Anna Margaret Haycraft (1932-2005), known to her readers as Alice Thomas Ellis, was a journalist, novelist, painter, Catholic polemicist, cookery book writer, fiction editor, mother of seven and a member of the Gloucester Crescent literary milieu. In the 1980s and 90s she was considered one of Britain’s finest novelists; now she is largely remembered only in Catholic circles, and not for her fiction but for her controversial defences of the pre-conciliar Church and her open criticism of Archbishop Derek Worlock of Liverpool – positions that have earned her the label of iconoclast and reactionary.
In the decades since the Gloucester Terrace household was dismantled, its conflation of home life, writing, painting and publishing has invited comparisons to the Duckworth milieu and the Bloomsbury Group. But Anna was neither Virginia Woolf nor Vanessa Bell. Although, like many good Catholics, she preferred the company of artists and inebriates to that of saints or peers, Anna was no political progressive but rather a defender of ancient moral codes disappearing with terrifying rapidity from the nation’s conscience.
Nor was she particularly interested in the personal satisfactions or creative triumphs of art: painting and writing were simply ways to spend the time allotted to her. One of the century’s most sought-after fiction editors, she was only in publishing because it was her husband’s calling; she would always claim that had he been a tailor she would have sewn his buttons. Anna’s indifference to any careerist identification with the numerous talents she commanded left one interviewer exasperated.
“You’re not a novelist, not a journalist, not an artist and not a cook. So what are you?”
“A Catholic,” she answered, without a second’s thought.
The one constant at the heart of everything Anna wrote was the home. Whether speaking from her “Home Life” column in the Spectator or through the voice of one of her numerous fictional female characters, Anna demanded that her readers take their place beside her in a household where for most of the 20th century the kitchen table bore the weight of endless manuscripts, canvases and cats, and provided food and conversation for the constant traffic of children, friends, neighbours, Religious and authors seeking publication.
For Anna, all work, all writing, emerged from the intimacy of the domestic world for which she was loved and renowned; she put the Catholic experience of home and the friendships of women centre stage within the public and masculine world of English literature and letters. And yet she was no feminist. On the contrary: she frequently asserted that the many joys and blessings in her life, or any claims she could make to what is now understood as female “emancipation” or “freedom”, were given to her by the traditions and doctrines of the Catholic Church, and most definitely not by feminism. “I believe that if forced to choose with whom I would prefer to spend a few hours, I would opt for football hooligans rather than face the malignant ferocity of a roomful of would-be lady priests and discontented nuns,” she said.
Every traditional Catholic feels in their blood a pull towards the Church’s two great vocations, the religious orders and family life. Anna knew both first hand. She was a happy pre-conciliar postulant in Liverpool until a spinal injury meant she had to leave her order. She married Colin Haycraft and settled into the London literary world.
In their different but complementary ways, conventual life and family life place the household at the centre of daily existence. Not the fantastical middle-class household of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with its angel at the hearth and cozy material perfection, but a working household in which all members labour, eat, talk and pray. Anna’s weekly column for the Spectator chronicled with superb irony the endless demands on the “housewife”. But of all the tasks she performed in this role, cooking was the most constant. Her novels, journalism and non-fiction works are everywhere informed by her knowledge and love of food.
In Anna’s novels, food and the manners surrounding its preparation and consumption are a source of class identity and ill feeling. The downtrodden Mrs Mason, forced to work as a charwoman, eats with a politeness that her bohemian employer, Irene, finds “grotesque”. Protected by money and breeding from the need to use a plate and napkin, Irene instead puts her elbows on the table, waves her fork to emphasise a point, and lets crumbs fall from her mouth.
Anna’s characters are divided into those who cook and eat lustily, leaving the stems on spinach and using all of an animal, and those whose fare is prim and affected or diminished in some way by the anxieties of the cook. (Is it healthier to boil the potatoes with peels still on? Which method of cooking best preserves nutritional content?)
Anna herself adopted the peasant style in her cooking, and spent the extra time it afforded her drinking and reading. She was a champion of real food, using lashings of garlic and olive oil when they were still foreign objects sniffed at by most English cooks. With tongue firmly in cheek, she even descended to the production of Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble, a cookbook for the housewife who has only 10 minutes to prepare a meal.
