The subtitle of Honey from a Weed is Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany Catalonia the Cyclades
The subtitle of Honey from a Weed is “Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia”, which sums up the couple’s itinerary during these years before they came to a halt at Spigolizzi, where in 1970 Mommens bought the masseria of a tumble-down ruined sheep farm. The arts were in any case well served by Gosling and Peter Heyworth, and Vita Sackville-West looked after gardening. “Youth, mercifully, was a subject relatively untouched”, as were modern architecture, design and craftsmanship. However, George Seddon, her next superior, was convinced that the paper’s readers were mainly working-class males, and that Gray’s ideas were too arty and too “continental” for them. She and the children lived by the South Downs “in a cottage in a wood – a kind of Walden situation – with no telephone, electricity or water laid on”. After the Second World War she took the children back to London, hoping to make enough money to pay their school fees.There she set up a research agency In 1950-51 she was research assistant to H.F.K.
Henrion on the Festival of Britain, and she also worked for Richard Guyatt on Coronation commemoratives. Plats du Jour followed, with Patience Gray doing all the writing and Primrose Boyd contributing some of the recipes.In July 1958, following a competition that was said to have attracted a thousand entrants, David Astor summoned her to the Editor’s office at The Observer, where he told her “unenthusiastically that I had won, and they were prepared to take me on to start a woman’s page”. At first she was happy, as she herself answered to the easy-going Nigel Gosling. Patience was the secretary of this school for teaching civilians new skills “such as how to make Molotov cocktails”.Thomas Gray was conscripted, leaving Patience the unmarried mother of a son and a daughter (he had a wife), and she took his name by public announcement in The London Gazette. She became romantically involved with Thomas Gray, a Spanish Civil War veteran, who ran a clandestine counter-insurgency course for the Home Guard at Hurlingham in London. She and Tania escaped his attentions by fleeing to the Black Sea in a monoplane piloted by a Romanian prince.When war broke out, she was sacked from the job she had got at the Foreign Office “for having too many foreign contacts”. Later, she took a BSc (Econ) at London University, where Hugh Gaitskell was her economics tutor.In summer 1938 Patience set off with her elder sister Tania (who became a photographer) on a mission for the Quakers to establish cultural ties to Romania.
When in July Queen Marie of Romania died, Patience was so moved by her subjects’ mourning rites that she wrote her first piece of journalism. It appeared in a Bucharest paper, whose editor laid siege to his young writer, filling her hotel room with tuberoses, the fragrance of which always made Patience shudder with remembered horror. As she got her university entrance at 16, too young to go up, she was shipped off to Bonn to learn German and study economics, “which I soon abandoned in favour of history of art”. She had had a late-in-life epiphany when she discovered she was the granddaughter of a Polish rabbi who fled from persecution, married a Lincolnshire farmer’s daughter and became a Unitarian minister.Patience Stanham was a very bright child.
She had been brought up with her two sisters in an Edwardian household run by domestic servants with her misogynist army-officer father, later a surgeon at the London Hospital, the only male. She was dressed in working clothes like her local peasant women neighbours, and she was engaged in the same labours, which she called “agriculture”. Though supple and lithe as a young girl, Gray was certainly in her sixties, and her agriculture involved bending down from the waist to hoe, weed and gather the crops – none dare call it gardening.She told me about her life. Gray’s directions for getting to her house in Apulia, at almost the very tip of the heel of Italy, were clear enough – but it hadn’t occurred to her that a visitor might get lost and delayed. The landmarks she described so carefully were only visible by daylight, for hers was not the only house at Spigolizzi, just off the Presicce-Lido Marini road, without electricity. Somehow, I managed to pitch up at the house with the pink tower in time to be fed some delicious dinner, involving an awful lot of pulses cooked in unfamiliar ways, and wild greens that I couldn’t have identified even if there had been more light than candles and paraffin lamps. We washed it down with some of Mommens’s slightly sour but attractive red wine.Next morning, I found my thin, willowy hostess stooped over in a parched-looking field opposite her house, harvesting chick peas for our lunch.
