Gordon Ramsay Read Online Free PDF Page B

had a new obsession of his own: he wanted to be in a band and he didn’t care what effect this dream would have on his family. ‘You’d come home on a Saturday afternoon, having playedfootball, and Dickie Davies would be on telly, and while you tried to watch the results Dad would suddenly be trying to show you he was a better guitarist than Hank Marvin,’ says Gordon, able to laugh at the early days of his dad’s transformation. ‘Then every Sunday Dad had the music blaring out. It was that council-house thing of the windows open, the fucking speakers were on and who has got the loudest stereo.’
    But bigger problems started to build up when Gordon senior joined a local band. ‘We’d have to go to these social clubs where he was playing gigs. We’d be bored stiff, then we’d have to help lift all these amps and speakers down the stairs and into the van. And I knew what would have happened along the way. Mum would have got agitated because someone would have eyed Dad up, and then when he had a drink he was like a different person and everything changed. The hell he put my mum through back then …’ Gordon’s voice tailed off, still unable to share some of the worst memories of his childhood.
    What seemed clear to everyone in the family except Gordon senior was the fact that his dreams of music stardom were always going to be dashed. Before he was even a teenager, Gordon reckoned he could smell failure – and he hated it. ‘Dad was never going to be a professional musician. The best he managed was working men’s clubs – playing alongside Marty Wilde on a couple of occasions. I would sit in all those smoky rooms listening to him playing on a stool with a synthesiser, strutting his stuff, and I knew it was never going to be.’ Gordon senior, however, would go on trying to keep his dream alive – whatever the consequences for his wife and kids.
    ‘At one point he sold the family car to pay for a ticket to Texas, where he had planned to spend three months playing with a band. The first everyone else in the family knew what he had done was when the finance company turned up to collect the keys.’ The event had been a big wake-up call for the family. ‘You just don’t forget those kinds of situations,’ said Gordon later. ‘Mum struggling to pay the bills and putting up with all this shit. It was embarrassing when the school had a holiday trip as well. There was no point in my bringing a form home to ask if I could go because then the rest of the kids would have to go and there was no way we could afford it. You learn, even at 12 and 13, that this is not the way to go in life. My father taught me a lot, without telling me anything at all.’
    Over the years, the Ramsay family have rarely talked about their other, far lower points. ‘There was violence and sadness and happiness combined in one house,’ was all Gordon would offer when asked about it years later. But, when trying to raise money for women’s refuge centres and for helplines for child victims of domestic violence, Gordon has also described the pain of seeing his mother wearing a pair of sunglasses in the middle of November after saying she had tripped on the stairs or walked into a door. And the times she dragged the whole family out of the house at 2.30 in the morning to get to a secure housing unit to escape any further beatings.
    But what Helen Ramsay also did, for so many years, was to go back to her husband time and time again. Today Gordon says he can only applaud what may seem a dangerous and self-destructive decision. ‘The reason she seemed so weak was because she was defending our arses.You have to admire the loyalty of a woman who puts her children first. And that’s where I get my determination from. From her, without a doubt.’
    This determination was what made the teenage Gordon work even harder out on the football pitch. He still believed it wasn’t too late to break through to his father and, like many children from a