The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Page 24

  Connie had always been interested in the healing powers of flowers and gardening. She had already written about how, during the First World War, people had found solace and the alleviation of strained nerves through working on their allotments. On her trips to New York she had particularly noted the ‘relief’ and ‘welfare’ gardens that were created in the cities during the Depression to combat food shortages and ease emotional stress. ‘Growing flowers . . . and working among plants and earth [brings with them] a potent and unnameable satisfaction,’ she wrote, ‘. . . a cure for frayed nerves.’ She wanted to find a way to bring beauty and pleasure into stressed lives as she had done for the children in the East End.

  One Monday morning in September 1940, shoppers were astonished to find some elaborate changes to the frontage of Coolings Art Gallery in Bond Street. For some years Connie had been doing flower arrangements for the two Coolings brothers, art dealers from Holland. The Spry decorators were expected to do flowers that were in character with the single painting displayed in each window, whether it was a Dutch interior, a marine painting or a pastoral landscape. That day, the sandbags over the basement lights in the pavement were covered in imitation grass. On the outside of the windows hung three immense bouquets – a brilliant mass of dahlias, gladioli, chrysanthemums and sunflowers – and in the upper windows floated the flags of the Allies. A reporter from The Times was sent to investigate:

  ‘The decorations are to make people laugh,’ one of the Coolings brothers told me, ‘they have no advertising purpose as unfortunately for the artists, no one is buying pictures right now. It is all meant to draw attention to the dismal appearance of the street.’ Some streets look like the firing-line with unsightly heaps of sandbags, windows boarded up or criss-crossed with paper stripping. Some other shops had also painted their sandbags green, but Mr Cooling recommends they should be covered with earth and planted with flowers and foliage. ‘What a grand and cheerful idea,’ agreed The Times.

  It was, of course, Connie’s idea, one which the Coolings brothers had happily agreed to. There was even a suggestion people might grow some vegetables, such as carrots, in their sandbags, an idea quickly scotched by the local authorities. But no one could deny it had cheered people up and made them laugh – exactly what Connie had intended.

  Connie found her true calling for war work when she was invited early in 1941 by the Ministry of Information to do a series of lecture tours around the country, talking to women employed in military work and factories, ‘to lift people’s spirits’. What she found were dispirited audiences tired of rationing and make-do-and-mend. While Connie sat and waited her turn to speak she heard officials droning on about how to fill in forms for permission to keep a pig or obtain a packet of vegetable seed. When her turn came, she would stand up and exhort the assembled women to return colour and creative expression to their lives. She spoke of flowers, ‘that natural, unrationed source of beauty’. The art of flower arranging in wartime, she argued, was not a frivolous idea. After the war a former WAAF wrote to Connie and reminded her of a lecture she gave at the time of Dunkirk:

  You wore navy, a white frilly jabot, a bracelet of dangling seals, you brought to all of us a sense that ‘the world will still go on’, in spite of the news from Belgium, particularly bad at that time. I was engaged to a gunner officer, posted missing, though he turned up next month from Dunkirk . . . You spoke of old roses in old gardens and held us spellbound, and at the end thanked us for listening to you on what seemed a trivial and unimportant matter at this grim time in our history. So, nineteen years and three sons later, we have our own roses, and I would like you to know how long your words stayed with me.

  These lectures put her back in touch with people from all walks of life, people who were frightened and tired and away from home. She brought flowers and talked to them about how to arrange them, however simply. Once, to prove her point, she created an arrangement of grasses and seed-heads with fireweed (willowherb) – ‘that inspiring magenta flower that seems to spring up wherever fire has scorched the earth’ – all gathered from a bombsite. She also made several new friends. Effie Barker, a dashing character who hunted and owned a pack of beagles in Berkshire, had turned her farm into a market garden staffed by Land Army girls whom Connie gave talks to. Later, Effie went to work for the Red Cross in Europe on civilian relief in Belsen. After the war she continued to supply Connie and the cookery school with vegetables.

  But during these lecture tours Connie was disturbed to discover how few of the people she addressed had heard of her, and realized how much her reputation had been confined to high society. It was not what she had planned or wanted, and in her last books she was still anxiously trying to dispel this image of herself and her work.

