‘The furniture struck me as being Continental, the lighting was dim,the curtains heavy,and in the last two decades of his life, kept permanently down’.
Post Scriptum:
I was introduced to Gerhardie by Michael Ivens, on of the editors of a magazine called ‘Twentieth Century’, which only lasted for a few issues. and was a strange hybrid – part literary ( think ‘The Listener’), part political samizdat, co-edited by another Michael – Wynn-Jones, who was to marry his no-nonsense girlfriend, the soon- to -be cookery writer, Delia Smith. At this time, she was writing a daily recipe for the Evening Standard.
In fact, I remember eating one too many of her home-made profiteroles at a party round at MW-J’s flat in Elsworthy Street, NW3 on Wednesday, 17th September, 1969. It could well have been their engagement party.
Other guests at the party included : Dennis Hackett, Irma Kurtz,Gay Search and Rowan Ayres. A lot of the guests were part of the Nova magazine team, where Wynn-Jones, now only twenty-eight, had been a sub-editor.
Nova was a trendy,ground-breaking women’s magazine of the time. Experimental, daring and outre. It tried to capture – or perhaps create – the zeitgeist of the day. I kept my copies for decades, until they were thrown out.
