Theme: Home life

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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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.

He would pop into our house and he could be quite shocked by me when I was wearing a dressing gown on a Saturday morning having had a little bit of a lie in and… ‘what, not up yet?’ and so on. He was quite critical of this, gently rebuking me, I felt. The following Saturday I thought, I must get out, get up early enough and not be caught by Jim. So he was quite firm about things like that but also he would like to wander round and tell us where to put things and how to hang things and tell us little tiny tips, like I said, like when I was in the flat, when we were in the flat in Magdalene Street about how to not have the flap of our 18th century folky oak table, not having the flap down but deliberately putting it up and pulling the legs out that held it up, underneath it, because although it made a wider surface in a small room, it opened up and therefore gave a better sense of space. These kind of things. He was horrified by the chairs that some friend of my mother’s had temporarily given us, they were rather ugly-looking little chairs and he came around with his own cloth and covered them all, these dreadful objects. Oh, really, I was quite under his sway and Jean [Barrington Ward] was very willing to be too. We both entered into the vision really.

Kettle’s Yard is a house and it is situated in Cambridge and is a part of the university there. It might be called a museum for there are a great many pictures there and much sculpture. But there are also a lot of pebbles and it is astonishing how often a pebble can look like something quite different – a duck, a torso of a man or a woman, sometimes both. I’m constantly amazed by the beauty of form and space, the glitter of light on surfaces. Glass and china play their part, even cracked teacups into which light falls, like sunshine into pools, and all this makes a home to live in, a place for people to visit and feel at home. We and our friends have lived here for 17 years and it is hard to convey the domestic side of Kettle’s Yard. In 1957 it was four little deserted slum-houses with an alleyway running between them. They were scooped out and turned into one house and the alleyway was bridged and so gradually as the cottages became a place, we began to invite people in. They came cautiously, one at a time, perhaps two, but as the years swept by, more people came until we reached ten thousand visits in the year.