FRIENDS, HOLIDAYS AND COOKBOOKS
My mother continued cooking, finding small jobs
cooking an evening meal for an elderly couple, or looking after an invalid
lady, or, at one time, cooking the lunch in a small Montessori School. She had always collected recipes, and
she had several folders of them by now.
She now decided that she would try and write a cookery book for
schools. She spent hours sorting
out all her recipes into different categories, we approached several publishers
and finally one of them. Dennis Dobson, agreed to publish it.
I
reluctantly set to and typed the whole book, Miss Barrows wrote a glowing
Preface, and in 1955 the book was published! It was nicely presented, with a cream binding, and an
attractively designed cover showing fish and vegetables in blue, white and
yellow. It was called Better
Cooking for Large Numbers. It did quite well and a few thousand copies were
sold, for which my mother received royalties.
All this helped to augment our income. I was earning £6 a week at the time,
not a great deal, and I began to take on extra work in the evenings. I did all kinds of work, as an
usherette in the cinema and the theatre, serving out food in a Bridge
Club. Through a secretarial agency
in Sloane Square I found some very interesting jobs. One of them was working for Sarah Churchill, Winston Churchill’s
daughter. My job consisted of
writing out cheques for bills which she then signed. She, meanwhile would walk round the room with a glass of
whiskey in her hand, talking into the phone, sometimes quoting her father’s
speeches. It was obvious there was
no-one at the other end. At the
end of the evening she would escort me fondly to the door, swaying on her
stockinged feet. I liked her and I
felt sorry for her. I was not
religious at the time, and yet I found myself sending up little prayers for her.
Completely different, and again famous, was Father
Trevor Huddleston. He had returned
to England after being thrown out of South Africa for his support of the black
people. He needed help to answer
the deluge of correspondence that he was receiving. He was tall and stern, and I was very much in awe of him, but
I greatly admired him for his commitment.
I would take piles of letters home with me and type the replies on my
little Olivetti portable. After I
finished working for him, I sent him a donation and received a thank you letter
which I still I have to this day.
All this extra work enabled us to go on holiday. We went several times to Spain, which
was probably the cheapest country at that time. We visited Madrid, and Majorca, where I completely fell in
love with flamenco dancing, and once we stayed in Deya, where we stayed in a
guest house run by Robert Graves’ son.
I remember lugging all my painting gear with me, though I did very
little painting. These visits
abroad were exciting and gave us a glimpse into another way of life and another
cuisine. My mother was never
happier than when she was traveling.
Since I had produced my sketches in Mousehole, I had
been going to evening art classes in London. In those days evening classes were free. I remember going to St. Martin’s School
of Art. I was always disappointed
with my work, I never seemed to be able to reproduce the free, spontaneous drawings I had achieved in
Cornwall. My drawings seemed to me
to be wooden and lifeless.
Nevertheless, my interest in art had been awoken and in my free time I
visited all the galleries in London and all the exhibitions going. In this way I was slowly educating
myself and learning about what made a good painting.
I also loved the cinema and the theatre. My mother would sometimes come with me
to the cinema, but because of her increasing deafness she would never go the
theatre. I remember going to see
Laurence Olivier as Othello. He
was my hero at that time, and I waited at the Stage Door to get his autograph. I saw many other good plays, Waiting
for Godot was one. Another play
was called Five Finger Exercise by Peter Shaffer, who later went on to write
Amadeus. I was enthralled by this
play and wrote an enthusiastic fan letter to him. I had a very nice reply from Peter Shaffer, and I still have
this letter too. What appealed to
me in this play was the character who followed his own bent, and not what he
was supposed to do. It was my
first introduction to the idea of following your bliss.
A girl whom I had known in Liverpool, who was a
veterinary student, got in touch with me and asked if I would like to go to
dances at Chelsea Town Hall.
So on Saturday nights we dressed ourselves up and off we went. I never enjoyed them. We would sit on
the chairs round the hall, waiting for someone to ask to ask us to dance. Glenys was an easygoing girl and got on
well. I was not a good dancer and
had no small talk. I never met
anyone I liked or who liked me.
Through Glenys I made another friend. She was Polish and a semi-invalid. She had studied architecture at
Liverpool and had asked Glenys if she knew of anyone who would like to visit
her at home. I said I would go and
began to visit Alina, and we became friends. Alina’s father was a Polish colonel; he had fought with the British in the
war, had been injured and now kept permanently to his bed. I never met him, but Mrs. Boheim was a
sweet,pretty, and homely woman who always cooked us a Polish meal. They lived frugally, but with great
dignity, having known a much more splendid life in Poland. I always enjoyed visiting them, and my
mother was invited along too, and
she and Mrs Boheim became friends.
I was now beginning to think that I should be making
more money. I was still applying
for jobs with publishers, but without success. I remember one interview, with Weidenfeld and Nicholson,
where I was seen by a very pretty and assured young woman, who must have been
my age. Her name was Antonia
Sanford, later to become the historical writer and wife of Harold Pinter. I did not get the job, of course.
I saw an advertisement for a secretarial job in ICI,
with much higher pay. It
seemed more important to get a better paid job than to continue with my dreams
of work in publishing. I applied
and got the job.
