Theme: Jim and Helen Ede

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.

It was called the big sitting room and it was very special and we didn’t go in there. I don’t think we were forbidden. I don’t know if we were forbidden, but we didn’t because we were brought up with a tremendous respect for the house which had to be looking good and we didn’t have any freedom of that kind. I remember another thing relating to those stairs was my father calling me down and saying ‘I’ve made a little pile of your things at the bottom of the stairs’, so we certainly didn’t leave stuff lying around.

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.

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.

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.

There was no extravagance going on of any kind. No, he wasn’t earning much and he was always giving money away. They weren’t really wanting the things that cost a lot of money, I don’t think. Jim was in that way like… evangelical is the proper word really, a sort of keen missionary. All his life, I think, he wanted people to get the pleasure and authenticity of things looking lovely, indoors as well as out of doors but my mother was terribly keen about nature and about things she saw in the country or at the seaside whereas Jim was more appreciative of things which artists had made very often but they both were very aware of what they were looking at.

I always remember Helen having a slightly sceptical attitude at times towards parts of the Kettle’s Yard thing if she thought it was… and ‘Och, of course, Jim is just so bent on it that I can’t even put my knitting down anywhere’ and so on. She felt this… the intensity of this could be a little bit much for her. She liked to prick it a bit, and yet in an extraordinary way, she also entered into it.

He was astonishingly welcoming to people who knew very little. You know, one might have felt that because he was so steeped and at that point of course he had been living with this material and living in that world for forty years in different ways, you might have thought that his… that he would have been slightly aloof or distant, in fact, quite the opposite. He continued to be, all the time I knew him, formidably curious about art but also about your reactions to art. I remember him standing in front of a Gaudier-Brzeska drawing, asking me what I felt about it and so on. At that time, very early on, he was even lending things to people to take back to their rooms. I can remember buying… not buying, borrowing… a Gaudier drawing. That stopped, more or less the time when the thing became more professional, more or less the time I was there, but I think I did manage to borrow one thing for a short period. But it was that kind of willingness to bring you into his orbit and to listen to what you had to say even though he had probably heard those kinds of reactions many, many times. It was about sharing, really, I think that that was the extraordinary thing about Kettle’s Yard overall. You had this sense of going… obviously you were going into someone’s house and it was a privilege and you were aware of that but he made you feel very welcome.

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.

When somebody told me one day, ‘Oh, you should go to Kettle’s Yard’ and I said, ‘Well, what’s that?’ and they said ‘Oh, it’s run by this marvellous character called Jim Ede who is just incredibly welcoming to students and has the most marvellous collection of modern art’, so I lost very little time in going round there. To discover something like Kettle’s Yard on my doorstep was magical actually. I’ll never forget going around there the first time and ringing this ancient doorbell and then this, kind of, slender figure appeared. He opened the door himself and just the most warm welcome, just wonderful. It wasn’t like the University at all. He wasn’t like some sort of terribly serious-minded academic. He was much more free and easy than that. Much more like a friend immediately. Incredibly open and hospitable and very enthusiastic as well.

We went to the Marlborough Gallery, Jim saw these huge, row after row, of Ben Nicholsons, grey and white, and he was scandalised, you know, ‘ten thousand pounds, what nonsense, I can’t possibly afford ten thousand pounds’. He didn’t buy one that day, although he could have done. We went to buy a piano that day and he didn’t like the colour of it, the piano was… he had this idea of music in the gallery, an idea which he backed up. He produced money every day of the week. I’d sit at my desk and I’d get letters from Jim, three or four a day, with money in them, cheques from various people… so before we knew what had happened, he had got money for the exhibition gallery. He conjured it out of the air. He also sold things I suspect – quite a lot of that. Little old ladies buying works of art which weren’t numbered or dated or anything. He sold things at auction. He was a wheeler-dealer, anything to achieve his objective and I find that admirable actually.

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.

It was a tree with a bough that’s at 90 degrees to the trunk so you can sit on it, it would make a great space to hang a swing but it looks into Helen Ede’s room. Helen would shut the door on that space when visitors came. Most people didn’t know Jim Ede was married. I like the idea of somehow being inside Kettle’s Yard but being outside Kettle’s Yard at the same time, being part of it but removed from it, and so looking back into her room with binoculars – I spent my 40th birthday doing that and it’s one of those pieces of work, I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing it at the time but now it seems really pertinent and poignant in many ways… Because I was occupying Helen’s space, that question of trying to be invisible in the space, I think, was something I was thinking about even more so, and certain things, like we were told that he used to deliberately… that she used to deliberately annoy Jim by leaving her knitting around and that kind of thing so we tried to play off with some of those issues because I could imagine he would have been quite difficult to live with.

I remember how agitated he was when I used to see him in Edinburgh much later, about the way that the press were not producing his book quite right and some photograph wasn’t quite in the right… and I had a certain sympathy for the poor people who were doing it because he was demanding in that kind of way but it was a demanding in the service of an ideal, not just because he wanted to, anything for himself. He didn’t strike one as a self-advocate or developing person in any way really like that. As I say, sometimes these little, tiny, childish vanities about some recognition of what he had done being secured but they were peripheral to his real passion to create something and open other people’s eyes and imaginations to it. I’m sure that’s so, certainly that’s what I experienced in him.

I mean, he loved telling stories about, for example, [Joan] Miró who I think he said he was having a coffee or tea with Miró at a Paris restaurant and there had recently been an assassination in Paris and there was suddenly the sound of an explosion, I suppose it would be in the fifties, and there was this sort of car back-firing, bang, and Miro said ‘encore un president’, another president bites the dust, so Jim would have a fund of stories to tell us over tea.

They were very… obviously they were devoted to each other. They weren’t well matched I wouldn’t have said, at all. I think she had the thin end of the wedge, rather. I think she had quite a hard time throughout our childhood and growing up to the extent that she was compelled by him to leave her two children, aged 14 and 16 or something or even less, at a strange boarding school where they had never been just before a major world conflagration and go abroad and live in Africa. She had to do that and I think it broke her, really, it was… I remember very much… because I didn’t feel the solemnity of this but she did and she was very distressed about it. Used to call it ‘The Great Waverley Wrench’ because it happened on Waverley station platform… Bye!… and she just thought, well that’s the end of that. Nowadays, I don’t think a woman would do it but in those days you had to follow your man.

I had a very great deal in common with her. We shared a great love of nature and of country things and all that. She loved being a peasant and living in the country. Once I was married and we lived in the country, she loved coming down and picking up sticks for the fire and fiddling around, you know, gathering mushrooms and apples and things. She was herself. She sort of blossomed in that environment. She was wrongly placed, I think, in a town, city, arty kind of.. it wasn’t her kind of thing at all, any of it. And she did, certainly at Kettle’s Yard, she made it quite clear it wasn’t her life, she wasn’t taking part in it except to be there and support him and feed him and all that which she did perfectly. But it wasn’t the way she wanted to live and her joy when she used to come and see us, because we were farming, at being just a sort of rustic kind of person was absolutely apparent.

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.

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.