Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life. Keith Floyd

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       Ferrets, Faggots and Fishing

      The outside lavatory at 16 Silver Street smelt of urine and Harpic, dampness and earwigs. The green, gold, blue and red transfers which were meant to simulate stained glass were peeling. A rusty chain with a much-handled wooden handle hung from the hissing and leaking cistern. The copper pipe of the water supply was mildewed green. The shiny hardwood lavatory seat slid to one side if you sat on it and both it and the wooden cover on its old hinges would fall down when you tried to pee in it. From the outside lavatory were six steps that led into a small, walled yard. At the end of the yard, beyond the red sandstone wall with its purple and red weeds burgeoning defiantly from the simple mortar between the stones, beyond the smell of wet privet hedges dank with the slime of snails, and before a fertile garden of voluptuous plum trees, bleeding raspberry canes, blackcurrant bushes and runner beans, was my grandfather’s workshop.

      My grandfather had a tin leg. Strapped across his shoulders by broad braces, over this thick brown trousers he wore a wide leather belt, and at precisely ten to one you would hear his huff, hiss, puff and his stomp as he clunk-clacked down the yard and down the six steps to the outside lavatory, the one o’clock news (previously, anxiously and obediently tuned in on the big, mahogany wireless that sat on a big brown sideboard by my grandmother) and his lunch.

      He stomped down the steps and clumsily crashed into the kitchen, with its grey and white speckled gas range the colour of a heron and its brightly burning cast-iron burners. The kitchen units were cream-enamelled with red piping, a large copper boiler with a massive gas burner fed by a rubber tube issued the odours of washday. The steam from the boiling sheets billowed СКАЧАТЬ