Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Davis, whose wife Ivy Elstrob had died during the war, was a great womaniser. He and Patience were not lovers but they grew very close very quickly, and it wasn’t long before they went travelling together, driving from Naples to Lecce in a tiny Fiat. This journey, made in the footsteps of Norman Douglas, took three weeks and was often arduous: Patience recalled ‘tomb-like’ hotel rooms and the fact that drinks were sometimes hard to come by (‘If you see a bar, however primitive, stop at it – there won’t be another for forty miles!’). But there were good olives to be had, and a perfect dish of mussels, cooked in their own juices over a hot fire at the side of the quay in Taranto. She was certainly enjoying herself. The children had joined her on this trip – Nicolas was by now sixteen and Miranda fifteen – but when Irving’s stepdaughter Ianthe turned up and expressed surprise at his companions, it wasn’t Patience who scarpered. Only the children were expected to disappear. She gave them twenty pounds – it was all she had at the time – and told them to hitchhike back to London. ‘We walked along the road to Paestum,’ remembers Miranda. ‘A lady stopped in a car. She said: I will give you a lift, provided you let me take you to your parents. And we said: it’s our mother who sent us off like this.’ She and Nicolas made it to Rome and thence to Florence, relying on strangers to take them in. En route to Monaco they stayed at the house of Percy Lubbock, the memoirist and critic, in Lerici, Liguria; an acquaintance both of their mother and of their aunt Tania, they had his address and made good use of it. They finally arrived in London three weeks later, where there was still no sign of Patience. ‘She wasn’t worried about us,’ says Miranda. ‘That didn’t apply. She wasn’t like other people’s mothers.’

  Back at the Observer – she made it home in the end – Patience had a new boss, George Seddon. She dropped into his neon-lit cubby hole of an office for a talk. Seddon told her that he had discovered Observer readers to be mostly working men living in Victorian back-to-backs in the Midlands. What did she think about this? She remarked that these working men clearly showed great discrimination when it came to their Sunday reading. Seddon, however, was unconvinced. Everything had to change, their needs catered for. As she would put it later, ‘Consciences were wrung, Which? flourished, advertising perked up, and the paper, heading for Consumerland, began to descend the treacherous slope – to sing the deceptive but seductive joys of acquisition.’ For the editor of ‘A Woman’s Perspective’ this was the beginning of the end. In 1962, almost four years after her arrival at the Observer, Patience received ‘a kind note from David Astor, doubtless on the urgent recommendation of George Seddon’. Time to go. Ah, well. She tried not to mind too much. She had enjoyed a good innings, given that most of her colleagues had never stopped thinking of her as an outsider. ‘I think I was regarded as something of an anarchist,’ she said, recalling her Observer days in 1987. ‘I had a phobia about fashion . . . People were appalled by my appearance.’

  Like many of the women in this book, Patience Gray’s professional life had a resounding and singular second act. Hers, however, was an awfully long time coming. The curtain would not go up on it for another twenty-five years.

  It happened like this. In 1962, she was at staying at Furlongs, the Sussex home of her friend Peggy Angus, the painter, designer and teacher. Furlongs, a former shepherd’s cottage near Firle on the South Downs, had been much frequented by artists before the war, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden* and John Piper among them. Actually, there is a well-known painting by Ravilious from 1939 called Tea at Furlongs, and when I think about Patience at this time in her life it is this that I see in my mind’s eye – an image at once both bohemian and intensely domestic, just like her. A table, set with a plate of bread and butter and covered with a strange black parasol stands hard by a low flint wall; beyond it cornfields unfold, yellow and green, like silk handkerchiefs pulled from a magician’s hat. For Patience, Furlongs was a refuge, convivial and restorative. She and Peggy were cut from the same cloth: passionate, fiery and more interested in creativity than in money.* In 1962, however, Peggy was happily consumed by her latest hand-printed wallpaper designs. Patience, on the other hand, was restless, expectant, waiting for the next thing. Her energy had nowhere to go.

  Tea at Furlongs by Eric Ravilious

  (Tea at Furlongs, Ravilious, Eric (1903–42)/Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.)

