Down the Kitchen Sink by Beverley Nichols

The official author of my quarantine has been Beverley Nichols. Some have been great and others not-so-great – and then there’s Down the Kitchen Sink (1974), which combines high highs and – well, no lows, but definitely things I had less interest in. Its title is an homage to his famous book Down the Garden Path – and it is subtitled ‘a memoir’, but it is really only half that.

The opening is a typically Beverley concoction of nostalgia, dry wit, and whimsy:

It was an evening in early spring and underneath the Eros statue the steps were piled high with the gold of primroses and the purple of violets, which the flower-girls were selling at tuppence a bunch. In and out of the traffic, like figures in a ballet, darted the newspaper boys. selling sheets which have long since fluttered into oblivion – the Westminster Gazette, which printed on green paper and The Globe which was printed on pink; and The Star, whose pages needed no colour, for they sparkled and crackled with the brilliance of its prose. All at a penny a piece.

[…]

I strolled thoughtfully across Piccadilly Circus – (in those days, the early twenties, one could still wander about London like a gentleman, without courting the risk of instant death) – counting my blessings. They were many. I was twenty-five, and almost aggressively healthy. I was wearing a new suit in the latest fashion, with very wide trousers, which were flatteringly reflected in the plate glass windows. I was glowing with the fires of the latest thing in cocktails – the ‘Sidecar’. I had consumed it in the long bar of the Trocadero – an enchanting grotto of delight, all gold mosaics and nouveau art, which should have been painted by Sickert, but never was. And only that morning I had corrected the proofs of my first entry in Who’s Who. Not a very long entry, merely a couple of lines. But something inside me, probably the ‘Sidecar’, which was made of equal quantities of brandy, Cointreau and lemon juice, persuaded me that as the year went by, it would grow considerably longer. Which it did.

Yes, I should have been very happy, but I was not. For at home somebody was waiting for me whom I dreaded to meet.

The person whom Nichols was waiting to meet was Gaskin – the man-servant that Nichols had just installed into his small house in a backstreet of central London, which he almost convinces us was not a sign of affluence at the time. Gaskin was only a few years younger than Nichols, and recently removed from his upbringing in Norfolk to this situation. But he is entirely at ease, in a way that Nichols is not – or professes not to be, at several decades’ distance. Gaskin seems to know what is expected in the master/servant relationship, and gives subtle approval when Nichols gets it right (and censure when he gets it wrong). He is preparing the first meal – having rejected the fish at Fortnum and Mason, he has found a good fish shop down the road. The proprietor came from Norfolk. Nichols quickly learns that, wherever they go, Gaskin will find a network of people who are from Norfolk, and trusts them.

This first half of the book was lovely. Nichols talks about the wonderful meals that Gaskin has produced at different times, and writes about them with a dizzying rapture. I enjoy that when it was about paradise-like desserts, say, but there was rather too much about meat and fish for this vegetarian to enjoy reading it. No, what makes the first half of Down the Kitchen Sink so wonderful is the portrait of Gaskin. As Nichols and Gaskin spent several decades together, their relationship was one of the most long-lasting in Nichols’ life. Gaskin emerges from these pages as a wonder in the kitchen, but also a delightful mixture of competence and wonder. The way in which he inveigles a kitten into the house filled my heart with joy.

The portrait ends, alas, with Gaskin’s death. And the pages where Beverley Nichols describes discovering that Gaskin has long hidden his alcoholism are beautifully, thoughtfully written. It’s wonderfully done, and I have seldom been as moved by the testament to a friendship – which was never an equal friendship but, in Nichols’ eyes at least, no less to be treasured for that.

The second half of Down the Kitchen Sink is less enjoyable, for me. It purports to be Nichols learning to cook for himself – and I thought it might be the sort of funny, self-deprecating narrative that Nichols is so good at. There are moments of that, and understandably, because Nichols is shockingly ignorant about everything in the kitchen. But before long it becomes more of a collection of recipes. Perhaps that is what Nichols had been commissioned to do, and he twisted it away from that commission into something more enjoyable. But by the final sections, it’s just him describing recipes – with a little context, but not much more.

If I wanted to recreate any of these dishes, then it would perhaps be a delight – but the 1970s are not renowned for their culinary excellence in the UK, and Beverley Nichols doesn’t seem to have opted for vegetarian dishes for very long. I wanted humour or poignancy, not instruction.

So, very much a book of two halves. And I shan’t re-read the second half. But I feel like I may well go back to that funny, touching delight of a first half.