There are places where time seems to stand still, where everything belongs to an age you thought past and half-forgotten, but that you discover you can still breathe it in the air as it drifts to you from the objects, the very walls of the house, the garden…
On 8 September 2024, a party of the Circolo Berkeley in Lecce travelled to one of the deepest corners of Salento, a dozen kilometres from Santa Maria di Leuca, “Finibus Terrae”, Land’s End, to visit one of these time capsules and listen to a fascinating story.
Nicolas (Nick) Gray and his wife Maggie Armstrong were there to welcome us.
In 1970, two middle aged artists, the eminent British food writer Patience Gray and her companion (later her husband), the Flemish-born sculptor Norman Mommens, bought a “masseria” on the top of the “Serra di Spigolizzi”. They made it their final residence, after roaming all over Europe to find a place they could finally call home, and that could offer working space to both of them. To get there, they had taken the longest road.
Patience Jean Gray, née Stanham, was born in Shackleford (Surrey) on 31 October 1917. She studied at the London School of Economics and she travelled to Germany to study and, with her sister Tania, to Romania. While in Romania, in 1938, the Romanian Queen, Marie (born Marie Alexandra Victoria of Edinburgh), wife of King Ferdinand I, died and Patience wrote an article to commemorate her. The newspaper editor appreciated the article and was bewitched by the author. He started to court Patience so overwhelmingly that she and her sister fled to Balcic, on the Black Sea, on a small four-seat monoplane flown by a Romanian prince.
It was during the WWII years, times of hard rationing, that Patience Gray, who had moved to West Sussex with her children during the Blitz, got interested in foraging, studying and collecting edible wild herbs to supplement the diet of her family. Later she also developed an interest in mushrooms. Her observations and studies all came together in her first book, Plats du Jour (1957), written with Primrose Boyd and illustrated by David Gentleman. Originally published by Penguin (republished by Prospect Books in 1990), the volume offered a wide sample of European traditional cooking and soon became a vade mecum of thousands of British women. It was also the first cookery book published in Britain to include a full section dedicated to mushrooms. The following year, Patience started working at The Observer, as the editor of the newly created “Woman’s Page”. That same year, she met the sculptor Norman Mommens, a meeting that would change forever the life of both.
Norman Mommens was born in Antwerp, Belgium, on 31 May 1922. His father was Belgian and his mother was English. He studied at the School of Architecture and Visual Arts of Amsterdam with H. Th. Wijdeveld, but the Second World War and two years of forced labour during the German occupation of Belgium prevented him from continuing his studies. He was lucky enough to have an uncle in Germany who managed to have him assigned as assistant projectionist in a cinema. Norman had a passion for drawing, probably inherited from his father, an engineer at the Kromhout car factory (the manufacturer of the famous Minerva car). After the war, in 1949, he moved to England, where he married Ursula Darwin (great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin). Ursula (who was also related to the Wedgwood family of ceramists), was a potter and for some time Norman worked with her, in her pottery in Sussex, before travelling to Cornwall to follow his inclination for carving. Ursula introduced Norman to her friend Leonard Woolf, the English essayist and writer, and the husband of Virginia Stephen, better known as Virginia Woolf. Leonard Woolf commissioned Norman the “Goliath”, a marble statue for the garden of Monk’s House, the country residence that Leonard and Virginia had bought in Rodmell, East Sussex. The statue is still there. After he met Patience, Norman and Ursula separated, though they remained in good terms for the rest of their life. In 1961, Patience resigned from The Observer and she and Norman departed on a marble odyssey through Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades before settling on the Spigolizzi hillock, near Salve, at the southernmost tip of Apulia.
When you arrive at Spigolizzi, a Carrara marble statue, standing in front of the door of the masseria, greets the visitor, “LifeTime”, double faced, like Janus, one looking ahead (east) and the other looking back (west). According to Patience, the female face looks towards the horizon. The male is looking towards home and hearth. Nick says it could reflect the idea about two essential elements of artistic creation: inspiration and reflection.
Our guests ushered us in the huge barrel-vaulted room that used to be Norman’s studio. Nothing had changed since the days when Norman used to carve the local stone or paint. Some of his creations are still there. As you step inside, the colourful and hope inspiring “Hosanna” catches your eye on the opposite wall, next to a door opening into the garden. On the left are some of Norman’s "Seraphs". The walls all around are a gallery of posters, paintingsand memorabilia of a life lived in “Franciscan simplicity” as Bernard Hickey once said, but rich in art and creativity. The books by Patience were displayed on a table: Her first cookbook, Plats du Jour, Ringdoves and Snakes (1988), a memoir of the year that she and Norman spent on Naxos, her collection of memories, Work Adventures Childhood Dreams (1999), The Centaur’s Kitchen (2005, published posthumously, edited by Patience’s daughter Miranda Armour Brown) and, of course, her masterpiece, Honey from a Weed (1986). Honey from a Weed is a thesaurus of recipes and notes on life and customs in the Mediterranean that Patience collected in the course of more than twenty years of life in various corners in southern Europe. She wrote it here, at Spigolizzi, in her room overlooking “the lake of stone”, ticking, sometimes furiously, on her Olivetti 22, a counterpoint to Norman’s hammering and chiseling next door or in the garden. The book was reviewed by Ed Behr in The Art Of Eating as “one of the best books that will ever be written about food.”
