The notion of gap years in a career was not totally invented by the present generation. After about two and a half years in our first jobs in Dublin, mine in Snaffles as a chef, Sile as a teacher in Basin Lane we decided to throw all up and head for the world outside while we still had the liberty to do so. We had a brief sojourn in France (and that’s another story) but ended up in London (which seemed quite as far away as Australia does today) in 1974 full of equal measures of fear and hope.

I had a letter of introduction to Margaret Costa, then cookery editor of the Observer and a godmother to my friend Stephen Pierce of Shanagarry. Her husband had a restaurant in central London called Laceys, very up market and very busy, they agreed to give me a try.
I lasted one night.
I blame neither them nor myself for that. My experience to date had been spotty in the extreme. I was badly in need of some further training before I could call myself a chef.
It was beginning to look like we would have to turn tail and try and creep back to Dublin and our former lives when we (i.e. Sile ) stiffened our backbones, gathered together our remaining funds and decided to give England a decent shot.
My restaurant guide bible at that time was (and still is) the Good Food Guide. We went through it with a fine tooth comb and picked out about 30 restaurants or small hotels where we felt we might fit in and learn something. We wrote them an honest letter, indicating that we were keen but little else and then sat back and waited to see if we would get any replies. Incredibly we got about 28 encouraging letters.
Most of them were very polite refusals, about ten were job offers of various sorts. Our confidence, which was just about at bottom, soared.
We picked out the two most tempting offers, one in Kent, one in The Lake District and made arrangements to be interviewed in both.
The Wife of Bath in the tiny village of Wye in Kent was our first interview.

The Wife of Bath Restaurant

When we got there the door of the restaurant was answered by a scrawny lanky man in a very torn jumper who I assumed to be some sort of a gardener. Of course he turned out to be the proprietor, Michael Waterfield.
After talking to him for a few minutes I knew that I wanted to work here more than anywhere else. This man was, and still is, the most gentle, unassuming man I have ever met in a kitchen. As proprietor of a restaurant, which was at that time recognised as one of the top ten in England, he had none of the characteristics of a prima donna chef.
Michael ran his kitchen with kindness and understanding, he never raised his voice, didn’t know how to be sarcastic, and still produced marvellous food. He became, and still to this day is, my role model of how a kitchen should be run. He had a job for me in the kitchen and one for Sile working in the little bar taking the diners orders.
The Wife of Bath was called that after the character in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales( we were very close to the Pilgrims Way) and also because Michael’s wife Hilary came from Bath.
Sile, being the sensible one insisted that we still should go to Grasmere to
the small hotel “Michaels Nook” where we had our second interview.
We had a long and torturous bus journey to Cumbria, and discovered when we got there that it would have been a most acceptable job but after meeting Michael Waterfield there was no competition.
We blew the last of our money by getting an express train back to London and arrived in Wye the following day, broke but looking foreword to our new life.
It didn’t disappoint us. We were to spend a most happy two years there.

As I said Michael was running one of the most renowned restaurants in England of the time. He had trained, like so many of his successful chef colleagues, under George Perry Smith in “The Hole in the Wall” in Bath.
Perry Smith is reckoned to be the man who translated the ideas of Elizabeth David into food for restaurants and was responsible for the huge raising of standards in catering in England, the reverberations of which can be felt in modern Britain’s culinary confidence and skill.

The Waterfield Family in the kitchen of The Wife of Bath
Pictured in Vogue Magazine in 1976

It was an exciting time to be in a kitchen in England, and Wye was a great village to live in.
The village was just a short train journey from Canterbury and about 90 mts by train from London. We actually could (and did) go to the theatre or cinema there and get the last train home. The Kent coast was about 30 mts away and Bob, the other chef, brought us to swim in Sandgate any hot afternoon when we were free.
Village life in England was a very new experience to us. For a long time we thought the villagers were cold and unfriendly. This was the time of the height of the IRA campaigns in England so we weren’t pushing ourselves forward anyway. By coincidence, at that time someone in Ireland sent us a copy of Hibernia magazine. There was an article in this written by an Englishman who moved to the west of Ireland who couldn’t get over how friendly (intrusive?) the natives were. The explanation was quite simple. English people thought it impolite to ask new comers about themselves, Irish people thought it impolite not to.
After 18 months in Wye our first daughter Caitriona was born and we were overwhelmed by the reaction of the villagers. They queued up at our door to bring presents, we bought absolutely nothing for the baby as everyone had hand me downs they were only too keen to give us.
We had been accepted and now they were only too happy to be friendly.
I doubt if we would have met with such kindness in a similar Irish village.
Thinking back on it all now I find it strange that I have no memory of ever being homesick while we lived in Wye. We made lots of friends there. Bob and his wife Janet were very kind to us and entertained us frequently and generously. We were much taken by the Waterfield family,
Michael kindly agreed to be Caitriona’s godfather, and Olga Wills, an Irish ex-pat like ourselves, agreed to be her godmother.
However it was the excellent , honest and simple food that is my best memory of our time in The Wife of Bath. While we were there Michael was updating his great Aunt, Janet Ross’s Italian cook book, “Leaves from a Tuscan Kitchen” for Penguin Books.

My very battered but much loved copy of “Leaves”

This wonderful little book on cooking vegetables was quite a revolutionary volume in the early seventies. It is amazing to see how it captures the simplicity of Italian cooking a full 25 years before the great success of The River Café.
The Wife of Bath was a very successful restaurant, we used to entertain the then prime minister Edward Heath quite often and on one historic occasion had Elizabeth David herself for lunch.

After two years we felt the time was right for us to come home so, in March 1977 we packed all our hand me downs together and sailed with Caitriona on the Inisfallen back to Cork. Our time abroad was only ever intended to be a few years, we knew that we wanted to bring up our children in Ireland but still we left Wye with real regret.