take was his lack of sympathy for me. He didn’t have a single kind word for me that day. Later on, he even suggested that I might be exaggerating the extent of my injury. So I went home, shut myself away, and had a good cry.
    I suppose I mourned for what might have been. But I had to let go of the game that Iloved. I was certain that I was doing the right thing in making a clean break. I had the example of my father and his so-called music career to encourage me, didn’t I? There was no way I wanted to be a pathetic dreamer like him for the rest of my life. I wanted to be the best at whatever I did. The only question was: what would that be?

Chapter Three
Getting Started
    When I was growing up, there wasn’t a lot of money for food. But Mum was a good, simple cook: ham hock soup, bread and butter pudding, fish fingers, home-made chips and beans. We were poor, and the idea of having a starter, main course and pudding was unheard of. We were always on free school dinners, and on the last Friday of every month, the staff made a point of calling out your name to give you the next month’s tickets. That was hell. It confirmed that you were one of the poorest kids in the class.
    So I connected plenty of food with good times, with status. But I’d be lying if I said I was interested in cooking. I latched on to the idea of catering college because my options were limited, to say the least. I looked at the Navy and at the police, but I didn’t have enough O levels to join either of them. So I ended upenrolling in a foundation year in catering at a local college, funded by the Rotarians. Did I dream of being a Michelin-starred chef? Did I fuck!
    I remember coming home and showing Diane how to chop an onion really finely. I had my own wallet of knives. They had plastic banana yellow handles. At my restaurant in Chelsea, Royal Hospital Road, we wouldn’t even use those to clean the shit off a pan. But I treated my knives and my white chef’s clothes with love and reverence. I sent a picture of me in my big white chef’s hat up to Mum in Glasgow. I was so fucking proud.
    Meanwhile, I had a couple of weekend jobs. The first was in a curry house in Stratford, washing up. Then Diane got me a job working in the hotel where she was a waitress. Again, I was only washing up, but that was when I first got the idea of becoming a chef. I was in the kitchen, and I was in heaven.
    After a year, one of my tutors suggested that I start working full-time, and attend college only on a day-release basis. I’d made good progress. So I started work as a commis at the place where I’d been washing up, the Roxburgh House Hotel. My first chef was this twenty-stone bald guy called Andy Rogers who would tell you off withoutever explaining why. Dear God, you would not believe the kind of food that he got us to turn out. Roast potatoes started off in the deep fat fryer and were then sprinkled with Bisto granules before they went in the oven. This was to make sure they were nice and brown. We used to serve mushrooms stuffed with Camembert. I knew it was all dreadful, even then.
    I was getting all this information at college, and I would come back and say, ‘To make