Country Fair. Max Hastings
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Fuller’s walnut was the most famous, but personally I preferred Fuller’s chocolate cake. My mother occasionally reminded me that they cost six shillings apiece and therefore counted as luxury food, but in my prep school prime I could demolish a two-pound Fuller’s cake single-handed, at one sitting. We occasionally drank Coca-Cola, but irrationally Kia-Ora orange squash and Lucozade were considered healthier for us. At about twelve I acquired a secret passion for that heavily marketed second-hand car salesman’s drink Babycham. It was very sweet, mildly alcoholic, and could be bought illicitly at the back door of the village pub for one shilling and three pence for a small bottle.
We ate a lot of fish, which came from the wonderful Knightsbridge fish shop opposite Harrods where the spoils of the sea lay on an open marble slab, presided over by a genial giant with a red nose, blue-and-white-striped apron and straw hat. The butcher, too, wore a straw hat as his badge of office. I was reared in the belief that all right-thinking Englishmen lived off huge chunks of bleeding meat, a vision that has never faded. In those days meat seemed, and indeed was, very expensive. Fillet and sirloin seldom entered our house. The Sunday joint was usually a second-division cut like topside. At grown-up dinner parties my mother favoured crown of lamb, the cutlets primly decorated with little paper coronets. These were followed by the Hastings household’s absolutely favourite pudding – chocolate profiteroles with whipped cream, created with sublime artistry by my mother’s German cook, Martha. The family always managed to be broke, in a very English middle-class way. That is to say, we lived amid chronic gloom about money, but everybody seemed to chuck it about.
When I was shipped off to prep school at the age of eight, my father inaugurated a custom designed to soften the blow. On the first day of every term, before delivering me to the 3 p.m. train from Paddington, he took me to a West End restaurant for lunch. His opening shot was Le Caprice, then as now in Arlington Street. He introduced me to Mario, the head waiter, asserting reverently that I would find him one of the most important people in my life. Father also pointed out stars such as Noëpl Coward and David Niven. With some help from Mario, whom even as a stripling I found pretty oleaginous, the French menu was interpreted
None of this diminished in the smallest degree my misery and terror about being removed from Rutland Gate SW7 to a punishment camp in Berkshire named Horris Hill. There, prowess on the playing field was the only virtue deemed worthy of applause, and certain masters did not trouble to conceal their enthusiasm for the prettier small boys. At the Caprice, when I asked tremulously for an ice cream and was presented instead with a sorbet, I perceived deliberate deceit and collapsed into hysterical sobs. If father had thought to sweeten the bitter pill of Horris Hill with a mere restaurant luncheon, he failed. I was still seething when I boarded the Hogwarts Express.
Yet restaurant lunches persisted on those black days at the beginning of each term. Once we went to Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, where we ate beef off the trolley and my father instructed me on the importance of tipping the carver half a crown. We tried the Ivy, where I was briefed about all manner of writers and literary agents to be seen at the tables, none of whose names meant a thing to me. I much preferred Lyons Corner House in Coventry Street, the huge multiple restaurant complex where we usually patronised the Seven Stars, which served delicious roasts with jacket potatoes for around fifteen shillings (75p) a head. When I first started taking girls out, the Seven Stars got a lot of my custom. I never bothered to ask my dates how they felt about roasts. I just assumed, like many of my generation, that you could never go wrong with meat. The most satisfactory meal I can recall as a teenager comprised a prawn cocktail and a fillet steak, with a second prawn cocktail to follow. ‘I knew you were eccentric when you came in,’ said the waitress gloomily.
In those days I spent about 150 per cent of my weekly income on entertaining girls. At eighteen, I remember giving one of them a notably lavish, overpriced dinner at a restaurant in Swallow Street near Piccadilly Circus named the Pipistrello. She didn’t display the smallest sexual gratitude at the time, but I suppose the evening wasn’t an entirely futile extravagance, since she is now my wife.