Natural Baby Food shows her in a more lavish mode, preparing meals to nourish and delight her many children and exhorting the nation to favour breastfeeding and homemade weaning food: advice that was, in 1977, still countercultural. Recipes from her cookbooks find their way into the novels, just as the fictional use of food as a dramatic device reappears in her polemical works as uncompromising censure. In Fairy Tale the young Eloise trades London for rural Wales in order to commune with nature. But nature does not care for her – in fact, it wants to consume her. Eloise ends up deep in the wood, smeared in mud and filth, feeding on human flesh. In Beware of Paganism, Anna warns readers that, at its heart, paganism isn’t the comforting goddess so beloved of the New Age; it is dark, old and dangerous: it gives licence to the appetites that will leave us rotting in sins of the flesh.
Anna knew that in both the religious house and the family home, the kitchen table ought to be counter-poised perfectly with the altar: earthly food needs to be real and sustaining and heavenly food properly refined by veneration. For Anna, the changes wrought upon her beloved Tridentine Mass by the reformist spirit following the Second Vatican Council were a desecration that turned the beauty and mystery of Christ’s self-sacrifice into a cheap, disgusting meal. “Once the priest, back to the congregation, faced outwards toward eternity, and raised the cup to the Lord. Now he and the congregation gaze on each other’s ugly mugs and the raising of the chalice seems more like a toast than anything else.”
For Anna, the new Mass and the “renewal” (a word she loathed) of the Church demeaned all Catholics, but especially the priest who, as he fussed around the altar preparing the Eucharist in both kinds for the congregation, looked “more like a napkin-flapping maître d’ than someone communicating with God”.
The first translation of the Mass into English, with its obsequious gestures to Protestantism, rendered the Latin description of transubstantiated wine, potus spiritális, to “spiritual drink”. For Anna, the “housewife”, the word “drink” was deeply suspicious, a “word that manufacturers use when they want to put one over on you … it is not the real thing”. But the purveyors of this new spiritual cuisine weren’t listening. For decades Anna took her fight to the closed doors of the liberal hierarchy, demanding: “Is it the Blood of Christ or not?”
It was a thankless task. She lost friends and jobs, and was harangued by letters and phone calls from heretics and atheists alike. When enough years had passed that her arguments weren’t considered quite so heterodox, it was suggested by one mainstream newspaper that she be counted among the “revered guardians of the nation’s conscience”. She spilt her pint. What, she asked, about those whose job it is to mind the gates? “I don’t mind doing my bit but I also have the housework to do,” she said.
Before she died, Anna completed Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring. It is a book about food but also about writing. It realises perfectly the wry everydayness that is Anna’s distinct “housewife” style, apparent to a greater or lesser extent in all her works. The reader walks with her from the kitchen to the bookshelf, where she rifles through the pages of Victorian recipe books before returning to the hob to stir the sauce and observe with arch acceptance the changes that have passed across the English table. Anna’s fiction and her journalism are similarly shaped: snatches of conversation overheard in the kitchen, copied hastily by the cook as she works. The narrative voice echoes Anna’s inner thoughts as she passes opinion on the many familiar voices rising up in polyphony over the table.
Making the everyday life of a woman into the stuff of fiction and non-fiction alike: that was Anna Haycraft’s great gift. She neither romanticised nor denigrated the life of the clever housewife and mother. In her company we can feel confident that the daily joys and drudgeries of family life matter, that they are not just a quiet and private pleasure but the stuff of literature, art, even of public life.
With Anna, the reader feels that the coming and going of friends and neighbours through the kitchen door, that the demands of feeding and dressing children, of dustbins and postmen and council rates, are present as much in the life of one’s own mind as they are in the Life of the Mind. For some feminists, freedom has meant turning away from family life and the conventional expectations of women; for Anna, it was precisely the conventional expectations that set her free.
Next week: how Anna Margaret Haycraft dealt with personal tragedy.
Bonnie Lander Johnson is a writer and academic.
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