  To cope with her nerves during these strenuous tours, Connie took up tapestry. On long train journeys she worked squares for a large floral carpet which she had designed from old flower and fruit pictures. ‘I began to think I had started too late in life and would never do twenty-four squares this side of the grave, and to wonder whether I should adapt my first square to an outsize pincushion.’ To speed things up, she got friends to help, carrying their squares, needles and thread about in their gas-mask cases. Her interest in textile design went back to embroidery lessons from Alice Messel, Oliver’s sister. Bettie Smail, the daughter of one of George Fletcher’s colleagues, regularly visited Connie at Park Gate for advice and inspiration. Bettie was a young designer for a Lancashire cotton firm employed by the government to keep up design standards in order to regain exports after the war. They would walk round the garden together, selecting and assembling groups and colour combinations for Bettie to paint.

  Victor Stiebel had closed his couture house and volunteered for military duties. He and Oliver Messel were posted to the Eastern Command Camouflage School housed in the Assembly Rooms in Norwich. It was staffed by a charismatic and flamboyant group of ‘arty types’ that included painters, architects, theatre designers, an opera singer, a picture restorer, a cabinetmaker and a magician. Messel’s official task was to disguise pill-boxes – as Gothic lodges, caravans, haystacks, wayside cafés. ‘Plant some old-man’s-beard here in the spring,’ he would instruct his workforce, or ‘Paint a pot of flowers in that window.’ He always asked Connie for advice with horticultural detail.

  Oliver Messel spent much of his spare time restoring the once elegant Georgian Assembly Rooms and holding lavish parties. In the summer of 1941, Messel and Stiebel wrote to Connie begging her to come and help them organize a ball in their ‘stately home’. Connie, at the time visiting Kate Barrett who had been evacuated with Swanley College to the east Midlands, readily agreed to make a detour on her way home. She arrived at the Assembly Rooms to find the place semi-derelict, the panelling boarded up and ugly pieces of military furniture scattered forlornly around the great rooms. She rolled up her sleeves, found yards of scrim, a roughly woven hessian used for camouflage netting, dyed it in bright colours and got local ladies to run it up into covers for the army-issue chairs. She sent orders to her shop to put quantities of flowers on the train and wired friends with nearby gardens for help. She created enormous floral wall groups and cajoled some Sappers into setting up dramatic lighting effects for them. Everyone put on their best clothes, a band was got up from volunteers and a colourful buffet of raw-vegetable salads and spicy soups was laid out on tables covered with dyed army sheets. The ball was ‘a terrific and splendid success . . . all thanks to dear Connie . . . what a lark!’

  Park Gate became a popular sanctuary for old and new friends who came to stay for weekends and summer breaks. Sidney Bernstein and his first wife the American journalist Zoë Farmer had bought a farm nearby in Kent, and visited along with their friends. Charles Laughton was a popular visitor plus, of course, ‘dear Komis’. One or two old friends became permanent fixtures: Marjorie Russell had retired and was now part of the household. She was becoming increasingly eccentric and dependent on Connie. Flo Standfast was another live-in
friend at Park Gate towards whom Connie had always felt very protective. Rosemary Hume came often, finding rest and recuperation from running Au Petit Cordon Bleu, always returning to London laden with fresh vegetables for the restaurant. A steady round of visitors would take their place at Connie’s famous kitchen suppers, and would be dragged into the garden to admire the roses or join a weeding party where gossip and laughter filled the air – and the piles of weeds barely grew, much to Walter Trower’s irritation.

  As well as good company and gossip, some brought welcome food rations. Connie was a keen swapper and barterer of homep roduced foods, though she always vehemently denied using the black market. American friends sent food parcels and friends in the military could usually rustle up something as a contribution, especially GI rations.