The restaurants which won my heart – and for many adult years my custom – were those great fisheries: Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street, the Carafe behind Harrods and the Vendôme in Dover Street. They were owned by an exuberant friend of my father’s named Bernard Walsh, for whom oyster was a middle name. Bernard staged annual seaside parties at Colchester to celebrate the opening of the season, from which his guests returned sick but happy. Father belonged to a notorious lunching group named the Thursday Club, which met every week on the top floor of Wheeler’s, and was regularly denounced by gossip columnists as a den of all manner of misbehaviour. Its star members in the early 1950s were Prince Philip, Baron the ‘society photographer’, actors Peter Ustinov and James Robertson Justice, the Marquess of Milford Haven, mouth organist Larry Adler and Daily Express editor Arthur Christiansen. That they all got very drunk was not in doubt. I am sceptical about whether much else went on. I was put down for the Thursday Club at birth, but sadly it collapsed before I was old enough to participate.
Any day of the week, Wheeler’s was my father’s home from home, and it became mine. The menu boasted twenty variations on Dover sole. My own favourite was Normande, served with a wine and grape sauce. Lunch for two cost about £3 including wine in the early 1960s, and was eaten huddled at tiny tables which became a trifle cramped when two members of the Hastings family were in possession. It was all so wonderfully English. There was no nonsense about nouvelle cuisine at Wheeler’s. Indeed, I am doubtful whether in its heyday any mere foreigner would have got a table.
About now, thoughtful readers may ask: if the Hastings family was skint, how did they manage to do such grand eating? The same way they do now, silly. Expenses. Since both my parents were employed by media organisations, I doubt if they ever paid for a restaurant meal out of their own pockets. We had nothing in banks save overdrafts, but the Lord (Beaverbrook or Rothermere) was always good for a glass of champagne and a lobster. My father’s epicurean masterclasses triumphantly succeeded in one respect. They induced in me an enthusiasm for expensive food which has never faded. Likewise, when I started working and living in a flat on my own, I simply summoned rations by telephone from Harrods. I had no idea how else food might be obtained. The consequence, as you might surmise, was an impressive series of financial smashes in my early twenties. One of them was retrieved only by a handsome legacy from dear old nanny, when she passed on to the great nursery in the sky after seventeen years’ hard labour with the Hastingses.
I once observed at a dinner party in the 1990s that I wished I had discovered back in 1964 or thereabouts that a girl was just as likely to go to bed with you if you bought her a hot dog as if you took her to Wheeler’s. This caused a middle-aged woman to shout from the far end of the table: ‘Rubbish! If a bloke gave me a good dinner, I used to feel I owed him one.’ I said how much I wished that we had met thirty years earlier.
Nowadays, my culinary life has changed out of recognition. In deepest west Berkshire, our family try to be living exemplars of The Good Life. Scarcely a restaurant features in the programme any more. At Hastings Towers we live off the land, though this is by no means a universally popular policy. About once a week, my wife stands by the back gate crying out towards open country: ‘Mr Fox! Mr Fox! Where are you? Come on in!’ This is a demo directed at me. It is designed to emphasise how tiresome Penny finds our chickens, and especially the bother of feeding and watering them. ‘When did you last hear of Marks & Spencer running out of eggs?’ she demands crossly. I find it soothing to see a few hens scratching about in a pen. They may not be very bright, nor very rewarding conversationalists, but if you put layer’s mash in at one end, something useful emerges at the other.
In our rustic domain, the chicken controversy is only one manifestation of a wider debate: how much husbandry can we take? If we profess to be country-dwellers and sportsmen, how far does it behove us to live off the landscape, to bottle and dry and freeze the spoils of chase and garden as our ancestors did? We eat a lot of game. I would be happy to exist on a permanent diet of semi-raw grouse, if others about the house shared my enthusiasm, which they do not. Many women find grouse too gamey. There is also domestic resistance to my views about how long birds should be hung, and to my theory that a few maggots contribute added protein, a view rigorously contested by the European Union in its latest regulations on the marketing of game meat.
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