As World War II began, Patience worked briefly for the Foreign Office and had a passionate affair with Thomas Gray. They didn’t marry; however, their son Nicholas was born in 1941 and their daughter Miranda in 1942. Patience found Gray irresponsible, and separated herself from him. As a single mother, she was shunned, and she went to live in Sussex with her mother during the war. The cottage had no electricity, heating or hot water.
Patience discovered the beauty of the woods, and began collecting fungi. These broke the monotony of a rationed diet. Patience learned from her mother, who was a gardener and a good baker. They had fruit trees and could barter preserves with neighbors.
After the war, Patience rented space in Hampstead in London, participating in a vibrant artistic community. Everyone was poor and the area was somewhat decayed and wild. With Miranda, Patience walked a lot and spied on people’s gardens. She was working on freelance writing projects.
In 1953, Patience and Primrose Boyd submitted a plan for a cookbook entitled Plat du Jour. The timing was right. Rationing had finally relaxed and people were doing their own cooking. The book, published in 1957, reached a wide audience, even in America.
While Nicholas and Miranda felt their grandmother’s house in Sussex was home, Patience worked in London and traveled, taking advantage of offers to learn, about wine, cookery and craft. She was the women’s editor at The Observer for three years. She wanted to “bring Europe home to England.” To others she seemed “eccentric, refined, above the fray.” She often went back to the country, and she and her children walked for miles in the woods, collecting.
In 1958, Patience met Norman Mommens, a Belgian sculptor. He was married, but he and Patience were drawn to each other, writing many letters. In 1962, when Norman moved down to Carrara, Italy, to work in stone, Patience went with him.
They lived in and around Carrara until 1970, where Norman worked with other sculptors, coming back to London in the winters, spending a summer in Catalonia, and almost a year on Naxos, a remote Greek island. All the while they were looking for a place to settle, where there was good stone. Patience spent her time foraging, learning from the neighbors about plants and cooking. Neither of them wanted to live in England, which was drifting toward “consumer land.”
At last, they went down to Puglia, “the end of the world,” the heel of the boot that is Italy, and happened on a sheep ranch, called Spigolizzi. They camped in the house, basically a cow shed, while they bought it from five peasant families. It was set in a flowering wilderness, the macchia, and difficult to get to. Water had to be hauled, there were no doors or windows and certainly no electricity. “Ideas of comfort are replaced with moments of intangible poetry and delight,” said Norman. They made it habitable with the indispensable help of a neighbor.
Patience and Norman settled down to work, Norman at sculpting and Patience at silver and gold jewelry. They took time out for agricultural work when the season demanded it, bottling many liters of olive oil (from almost 75 trees!) and wine. Patience kept in touch with friends and family through voluminous letters, and when visitors came, she cooked.
Throughout their itinerant years, Patience had been collecting recipes and writing stories for a book which would eventually become Honey from a Weed. Editors loved the drafts Patience sent them, but they didn’t see that the book could be economically viable. Patience saw it as a handbook for the time to come, when people had an interest in self-sufficiency and were reacting against consumerism. It wasn’t meant to be polemical, but its themes overlapped with a growing interest in ecology.
Honey from a Weed was about wilderness. The recipes in the book detail everything Patience learned about foraging and cooking from her peasant neighbors. Patience was intimate with the surrounding macchia, loved to wander alone. She also didn’t want people to have romantic notions about their life. Fields were sprayed, a nuclear reactor was being considered for their area and people increasingly wanted “American kitchens”!
Alan Davidson, who had started Prospect Books, agreed to publish the book in a limited edition. Davidson and Patience worked on it by letter and then Davidson came down to the Salento for a week. Every detail was discussed. The book is full of drawings, has a detailed bibliography and an unusual format. Patience went to London for the book launch in November, 1986.
Honey from a Weed got a great reception, particularly from other food writers. It was pronounced “a classic” and “life-changing.” Patience was profiled in magazines and did many interviews. Both Norman and Patience were intimidating, “relentlessly natural.” After 30 years of work at Spigolizzi, Norman died in 2000, and Patience, of a stroke, in 2005.
Adam Federman’s biography of Patience, Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray [published 2017], is a wonderful introduction to her. As he says, Patience Gray’s book “is an antidote to modern life. Things are sacred.” In Honey from a Weed, Gray writes “poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance.” I am fascinated by the life of this woman, who gave up a rich cultural and intellectual life in London to live in the wild and isolated Salento. What she found, of course, was that the world came to her.
