It was half past eleven in the morning on 29 May 1953 when they unfurled four little flags on a string tied to Tenzing’s ice axe – the Union Flag, and alongside it the flags of Nepal, India and the United Nations, just seven years old. Only Hillary took photographs for a quarter of an hour – so there are none of him at the summit – and they started down.
Tenzing, the Nepalese Sherpa, had climbed the sacred mountain, which had defeated everyone else. He said that in the villages they asked him if he had seen the gods above the clouds. Lord Shiva, perhaps, for that was where he lived. No, said Tenzing, but he had felt a calm that inspired him, and did for the rest of his life.
They took their news down. Morris described seeing Hillary in the half light: ‘Huge and cheerful, his movement not so much graceful as unshakably assured, his energy almost demonic. He had a tremendous, bursting, elemental, infectious, glorious vitality about him, like some burly, bright diesel express bounding across America.’
And then the telegram. ‘Snow condition bad,’ he wrote, which meant ‘Everest climbed.’ In the rest of the message, which said the assault had been abandoned until the weather cleared, he used the code words agreed for Hillary and Tenzing. The rest of Fleet Street, squatting in Kathmandu, swallowed it. The Times had its scoop and on the morning of the Coronation it broke the news. The bells rang out for them.
An answering telegram reached the expedition that day, addressed to Sir Edmund Hillary, the new Queen’s first Knight.
He was a hero for the rest of his life. There were expeditions to both the poles, up the Ganges, back to the Himalayas, but above all for Hillary there was a commitment to the Nepalese people whom he’d come to know on the great climb. The Trust he established built two dozen schools; hospitals, bridges, airfields. He was celebrated as a humanitarian, and never lost the straightforwardness of the man who said he had always hated the ‘danger part’ of climbing and thought that the greatest of all feats was the comradeship that built up in the lonely places. ‘The giving of everything you’ve got,’ he said, ‘is really a very pleasant sensation.’
Edmund Hillary, adventurer, scientist and beekeeper, died in 2008, aged 88.
He once said that in honouring explorers from the past people should remember that it was ‘still not hard to find a man who adventures for the sake of a dream … or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching. Not for what he may find.’ That was the spirit Hillary tried to bring to his time.
When Elizabeth David began to write her first book for the British on the food of the Mediterranean, her readers were still disentangling themselves from wartime rationing. Olive oil was something you bought at the chemist, with a warning on the little bottle: ‘For external use only.’ She was going to raise their sights, even though she must have known that very few of the home cooks to whom she was addressing herself would have the inclination, let alone the appetite, to follow her instructions for stuffing a whole sheep. Yet that is what they might have done on the Greek island where, as a young woman, she had decamped at the end of the thirties with her married, older lover and where she consummated a life-long affair with food.
Not food as part of a dull household routine, but food as a creative force. More than that, food as the emblem of people’s lives: the thing that told you everything about them. When David published French Provincial Cooking in 1960 she told her readers of how she’d found a tattered book of recipes at the Sunday market in the cathedral square of Toulouse which exuded ‘a certain atmosphere of provincial life which appears orderly and calm whatever ferocious dramas may be seething below the surface’. And those hidden dramas were as interesting to her as the calm. Delving into the cuisine of the south of France, she gave her readers a sharp nudge: ‘It does not do to regard Provence simply as Keats’s tranquil land of song and mirth. The melancholy and the savagery are part of its spell.’
For those brought up with the homely straightforwardness of Mrs Beeton and successive generations of advisers on fruit cakes and steak and kidney pie, wholesome broth and sticky puddings, savage melancholy was probably new in the kitchen. But by the end of the fifties David had brought a new spirit to the table. She soon cast a spell on imitators and disciples enough to ensure that she become the first of the modern British cooks. Without her, it’s probably safe to say, there would have been no Delia Smith, no Jamie Oliver, none of the excitements of the cooking that became a celebrity industry and one of the most unexpected social changes of our time. She made it possible to speak of a culture of food without seeming pretentious or odd, though if she’d thought that spiky boys would one day be queuing up when they left school in the hope of becoming chefs, she would have been mightily surprised.
Her natural milieu was a privileged one. She came from money and whizzed around Europe with an abandon that only her class could afford. Yet by the time she’d got to know France and Italy and Greece, say by the time she was in her mid-thirties after the war, she had conceived a zeal that turned her into a kind of evangelist for something better for everyone; something that the English table as she’d known it had lost. She had lived with a family in Paris and Normandy whom she realized were ‘exceptionally greedy and exceptionally well-fed’ but learned the family cuisine of France at their table, as spectacular in its own way as haute cuisine of the Escoffier sort, and she’d also breathed in the smell of fresh lemons in the south, understood the sensuality of food, and realized – as she said – that there was nothing more alluring than the sight of a nearly ripe fig waiting to be pulled from its tree at dawn.
To readers reared on boiled beef and carrots (both overcooked, of course), she was a revelation. On Mediterranean food in 1950: ‘The ever recurring elements in the food throughout these countries are the oil, the saffron, the garlic, the pungent local wines; the aromatic perfume of rosemary, wild marjoram and basil drying in the kitchens; the brilliance of the market stalls piled high with pimentos, aubergines, tomatoes, olives, melons, figs and limes; the great heaps of shiny fish … the butchers’ stalls are festooned with every imaginable portion of the inside of every edible animal (anyone who has lived for long in Greece will be familiar with the sound of air gruesomely whistling through sheep’s lungs frying in oil).’
To many readers an aubergine was a strange, foreign thing – was it a fruit or a vegetable? … perhaps neither – and David was talking to a generation that knew little of pasta, let alone the spices and the food of the East. But there was actually nothing at all foreign about eggplant: it had just somehow been forgotten in Britain. Although she was an explorer who brought news of the exotic from distant places, her real passion – and maybe her legacy – was the cooking of home. For she wanted nothing so much as the rediscovery of what had been lost, and to remind anyone who wanted to cook well that there was a history and a heritage in the gardens and fields of her native land that deserved to have life brought back to it.
So when she published Summer Cooking in 1955 she started with regret about the ‘hypnotic power’ of the deep freeze and a plea for the rhythm of the seasons to be understood and respected. She had seen people in her local greengrocer’s crowding round the freezer to pay four shilling for a few strawberries in a cardboard box when they could have had seven perfectly ripe, sweet oranges for a quarter of that. And she wrote, with a knowing sigh: ‘As soon as strawberries and raspberries are in season they will be clamouring for frozen pineapple and cartons of orange juice.’ That could have been written half a century later, because the battle goes on, with the same forces still trying to abolish the natural calendar of the table.
Some of the recipes in that book are hymns to simplicity, a few sentences only. Yet David’s purée of sorrel, or mint chutney or polpette of mutton, or crab mousse, come out perfectly, and cooks have found them as pleasing to read as to eat. Chefs like Simon Hopkinson have talked about going to bed with the books to bring on the happiest of slumbers. She passes on classic recipes without alteration – one begins ‘skin, behead and wash some small eels’ – with