Mary Berry - Recipe for Life

In the words of my father, my birth caused no end of trouble. I arrived on 24th March 1935, two weeks before I had been expected, on the day that my parents, Alleyne and Margery Berry, had been scheduled to move house. Not at all convenient, as you can imagine! When my mother went into labour in the bedroom of their maisonette on Park Street in Bath, the removal men had to be sent packing and the disgruntled new tenants persuaded, by Mums doctor, to delay their own move. Years later, in his memoirs, my father would record my birth as follows: After coming to Bath, for a short time we lived in a converted half-house [maisonette] and Mary had the confounded cheek to be born there when she should have arrived a fortnight later. It was certainly not be the last time that my father would have cause to despair of his only daughters flightiness.

Thanks to the inconvenient timing of the arrival of Mary-Rosa Alleyne Berry it was a week behind schedule that my family moved into their new home at 5 Park Lane, opposite Baths Victoria Park. My father, who was a surveyor, had designed the house himself to accommodate his growing family, which as well as troublesome week-old me also included my five-year-old brother, Roger. My younger brother, William, would arrive four years later, and one of my earliest memories is of seeing him as a chubby baby sitting in a high chair in the kitchen at Park Lane, tied in with a loop of woolly blue fabric of the type used in school to show whether you were in the red team or blue team. In those days it was thought to be clever financial planning to have your children spaced so widely apart, but its not a bit good growing up as you have absolutely nothing in common with your siblings. Were the greatest of friends these days, but as a child I was just beaten up all the time by my big brother.