ReCollection: Kettle's Yard Oral History Archive

The parents were always reading and there was lots of music and lovely music parties because there was a double room on the first floor with four Georgian windows and this was perfect. We called it the big sitting room but we didn't sit in it very much and it was used for music parties and they had various friends who were really very good musicians. They realised we got out of bed and sat on the stairs and listened to this music and I think the parents rather ignored our presence and didn't send us back to bed. Jim knew that they were important musicians. He was quite happy to talk about music but I think Mummy will have given the more expert understanding really. Solomon was quite a famous, a very famous pianist who used to come and the Lena Quartet and then David and Norman who were from the English Singers I think. As soon as you're really deep into one of the arts, you seem to get the others as well because we definitely had people who were writers... writers, musicians, poets and artists and they seemed to know each other and a lot of people used to come.

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And then of course the opening of the extension was a great occasion when Jim managed to get all these people to come. So what with the Prince of Wales and Jacqueline du Pre and Daniel Barenboim and it was a marvellous party. I certainly enjoyed it very much and wore my diamond earrings, about the only time ever and met a lot of people. When they were leaving, we always remember, we looked out of a window and Daniel Barenboim and Jacqui were doing a sort of dance on that green in front of the cottages [Harold Swan: Daniel surely was swinging her around] Yes, yes, that's right. They were on their way home but of course it was very memorable because it wasn't awfully long after that that she was known to have multiple sclerosis. The thought of her dancing, I'm afraid, wasn't possible after that.

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David Jones was a very close friend and he came very often at weekends and he liked to drink beer so he used to bring it round from the pub in a jug because the parents never suggested... I mean, now if I had a visitor who liked beer, we would get it in for them before they came, but it was far too expensive I expect. David used to sit there and drink this beer, very contented. I really loved him, he was a lovely person. And another rather fun thing was all these actors and actresses who came in. They were very noisy and demonstrative, calling each other darling all the time, I remember that, and they didn't take a lot of notice of us, you know, people like John Gielgud and Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft but the nice one, for us, was Ralph Richardson because he was aware of our presence and took us out in his car. We didn't have a car so it was very exciting and he used to drive us, it was an open sports car, and he used to drive us and take us to a sweet shop somewhere quite far away and was very nice. They tended to come in groups. Laurence Olivier too, they all called him Larry, and he was really at the beginning of his career. So that was exciting and then there were ballet people and, very exciting for us because we must have been a bit older, there was an Indian ballet and we, Mary and I, got very keen on them all. They had lovely costumes and it was beautiful dancing and we actually went and saw them and then my parents took me to Romeo and Juliet and Mummy made me a pink dress for the occasion and we sat in the front of the dress circle. I don't know how we got... how they afforded it but these sort of things were really memorable.

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I know that Jim was looking for somewhere where he could show people round and make them appreciate nice surroundings. He did think of a big country house that he would look after and show the public round and then for some reason they chose to rent a place in Cambridge for a bit because of course they had to live somewhere and that was in Maid's Causeway. It was while they were there, I think, that they heard about these cottages which the Cambridge Preservation Society didn't want to have them pulled down because they'd got rather special roofs. Jim bought them. Where he found the money we don't know. He bought them and we visited Merton Lodge, which is a house opposite, which had a lot of stairs and I always worried that that may have set Mummy's heart trouble off, but that's probably nonsense. They lived there and we came and visited in 1957 and at that stage, a lot of building was going on. I suppose, always when constructing new places, Jim got agitated and quarrelsome, trying to get it just the way he wanted. I suppose you'd use the word perfectionist and like all perfectionists, it wasn't pleasant for the people round about.

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She was brought up in a very academic and musical family who had all been professors and ministers of religion way back and came from Germany. She went to one of the merchant company schools in Edinburgh and then she went to the Edinburgh art college and she had a lot of friends that she kept over the years from her art college days. It was there that Jim first sighted her because he was studying at the Slade and for some reason came to Edinburgh, I think, just temporarily and there is at the art school a beautiful sculpture gallery with a sort of balcony all the way round. Daddy was up in this gallery and spotted a beautiful girl down on the floor and, according to himself, is said to have decided at that moment, that this was the one that he wanted to marry. After that, they must have actually met and then there was a lot of correspondence during the Great War, so that's '14-'18, they wrote letters to each other while he was away, to begin with at the front and then in India convalescing.

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I've got 1931 for Savage Messiah and when did Jim resign from the Tate? '36. So it was near the end of his time at the Tate that he was writing that book, which will have added to his burdens. Helen helped a great deal with the book. I mean, in every department, Jim always got a lot of common sense and encouragement from Helen although at the same time she sometimes... she got very fed up and hard pressed by the sort of things she was made to do and she must have been very exhausted and often longed for a more normal life and yet she knew he wouldn't be happy living a normal life. She was totally loyal but at the same time suffered a good deal.

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Their house was up on the mountain and one got very fond of the scenery, I mean, it was really Mediterranean scenery with wonderful views of the sea. We went every evening for a walk round the back which was quite a rough walk and we'd go to the Mediterranean coast and Mummy was always quoting, 'Nobly, nobly Cape St Vincent to the North-west died away; sunset ran, one glorious blood red, reeking into Cadiz Bay'. You know, she came out with quotations at the drop of a hat. She was so familiar with English literature really and poetry. So we really loved those walks and then we often had a session of being read to from a nice book before we went to bed.

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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.

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He once went back, I think it was when Jeremy Lewison started to be curator. Having not been back for ages, I was there some of the time with him. He was very excited about Jeremy starting and he rushed around getting things back to normal, which they weren't. I don't remember who was in charge before, whoever it was, and whoever it could be, it would always have been like this, that Jim had lots to do tidying it all up and getting it the way it ought to be. I mean, even if a saint had been looking after it, that would have happened. But before that, in Edinburgh, the first week or so, he was very happy that he'd left Kettle's Yard and felt all was well and then he began to worry and he became extremely miserable and Mummy became extremely miserable too of course. So, at any rate, that cheered him up, this visit to Kettle's Yard to get things right for Jeremy's starting. But he didn't get over these miseries really. There was a lot of argument about the Gaudier drawings upstairs in the attic. He was constantly putting the dilemma to me at any rate and I found it very difficult to know what to say. You know, there's some method of doing something that he thought was right and nobody else did, or not many people did, and should he insist on this course that was right or should he adapt? Well, he never wanted to adapt. It made us not enjoy his company for a while because he was behaving as somebody bereaved.

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