Nick summarized Norman and Patience’s life and work in a most cheerful way, interspersing amusing anecdotes. He certainly has a gift as an entertainer. He and his wife, English journalist Maggie Armstrong, have spent most of their life on barges, carrying all sort of goods along the canals and the rivers of France, Belgium and Holland. Nick explained the mysterious stance of Norman’s seraphs. During the war, the place where Norman had been sent to work in Germany was heavily bombed. A woman and her child had been trapped under the rubbles of a collapsed house and Norman and several other people worked hard to try to save them. Both mother and child were dead when they found them, but the image of a dozen men lifting a huge architrave high over their heads with their bare hands, so that others could dig among the wreckage, would remain stamped in Norman’s memory. In his imagination, those men became seraphs with their wings spread high on their back.
Norman exhibited his sculptures in Carrara, London, Matera and Casarano. The catalogue of his creations, edited by Ada Martella, was published and celebrated in an exhibition at the Convento di Santa Maria degli Angeli (a former Franciscan monastery) in Presicce (“L’Archivio Disvelato”, 2019).
Our group soon dispersed, and conversations scattered, into the other rooms, where other works by Norman and critical essays on Patience, including Adam Federmans' biography, Fasting and Feasting, The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray (Prospect, 2017), were collected, and into the garden. In the kitchen, the “Guardian Spirit” still presides over the preparation of food. The “Moon Fool” that Norman had painted in earth colours on the whitewashed barrel vault, and the “Sirena Salentina” look down at you, telling you are in a safe haven. The large table, a slab of marble supported by elegant wrought-iron stretchers, the ample fireplace with room for smoking meat and salami, the baskets hanging from the wall, the essential crockery, are reminders of the laborious life in the fields of the Salentino peasants of old. From England, Patience brought along her cutlery: silver spoons and forks, with her grandfather's monograms inscribed at the end of the handle, and knives with Sheffield blades and bone hilts.
For long spells, especially in spring and autumn, Norman and Patience were real peasants in the morning, from dawn until midday sometimes, and artists for the rest of the time. They patiently cultivated the field opposite the house, on the other side of the road, and planted beans, chickpeas, broad beans, and all the vegetables they used for their daily consumption, in circular rows around the “aia”, the ancient threshing floor. One of the flat blocks delimitating the “aia” was missing and Norman inserted his giant herma there, the imposing statue of Carrara marble, “Anatolì,” a name that Norman dreamed one night as his own Greek name while in Naxos. “You need a Greek name,” the islanders, who choose “Ipomenì” for Patience, had told them. So they both had one.
Norman and Patience soon became the enthusiastic guardians of the remains of the ancient civilization of Salento, the “masserie”, the often abandoned elegant residences of the local gentry and the rustic structures scattered in the countryside and, of course, the maquis. Patience had developed a unique ability to spot flint fragments and tiny Neolithic tools and arrowheads. During the last years of his life, Norman devoted himself mainly to drawing and writing. In 1991, he privately published a volume, Remembering Man (Leucasia Edizioni, Presicce), in which he exposed, in a dense prose, sometimes hermetic, his reflections on art, creativity and the sense of man in the universe.
Patience kept an extensive correspondence with relatives, friends, artists and colleagues scattered all over the world. Sometimes she would send them one of her “fascicoli”, slim essays on life at Spigolizzi and elsewhere, and memories of people and places. She collected many of them in Work Adventures Childhood Dreams (Leucasia Edizioni, Presicce 1999).
In the “aia”, Anatolì is on the western circular section of the threshing floor, and it faces east. Three stone blocks, inserted upright along the circumference, mark the three other cardinal points, an indispensable reference for the peasants who needed to know the direction of the wind when they tossed the mixture of corn and chaff in the air during threshing. The place has a particular charm at dawn, when the herma is resplendent under the rising sun.
We had a light lunch in the garden, under the eyes of the “Moon Goddess” emerging from the thick vegetation of flowers and Mediterranean scrub. Our guests had prepared bread, cheese, “tarallini”, and two spicy and tasty dips: a “tapenade”, a sauce of crushed anchovies, tuna, olives, capers and egg, and a fish paste, sea bream cooked in court bouillon, skinned, boned and ponded in a mortar with aïoli. As Nick told me, in deference to the Anglophiles, the secret ingredient in the aïoli was a teaspoonful of quintessentially British Colman’s Mustard Powder, which both thickens the mayonnaise and adds a bite. And, ça va sans dire, jugs of wine. We had brought our basket, too: “focaccia”, bread rolls, a tray of almond sweets and more wine.
A gazebo provided some shelter form the fierce sun. Once, on that very same spot, there was a huge fig tree, under which Norman and Patience would sit with some intimate guest at a wooden table and have dinner during the summer nights, by candlelight, since they always refused to have electricity installed at Spigolizzi. Inside the house, Aladdin paraffin lamps provided illumination. Only during the last few years of Patience’s life (Norman had died on 8 February 2000), Nicolas and Maggie persuaded her that a small concession to modernity was not so serious an offence to the spirit of the place and the masseria was illumined by electric light for the first time. The novelty also allowed the introduction of a fridge. Patience looked with contempt at the machine and commented, turning towards Nick, “You ruined my kitchen!” Patience died at Spigolizzi on 10 March 2005. She rests at the cemetery of Salve, not far from Norman’s tomb.
The fig tree has long disappeared. Nicolas and Maggie had to cut it down because it threatened to demolish part of the house. In 1970, right under that tree, the renowned American experimental musician and composer Alvin Curran had composed “Under the fig tree,” dedicated to Norman and Patience, and the magic of Spigolizzi.
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