Another thing I remember the stairs for very well is that my mother used to sit on the second stair to grind the coffee, we had a coffee mill with a proper handle, or else to whip mayonnaise. She used to make egg mayonnaise with olive oil and egg and possibly lemon, I don't know. I used to sit on her lap, between her lap and the coffee mill, which was on her knee and so I must have been pretty small at that time and I used to just be fascinated to see this thing whizzing round and round. Her hand moved so fast that I couldn't see it, you know, it made a sort of fuzz. And I used to have a go with both my fat little fists and could hardly turn it at all. As to the mayonnaise, she always said no, she couldn't let me do it because if she were to stop stirring and anyone was to stir it in the wrong direction, it would curdle. Now she was reared in Edinburgh and she had a strong Scottish accent. She used to say it would curdle. So I was never allowed to do that. But I do remember very well sitting on her lap at the bottom of the stairs.

They were very... obviously they were devoted to each other. They weren't well matched I wouldn't have said, at all. I think she had the thin end of the wedge, rather. I think she had quite a hard time throughout our childhood and growing up to the extent that she was compelled by him to leave her two children, aged 14 and 16 or something or even less, at a strange boarding school where they had never been just before a major world conflagration and go abroad and live in Africa. She had to do that and I think it broke her, really, it was... I remember very much... because I didn't feel the solemnity of this but she did and she was very distressed about it. Used to call it 'The Great Waverley Wrench' because it happened on Waverley station platform... Bye!... and she just thought, well that's the end of that. Nowadays, I don't think a woman would do it but in those days you had to follow your man.

I would say she was a very attractive person and people felt her warmth. I don't know what it was really. There was a peacefulness and a radiance about her, which wasn't the same as Jim. Jim had something infectious and warm and sparkling but Helen had, even when she was very frail, she had something very positive and so people tended to be very attracted to her. She did worry when Jim was worried and she did encourage him and I think in a way she wished he wouldn't be so single-minded about his schemes but she also knew that if he didn't pursue these sort of schemes he'd be very unhappy so she didn't want him to be unhappy. I think occasionally, yes, occasionally he may have given in and realised he'd been a bit too impulsive. I remember she often, in the later days of her marriage, spoke about old love and new love and how they were different. Yes, she had a lot of common sense, she didn't believe in hair-brained schemes, she had a lot of common sense, she laughed a lot, she looked good, she continued to look good and she was honest with people too, which they found refreshing. She had a marvelous Scots accent, Edinburgh accent, and she was an excellent cook.

I always remember Helen having a slightly sceptical attitude at times towards parts of the Kettle's Yard thing if she thought it was... and 'Och, of course, Jim is just so bent on it that I can't even put my knitting down anywhere' and so on. She felt this... the intensity of this could be a little bit much for her. She liked to prick it a bit, and yet in an extraordinary way, she also entered into it.