  One of Connie’s most regular guests was the American journalist Helen Kirkpatrick. Connie’s lecture agent in New York had introduced them, and when Kirkpatrick came to England to work as a journalist Connie had immediately taken to her powerful personality and invited her to Park Gate. Her marriage had been a disappointment, Kirkpatrick told Connie, so she had gone to Geneva on a summer job escorting teenage girls round Europe, which she loved – so much so that she cabled her husband: ‘Not returning!’ Tall, sandy-haired and blue-eyed, with ‘a roguish smile and enquiring mind’, Helen Kirkpatrick was known and respected for her political acumen and integrity. By 1940 she was the London war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, writing graphic descriptions of life in London during the Blitz. Outspoken and tough-talking, when told by the newspaper that it did not have women on the staff, she promptly replied, ‘I can’t change my sex. But you can change your policy.’ During the course of the war she travelled extensively, covering the campaigns in Algiers, Italy and Corsica, the liberation of France and the advance into Germany, often under dangerous conditions.

  Kirkpatrick lived in a mews house in London, where Connie would visit with baskets piled with her own tomatoes, onions, baby marrows, garlic, savory, chives, lettuce and tarragon, and plant up her window boxes with herbs. Kirkpatrick, whose typically American view on English cooking was of overboiled cabbage and stale fish served in hotel dining-rooms and boat-train dining-cars, wrote that Connie had refused to be daunted by the rigours and restrictions of war. For her, rations were an incentive to discover new ways of doing things: ‘No stately home of England, no smart Mayfair restaurant has presented a boiled-potato-and-cabbage-shy American with the sumptuous repasts of the Spry household.’ Another popular if demanding guest was Lesley Blanch, a contemporary of Oliver Messel and Rex Whistler at the Slade. Blanch later did book illustrations and book jackets before turning to writing and journalism, and in the 1930s was feature editor of Vogue in London. During the war she covered various aspects of Britain at war for the Ministry of Information and documented the lives of women in the forces with her friend the photographer Lee Miller. Having been bombed out of three London flats, she sought sanctuary with Connie in Kent.

  Blanch was independent-minded, glamorous and a tremendous gossip and wit. She adored patchouli, attar of roses, the clank of exotic but well-chosen jewellery and wrote books about Russia. What most appealed to Connie about her was her passion for food. She liked to travel without plans, relishing the unexpected: ‘the juxtaposition of kebabs, tin plates and licked fingers along the road’ or ‘long days, gazing and guzzling’. Like Helen Kirkpatrick, Blanch had been married briefly in the Thirties and divorced in 1941. When John Gielgud was staying at Park Gate with his sister Eleanor, he saw Lesley under a table during an air raid ‘canoodling with a Russian’. Romain Kacew was a Russian-born Lithuanian Jew, serving in London with the Free French forces. He and Blanch were married after the war, when Kacew changed his name to Romain Gary.

  Connie soon found that her true wartime métier was to be pursued at home in her garden and kitchen. It was here that she embarked on an entirely new campaign: ‘We need a food revolution, we need to be flung out of our old, indifferent, wasteful habits,’ she wrote. ‘Food is in the news, and here we are in the middle of the war, rationed and restricted as never before, with economy and belt-tightening the order of the day, and yet I want to cry out about food. The only unlimited thing about food today is talking about it.’

  Which is what she did. At a time when people were writing about ‘austerity’ food and digging for victory, Connie was talking about growing food for taste and pleasure; sitting with friends around her kitchen table, discussing, arguing, experimenting and writing about everything and anything to do with growing and cooking delicious food. For Connie, the Wartime Kitchen Front was a warm country kitchen filled with the aromas of bubbling soups and freshly harvested vegetables. At the heart of her kitchen was a glass-fronted cupboard bursting with cookery books. She used these daily, poring over them, marking them with comments and food stains, clipping the edges together and stuffing cuttings and other bits and pieces of paper between the pages. She loved books that told her how to use country produce – ‘they make me feel rich and resourceful.’ Amongst her collection was Ambrose Heath’s Good Soups in which the author claimed soup making to be a great adventure, Good Food on the Aga, and the great domestic goddesses of the past – Mrs Beeton and, in America, Fannie Merritt Farmer.

  These were practical books for practical use but, as Connie wrote, they were also there to inspire and make the sky their limit. As noted earlier, she was less interested in wartime books of make-do and austerity. ‘It was always better’, she explained, ‘to take an idea that started out as tantalising, even lavish – a big pattern which could be cut into a smaller shape.’ War, she reckoned, was a time not of compromise but of challenge. In using the best recipes of classic cooking one could be spurred on to create exciting food. ‘I would rather have a few high spots in the week’s menus than a dead level,’ she wrote. ‘I’d rather have enough sugar in today’s sweet and have, if necessary, no sweet tomorrow.’ There was always a way to find a good substitute for unobtainable ingredients, and she had little time for Lord Woolton, the Minster of Food, with his sermons and wholesome advice about making the best of ration foods, especially his famous pie.