  One evening at Furlongs, a splendid sight: in the gloaming, a wild-haired Flemish sculptor called Norman Mommens appeared over the brow of a nearby hill, effigies on sticks in his hands. (Perhaps it was 5 November; there was certainly a bonfire at Furlongs that night, for Miranda, who was there, remembers that Norman put his sheepskin coat around her shoulders as she sat by it.) Had he walked the seven miles to Firle from the house he shared with his wife, the potter Ursula Mommens,† in South Heighton? It seems more than likely; he had about him the air of a man on the run.

  By all accounts, Patience should have met Norman years before; he and Ursula had previously earned a living turning out mould-made ceramic heraldic beasts for the Festival of Britain, and they and Patience knew plenty of people in common. But for one reason or another, this was their first collision. Inside the house, they stood by the fireplace and talked: Patience told Norman that she was worried about Nicolas, who was then going through a rebellious phase. Norman told Patience about the difficulties in his marriage.

  It wasn’t long before Norman was visiting Patience at the Logs. For Miranda, now a student at Chelsea School of Art, this was delicate. Three was a crowd and so, without telling her mother what she was going to do, she quietly moved in with friends. Patience was upset by this, but perhaps she was relieved too; certainly, it was left to Norman to arrive at Miranda’s door with a little bunch of snowdrops and ask her to come home. Norman, you see, was five years Patience’s junior, and she was worried that he would run off with someone else – even with her own daughter. Of course, on the surface of it, this was silly. Norman was as devoted to her as she was to him. But you can see how the muddle arose. Of the two of them it was Patience who was the more altered by their relationship. Everyone saw it. She was transfigured; Norman had made her young again. She saw him as her destiny, a man to be followed like a star. No wonder she panicked.

  In 1963, in an effort, perhaps, to dispense with these anxieties once and for all, the two of them left for Greece. For their friends and relatives their departure was a great drama. How long had they been planning it? Or were they just acting on a whim? Patience wasn’t letting on, and in her book about their subsequent adventures on Naxos, Ringdoves and Snakes,* she gave the gossips short shrift: ‘Who cares now whether the departure was contemplated a whole winter from a hammock strung between two beams in a billiard room whose clerestory windows were caked with snow, or whether one morning we woke up to say: we’re starting? Why must people know why we went? When we arrive, we leave behind the reasons why we came. We shed a snakeskin of fuss, plans, hesitations and other people’s claims.’ But if she had to answer the questions that assailed them, she would say that it all came down to Norman’s appetite for marble, which was rather hefty. Though this might not have been the whole truth, it was no lie. As things turned out, they would spend the next seven years in search of stone, an odyssey that would take them from the Cyclades to Tuscany, from Catalonia to the Veneto and, finally, to Apulia.

  Norman Mommens in the Fifties; ‘Goliath’ was made for, or bought by, Leonard Woolf

  (Guy Gravett.)

  They lived hand-to-mouth. Penniless and itinerant, she and Norman existed ‘in the wild’ and ‘on the margins of literacy’, an experience that changed the way they thought for ever. They relied on providence and nothing else, and in the process discovered that poverty gave the good things of life ‘their proper significance’. At first, Patience would come back to London for visits, putting up with the questions and uncomprehending stares of those who accused her of slumming it. But as the years went by, she became ever more prickly and ever more peculiar-look
ing – ‘a wild-haired, gap-toothed gypsy woman’ according to one friend – and in the end it must have seemed easier not to bother; letters would suffice. In 1970 she made the separation permanent when she and Norman moved into the vaulted barn of a ruined sheep farm – a masseria – called Spigolizzi in Apulia, in the heel of Italy, and began a rooted new life of making and growing. (Patience, inspired by Norman, began to design jewellery.) The house was – it still is – very remote, and it had neither running water nor electricity; she cooked over olive wood in a huge hearth that had once, long ago, been used for smoking cheeses. When Patience’s old friend Henrion came to visit he was shocked, appalled: how on earth would they survive the winter? But it was what they wanted. A homely wilderness. As she would write, ‘Self-preservation is a poor substitute for an unfettered life.’ It was with some reluctance that she finally agreed to have electricity installed in the early Nineties.

