Writing at the Kitchen Table Read online

  ARTEMIS COOPER

  Writing at the Kitchen Table

  THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF

  Elizabeth David

  Contents

  Title Page

  List of Illustrations

  Family Tree

  Introduction and Acknowledgements

  1. The Gwynnes

  2. The Gwynne Girls Grow Up

  3. Paris and Munich

  4. Acting it Out

  5. Norman Douglas

  6. The Loss of the Evelyn Hope

  7. Alexandria

  8. Tony David

  9. Indian Interlude

  10. Back in Blighty

  11. Mediterranean Food

  12. Italian Food

  13. Friends, Editors and Other Enemies

  14. On the Road in Provincial France

  15. The Year of Betrayal

  16. Farewell to P. H.

  17. The Shop

  18. Salt and Spice

  19. Baking Bread

  20. Omelette and Ice

  21. Brave New World

  Epilogue

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  1. Stella Gwynne, Elizabeth’s mother

  2. Rupert Gwynne mp, Elizabeth’s father

  3. Wootton Manor

  4. Portrait of Elizabeth by Ambrose McEvoy

  5. Family group at Wootton, 1924

  6. Stella and her daughters, late 1920s

  7. Elizabeth as an actress

  8. Charles Gibson Cowan

  9. Peter Laing

  10. Norman Douglas

  11. Elizabeth, 1944

  12. Tony David, 1944

  13. Elizabeth at her desk in Cairo, c.1943

  14. Tony David in Cairo, 1943

  15. Cairo friends, 1944

  16. Renée Fedden

  17. Elizabeth and George Lassalle, early 1950s

  18. Lesley O’Malley at Halsey Street

  19. Elizabeth, early 1950s

  20. Diana Gwynne’s wedding to Christopher Grey, 1941

  21. Elizabeth with John Lehmann, early 1950s

  22. Elizabeth in her kitchen at Halsey Street, mid 1950s

  23. Elizabeth in the kitchen, 1956 or 1957

  24. Elizabeth, 1956 or 1957

  25. Elizabeth by Anthony Denney, 1964

  26. Peter Higgins

  27. Elizabeth in the shop, mid 1960s

  28. Anthony Denney

  29. Elizabeth David Ltd in Bourne Street, Pimlico

  30. Elizabeth in France, c.1971

  31. Elizabeth’s sister Felicité

  32. Elizabeth in old age, late 1980s

  Photographic Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to thank the following for their permission to reproduce the above photographs; those not listed below all come from the Elizabeth David Archives:

  Steve Grey 4

  Mrs Aileen Gibson Cowan 8

  Islay Lyons 10

  Hassia, Cairo 11

  Jean Weinberg, Cairo 12

  Jane Blakemore 15 18

  Doreen Thornton 19

  Mrs Anthony Denney 25 27

  Georgina Tritton 26

  Piggott 32

  Introduction and Acknowledgements

  On 22 February 1994, two years after Elizabeth David’s death, the contents of her two kitchens at 24 Halsey Street, Chelsea, went on sale at Phillips auction rooms in Bayswater. The press had taken up the story as soon as the forthcoming sale was announced, showing photographs of pots and pans, spoons and storage jars, all displayed on her scrubbed-pine kitchen table. Cookery writers and chefs were invited to choose items they coveted or might bid for. From the moment viewing began, a steady stream of people made their way to the showrooms. They were private individuals, not professional dealers, and they spent hours poring over cheese graters and ramekins which could have come from a junk shop.

  The day itself took everyone by surprise. The saleroom was packed by nine-thirty in the morning, and the auction, scheduled to take place at midday, was delayed by the crush. ‘We brought in every chair we could,’ said one of the saleroom staff, ‘but the crowd was unbelievable. They were out in the corridor and all the way down the stairs. There must have been three hundred, perhaps four hundred people … and there was this sense of excitement, of electricity. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  When the proceedings finally began, the auctioneer was almost overwhelmed by the sheer volume of bids. People wanted something, anything, even if they didn’t know what it was. ‘I don’t know exactly what I’ve bought,’ said one woman after paying £75 for a lot. ‘I just wanted to have some keepsake.’ One of Elizabeth’s friends recalled how odd it was to see little things that he had given her go for fifty to a hundred pounds. Some people had their eyes on certain pieces: Prue Leith was determined to buy the kitchen table, and a roar of approval went up from the crowd when the table went to her for £1,100. Leith rose to her feet with a whoop of delight, and took a little bow amidst a round of spontaneous applause. ‘I’m going to cook on it just like she did, and think of her,’ said Prue Leith afterwards. ‘She was the most important cookery writer this century. That’s why I wanted her table. I can’t believe I’ve got it.’ By the end of the afternoon the sale had made £49,000 – more than three times its estimated value. The bidders had not bought pots and wooden spoons, but relics: fragments from someone they had never met, but who had had such an effect on their lives that they wanted to keep a little piece of her for ever.

