Gordon Ramsay Read Online Free PDF

ways he could exact revenge.
    Looking back, Gordon says he thinks staying in Scotland would have destroyed his father – and possibly everyone else in the family. But the Ramsays were to get a fresh start and a stay of execution. One day, Gordon’s dad quit the job that was making him so miserable and took the family 300 miles south to Warwickshire, where he was to become manager of Stratford-upon-Avon’s brand-new sports centre.
    As far as young Gordon was concerned, their new home was another world – and hopefully a far safer one. ‘Stratford is the most English of places and it was a huge culture shock after Glasgow,’ he says. ‘There were none of those enormous Glasgow buildings and no tubes and trains running everywhere. Glasgow was fierce – up there we shopped at the Barras outdoor market, but Stratfordhad supermarkets. It felt sophisticated, posh and a whole lot calmer.’
    For a while, things were calmer at home as well. Gordon senior threw his energies into his new job and the whole family began to put down roots. Gordon grabbed the top bunk in the room he would share with Ronnie for much of the next decade and formed a gang of four with their elder sister Diane and younger sister Yvonne. With free access to their dad’s leisure centre, it is little wonder that the kids were soon obsessed by sports – Gordon more than any of them.
    What he wasn’t as interested in was school. ‘I got bored easily because I’m a real hot pants and I can’t sit still for long. But I was fanatical about sport. In the afternoons, if I wasn’t playing football, I was fishing off the weir or climbing up the side of the theatre and doing moonies and jumping in the Avon. We hunted for conkers outside Anne Hathaway’s cottage and we all just had great fun.’
    But, after a while, Gordon’s dad lost his early enthusiasm for work and started to go back into his shell. So nine-year-old Gordon tried once more to please him and pull him back out of it. The youngster had seen that going to football matches hadn’t worked. So he thought that some direct competition might do the trick instead. ‘Almost every day I would run up alongside the edge of the 25-metre pool to see if I could run faster than Dad could swim,’ he says. He never could – and Gordon senior never once thought to boost his son’s confidence by slowing down.
    What also drove Gordon forward was a sense that he was always one step behind his younger brother in the quest forhis father’s affection. ‘Ronnie was always Dad’s blue-eyed boy. He was Number One. Definitely the favourite.’ So Gordon decided to run faster, climb higher, do whatever it took to overtake his brother. ‘My big thing was cross-country racing on the edge of town at Coughton, which was one of Warwickshire’s toughest races. The course was nine miles and covered all terrains: forests, fields, streams, country lanes, corn, sheep, farmyards and suddenly back into the school grounds. It was tough but I was desperate to win it.’
    But, even if he had come first, Gordon reckons his dad would hardly have noticed. There had to be something else, he thought, some other talent he had buried inside him which would make his father sit up and pay attention. Kicking a football around their housing estate one day, Gordon reckoned he might have found it. Every boy in the country kicks a football about as a child. Probably every boy hopes he’s better than all the other kids on the estate. But Gordon suddenly realised that in his case it was true. He really could kick the ball harder, faster and more accurately than anyone else. He could keep possession of it even when the older kids tried to steal it from him. He could pass the ball wherever and whenever he wanted. He could run like hell with it. He could score goals. If I train harder, he thought, this has got to be something Dad will approve of.
    But Gordon senior didn’t seem to notice his son’s new obsession – or his talent. Because he