The Devil in the Kitchen (3 page)

My father is standing there, dressed smartly in a gray suit. He is holding Craig, the youngest of the family. Ten days old.

Crisp, blue sky. Bright sunshine.

“Bring the baby,” the ambulance man repeats. “He’ll need feeding.” My father climbs in with Craig, who looks very snug and warm, wrapped up in a cozy white blanket.

Bang! Doors close, engine starts. The exhaust pipe pukes a dark cloud. The ambulance drives away, up the hill, out of sight.

E
VERY NIGHT FOR
the next few nights Dad would give us our dinner before heading off to the hospital to see Mum. After the visit he’d return quite late, bringing bags of sweets for his boys and telling us, “These are from Mum.” She’d had a brain hemorrhage, but if he knew she was going to die, he never let on.

On February 20, the Tuesday after she had been taken to the hospital, the doctors turned off the life support machine. That night Dad came home and he woke us all up and told us to climb out of bed and to go downstairs. We gathered in the front room, where a few days earlier Mum had said she hadn’t felt right, and Dad sat in his chair. I stared at his face and the tears on his cheeks. Then he told us, “Your mother died tonight.” His words came thundering at me. Our mother had gone. Maria Rosa White—my father called her Maro—the woman who gave me so much more than my Italian name, was only thirty-eight years old.

After the funeral I don’t think I went home to play or be with my family. Instead I was dropped off at school and stayed in the playground with my friends. I had a toy car, a gift from someone or other, and my classmates were enthralled by it. It wasn’t a Matchbox car but something quite substantial and to me it was like a trophy. I think I was in the playground for about ten minutes and collected by I-don’t-know-who and taken to a strange house, where I stayed for two, maybe three days. I still don’t know where I went. It was a strange house with strange people who were obviously helping out Dad and who had kids the same age as me. It was as if I had been taken from my world into this other world.

THREE

Gambling, Greyhounds and Grief

A
FEW DAYS
after my mother’s funeral, I returned home, home to a different way of life. I’d find my dad sitting up late at night, drinking along with a Shirley Bassey record. He rarely spoke of my mother’s death but just got on with things, trying to cope with his damaged brood and apparently ignoring his own pain. But the bitterness of it remained with him. When he was a kid, his parents had separated and divided up their four children, and he seemed determined not to let that happen to his family. Somewhere along the way I learned that he had made a promise to my mother to raise her sons, rather than put us in a children’s home. If he had put us in a home, it would have been acceptable, even expected, in the late sixties. For Dad it was totally unacceptable. He’d have hated finger-pointing people saying, “Poor Mr. White, lost his wife, had to put his kids in a children’s home.”

He was a disciplinarian, born in the twentieth century but raised with Victorian principles and values. He may not have been a religious man but he programmed me and my brothers religiously and he was a stickler for standards. He was punctual as hell. Each morning he would wake the family at six forty-five and we would get up, dress and have breakfast in time for his departure right at seven thirty to catch the seven forty bus that took him into Leeds city center. Off he’d go to work, wearing a smart suit, a trilby, and shoes that were polished with military precision. Even if he was feeling unwell, he would still head off for the bus stop, saying, “Never call in sick.”

The thing about Dad is that he was a one-dimensional man, and like most one-dimensional men, he believed in correctness. On those occasions when I could neither conform nor live up to his high standards, he could not contain the impatience.

“Put on these clothes,” I remember him saying once after I had answered back on a day when he was lacking patience. I looked at the pile of garments that he was pointing to, and they were my Sunday best. I changed into the clothes. Then he packed me a suitcase, took me to the front room, pointed at the sofa and said, “Sit there and wait.”

I asked, “Why, Dad?”

“The taxi is coming to take you to the children’s home,” he replied.

Petrified, I sat waiting and thinking, am I going to be the next one to be taken away? But there was no taxi. It was simply Dad’s method of punishment. The old man’s failings were outweighed by the goodness and decency within him, but it would take me a long time to realize that. It’s a demanding job, being a single parent.