  *

  Elizabeth David’s reputation rests primarily on her first five books. A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1949 while England was still in the grip of rationing. Her aim was ‘to bring a flavour of those blessed lands of sun and sea and olive trees’ into English kitchens. At a time when aubergines, lemons and olive oil were almost unobtainable, the book’s success amazed both her and her publishers. What Elizabeth had managed to do, in this book and those that followed, was to describe food in such a way as to make people dream of it and want to cook it.

  Timing was with her. After the dismal years of war and post-war austerity, the world was opening up. People started travelling as never before, and they were not afraid of garlic and wine sauces as their parents’ generation had been. At the same time, new transport systems were established which brought foreign food hitherto unavailable in English shops. Some of Elizabeth David’s staunchest supporters declare that it is due to her alone that we can now find Italian olive oil, red peppers and Israeli avocados in every supermarket. This must be an exaggeration, but there is an argument for saying that, in her quiet way, she was the most influential cookery writer of her time. There is scarcely a professional cook of any distinction in these islands who does not acknowledge her as an inspiration. She also taught a whole generation of people how to think about food in ways they never had before, and how to cook the simple, authentic dishes she described. Elizabeth never approached cooking as a chore. It was hard work, certainly, but her writing made cooking a creative act to be enjoyed for its own sake, not something to be got out of the way.

  There was also something compelling about her writing. On the surface, it seemed admirably spare, straightforward and to the point. But behind those crisp sentences, one can feel the pressure of her loves and hates, her enthusiasm and her passion. The reader becomes acutely aware of these emotions, although they are never mentioned. This is what makes her prose so powerful, and why she inspired a whole generation not only to take up cooking, but to plunge into it with her own kind of serious enjoyment. ‘I think,’ she wrote, ‘that the ideal cookery writer is one who makes his re
aders want to cook as well as telling them how it is done; he should also leave something, not too much perhaps, but a little, unsaid; people must make their own discoveries, use their own intelligence, otherwise they will be deprived of part of the fun.’

  *

  About her private life, Elizabeth left everything unsaid. She hated publicity of any kind, and revealed very few clues about the sort of person she might be. The photographs in the press showed an elegant, rather beautiful woman with clever, cat-like eyes. She wore well-cut, classical clothes, and emphasized her long neck with white shirts open at the throat. Sometimes there was a photograph of her crowded kitchen, with its French armoires and bowls of eggs and lemons on the dressers; but that was as close as the public ever got to her private life. ‘Everything I want to say is in my books,’ she maintained. She gave out nothing else, and anyone foolish enough to ask an impertinent question would shrivel up in the frozen silence that followed.

  *

  Fortunately for the biographer, the crockery and kitchen equipment sold at Phillips had not been the only things she left behind. In her house in Halsey Street, books spilled out of every available bookshelf. They had taken over the sitting room to such an extent that the floor was an obstacle course and there was nowhere to sit down. They had advanced up to the first floor in little piles on each stair. Her bedroom contained more bookshelves, also full to bursting; and there was a subsidiary library in her kitchen. She had never been able to acquire them on an expensive scale, but her books made a magnificent collection on the history of cookery and gastronomy in English, French and Italian. First choice went, as she had instructed, to the Warburg Institute. The rest went to the Guildhall Library.

  There were also, in every room, innumerable files and cardboard boxes of papers, notebooks, correspondence and catalogues. Elizabeth had appointed her long-time editor and friend Jill Norman to be her literary executor, and before the house in Halsey Street was sold, Jill and her husband Paul Breman moved the archive to their house in Hampstead.

  *

  I never met Elizabeth David, although I did talk to her once on the telephone. I was just beginning a book about Cairo during the Second World War when a friend gave me her telephone number. She was a considerable name. I had two of her books and was very keen to meet her, but I had also been told that she could be difficult. While I summoned up the courage to dial, I wrote out what I wanted to say on a piece of paper.

