Now, with the perhaps hazy sheen of hindsight, he says it wasn’t as harsh as the media insisted. “Everyone thinks that kitchens were like Gordon Ramsay’s Hells Kitchen. That’s not true – that’s manufactured drama. Kitchens weren’t like that, kitchens were hard because of the hours you worked. And the pace you had to work,” he says. “When a chef used to scream, he screamed on the orders and drove the troops. They weren’t abusive like people think. They were very hard because we worked very long hours and had to work very fast and very hard.”

Even so, there are many stories suggesting it was a brutal time: the young chef whose jacket was allegedly cut in retaliation for his complaints about the heat in the kitchen, cheese plates being thrown at the wall. In his memoir, White recalled having made a 20-year-old Ramsay cry. “I don’t recall what he’d done wrong, but I yelled at him and he lost it.”

“Gordon crouched down in the corner of the kitchen, buried his head in his hands and started sobbing. ‘I don’t care what you do to me,’ he said as he wept. ‘Hit me. I don’t care. Sack me. I don’t care.’”

Reflecting on his life, the 61-year-old says losing his mother when he was six left an indelible mark; she died from an aneurism. It’s a common refrain in his interviews – the subsequent emotional damage is enormous, he says, and takes many years come to terms with. “You have to unravel all that confused emotion.”

“I suppose when you lose a mother like I did at a very young age, you don’t take anything for granted. And when you’re young, you tend to be in a rush. The simple reason is because ... I was terrified of dying before I ever realised my dreams,” he says. “I hid in the kitchen, the kitchen was a world in which I could operate, I could be Marco; when I left the kitchen I was rather scared, I’d been institutionalised.”

Born in Leeds to an Italian mother and an English father, he was the third son of four and grew up in a housing estate. Far from it being a calling, the decision to become a chef was made for him.

“I never wanted to be a chef, it never crossed my mind. But my grandfather’s a chef, my father’s a chef, my uncle’s a chef. And so being born into humble beginnings, you tend to follow your father’s profession ... so I went to work in the hotels. Had my father been a miner, I’d have gone down the mines, had he worked in the mills, I’d have gone to the mills ... Because he was a chef and because he worked in the hotels, that’s where I was sent, I didn’t question it. I just did what I was told.

“I just did my job. I didn’t have the confidence to express with words and I wasn’t great at communicating as a young man, so therefore, I’d keep my head down. But I’d say one of my abilities – apart from being able to work hard, and absorb pressure – was that I had the ability to stay very focused.”

Repetition and mind-numbing tasks were no problem. “I’d do them without complaining or without slowing down. You could give me massive amounts of work to do, stack it to the ceiling, I just programmed myself to push on through it.”

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That single-mindedness is a key factor in him realising his goal so young, but there was something else at play. “I was always driven by the fear of being sacked. I was always driven by the fear of failure, the fear of not being good enough - ruled by my fears and my insecurities. And also, when I was young, because I was so damaged by the death of my mother, that I didn’t really communicate with my words, I communicated with my fingers by doing my job.

“I know they say in life, you’ve got to control your destiny, otherwise destiny controls you. But I think in my case, destiny has always controlled me. And I’ve been tremendously lucky in my life.”

White’s daughter Mirabelle has just followed that family lineage to start at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire – the same kitchen her father worked in 40 years ago, under Raymond Blanc; she specialises in desserts. He says it’s a changed world now: it’s no longer the domain of blue-collar workers, young people are different, it’s more gender balanced. “I think women in kitchens overall, they’re better cooks than men. They tend to have better palates, they are more punctual, they’re more consistent on the plate than men, it’s quite interesting. If I look at Mirabelle, she’s very consistent and she’s very fast and very driven. And so I think she’ll do really well within that world.”

The two places he is most comfortable to this day are kitchens and nature. The latter has provided constant solace from his childhood to the time he quit cooking, and more recently, when he left London. “I’d say that mother nature is my surrogate mother.”

Home these days is Bath, where he bought 20 acres seven years ago. Originally a farm, his vision for the land is a nature reserve, pesticide-free and complete with orchards, bees, ducks and geese. “It’s amazing how nature bounces back if you allow it and nurture it, it’s like a little oasis. When people are blessed with land, they should have to give a little bit back.”

His upcoming speaking tour will involve insights into his childhood and humble beginnings, as well as what he has learnt over the years. According to White, a romantic approach has been both his downfall but “also the making of me”. “I gave everything to it: my whole approach to food was romantic, my whole approach to restaurants was romantic and I loved them more than anything, so therefore I became neglectful in my life,” he says.

“You’ve got a choice – you can either walk in the shallow end of life or swim in the deep end. It’s your choice. And I kind of like the deep end. I was petrified of it as a child but now I sort of love it.”

Marco Pierre White – Out of the Kitchen is in Brisbane, May 23; Sydney, May 25; and Melbourne, May 30.