M
Y FATHER THOUGHT,
deep down, that he was an extremely unlucky man, and my mother’s death only reinforced that opinion. But if you met him, you got a bloke, the working-class Northerner with a dry wit who talked betting nonstop. Dad was a gambler, and he turned to that, too, for solace. He did the dogs, the horses and the pools. He was hooked on the adrenaline that comes with gambling.

Inevitably, his love of the horses and the dogs also became a major part of my life. On one occasion Dad had some leave planned and he sent me off to school with a letter for my teacher. He had written something like, “My annual holiday is coming up and I would very much like to take Marco away for a week.” I was excused from Fir Tree Primary and when I returned after the break, my teacher asked if I’d had a nice holiday.

I said, “Very nice, thank you very much, miss.”

“Where did you go, Marco?”

“York Races for a week, miss.”

Like many gamblers, my dad let superstition play a major role in his life. An early-morning sighting of a robin redbreast, for instance, would bring him good luck for the rest of that day. So on Saturday mornings our semi-detached house was filled with the wonderful smell of sizzling bacon. Dad wasn’t doing a fry-up for his sons—he cooked the meat to entice the robins. The fried bacon went onto a plate, which then went out to the back garden. Dad would gaze out of the window, hoping a hungry robin would fly by 22 Lingfield Mount and swoop down for the meat. The size of the bets depended on the sighting of a bird.

Our back garden was not only a canteen for robins but also a home to Dad’s cherished trio of greyhounds, which he raced on nearby tracks. Greyhounds were his true passion and each of the three dogs had a kennel in the garden. Two nights a week Dad’s mate Stan Roberts would pull up in his Morris Minor (Dad didn’t drive) and we’d head off to the racetrack. There’d be four of us in the car: Dad and Stan sat in the front while I shared the backseat with a greyhound.

At the track I would hover outside the bar while inside Dad enjoyed a drink with his friends. The door would open and a bottle of a pop and packet of crisps would be passed out to me. I’d sneak a glance into the brightly lit room (dimmer switches had yet to come along) with a haze of smoke lingering like a white cloud above the gamblers’ heads (air-conditioning was unheard of ). Coming home at eleven
P.M
., I’d fall asleep on the backseat. The greyhound was my pillow.

Dad was out one day when there was a knock on the door. A bloke was standing there and he asked me, “Do you sell greyhounds?”

We didn’t but I told him, “Yes.” I took him through the house and into the back garden to inspect the dogs.

“How much is that one?” he said, pointing at one of the animals.

“Fifty pence.” It was my first business deal. (I have done better ones since then.)

The bloke handed over the money and left with the dog. I treated a mate, David Johnson, to goodies from the sweetshop and then we headed off to play in the woods. When Dad found out what I had done, he went ballistic and sent me up to my room without any tea. That was his traditional form of punishment: “Off to bed. No tea for you.”

For Dad, greyhound racing was all about rigging the price and he had various tricks that he used. From time to time I assisted in this dastardly business. If you’ve got a dog that has won a couple of races in a row, then the odds of it winning the forthcoming race are going to be short. So with a dog that was, let’s say, black with a white patch on its paw, Dad would paint out the patch and enter it into the race under a new name, thereby achieving a good price at the bookies.

Another devious trick went like this: The day before the greyhound was due to race, it wasn’t fed. But then, last thing at night, it was given a bone to chew on, which would keep the dog awake. The next morning I would take the dog for a brisk four-mile walk and later on, when it came to race, it would look pristine and might be a favorite but was too knackered to win. So now the next time it raced, it would get long odds because of its previous form but this time round it would be in tip-top shape. I think I’m right in saying that one of Dad’s dogs, the Governor, set track records at Halifax, Keighley and Doncaster.

When I wasn’t tagging along after my father, I would play by myself in the woods or down by the river, rediscovering the side of nature that I had been introduced to during those holidays with my mother in Italy. Out of school, I was a bit of a loner, I’d say. In school, I was doomed. I was not only damaged by the death of my mother but also suffered from dyslexia. In those days “word blindness” was considered a sign of stupidity rather than a condition that calls for a special-needs teacher. One or two teachers were sympathetic but others humiliated me. For a very long time I assumed I was an idiot. What’s more, I felt like a freak. Every pupil—except me—had a mother. Every other pupil—except me and a lad called Quentin, whose parents had divorced—was the product of an apparently happy home environment.

