A Twist in the Tale (9 page)

Mark trained
under Jacques le
Renneu
for five years. Vegetables
were followed by sauces, fish by poultry,
meats
by
pâtisserie
.

After eight
years at the Savoy he was appointed second chef, and had learned so much from
his mentor that regular patrons could no longer be sure when it was the
maître
chef de cuisine
’
s
day
off. Two years later Mark became a master chef, and when in 1971 Jacques was
offered the opportunity to return to Paris and take over the kitchens of the
George
Cinq
– an establishment that is to Paris what
Harrods is to London – Jacques agreed, but only on condition that Mark
accompanied him.

“It is wrong
direction from Coventry,” Jacques warned him, “and in any case they sure to
offer you my job at the Savoy.”

“I’d better
come along otherwise those Frogs will never get a decent meal.”

“Those Frogs,”
said Jacques, “will always know when it’s my day off.”

“Yes, and book
in even greater numbers,” suggested Mark, laughing.

It was not to
be long before Parisians were flocking to the George
Cinq
,
not to rest their weary heads but to relish the cooking of the two-chef team.

When Jacques celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday the great hotel
did not have to look far to appoint his successor.

“The first
Englishman ever to be
maître
chef de cuisine
at the George
Cinq
,” said Jacques, raising a glass of champagne at his
farewell banquet. “Who would believe it? Of course, you will have to change
your name to Marc to hold down such a position.”

“Neither will
ever happen,” said Mark.

“Oh yes it
will, because I ‘
ave
recommended you.”

“Then I shall
turn it down.”

“Going to put
cars on wheels,
peut-être
?” asked Jacques mockingly.

“No, but I have
found a little restaurant on the Left Bank. With my savings alone I can’t quite
afford the lease, but with your
help .
.

.”

Chez Jacques
opened on the rue du
Plaisir
on the Left Bank on May
1st, 1982, and it was not long before those customers who had taken the George
Cinq
for granted transferred their allegiance.

Mark’s
reputation spread as the two chefs pioneered “nouvelle cuisine”, and soon the
only way anyone could be guaranteed a table at the restaurant in
under
three weeks was to be a film star or a Cabinet
Minister.

The day
Michelin gave Chez Jacques their third star Mark, with Jacques’s blessing,
decided to open a second restaurant. The press and customers then
quarrelled
amongst themselves as to which was the finer
establishment. The booking sheets showed clearly the public felt there was no
difference.

When in October
1986 Jacques died, at the age of seventy-one, the restaurant critics wrote
confidently that standards were bound to fall. A year later the same
journalists had to admit that one of the five great chefs of France had come from
a town in the British Midlands they could not even pronounce.

Jacques’s death
only made Mark yearn more for his homeland, and when he read in the
Daily Telegraph
of a new development to
be built in Covent Garden he called the site agent to ask for more details.

Mark’s third
restaurant was opened in the heart of London on February 11th, 1987.

Over the years
Mark
Hapgood
often travelled back to Coventry to see
his parents. His father had retired long since but Mark was still unable to
persuade either parent to take the trip to Paris and sample his culinary
efforts.

But now he had
opened in the country’s capital he hoped to tempt them.

“We don’t need
to go up to London,” said his mother, laying the table. “You always cook for us
whenever you come home, and we read of your successes in the papers. In any
case, your father isn’t so good on his legs nowadays.”

“What do you
call this, son?” his father asked a few minutes later as
noisette
of lamb surrounded by baby carrots was placed in front of him.

“
Nouvelle
cuisine
.”

“And people pay
good money for it?”

Mark laughed
and the following day prepared his father’s
favourite
Lancashire hot-pot.

“Now that’s a
real meal,” said Arthur after his third helping. “And I’ll tell you something
for nothing, lad. You cook it almost as well as your mother.”

A year later
Michelin announced the restaurants throughout the world that had been awarded
their coveted third star. The Times let its readers know on its front page that
Chez Jacques was the first English restaurant ever to be so
honoured
.

