rules of the game were simple, the same as all the hundreds of other games of chicken we’d played on our motorbikes and trikes over the years, the same as every game of chicken ever. One person stands in the middle of a field (in this case Philip) while someone else (in this case me and the rest of our mates in the car) drives at them. The person who bottles it and moves first is the chicken. Philip didn’t move. I’ve no idea why not, he just didn’t. There were four of us whizzing across that field in the Fiat, really hoofing it, doing a good 30 miles an hour. We were all looking at him, waiting for him to jump out of the way, and he was looking at us, waiting for us to swerve. We were looking at him and he was looking at us and the next thing, BANG!, we hit him. He hit the windscreen and went straight over the top. The 126 had a cloth sunroof which was open at the time, and I swear we all watched in horror as poor Philip flew over our heads. I remember his legs appeared to go past in slow motion. I looked in the rear-view mirror to see if I could see him, more importantly to see if I could see him moving. Everyone else in the car was shouting, ‘You’ve killed him, you’ve killed him!’ I did a handbrake turn and spun the car round just as Philip was getting up. I couldn’t believe it. Not only was he alive, he was in one piece. I seriously thought I’d ended his life.
The new priority suddenly became keeping him quiet. I couldn’t afford to have my mother finding out or that would have been it, we wouldn’t have had the car any more. In the end I made a pact with Philip. I told him that if he didn’t tell anyone we’d run him over I’d let him drive the car when he came round, which was a pretty big deal because I wouldn’t let anyone drive my car, so it seemed like fair compensation for running him over. Philip agreed and became the only person I ever allowed to drive that Fiat 126, although he could only drive it at certain times and in certain places as I didn’t want my mum or dad to see him at the wheel because they would have known straight away that something wasn’t quite right.
The windscreen wasn’t quite as easy to fix. The glass had cracked side to side where he’d hit it. One look at that and my mum would have wanted to know what we’d been up to, so I kicked the windscreen out, got some chicken wire from the farm and added ‘rally windows’ to my list of modifications.
Even after that, and with no windscreen, I used to drive that car like a lunatic over the fields. Just over the fields though, nowhere else. It was brilliant.
Not long after that my dad started taking me to Tockwith Aerodrome to teach me to drive properly. Tockwith was a disused old airfield near where we lived where parents would take their kids to learn the basics before going out on the road. It cost something like a fiver a go and you could drive round there all afternoon. Fittingly it’s now an approved go-karting school. Everyone else learning there was 17 or 18; I was there with my dad teaching me to mirror, signal, manoeuvre when I was 13.
We used to go over there in his Audi. We’d swap seats and he’d be straight back in advanced police driving instructor mode, telling me how to do it properly, and I mean properly. It wasn’t just all about the three-point turns and the reverse parking. He taught me to anticipate, to control my speed and brake with the gears, to go sideways, the lot. He must have been doing something right because I passed my test first time after only one hour-long lesson. I had intended to have more lessons, but I applied for my test as soon as I got my provisional licence; I had after all already been driving for five years by then. I got someone else’s cancellation, so one lesson immediately before my test was all there was time for. I turned 17 on 30 June and I passed my test on 7 July. So you see, my dad was right: at £40 my little Fiat 126 really was cheaper than driving lessons.
I’m not sure Philip Schofield was ever quite the same after his brush with the Fiat though.
When it comes to education, I’d say some of the most important things I learnt came from going on trips to France with Dad in his HGV. My dad has spent his life being a jack of all trades, and he’s actually been very good at some of them. He was not only a renowned sommelier and judge on the Jurade de Saint Emilion, he was also one of the two main UK importers of wine from the Bordeaux region. Always keen to save a couple of quid, he didn’t just import the wine, he got his HGV licence, hired a lorry and went to collect it himself. And I used to go with him.
I was never good at school. I even failed cookery. I was always just too thick to be academic. My sister was the one with the brains and I was more practical. If it involved anything written I wouldn’t be able to do it, which was one of the reasons I failed cookery, or ‘home economy’ as it was called then. I say one of the reasons; I’m convinced the other was that the home economy teacher hated me because I could cook better than she could. I think everyone just assumed I wasn’t putting any effort into my written work, but that wasn’t true. I’d sit there for hours, night after night, trying to write up how to cook an angel cake, or put into words the concept for a new design of kitchen cupboard, and I’d always get a D for it.
Actually, look at my school books, and the diagrams and illustrations that went with the writing were always incredibly detailed and painstaking, which should have given someone a clue that I was putting more than a D’s worth of effort in. In truth, those drawings took half the time it took me to do the writing yet would easily get me an A. If not the quality of those drawings, then the effort I put into practical work was surely enough to make anyone who was half awake realise that I had a genuine passion for the subject which my writing wasn’t reflecting, and that maybe there was something more fundamental wrong. But my teacher was too busy filling my exercise books with must-try-harders to notice that it was only the words that were the problem.
As for English, I didn’t even try to concentrate on it. What was the point? Shakespeare, Dickens – what good were they to me? My brain just switched off to anything printed that wasn’t in a car magazine. Put me in art or cookery, doing something creative or practical, and I came alive; get me to read out loud, and I was like the slow kid in the class. It wasn’t until much later, when I first had to read an autocue for Saturday Kitchen, that someone worked out I wasn’t the thick kid after all, I was in fact dyslexic.
I was 13 when we first went over to the South of France together to collect the wine. It was a week-long round trip: two days there, two days back, and the rest of the time he’d leave me in a French chateau to learn what French food was really all about. Through Castle Howard and his connections with Saint Emilion he knew the families who ran these great old chateaux and they were more than happy to have a young wide-eyed wannabe chef stay for a few days. Every visit was to somewhere different, but every time it was just as incredible and eye-opening. You couldn’t imagine a greater culture shock if you tried. I was growing up in England at a time when a Berni Inn was considered an exotic place to eat. If it didn’t come with chips and an all-you-can-eat salad bar it was completely alien. All of a sudden I was being dropped off at these big family houses where some of the greatest chefs in the world had trained and I was being looked after by the lady of the house who had in her head the entire history of French cooking.
These were some of the best chateaux in France – Figeac, Pressac, Cheval Blanc – so I was meeting real experts, the people who actually trained the chefs. It wasn’t restaurant food, it was authentic rustic French cooking, the foundations and building blocks of every great French restaurant. It was proper French food, at its very best, and I was in there, taking it all in, while my dad was off in Saint Emilion sorting out his HGV-load of wine.
This was my first experience of good wine and food (there was no such thing as shit wine or food out there). And it was my first experience of proper French food: foie gras, truffles and pigeon – not just pigeon breasts, but pigeon, with the head still on. It was also my first real experience of markets. At home, if you had to go food shopping it was off down to Sainsbury’s. Here, the cook would take me to the local market, point at a quacking duck
