ReCollection: Kettle's Yard Oral History Archive

I suppose it's fair to say that by then Jim had become almost a kind of father figure. You know, having spent time looking after the house, I remember in that last vacation before I left England I was in and out of Cambridge, I would spend nights at Kettle's Yard because I no longer had a room in college and I basically had an open invitation to go and stay with the Edes so I used to do so. And I really got to know them terribly well. I got to know some of the quirks as well by then. The fact that, although there was this very, kind of, ascetic, self-disciplined exterior to Jim, he was actually quite a shy person who overcame his shyness essentially, as so many good teachers do, by talking about what really interests them and he was a very warm person and, in many ways, I think both he and Helen enjoyed their pleasures because their pleasures were so simple and so obviously shared. And there was nothing they liked more, after this very austere, almost invalid evening meal, that to sit upstairs as the light faded, listening to gramophone records. They had two indulgences - very dark bitter chocolate, eaten in very small quantities and half bottles of either burgundy or a very good claret, quite a lot of which was stacked in the cupboard under the stairs going up to the attic and of course, always sipped, again, in small quantities out of those marvellous 18th century tumblers and stemmed glasses in Kettle's Yard.

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And so there was that initial tour around the house with Jim, sometimes just one-on-one, sometimes a group of three or four people, and in the course of an afternoon, probably fifteen to twenty people might go through the house. He also had a way of signalling to maybe four or five, five or six people that he'd quite like them to hang back at 4 o'clock because there would be tea and toast around the long oak bench table in the dining room, in the dining alcove. You were not invariably asked, in fact he tried to invite different people, but it became something of a pattern and among the regulars there were several of us who were identified as people who would help with a little... by being more familiar with the house and its contents and with Jim as a personality, would actually help socially to put first time visitors at their ease. So, in one way or another, I became involved as a kind of Jim helper and regular taker of tea and tea was a complete ritual. It was always lapsang souchong served out of a Queen Anne silver teapot into cracked and stapled china cups which had travelled half way around the world, they'd clearly had them in North Africa as well as France, but Jim never threw anything away. If something got damaged it was mended. And along with tea came burnt brown toast, because he was usually too busy talking as he toasted the toast under the gas grill to actually take it out in time, and honey and homemade marmalade. That was it. That was a completely invariable feast, every day at 4 o'clock. It was in many ways Jim's main meal. This was a man who'd been gassed in the trenches in the First World War and had had gastric problems for the rest of his life and his diet, as I got to know him better, of course, I discovered about these things, his diet consisted of Complain, that invalid food which he had for dinner every night so tea and toast really was a high point in his day.

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In those days, also, Jim used to keep an eye on one or two of the people who lived in the retirement houses at the back of Kettle's Yard. Old Mrs Brookes, I remember, was rather infirm so one of the things you did was you always popped in to see Mrs Brookes in the afternoon and offered to put the kettle on. Looking after Kettle's Yard was quite a wide ranging experience and it did involve other people as well. There was an old tramp who used to come past that Jim was very fond of who always came at about 10 o'clock in the morning and Jim said, 'Now don't be worried if you hear this strange noise outside the door because he doesn't talk to himself, he shouts, and sometimes he gets quite worked up and you get worried, you know, you wonder what on earth it's about'. He said, 'But don't worry, he'll ring the bell and when you open the door, he'll say 'morning sIr' and hand you his tea tin'. He said, 'Whatever you do, don't let him into the house, I never let him cross the threshold. But take his tea tin and he'll wait patiently while you fill it up for him'. Sure enough, exactly the same thing happened. I heard this terrible commotion outside, this man who was ranting and raving and as soon as I opened the door, 'morning sir', and there was the tea tin. That was at 10 o'clock on a Wednesday morning and at 2.30 in the afternoon, the actor Sir Ralph Richardson was on the doorstep saying, 'Where's my friend Jim? He never goes away, why isn't he here?' So it was a fascinating experience and I think probably it did make me feel that I wanted to work with the arts in some way.

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There are things that you can learn about particular pictures which you can pass on as information. I think Jim's approach was very subtle, quite informal and quite spontaneous so that he wouldn't stand and say the same thing about the same object to every person who joined him. I mean, to some extent what he said was interactive, depending on what you said. He might tell you, standing in front of the Christopher Wood 'Boat Builders', which of course used to be in the old house before the extension was built, he would find a point of connection between you and the picture and it might be that you'd been to Brittany, it might be that you recognised some stylistic affinity in the picture. My art historians friends would say, that looks like somebody who looked at Gauguin, and then you'd be off on Gauguin and Brittany and Jim would make those connections. But he'd never let anyone rest at the point of comparison. It was always the object in front of you that was important and what you might learn from it. Of course, because he'd known all of the artists in Kettle's Yard personally, whether it was Wood, Jones, Nicholson, there was always the element of personal reminiscence and of, 'What he, the artist, said to me, Jim Ede'.

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