A Vineyard in the Dordogne - How an English Family Made Their Dream of Wine, Good Food and Sunshine Come True. Jeremy Josephs
witness even a single flake of snow.
But Anne had other reasons to be feeling particularly pleased with herself that morning: she was poised to produce a Christmas lunch which would make her the envy of family and friends alike. When she had popped an apple inside her huge 20lb turkey to both flavour and keep its meat moist, everything was ready. Then, sensing the enormous wave of excitement as her five-year-old son Hugh scrambled to unwrap his presents, while Corinne, fourteen months his junior, made short work of the paper covering hers, she paused to reflect on the silent miracle developing within her but over which she had not the slightest degree of control. Although delighted to have discovered that she had fallen pregnant for the third time, she was unaware that the sumptuous feast which she would shortly serve would also be providing nutrients and nourishment for a second little girl.
Anne Ryman had long been accustomed to the good life. Her parents, having excelled in the fiercely competitive world of heavy engineering in Scotland by specializing in the manufacture of cranes, had determined that their only child would have nothing but the best. They had headed south and settled in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, so that Anne’s childhood and teenage years were as remote in character from the grease and grime of Glasgow’s industrial heartland as anything could possibly be. Always cosseted and often indulged, she had enjoyed an endless round of classes in classical dance, horse riding and lacrosse. Although they possessed ample funds with which to finance their various projects, academic excellence had never been Isobel and Bennie Butters’s overriding goal when it came to their daughter’s upbringing. The priority was rather to ensure that she should emerge as an elegant and refined young lady. Everything revolved around that. And how better to achieve such an objective than to send Anne off at the age of seventeen to the select Swiss finishing school of Mont Fertile, on the banks of Lake Geneva, just outside Lausanne?
Not that being dispatched overseas so summarily had given Anne any qualms at all. Indeed before long the Butters’s daughter, freed from the constraints of their sometimes stifling control, was having the time of her life.
Anne had had a passion for cooking for as long as she could remember, so after Switzerland it seemed an entirely natural progression to study at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in London’s West End. The pretty débutante was one of sixteen students to enrol at the select school in Marylebone Lane that year, and one of just eight to graduate the following year. The school’s aims were clear-cut: it set out to teach its students how to cook first-class French food. With the English economy expanding rapidly in the late 1950s, Anne soon found herself recruited by the Glyn Mills Bank, situated in the heart of the City of London, where she was in turn issued with an equally unambiguous remit: to prepare and present stylish meals for the bank’s directors, either when lunching alone or keen to impress guests during more formal corporate entertaining. Responsible for the running of the bank’s large and fully equipped kitchen, and with one butler and two washers-up to assist her, Anne was in her element. Barely twenty, she was apparently able to organize and cope with anything. Asked by one of the directors to prepare dinner for sixty guests, she was not intimidated in the slightest. Having decided to serve lobster Newburg as the main course that evening, with its traditional wine and tomato sauce, she calmly ordered thirty lobsters and dealt with them herself when they arrived with their claws bound tightly in several large wooden crates which were stacked next to the kitchen’s sparkling white-tiled walls.
It was in October 1959, while working in the City, that Anne received an unexpected invitation to a dinner-dance at Wentworth Golf Club, in Surrey. Her cousin, Mike Dawson, a golfer who enjoyed a considerable reputation as a Scottish international, asked her if she might like to attend. Since he was engaged to be married, Anne knew very well that she had not been invited to accompany him that evening. What she did not know, however, was that her cousin happened to be a close friend of another golfing enthusiast, a highly eligible twenty-eight-year-old bachelor by the name of Henry Nicholas Ryman – Nick to all his friends.
‘I had imagined that there would be lots of people, that it was going to be a big party,’ she recalls. ‘But when we got there there was my cousin and his fiancée, together with another couple who were also engaged. The only one without a partner was Nick – and I soon realized that I was the partner for Nick. It was a blind date. I had no idea. It was all set up. I soon got over the shock of seeing us as a sixsome. Of course I had heard of the Ryman chain of shops. Nick and I chatted away and we got on very well. I was very naïve in those days though – much more interested in my horses than anything else.’
There were certainly no signs of any such reticence on the part of Nick Ryman. Quite the contrary. Here was a man who knew his mind.
‘When I saw Anne for the first time she nearly knocked me out. I thought to myself, what an absolutely beautiful girl. She was tall, blonde and blue-eyed – and with a sparkling personality to match. For me it was undoubtedly love at first sight.’
Unlike Anne, who continued to live with her parents in Gerrards Cross, obliging her to commute to the City, Nick had had his own flat for some six years in Dean’s Mews, a stone’s throw from Oxford Circus, in the heart of the West End. From there he had led the life of a wealthy young man about town, always nicely turned out in a smart suit and impeccable white shirt, and with not much more on his mind than business and golf. Like the woman he was happy to have been seated next to at the dinner-dance, he had enjoyed a rather privileged upbringing. For his twenty-first birthday present in 1952 his parents had bought him a two-seater Jaguar XK 120 in which, with hood down, wire wheels spinning and twin exhaust roaring, he would regularly roar through the Hertfordshire countryside en route to work with his elder brother Desmond, both young City gents tenaciously hanging on to their bowlers, determined not to lose them in the wind. All in all it was not a bad life. And yet Nick had come to tire of it. Even golf appeared momentarily to have lost its allure. With his thirtieth birthday beckoning, he had for some time taken the view that the moment had come to think of settling down. Having returned Anne to her parents’ home after their evening together, he harboured not the slightest doubt that she was the person he wanted to settle with. Three weeks later they were engaged.
Emotional and romantic by nature, Nick had popped the question at the Jolly Farmer pub in Chalfont St Peter, not far from Gerrards Cross. And as he did so he shared with Anne a dream which, for a number of years, he had chosen to keep to himself. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘we will buy a vineyard and live in France.’
‘This idea was most agreeable to me,’ Anne Ryman explains. ‘Because I had spent many holidays there, I could speak the language, and had always loved the food of France and the French way of life. But I still took Nick’s words with a huge pinch of salt.’
She was right to do so. Because of more immediate concern was the fact that Anne’s parents considered that matters matrimonial were proceeding altogether too hastily. While they were certainly in favour of the match, they nonetheless successfully pleaded the case for the passage of a modest period of time before the wedding ceremony should take place. But for Nick, who seemed to have been born with impatience in his genes, even eight months appeared an eternity. It was with some relief, therefore, that he finally heard the bells of St James’s Church ring out loud in Gerrards Cross on 8 June 1960. It was a typical English country wedding, with the reception held at Anne’s parents’ home in a specially erected marquee. Of course, there was only one candidate for the role of best man: the mischievous matchmaker Mike Dawson.
Similarly, there was only one choice of venue for their honeymoon. It had to be France. After spending one night in London, they loaded Nick’s latest Jaguar, a new grey XK 150S, on to the ferry at Dover and embarked upon a gastronomic tour of France.
‘I handed in my notice as soon as I got married,’ says Anne. ‘I had been very happy working at the bank, but that was the done thing in those days, at least in our circles. The wife didn’t work – that was unheard of. You had children, you were a lady of leisure – and that was it.’
If the wife’s responsibility was indeed to raise a family, Anne Ryman certainly did not allow the grass to grow under her feet. For precisely nine months and six days after she was wed she gave birth to her first child, a handsome, fair-haired boy named Hugh, whose mouth and nose, some said, appeared to be miniature replicas