ReCollection: Kettle's Yard Oral History Archive

It was called the big sitting room and it was very special and we didn't go in there. I don't think we were forbidden. I don't know if we were forbidden, but we didn't because we were brought up with a tremendous respect for the house which had to be looking good and we didn't have any freedom of that kind. I remember another thing relating to those stairs was my father calling me down and saying 'I've made a little pile of your things at the bottom of the stairs', so we certainly didn't leave stuff lying around.

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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.

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She dropped her knitting and he got up... the ball rolled across the room, he got up and in getting up, pulled something in his back or somewhere, you know, and staggered to the floor, fell over and bumped his knee and she said 'serves you right!', for no apparent reason, you know, she was quite able to stand up for herself. A lovely thing that I was reminded of the other day, when she was cooking and he was hovering around in the most irritating way over the gas cooker where she was and he said 'have you finished with this gas?' and she said 'No, I have not!' which was lovely so did know how to deal with him, you know, she kept him in his place.

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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.

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I had a very great deal in common with her. We shared a great love of nature and of country things and all that. She loved being a peasant and living in the country. Once I was married and we lived in the country, she loved coming down and picking up sticks for the fire and fiddling around, you know, gathering mushrooms and apples and things. She was herself. She sort of blossomed in that environment. She was wrongly placed, I think, in a town, city, arty kind of.. it wasn't her kind of thing at all, any of it. And she did, certainly at Kettle's Yard, she made it quite clear it wasn't her life, she wasn't taking part in it except to be there and support him and feed him and all that which she did perfectly. But it wasn't the way she wanted to live and her joy when she used to come and see us, because we were farming, at being just a sort of rustic kind of person was absolutely apparent.

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She loved the music, the concerts, she really got going on that. Marvellous occasion with Prince Charles, because, you know, they came for the opening of the extension and Jacqueline [du Pre] and Danny Barenboim were playing, and after the concert she was very busy getting drinks ready for the musicians and the little lobby where you come in by the door was absolutely full of Prince Charles, aged about 18 or something, completely surrounded by young admirers, all touching his sleeve and asking about cello - she said he thought cello was a rather squeaky instrument, that she didn't think he was going to go on playing it - and anyway, in comes my mother from the kitchen door, laden with a tray, elbowing everyone out of the way. Well she was very anxious always to behave properly in the right circumstances and had no idea that it was Prince Charles she was elbowing out of the way so we managed to pull her leg about that one a great deal.

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