Laura says: “Jim had this slightly rueful phrase. He talks about his dukey days, as in wanting to court dukes and duchesses and get invited to society balls.That’s when he was quite a young man in his 20s, but he sort of repents of that and he realises he doesn’t want to be on the edges of the aristocracy because, actually, the best parties were being held by the Bloomsbury set or the dancers around Diaghilev’s ballet Russe, or Lady Ottoline Morell, who was a great society hostess. She retains a similar attitude towards food. “I think for people who have had anorexia or battled through depression there is a little undercurrent of it their whole lives. I hope that what my book is about is finding ways to be happy and love life. To make a future for yourself that isn’t bound by the various restrictions the illness puts on you.” But the Tate certainly gave him cachet. So when someone grand or someone who was up and coming in the art world would come to the Tate, Jim might give them a tour. He also indefatigably went to every exhibition opening in London in the evenings after work. So,when Ben Nicholson or Barbara Hepworth or Henry Moore were young up and coming artists who nobody had ever heard of Jim was meeting them at private views and inviting himself around to their studios for tea and seeing their work literally as it came out from under the chisel or came off the easel.”

Her meticulously researched, sympathetically told account confirms what visitors to Kettle’s Yard know instinctively – living with Jim Ede must have been very trying indeed. LF: Part of the reason the book is called Ways of Life is because it’s very hard to say what Jim did or was. He’s not an artist, he’s an author, but he’s also a collector and a curator, and also a lecturer. He made his own way of life. He worked out what he wanted to do, but there’s no obvious path. I think it is true that it is incredibly hard to become a senior, or even junior curator today. There’s an expectation that you’ll have done an undergraduate and an MA and a PhD, and you’ll do an unpaid internship. Who can afford to do that when paying rent in London? To keep Kettle’s Yard just so, required “an absolute barnacle”, as Ede’s grandson Andrew put it, describing his grandfather’s tendency to tyranny. The correct temperature of marmalade was “an article of almost ‘biblical faith’”; he fussed about the lemon – “it had to be a pale lemon” – that sits in the house’s dining room with considered carelessness on a pewter salver, echoing the bottom-right dot of Miró’s painting Tic Tic hanging nearby.Freeman documents their long lives in fabulous detail. Some of her source material is an unpublished memoir Ede wrote in his 80s; some comes from the compulsive letters he wrote to TE Lawrence – whom he befriended through the Tate – and Jones, and the Nicholsons and the self-taught Cornish artist Alfred Wallis, who Ede helped make an art-world star. The gaps are filled with interviews with surviving friends and relatives, undergraduate visitors to Kettle’s Yard – everyone from Edmund de Waal to Nicholas Serota. Ede had pivotal walk-on roles in many more famous lives; the visitors’ book at his grand, unaffordable house in Hampstead records wonderful dinners and parties with Henry Moore and Graham Greene and Edith Evans and John Gielgud and Vanessa Bell. Here, he is given centre stage. He often did down his time at the Tate because I think he was rather unhappy as an employee,” says Laura.

But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line. In the 1950s, Jim Ede came to Cambridge to look for a stately home that he and his wife Helen could move into with their amazing art collection. But when funds did not stretch this far, they eventually settled on four almost derelict cottages that were to become Kettle’s Yard. Jim Ede in Kettle's Yard: Courtesy of Kettle's Yard Ede never thought not to join up – though how could he, “who believed in love, friendship, art and beauty” and who was enthralled by Helen Schlapp, beautiful daughter of a German professor? His ordeal in the trenches, however, meant at least that his stern parents would indulge his desire to lead an unconventional life: he might be a bohemian, they reasoned, but at least he was alive. He was in late middle age by the time he and Helen found the cottages that became Kettle’s Yard. But when he was young he was fun. He was a dandy, he was a man about town. He knew everyone there was to know in literary and artistic London in the roaring 20s. And the more I found about him, the more I realised how kind of contradictory he was, because I think the impression you get from Kettle’s Yard is of someone calm, serene, at ease with the world. And he wasn’t. I think he was a rather complicated, tortured, troubled soul in many ways.” Kettle's Yard: Jim's bedroom. Picture: Paul AllittHe [Jim Ede] left this house that people still make a pilgrimage to. I think we don’t necessarily die, so long as the books, the art, the places we create go on living” – Laura Freeman Ways of Life is a portable Kettle's Yard, an entrancing book of immense and curious beauty -- Ruth Scurr, author of Fatal Purity Visitors to these parties included Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Stanley Spencer, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, as well as TE Lawrence, Arnold Bennett, David Garnett and possibly Graham Greene.