To celebrate
the award Mark’s parents finally agreed to make the journey down to London,
though not until Mark had sent a telegram saying he was reconsidering that job
at British Leyland. He sent a car to fetch his parents and had them installed
in a suite at the Savoy. That evening he reserved the most popular table at
Chez Jacques in their name.

Vegetable soup
followed by steak and kid-
ney
pie with a plate of
bread and butter pudding to end on were not the
table d’hôte
that night, but they were served for the special
guests on Table 17.

Under the
influence of the finest wine, Arthur was soon chatting happily to anyone who
would listen and couldn’t resist reminding the head waiter that it was his son
who owned the restaurant.

“Don’t be silly,
Arthur,” said his wife. “He already knows that.”

“Nice couple,
your parents,” the head waiter confided to his boss after he had served them
with their coffee and supplied Arthur with a cigar.

“What did your
old man do before he retired?
Banker, lawyer, schoolmaster?”

“Oh no, nothing
like that,” said Mark quietly. “He spent the whole of his working life putting
wheels on cars.”

“But why would
he waste his time doing that?” asked the waiter incredulously.

“Because he
wasn’t lucky enough to have a father like mine,” Mark replied.

G
ERALD Haskins and Walter
Ramsbottom
had
been eating cornflakes for over a year.

“I’ll swap you
my MC and DSO for your VC,” said Walter, on the way to school one morning.

“Never,” said
Gerald. “In any case, it takes ten packet tops to get a VC and you only need
two for an MC or a DSO.”

Gerald went on
collecting packet tops until he had every medal displayed on the back of the
packet.

Walter never
got the VC.

Angela Bradbury
thought they were both silly.

“They’re only
replicas,” she continually reminded them, “not the real thing, and I am only
interested in the real thing,” she told them haughtily.

Neither Gerald
nor Walter cared for Angela’s opinion at the time, both boys still being more
interested in medals than the views of the opposite sex.

Kellogg’s offer
of free medals ended on January 1st, 1950, just at the time when Gerald had
managed to complete the set.

Walter gave up
eating cornflakes.

Children of the
Fifties were then given the opportunity to discover the world of
Meccano
.
Meccano
demanded eating
even more cornflakes and within a year Gerald had collected a large enough set
to build bridges, pontoons, cranes and even an office block.

Gerald’s family
nobly went on munching cornflakes, but when he told them he wanted to build a
whole town – Kellogg’s positively final offer – it took nearly all his friends
in the fifth form at Hull Grammar School to assist him in consuming enough
breakfast cereal to complete his ambition.

Walter
Ramsbottom
refused to be of assistance.

Angela
Bradbury’s help was never sought.

All three
continued on their separate ways.

Two years
later, when Gerald Haskins won a place at Durham University, no one was
surprised that he chose to read engineering and listed as his main hobby
collecting medals.

Walter
Ramsbottom
joined his father in the family
jewellery
business and started court-
ing
Angela Bradbury.

It was during
the spring holiday in Gerald’s second year at Durham that he came across Walter
and Angela again. They were sitting in the same row at a Bach quintet concert
in Hull Town Hall. Walter told him in the interval that they had just become
engaged but had not yet settled on a date for the wedding.

Gerald hadn’t
seen Angela for over a year but this time he did listen to her opinions,
because like Walter he fell in love with her.

He replaced
eating cornflakes with continually inviting Angela out to dinner in an effort
to win her away from his old rival.

Gerald notched
up another victory when Angela returned her engagement ring to Walter a few
drays
before Christmas.

Walter spread
it around that Gerald only wanted to marry Angela because her father was
chairman of the Hull City Amenities Committee and he was hoping to get a job
with the council after he’d taken his degree at Durham. When the invitations
for the wedding were sent out, Walter was not on the guest list.