To cap it all, I had this strange name, Marco (my middle name, Pierre, remained a well-kept secret until I was in my twenties). I could only dream of what life might have been like had I been a John, a Peter, a Paul or a Timothy. I just wanted to be like everyone else.

C
RAIG, THE BABY
of the family, was just thirteen days old when our mother died, and for Dad, the prospect of leaving work to look after the family must have seemed an impossible one. Perhaps Dad was advised by friends; maybe he made the decision while sitting alone searching for inspiration from Shirley Bassey’s lyrics. Whatever the case, he had concluded within weeks of my mother’s death that he was in a horrific, no-win situation, and he could not see how he could bring up Craig as well as Graham, Clive and me. Craig, however, would not be going to the children’s home.

It took a couple of months for Craig’s adoption papers to be arranged and during that time he lived with temporary foster parents in York Road, not far from us. I remember him coming home to 22 Lingfield Mount for a short spell. Then for the second time in three months, another member of my family was taken away, yet this time round I can’t remember witnessing the departure. Craig did not disappear forever. He was not going to become one of those poor souls who spends a decade of his adult life trying to trace his birth parents.

Craig was adopted by my mother’s brother, my uncle Gianfranco, and his wife, Paola. Aunt Paola had previously been told that she would never conceive, so my mother’s death provided the couple with a child. It was like a blessing from God. My father’s loss was their gain. Craig was collected by Uncle Gianfranco and off he went to live with the couple in Genoa.

He underwent two name changes: White had to go (understandably) to make way for Gallina, and his first name was too much of a mouthful for his new countrymen. His middle name was Simon and so Craig became Simon, as in
See
mon. My dad had handed him over and I don’t think he ever saw him again.

There was little contact with the Italian in-laws. They would send us Christmas presents and then Graham, Clive and I would be instructed by Dad to sit at the dining room table and write thank-you letters. My father did not have many kind words to say about that side of the family and I think they were equally unimpressed by him.

When I was ten years old, I visited my uncle and aunt for the last time. I flew from Manchester to Milan. I was to go for a couple of weeks or so to enjoy the Italian countryside to which my mother had introduced me. But things were strange from the moment I arrived. I felt out of place amid all this regular family life. Simon, now four years old, didn’t understand a word I was saying and I couldn’t understand him. He didn’t even know that I was his brother.

Then there was the food problem. Back in Yorkshire, I was used to haddock or cod that was deep-fried in batter and served with chips, all of it drenched in malt vinegar and salt and then wrapped up in newspaper. Good old British fish ’n’ chips, in other words, which we’d get from the high street “chippies” as a fortnightly treat. It’s unhealthy, but washed down with a mug of tea, it’s divine comfort food. In Italy, my aunt cheerfully presented me with a plate of sea bass that had been sautéed in a little olive oil. I was aghast. The skin was visible. The head was still on. There was no crunchy coating of deep-fried batter to disguise the fact that this was a fish in front of me. It was extremely healthy, granted, and probably quite tasty. But for a young palate accustomed to fish with ketchup, it was utterly disgusting. “Yuk,” I said, and pushed the plate away. I couldn’t even manage a mouthful.

To her credit, my aunt didn’t take this as a national insult (in the way I would come to expect from the proud Italian cooks I’d work with later on). There was no screaming, no broken crockery. But still, she was not pleased. Between the fish and my sulking and homesickness, my uncle and aunt were getting fed up with me. A few days before my fortnight-long holiday was due to end, my bags were packed and I was driven to the airport and put on a plane home.

Of my two older brothers, I had more of a bond with Graham, who was often fishing, shooting pigeons, hunting rabbits and ferreting. In fact, on the day my mother went into the hospital, his love of fishing had spared him the sight of her being taken away in the ambulance because at the time he was sitting on the banks of Adel Beck.