  Spigolizzi as it was when Patience and Norman found it

  (Francesco Radino, courtesy of Miranda Armour-Brown and Nicolas Gray.)

  It was at Spigolizzi that Patience began working on her second cookbook, a volume that would contain all that she had learned in the marble years, and all that she was learning now, from her peasant neighbours (though it wouldn’t be long before they were learning from her). This book, uncanny and deliberate, would celebrate the feasting and the fasting that is the lot of anyone who relies on windfalls. Eat, preserve, wait for the next bounty: where there is subsistence farming and extreme weather, this is how it goes. More particularly, it would eulogise the edible weeds, bitter, abundant and health-giving, in which she had first become interested on Naxos: dandelions and wild chicory; comfrey and sorrel; glasswort and samphire; broom rape, fat hen and tassel hyacinth. There would be recipes for polenta, wild boar and fish soup, but for mischief she would include a recipe for a stew of la volpe, given to her by an old anarchist in Carrara. ‘A male fox shot in January or February,’ begins this alarming recipe. ‘Skin it, and keep the carcass in running water for three days, or, otherwise, hang it up outside in a frost.’ Beneath it she noted that these preliminaries are vital, since they remove the otherwise rather ‘foxy’ taste of the meat – and that the procedure works for badger too.

  Patience tried for years to get her curious, prescient book published. But no one was interested. This was before the nose-to-tail eating was made fashionable by cooks such as Fergus Henderson; the foraging of Michelin-starred chefs such as Rene Redzepi at Noma in Copenhagen; the establishment of the Slow Food movement by Carlo Petrini in Bra, in Piedmont; the trend for local foods, organic foods and something known as ‘heritage tomatoes’; the tendency for cookery writers to punctuate their recipes with scholarship and memoir. It wasn’t until 1986 that it was finally taken on by Alan Davidson, the food historian, who ran a tiny company called Prospect Books and who also happened to be a man after Patience’s own heart.

  The kitchen at Spigolizzi; the refrigerator was not installed until 2002

  (© Jason Lowe.)

  Honey from a Weed (the title is from William Cowper*) was not, and never will be, a best seller. But its reception in food circles was rhapsodic – in the London Review of Books Angela Carter acclaimed it as a ‘unique and pungent book . . . a baroque monument’; Elizabeth David also wrote to its author, congratulating her on its success – and it has had a cult following ever since, both in Britain and, more particularly, in America, where its peculiar syntax and unfamiliar delights are a staple of gastronomic symposia and learned journals. It is a book, never out of print, that brings forth joy in some, but earnestness in an awful lot more. It is, you can’t help but notice, especially loved by male cooks, who seem to find its rigour excitingly macho. In Patience’s lifetime it brought to Spigolizzi a steady stream of pilgrims, men and women she would happily feed and put up for the night. After all, as she always maintained, one of the purest, most human delights was the ‘disorderly’ feel of a successful lunchtime. But she must also, I think, have enjoyed watching them watch her, for in old age she made for a remarkable sight. Physically, she was a paradox: as strong as an ox – she had to be, living there – but a skinny-limbed brown thing too, a wizened, witchy-looking woman (she was a passionate smoker) with wild hair and wide eyes. And always at her side was Norman, aka the Sculptor, who looked, with his long white hair and beard, like Abraham or Moses. She rarely disappointed her visitors, even at her most irascible. Her talk was as sinewy as her prose, and weeds, whether fresh or bottled, seemed always to be on the menu. Was she homesick? No, definitely not. ‘I wasn’t absolutely mad about English life at all,’ she told a (young, male) journalist in 2002.

  Patience in 1987. The portrait was taken by Jane Bown, who was one of her contemporaries at the Observer

  (© Jane Bown/Guardian News & Media Ltd.)