  She liked cookery books that teemed with brilliant ideas; intriguing titles particularly attracted her: Caviare to Candy, Cantaloupe to Cabbage, the American Tried Temptations, Old and New and the Picayune Creole Cook Book with its aura of New Orleans romance. But she reserved her greatest respect for French cuisine – Madame Prunier, Marcel Boulestin – and of course, her friends Rosemary Hume and Dione Lucas’s own Au Petit Cordon Bleu. War or no war, Connie wrote, with a few modifications, cooking guided by this book will never be commonplace, even if some of the ingredients cannot be obtained and the lack of cream and brandy ‘may floor you’.

  Connie’s greatest concern about wartime food was the lack of interest in fresh vegetables and the English inability to cook them properly. She described sitting in her kitchen with friends one Sunday afternoon, listening to The Brains Trust on the radio. The panel had been asked to remember their nicest dish or meal: ‘Professor Joad spoke tantalizingly of an omelette contained in a crisp French loaf eaten at a picnic luncheon in France.’ Others described spaghetti and fritto misto, Cornish cream and even baked deer’s heart. ‘They had us all practically dribbling,’ she wrote. ‘But’, she countered, ‘I missed vegetables, and I’d like them to consider the merits of the first peas and new potatoes accompanying baby lamb, home-grown asparagus and young sweet corn, braised endive . . . and what about real cabbage soup done in the French way, or country teas with cos lettuce, watercress, spring onions, and white icicle radishes?’

  Despite her claims to ignorance on such matters Helen Kirkpatrick, like several other friends, supported Connie’s advocacy of good homegrown food. ‘I knew less than nothing about cooking,’ she wrote, ‘and herbs were totally foreign to me.’ But on her visits to Park Gate she would browse through Connie’s cookery books and hang around the kitchen asking questions about sauces and dressi
ngs. She noted how Connie typically refrained from giving instructions. ‘Having piqued my curiosity, she helped me as my interest in learning to cook steadily increased; her method of teaching was to allow one to discover and to inquire.’ Sometimes the air-raid siren sounded and everyone would take shelter under the stairs, still talking, too absorbed to notice the bombers overhead. Later Connie would go into the kitchen and assemble a simple, delicious homegrown meal.

  Living this busy, cheerful and rather wild life, she decided to write her own wartime food book. It would be a cookery-cum-gardening book that would combine ideas and recipes, including soups, meats and sweets, but the real heart of it would be vegetables, a plea to readers to grow them and eat them with imagination and enthusiasm. ‘Books and talking about country life and fare, about fruits and flavours, always drive me first out of doors to grow or collect, and then into the kitchen to experiment.’ In her new book Connie recalled childhood raids on free food in the countryside – nettles for beer, mushrooms, elderflowers, nuts and wild salad leaves; and how later, as an ignorant young wife, she wrote from her remote home in Kilkenny to Harrods for things she could have got at home for the asking. ‘It is a dull-witted thing to live in the country and not know how country women use its produce,’ she wrote. She celebrated the practical wisdom of practical people; the good salt-of-the-earth knowledge that had never been needed more than now. ‘Even under the severest rationing, no one, not even the Marthas [the less bright], should be reduced to dullness.’

  Instead, Connie brought the brightness of her garden into the kitchen. Whether the book was her own idea or she was talked into it by her friends is not known. Perhaps it was Lesley Blanch, who did the delightful drawings and was already writing her own food and travel book, Round the World in 80 Dishes: The World through the Kitchen Window, which she published after the war; or Helen Kirkpatrick, who wrote the foreword and helped Connie with her writing; or Rosemary Hume who supplied and tested the recipes – her professional contribution was considerable – or Sidney Bernstein whose persuasive powers had set Connie on her meteoric career a decade earlier. The title – Come into the Garden, Cook – is said to have been a ‘brilliant inspiration’ of Shav Spry’s. However it came about, it would become Connie’s best-loved book.