Food
The Edes' enjoyment of simple pleasures at Kettle's Yard during the 1960s
Duncan Robinson
Transcript
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.
Visiting Jim in Edinburgh in 1977, life after Helen's death
Jeremy Lewison
Transcript
I stayed with him in his flat in Jordan Lane. I spent three days with him, I think, there, so I spent this time with Jim and basically he's telling me about the history of Kettle's Yard and history of himself and his relationships with the artists. As it turned out, it was all the stories that everybody knew anyway and which he published and, etc, etc, but it was nice to spend time with him. Very important, I think, to see how he lived. Effectively, he'd set up a little, mini Kettle's Yard in Edinburgh, although the quality of the artwork wasn't the same but it was, you know, his spartan way of life. I can remember him saying when I was washing up the dishes after dinner, and dinner was a very light meal I have to say, it was grated carrot and I can't remember what else, but it was like an hors d'oeuvre for most people. I remember washing up, he said, 'well, I only use hot water, I don't use washing up liquid because it's a waste of money' and you would literally just wash the things under the hot tap and dry them up and that was it. He was very much in control of his faculties still, very alert, a dapper man, always well turned out. I can remember that between 2pm and 4pm, I had to go out because between 2pm and 4pm he would visit St Columbus Hospice to visit the terminal patients. He would talk to me about that too, about actually how a lot of them didn't want to see him for quite a long time and then, I think, gradually, he managed to integrate himself into that community. So the 2pm to 4pm ritual of Kettle's Yard was maintained in the visits to St Columbus Hospice.
Changes to concert programming after the Edes left in 1973
Paul Clough
Transcript
Jim initially went on programming the concerts from Edinburgh so the first year he booked up who the musicians were and then, I think, found that that was too difficult and I found it pretty difficult because I had no... really, all that I knew was that someone would turn up. I hadn't been involved in the pre-arrangements and so... it never happened that anyone let us down but I probably didn't even have a contact phone number to follow up if there was a problem. Diana [Gordon] was a wonderful find. Diana had retired very recently as a producer for Radio 3 and she had a wonderful network with impresarios and agents and she knew who was interesting and some of the people who played in the house, Lindsay Quartet comes to mind, were definitely on her personal network and Diana and I worked together very well, very amicably. She had her domain and really I only encroached on that domain in two ways: one, I put out the chairs and put them away again still and stood up at the beginning and, you know, got hush and then went to the green room to get the performers out but; two, I provided the evening meal for them and so I have had at my table and eating my food the most... funnily enough a far wider and more stellar selection of musicians than of visual artists, considering that Kettle's Yard is primarily a visual place. That was a very beautiful part of the job and nothing ever took away the enjoyment of the music for me.
Helen grinding coffee on the stairs, London 1920s
Mary Adams
Transcript
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.
Jim's welcome to the house and afternoon tea ritual, 1960s
Duncan Robinson
Transcript
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.
Helen standing up for herself
Mary Adams
Transcript
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.
Difficulty claiming the space during the residency in 1998
Transcript
[Eggebert]: It was about living in his artwork and disrupting it. It was also about the fear of breaking things or moving something out of place. For example, with the table, because we knew that in the kitchen there had been red gingham curtains and part of my activity there was to remake those curtains, we decided we'd get a red gingham plastic tablecloth, so it would go with the curtains in the kitchen and to have this over the table. So we did take the candlesticks and the other objects on the table off, and said 'well, we had to eat somewhere'. So we put this red gingham tablecloth... and one of the invigilators just couldn't bear this, it just horrified her, because that particular space is sort of a green, dark, soft space and the red just clashed. So there was something about the whole aesthetic encounter of the space. That was the kind of thing, that we were conscious of us, just physically, what we wore might clash or where we stood might disrupt the balance or where the cot was and so on.
[Walker]: That was very much the space where we took possession of the house every morning. Because, remember, we weren't staying overnight in the house most of the week so we'd get up, about 7 o'clock, and we'd walk to Kettle's Yard and we'd sit down then we'd take it over, in this almost ritualistic way really, and we'd have breakfast and Freddie [their son] would shout and want to get out... did he have a high chair? yeah... it would bring noise into the place, it would bring different colours into the place, it would bring probably the concept of youth into the house as well, of people of a younger age, into the space and using the space, because not many children go in there, it's one of those places where you can feel the fear and anxiety of parents as they take their children around the place that they're going to smash everything up. I didn't actually feel that worry about breakages because I don't have a problem with breakages which, you know, was actually part of the work that I did there, was breaking stuff up. Not in a, sort of, aggressive way but that was incidental to what I was doing there. But I did feel very much that I was an intruder.
