The Return

As the boys got older, they continued their holidays in Mousehole and built up a hard core of friends who either lived in the village or like them had the luxury of a seaside holiday home. Although they were on holiday, visiting for a few weeks every year, they acted, or so I’m told, as though they owned the place, like real Mousehole boys. Nevertheless, they used to take their schoolfriends down to Cornwall and I would get postcards from The Old Fish Door, as they both used to think it was called, telling me about various antics. Ben allowed them to run wild as he had done as a child in Mousehole and they’d be out all day on the rocks down below, often forgetting about food or, if they were hungry, catching up with Ben in the pub, coming in through the back door (Harry’s door, named after Harry Drew, who always used it) for some change to buy a pasty. During this period various people lived at the Fish Store, renting it for eleven months of the year and vacating it for the annual August holiday. Someone cut out a newspaper headline that reads ‘August is the cruellest month’ in big letters. This harrowing message has weathered the years remarkably well. These days, the torn and faded cutting has pride of place above the fireplace, stuck to one of Henry’s squares of primed board, the type he used for a series of bold face paintings for his final show at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. It hangs like a fine piece of art.

Relations between Ben and me over the years since our split were terrible. Our only communication was through solicitors, so it is curious that, when I really needed support over schooling problems with Henry, I rang him up. In retrospect, that was the first step towards us becoming friends again and me being able to return to the Fish Store.

I was staying with my brother Adam at Liberty House when the invitation came to go to the Fish Store for lunch. We arrived with Zach’s dog Sam one hot but overcast August day in 1999. The Fish Store took my breath away with its new kitchen-cum-dining-room at the studio/front-door end of the building. There was a shiny granite-topped island with wooden cupboards underneath and shelves running along the wall above a double butler’s sink. The cottagey windows had been replaced with big sheets of glass which swung out towards the sea on special frames, giving uninterrupted views. The house smelled of roast peppers and there on the worktop was a big pile of freshly picked crab on a familiar dark-brown Bernard Leach dish and a bowl of home-made mayonnaise. Everyone was very nervous and the boys, who had grown up with each parent separately, were confused about seeing us together. It was surreal but bearable and quite good fun in an odd sort of way.

Unknown to me, Ben was becoming increasingly anxious that the current Fish Store tenant saw himself as a sitting tenant and might prove difficult to remove. So when, two years later, I was at a major crossroads in my life and suggested almost as a joke that I should take on the tenancy, effectively turning the Fish Store back into a family home, it was the perfect solution.

In September 2001, Zach and I hired a van and moved furniture from our London home down to the Fish Store and kitted it out with new beds. Telling no one of my new arrangement, I began bringing clothes and kitchen equipment to my old holiday home. It was all very curious because in so many ways everything was the same but it patently wasn’t. The Fish Store smelled the same but was physically different. A new shower had been installed in what had been Ben’s bedroom. The bathroom had been opened into the ‘studio’ and turned into a kitchen-cum-dining-room. What had been the kitchen was now a huge master bedroom, while the two other bedrooms remained exactly as they had always been. Only one picture which I remembered – George Lambourne’s painting of Mousehole harbour – and a couple of etchings by Sara were still hanging on the walls.

I spent a lot of time at the house, initially by myself, just enjoying being there. Sometimes Zach or Henry or some of their friends would come with me or a close girlfriend would arrive by train for a weekend. Mostly I was by myself with my dog Peanut. It was during this time, after a couple of consecutive Christmas and New Year visits when the house filled with Zach and Henry’s friends, that the germ of an idea for the book took root.

Royden and Jake kept me supplied with fish and crabs and as the weather improved I spent more and more time at the Fish Store cooking, talking to locals and making notes. In the summer of 2002 I overlapped with Ben’s August visit, actually staying under the same roof – unimaginable during all those acrimonious years – with Henry. We all did our own thing during the day but in the evening we were very social, entertaining on a grand scale virtually every night. It was an opportunity for me to cook some of the dishes we’d once enjoyed together regularly. Old favourites such as smoky aubergine dip on garlic toast, Vichysoisse made with just-dug new potatoes, poached sea bass with tomato vinaigrette, and treacle tart with Jelbert’s ice cream. I introduced Ben to coriander-and-chilli-flecked crab bruschetta and roast haddock with tomatoes and borlotti beans, and he made his new signature dish of roast peaches with Amaretti. It was a good time for everyone and, without meaning to sound schmaltzy, brought the family together on a different level. Several more overlaps occurred with both boys and more old and new friends and a new, hitherto unimaginable, phase in our relationship began. The boys, of course, were delighted but a lot of people are still, several years later, scratching their heads.

All the grief and animosity that Ben and I went through in our different ways in the years following our separation and divorce has been put behind us. I wouldn’t say the ‘war zone’ has been forgotten, but at least we are now able to be friends and friendly with each other’s new partners.

It is the Fish Store that has made this possible.

In the middle of 2004, my daily recipe column for the London Evening Standard came to an end and I could no longer afford to run two homes. By then, Ben had gifted the house to the boys and I’d begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable with paying rent to my sons. After an emotional family powwow, it was decided to return to the old arrangement of letting the Fish Store to friends and friends of friends as a holiday let. The house was duly decorated and Zach, a graphic artist and designer, produced a lovely brochure. Whenever the place isn’t let and it fits in with the rest of our lives, both Ben and I, separately and sometimes together, hurry back to the Fish Store.