  ‘Hello?’ The voice was cold, absent-minded. I threw myself into my introductory patter. By about the third sentence I realized I was getting none of those encouraging little noises that most people make, although I knew she was listening. I rambled on nervously, and finally managed to ask whether I might come and see her. There was a long silence, and then the single word, ‘No.’ My heart sank. ‘But,’ she said, ‘you can talk to me now if you like.’ I was totally unprepared for an interview, and was at that embarrassing stage of very early research when one knows almost nothing. Elizabeth realized this at once, but decided to take pity on me. She told me about her suffragi (cook-housekeeper) Suleiman, and the little restaurants on the edge of the Nile where one went to eat freshly grilled pigeon. She also told me a very complicated story which featured a general, several people I had never heard of and the revolving door of the Continental Hotel.

  It was not a very satisfactory interview. I tried to find out more, especially about her marriage, which I knew had taken place during the war; but while I talked to a number of people who knew her, they all seemed very vague about her activities. I looked up her own descriptions of Egypt, in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. They were redolent of the time and place, but gave no clues as to what was happening in her life.

  Two years later, when my book was nearly finished, I happened to meet Jill Norman and asked if she thought Elizabeth might be willing to talk to me again. Jill thought it unlikely. Elizabeth was not well. A sister to whom she was devoted had recently died, and she herself was in hospital with a broken leg. A few days later Jill rang to say that she had tried to put in a good word for me, but Elizabeth was really not interested. That, I thought, was that. I assumed I would never find out what had happened to her in Cairo.

  *

  Ten years later, out of the blue, I received a telephone call from Eleo Gordon of Penguin Books. She wanted to know if I was interested in writing Elizabeth David’s authorized biography. My instinct was to say yes at once because I longed to know more about her, but the word ‘authorized’ made me nervous. What did it mean? If it meant censorship in any form, then my answer would have to be no. However, I was reassured by Jill Norman, and Jenny Dereham of Michael Joseph, who had edited Elizabeth’s posthumous book Harvest of the Cold Months. Both agreed that what I wrote would be up to me. As far as they were concerned, the word authorized simply meant that I would have full access to Elizabeth David’s papers. Jenny Dereham became my editor when I accepted the commission.

  The papers stood in a series of sixty cardboard filing boxes in the studio of Jill’s house in Hampstead, taking up two rows of a long set of bookshelves that ran the length of the room. To my immense relief, they had already been meticulously catalogued: an enormous task undertaken by Jill’s husband Paul Breman, to whom I am immensely grateful. On that first morning I stood in front of them, awestruck. Here was an impressive collection of papers, but would there be enough material to put together both sides of her life? A swift glance at the contents of each box, neatly labelled on the outside, confirmed that most contained papers to do with her work; but in the course of a morning of mounting excitement, I realized that her private life was here too. There were letters from Sybille Bedford, Mark Boxer, Lawrence Durrell, John Lehmann and Hilary Spurling, not to mention cookery writers such as Jane Grigson and Julia Child. There were albums, photographs, several boxes of family papers and correspondence. Best of all was the discovery that Elizabeth had kept handwritten drafts of almost all the most important letters she sent.

  There were also treasures, such as a little blue writing case (smelling faintly of old leather and cumin seeds) that contained bills and snapshots and fabric swatches dating from the 1940s. I found her wartime passport, which charts her passage from France to Italy, the Balkans, Greece and Egypt. Elizabeth’s godson, David Watkins, lent me the collection of letters from Norman Douglas that she had given to him. They were kept in a small handbag covered in rust-coloured cloth, and with the letters was an Egyptian leather purse, with another little cache of photographs, papers, letters and old invoices from her days in Egypt.

  In the months that followed I began to talk to her friends and family, and piece her life together with the help of the archive. The image that emerged was of an extraordinarily enigmatic woman who was very difficult to pin down. She could be open-hearted but utterly unforgiving. She laughed a lot and was very funny, while taking herself and her work very seriously indeed. Her conversation was challenging, unpredictable and even spiky, yet she was also very shy and reserved. She was utterly without pretension and could sniff out the bogus and pretentious in others with devastating accuracy, but she also played the great lady who expected to be treated as such.

