Free Humble Pie by Gordon Ramsay Page A

of it missing, or the cardboard box it came in would be so wet and soggy that you wouldn’t have wiped your arse with it.
    Christmas was terrible. When we were older, Mum always used to work in a nursing home, doing as much double-time as she could. Sometimes she didn’t even come home on Christmas Day. I used to dread Christmas. And then the bailiffs would show up. We’d be evicted. Dad’s van would be loaded up, and we’d be off to thenearest refuge or round to the social services, pleading homelessness.
    As a teenager, I used to be ashamed of some of the places we lived – the ones that were riddled with damp, the ones that had been left like pigsties by other families. And every time he got violent, any ornament, any present we’d bought for Mum, would be smashed, simply because it belonged to her.
    For our schooling, we were never in one place long enough to develop any kind of attention span. Dad was hardly the kind of man to insist on you doing your homework. Only poofs did homework. The same way only poofs went into catering. No, he was much more interested in trying to turn us into a country music version of the Osmonds. Diane, Ronnie and Yvonne, my younger sister, all sing and play musical instruments. They didn’t have any choice about that. Dad was obsessed. But I never went along with his plan. That’s not to say I wasn’t just as scared of him as they were. My tactic was to keep my head down and my nose clean. When I was asked to lug his bloody gear about the place, I just got on with the job. It’s funny, really, that people think of me as so forceful and combative, because that’s the precise opposite of how I was as a kid. I wouldn’t have said boo to a goose.
    His favourite punishment was the belt. You’d get whacked for something as innocent as drinking his Coke. I would get completely fucked over for that sort of thing. It wasn’t so much the Coke he was bothered about, more that he wouldn’t have a mixer for his precious Bacardi.
    Yvonne was born in Birmingham. Next stop was Daventry, where we had quite a nice council house. Then we were off again, to Margate, where, for a time, we lived in a caravan. That was horrendous. We didn’t even have enough money for the gas bottle to keep the place warm.
    Then it was back up to Scotland again, followed by another stint in Birmingham, and then on to Stratford-upon-Avon. But Dad couldn’t settle. Off he’d go: to France, or to America. He never sent money home. It was up to Mum to earn our keep. When he came back from abroad, we moved to Banbury, where he was going to run a newsagent’s shop. We lived above the shop, and the guy who owned it was lovely. But Dad was on the fiddle. The owner found out, and we were out on our ears again.
    So it was back up to Glasgow. But I was a teenager now, and I decided not to go. The council gave Diane and me a flat, and we stayed put. I was doing a catering course at college, funded by the local Round Table, but, in anycase, I don’t think Dad wanted either of us around.
    I had crossed a line when I was fifteen. I was going out with a girl called Stephanie, and one night I came back late.
    ‘Get your stuff out of my house, and go and live with her,’ he said.
    ‘I’m sixteen next week,’ I said. ‘I can go where I like.’
    I’d already been given a big radio for the upcoming birthday, and he threw it at me from the top of the stairs.
    ‘I can’t believe you’ve done that,’ I said. ‘You know damn well that Mum bought it for me.’
    I knew she’d got it on hire purchase, which was costing her £8 a month, and I couldn’t bear it.
    ‘I’d rather you did that to me than to something that hasn’t even been paid for,’ I said.
    He came storming down the stairs. At first, I stood my ground. Then I saw the look in his eyes and I bolted. For the first time, I felt that he really might kill me. I saw something in his eyes that day – a kind of madness.
    Once Diane and I were out of the way, he