Writer turned her kitchen into NW1’s literary salon

Novelist Alice Thomas Ellis

FOR some 35 years Anna Haycraft, better known as the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis, lived in a romantically crumbling house in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town.
In 2001 she left NW1 for her native Wales where she lived until her death last week. But her ghost must surely linger within the walls of the house that was so inextricably bound up with her personality. They shared a sort of Gothic glamour which once encountered, will never be forgotten.
To visit her, one had to descend to the basement, then penetrate a damp forest of drying laundry. Within the shadows of the cavernous kitchen, Anna would hold court, leaning against the Aga, cigarette in hand, her huge dark eyes a mixture of mischief and tragedy.
She and her husband, the publisher Colin Haycraft, were famously hospitable, and their kitchen was a meeting place for the literati of NW1 – Beryl Bainbridge, Claire Tomalin, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and the rest.
Anna had met Colin in 1956 when she was working in a delicatessen in Chelsea.
Born in Bangor, she had gone to Liverpool School of Art, and, perhaps more importantly, converted to Catholicism. Her faith was of paramount importance to her for the rest of her life.
Her traditionalist views became more entrenched with the years, and in 1996 her article in the Catholic Herald, denouncing the more liberal views of Archbishop Derek Warlock provoked outrage in religious circles.
After her marriage, she and Colin ran the publishing firm Duckworth largely from home in Gloucester Crescent – he in charge of non-fiction, she of fiction.
They also produced seven children, two of whom died young, her son, Joshua, in his teens in a tragic accident in 1978.
When asked much later if the loss still affected her, Anna said: “You never, ever get over it.”
Despite the lightness of touch in her novels, there is in them a leitmotif of sadness, as well as all the strands of her own character: wit, elegance, mischief and intolerance.
Her first book, The Sin Eater, was published in 1977 to considerable acclaim, and many others followed, notably the wonderfully funny The Birds in the Air, and The Clothes in the Wardrobe.
She co-wrote a cookery book, Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble, wrote for The Spectator and more recently, for The Oldie.
She deplored what she saw as the vulgarity of modern life, and took a humorously bleak view of the future.
She was apt to say: “Nothing for it, darling, let’s just sit in the garden and get pissed.”

RUTH GORB