  They were a happy and devoted couple, these two. Every year Norman would devote the month of October to making a book for Patience, to be given to her on her birthday. She kept these treasures, with their paintings and their poems, each one more precious than the last, in a large wooden chest. While she was alive they were her secret. After she died, Rossella Piccinno and Tommaso Del Signore made a beautiful film about them, To My Darling.

  Patience finally gave up her long-standing opposition to the institution of marriage in 1994 when, more than thirty years after their first meeting, Norman Mommens became her husband.

  When he died six years later she announced his death to friends with a card that read, ‘Norman is among the angels.’ She lived on in the masseria, watched over by the silent sentinels of his sculptures until, in 2005, she went to join him. One assumes that by now the angels have learned how to rustle up a decent bowl of orecchiette con la rucola.

  The Show Must Go On

  (Photography by Yousuf Karsh, Camera Press London.)

  (© Nick Werner Laurie.)

  Three trouser-wearing characters: Nancy Spain,

  writer and personality; Joan Werner Laurie, magazine editor;

  Sheila van Damm, rally-car driver and theatre manager

  (From Sheila van Damm, No Excuses.)

  ‘If you like: ambition’

  People curl their lips at celebrity memoirs, and talk of them as a sign of the times. If only they knew. In 1956 Hutchinson & Co. published an autobiography by the well-known personality Nancy Spain.* It was called Why I’m Not a Millionaire, because Spain was an incurable spendthrift. ‘Here is the book that 11 million people have been waiting for,’ boasted the jacket. ‘A life story that will make you laugh and cry, all about the good times of Nancy Spain, book critic of the Daily Express, gossip writer of SHE, and popular panellist of What’s My Line? Rich with anecdote, thick with a procession of glorious personalities, with Nancy you can meet Noël Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Lord Beaverbrook, [and] the Duke of Windsor, get engaged to Gilbert Harding, ride down the Fosse Way on a milk-cart horse and penetrate behind the scenes at Lime Grove. Crackling with wit, bursting with vitality, this is one of those books that will go straight to your heart. Because every word of it is true.’

  Why I’m Not a Millionaire received more than its fair share of publicity. Naturally, it was serialised in Nancy’s own paper, the Daily Express, which in 1956 had a circulation of more than four million. But its author also had the temerity to review it there herself, amusingly drawing attention to its absurdities – ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t really believe in this N. SPAIN,’ she wrote. ‘N. SPAIN is obviously a figment of Lord Beaverbrook’s imagination’* – even as she dropped the big names her fame-hungry fans would find among its pages, if only they would go out and buy it. In the Evening Standard her close friend and putative fiancé Gilbert Harding authenticated his praise – ‘the best thing that Miss Spain has written . . . vastly amusing . . .’ – by accompanying it with a typically ill-tempered description of his usual feelings about her work (he did not understand her detective novels; her children’s books left him cold; as for her journalism, he could take it or leave it
). Elsewhere Spain’s swashbuckling social climbing – not for nothing did her friends think of her as a pirate, albeit one with neither cutlass nor eye patch – seemed somehow to have scrambled critical faculties. Even the Times Literary Supplement found itself unwilling to state the obvious, which was that her book was as shallow as a puddle. ‘Her courage, both on and off the hockey field, is most impressive,’ it noted. ‘Those who admire the muscular heroines of John Betjeman will find the author of this book no less strongly adorable.’

  That word, though: courage. In 1956 courage was still very far from being a synonym for gumption, and it was used with rather less abandon than today. For this reason, it catches the eye. Why did the TLS’s reviewer use it? It’s possible, of course, that he (or she) was simply referring to Spain’s experiences during the war, when she had served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service as a press officer, a post that kept her in London during the Blitz. Nancy had no choice but to be brave then. ‘I never knew if I left someone at Admiralty Arch, say, and walked across St James’s Park to my office, that there might not come a chuffing noise, a gliding silence, and a crash,’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘And I might never see or speak to my friend again.’ When a V2 landed on the Guards Chapel during the morning service of 18 June 1944 her office in Petty France was all but demolished; unable to open the building’s first aid kits, she ripped her shirt tails into bandages for the injured Wrens outside.