Andrew Kay: The Hunger

Taking life by the horns and sucking out the marrow

I’m back in my kitchen and loving every minute of it. Cooking has been my passion since I was a small boy. I would spend hours in the kitchen either with my grandfather or mum and by a very early age I could rustle up a decent supper or a Victoria sandwich cake. By the time I hit my teens I was getting to be more adventurous – curries and stir-frys – which in the 1960s in Lancashire was pretty advanced, especially as most of us had never seen garlic or peppers by that point.
By the time I reached London and art school, Chelsea if you are interested, I was ready for anything. The intake of students consisted mainly of Londoners, quite a lot of posh girls and a smattering of us northerners.

I had very little experience of eating out and the experiences that I’d had were not great, by which I mean terrible. It was a time when orange juice was often offered as a starter and half a grapefruit bedecked with half a glacé cherry was seen as exotic.
London, and my new, sophisticated, cosmopolitan chums introduced to me to a world of real Chinese food, Indian restaurants, Polish cafés, Italian trattorias and French food. I was besotted, I gobbled it up both physically and mentally. I gorged myself in bacchanalian delights, fearless of what I might try. I ate offal in China Town, black sausage in South Ken, curries in Euston, bhel puri in Tooting and French wherever I could get it.
For the most part the French influences came from my personal tutor, a delightful and talented photographer called Lesly Hamilton, her surname gained in marriage to an English actor. Lesly has a young daughter, Severine, and back then I would go round to her Fulham flat and we would all sit in her kitchen and cook and chat and chat and cook. She taught me so much about art, about life and about eating. She made me laught too as her conversation was always peppered with the phrase ‘ooh la la’ and she would toss back her head of shiny black curls and laugh.

Lesly is as active today as she was forty years ago, travelling the world with her cameras, capturing the images that lie behind the images that lesser artists capture. She is as happy back stage at the opera as she is by the bins out back of a down town burger joint, or treading the early morning sidewalks with hookers and junkies.

Lesly opened my heart to food and also to the theatre. It was Lesly who took me to see La Grande Eugene and Theater Orkater, she introduced me to the Grand Magic Circus and took me to tea with the extraordinary Susannah York when she was performing Cocteau’s Le Voix Humaine in South London. She had very large hands I remember, a fact that I confirmed when I saw her playing in Quartet shortly before her far too premature death. Lesly was my mentor in an age when we didn’t have mentors. She was my muse, my inspiration and my driving force.

Today, when I am feeling lack lustre or feeble or simply lazy, I think of Lesly and imagine that as I am bemoaning my situation she is probably taking pictures of some gang leader and his hooker moll. It usually brings me back to earth with a well deserved bump. So my love of food and theatre and art were there – but Lesly gave me something far better, she gave me the appetite.