Mr
and
Mrs
Haskins travelled to
Multavia
for their honeymoon, partly because they couldn’t
afford Nice and didn’t want to go to
Cleethorpes
. In
any case, the local travel agent was making a special offer for those
considering a visit to the tiny kingdom that was sandwiched between Austria and
Czechoslovakia.

When the newly
married couple arrived at their hotel in
Teske
, the
capital, they discovered why the terms had been so reasonable.

Multavia
was, in 1959, going through an identity crisis as
it attempted to adjust to yet another treaty drawn up by a Dutch lawyer in
Geneva, written in French, but with the Russians and Americans in mind.
However, thanks to King
Alfons
III, their shrewd and
popular monarch, the kingdom continued to enjoy uninterrupted grants from the
West and non-disruptive visits from the East.

The capital of
Multavia
, the Haskins were quickly to discover, had an
average temper-
ature
of 92 F in June, no rainfall and
the remains of a sewerage system that had been in-discriminately bombed by both
sides between 1939 and 1944. Angela actually found herself holding her nose as
she walked through the cobbled streets. The People’s Hotel claimed to have
forty-five rooms, but what the brochure did not point out was that only three
of them had bathrooms and none of those had bath plugs. Then there was the
food, or lack of it; for the first time in his life Gerald lost weight.

The honeymoon
couple were
also to discover that
Multavia
boasted no monuments, art galleries, theatres or opera houses worthy of the
name and the outlying country was flatter and less interesting than the fens of
Cam-
bridgeshire
. The kingdom had no coastline and the
only river, the
Plotz
, flowed from Germany and on
into Russia, thus ensuring that none of the locals trusted it.

By the end of
their honeymoon the Haskins were only too pleased to find that
Multavia
did not boast a national airline. BOAC got them
home safely, and that would have been the end of Gerald’s experience of
Multavia
had it not been for those sewers – or the lack of
them.

Once the
Haskins had returned to Hull, Gerald took up his appointment as an assistant in
the engineering department of the city council. His first job was as a third
engineer with special responsibility for the city’s sewerage. Most ambitious
young men would have treated such an appointment as nothing more than a step on
life’s ladder. Gerald however did not. He quickly made contact with all the
leading sewerage companies, their advisers as well as his opposite numbers
throughout the county.

Two years later
he was able to put in front of his father-in-law’s committee a paper showing
how the council could save a considerable amount of the ratepayers’ money by
redeveloping its sewerage system.

The
committee were
impressed and decided to carry out
Mr
Haskins’s
recommendation, and
at the same time appointed him second engineer.

That was the
first occasion Walter
Ramsbottom
stood for the
council; he wasn’t elected.

When, three
years later, the network of little tunnels and waterways had been completed,
Gerald’s diligence was rewarded by his appointment as deputy borough engineer.
In the same year his father-in-law became Mayor and Walter
Ramsbottom
became a
councillor
.

Councils up and
down the country were now acknowledging Gerald as a man whose opinion should be
sought if they had any anxieties about their sewerage system. This provoked an
irreverent round of jokes at every Rotary Club dinner Gerald attended, but they
nevertheless still hailed him as the leading authority in his field, or drain.

When in 1966
the Borough of Halifax considered putting out to tender the building of a new
sewerage system they first consulted Gerald Haskins -Yorkshire being the one
place on earth where a prophet is with
honour
in his
own country.

After spending
a day in Halifax with the town council’s senior engineer and
realising
how much had to be spent on the new system,
Gerald remarked to his wife; not for the first time, “Where there’s muck
there’s brass.” But it was Angela who was shrewd enough to work out just how
much of that brass her husband could get hold of with the minimum of risk.
During the next few days Gerald considered his wife’s proposition and when he
returned to Halifax the following week it was not to visit the council chambers
but the Midland Bank. Gerald did not select the Midland by chance; the manager
of the bank was also chairman of the planning committee on the Halifax borough
council.