  As I immersed myself in her life, the archive that had looked so daunting at first began to seem more manageable. I also began to collect photocopies of long letters she had written to friends and family. And yet, rather like Elizabeth’s writing on cookery, what was omitted was as intriguing as what she recorded. In all the thousands of pages of notes, of letters to friends, of drafted articles, there was so little about herself. Sometimes she described what was happening to her, in very funny set pieces: a disastrous trip to Morocco, six weeks of frantic driving all over France for a series of articles in Vogue. The only revealing glimpses came indirectly, in letters or articles that seem to have been written in a state of controlled rage.

  This was why it was so particularly exciting to read the one long letter in the archive – perhaps the only such letter she ever wrote in her life – wh
ich describes the end of an affair with a man she still loved. I had come across it early on, and realized its importance. But since it was part of the second half of her life and I was then concentrating on the first, I did not spend much time on it. When I read it again several months later, I had that eerie sensation of finding the key I had been looking for, while knowing it had been under my nose all along. At that moment, a series of jumbled thoughts that had been clattering around in my head suddenly fell into place. This moment of illumination could never have happened had I not, simultaneously, been talking to and mulling things over with people who had known Elizabeth for years.

  *

  The following people have made all the difference in helping me to understand Elizabeth David and her life: Jack Andrews, Sybille Bedford CBE, April Boyes, Johnny Grey, Rosi Hanson, Veronica Nicholson and Elizabeth Savage. The prolonged conversations I had with them were all crucial to me, because it was only by talking things through with the people who knew her best that I was able to put what I found in the archive into perspective. They have been unfailingly generous with their time and, best of all, they allowed me to feel that I could ring them up whenever I needed help and advice – which I frequently did. I must also at this point mention my husband, Antony Beevor. Quite apart from his constant encouragement and his initial work on the text, he has provided that inestimable asset to any biographer: an outsider’s perception.

  I was also exceptionally lucky in receiving so much help, and hospitality, from Elizabeth’s nephews Rupert, Johnny and Steven Grey. This book is immeasurably richer for the help and support of the Grey brothers and their unfailing honesty in answering my most awkward questions.

  I would also like to acknowledge my gratitude to Gerald Asher, Paul Bailey, Ann Balfour-Fraser, Ann Barr, Alan and Olivia Bell, Jane Blakemore, Emma Bolland, Gordon Bowker, Arabella Boxer, Lady Anne Brewis, Nathalie Brooke, Sir Bernard and the late Lady Burrows, Julia Caffyn, James Chandler, Janet Clarke, Patricia Clarke, Derek Cooper, Simon Courtauld, Josette d’Amade, Antony Daniels, Anne Davies, Alan and Jane Davidson, Michael Day, Celia Denney, Jessica Douglas-Home, Barbara Doxat, Roger Eland, George Elliott, the late Roger Ellis, Priscilla Esslin, Frances Fedden, the late Eunice Frost, Christopher Gibbs, Ialeen Gibson-Cowan, Lady May Gore, The Earl of Gowrie, Antonia Graham, Henrietta Green, Professor N. G. L. Hammond CBE, DSO, Anthony Hanson, Sabrina Harcourt-Smith, Frances Harper, John Hatt, Lady Dorothy Heber-Percy, Stephanie Hoppen, Anne Higgins, Derek Hill, Michael Holroyd C.B.E., John and Ellen-Ann Hopkins, Simon Hopkinson, Professor Richard Hosking, Laurette Hugo, Kate Hunloke, Molly Izzard, Rosalind Jenkinson, Hugh and Judy Johnson, John King, Kathleen Laing, Heidi Lascelles, Caroline and the late George Lassalle, Roger Latham, Richard Leech, Paul Levy, Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor, Patrick Lewin, Jeremy Lewis, Jenny Lo, Priscilla Longland, Hitch Lyam, Lady Maynard, Jean McAuliffe, Victor Morrison, Patrick O’Connor, Marguerite Patten, OBE, Burnet Pavitt, Neville Phillips, the Countess of Ranfurly, Liz Ray, The Viscount Ridley, Jancis Robinson, Lady Sibell Rowley, John Ruden, John Sandoe, Anne Scott-James, Hilary Spurling, Ann and Franco Taruschio, Doreen Thornton, Peter Trier, Georgina Tritton, Katharine Whitehorn, Audrey Withers, Patrick Woodcock and Michael Zyw.