Luard Elisabeth - My life as a wife: life, liquor and what to do about other women

ELISABETH LUARD is an award-winning food writer whose work includes European Peasant Cookery (published in the US as The Old World Kitchen, a New York Times benchmark cookbook of the twentieth century), The Food of Spain and Portugal, European Festival Food, Sacred Food and The Latin American Kitchen. She has also written a couple of doorstopper novels including Emerald (WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award), and a trio of memoirs-with-recipes including Family Life (Guild of Food Writers Book of the Year 1997), and was awarded the Glenfiddich Trophy for Food Writing in 2007. She contributes regularly to national newspapers and magazines including the Telegraph, Daily Mail, Country Living and the Oldie and is currently Director of The Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery. Brought up in South America, Spain and France as a member of a diplomatic family, married for forty years to the late Nicholas Luard novelist and founding father of the satire movement of the 1960s she brought up their family of four children in a remote valley in Andalucia, where she developed her early career as artist and illustrator. She still travels widely, continues to use sketchbook and watercolours as a way of recording images and recipes, and now happily entertains her grandchildren in a remote farmhouse in the wilds of Wales. A Cooks Year in a Welsh Farmhouse is her most recent book.

COOKBOOKS

EUROPEAN PEASANT COOKERY
THE PRINCESS AND THE PHEASANT AND OTHER RECIPES
THE BARRICADED LARDER
EUROPEAN FESTIVAL FOOD
THE FLAVOURS OF ANDALUCIA
COUNTRY COOKING
SAFFRON AND SUNSHINE
SACRED FOOD
THE LATIN AMERICAN KITCHEN
THE FOOD OF SPAIN AND PORTUGAL
CLASSIC FRENCH COOKING
FOOD ADVENTURES
TRUFFLES
CLASSIC SPANISH COOKING
SOUP GALORE
RECIPES AND RAMBLINGS
TAPAS: CLASSIC SMALL DISHES FROM SPAIN
A COOKS YEAR IN A WELSH FARMHOUSE

MEMOIRSWITHRECIPES

FAMILY LIFE
STILL LIFE

NOVELS

EMERALD
MARGUERITE

Love, Liquor and What To
do About Other Women

ELISABETH LUARD

First published by Timewell Press 2008

This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright Elisabeth Luard 2008

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In memory of my father
Wing Commander Richard Maitland Longmore,
MBE, DSO, DFC.

(1917-1943)

THANKS ARE DUE TO MAGNUS LINKLATER AND THE TIMES FOR permission to include Nicholas Luards obituary. And for advice and support over the years to: my sister-in-law Priscilla White, sister Marianna Falconer, best friend Venetia Parkes, Christopher and Rosemary Logue, Michael and Victoria Hastings, Elspeth Vernon and Holly Rumbold (style-queens of Hollywood Road), Humphry and Katherine Wakefield, Richard and Virginia Storey, Milet Delme Radcliffe, Hugh Millais, Dominick Elwes, the great and unforgettable Miriam Rothschild, Denis and Jenny Mollison, Magnus and Veronica Linklater, David Grenfell and (late, lamented companions in the desert and elsewhere) David Towill and Bobby Hesketh. And most particularly to my good friend, broadcaster and writer Jen Skiff, recipient and saver of emails during the worst of times, for encouragement to share bad days as well as good. To cousin Sue Casacia for introducing me to the American branch of my mothers family. To my late aunt Janet Worth for stories of my fathers family. To Drusilla Beyfus for supplying me with a reason to write this book: a copy of her interview with Nicholas and myself published in The English Marriage in 1968. To my agent Abner Stein for far more than I could ever list. To publisher Gerard Noel for allowing me to write the book I wanted to write, and copy-editor Chris Parker for care and attention when undeniably needed. And above all, to my children and grandchildren for tolerance and unconditional love.

Obituary in The Times, 28 May 2004, by Magnus Linklater

NICHOLAS LUARD

Impeccable subversive who kicked against the
establishment and then protected the environment

IT WAS CHARACTERISTIC OF THE EX-PUBLIC SCHOOL, OXBRIDGE-educated generation which launched the satire movement in Britain in the 1960s that Nicholas Luard, who was at the heart of it, should have been himself a Wykehamist, former Guards officer and Cambridge graduate. Behind these impeccable credentials lurked a fully paid-up subversive.

Satire in those days was daring in a way that is now hard to comprehend. The Establishment Club in Soho, which Luard co-founded with Peter Cook, mocked every convention of a very conventional period. As he himself said later: Authority was everything: you disobeyed any form of it, from a schoolmaster to a doctor, at your peril.

Yet, on the stage of the tiny, smoke-filled former strip-club in Greek Street, no holds were barred. Lenny Bruce, the American comedian, poured out his corrosive lampoons. John Bird, John Fortune and Eleanor Bron dissected class, sex and religion. The cast of Beyond the Fringe Cook himself, Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett experimented with ideas more daring than anything they could put on in a conventional theatre. The poet Christopher Logue wrote lyrics for the jazz singer Annie Ross. Upstairs, Gerald Scarfe exhibited merciless cartoons of political figures.

Luard was never a performer himself, but he could and did help to turn ideas into reality: during the brief satire boom, he funded and ran The Establishment, went on, with Cook, to buy Private Eye, published an arts magazine, invented poetry posters with Logue, opened another social club, and ran a production company which at one point employed 81 people in his cramped Soho premises. Richard Ingrams described him as the Brian Epstein of the satire boom the only satirist to wear a suit.

But Luard was not much of a businessman. Members of The Establishment were offered 50 credit, and some fell into the habit of cashing cheques for 50 at each of the bars every night of the week. There were also demands for protection money from gangsters. When The Establishment closed, and after he had sold his interest in