A pin-up for Scottish pensioners

‘I’m a pin-up for Scottish pensioners’

Mary Wakefield

8 September 2007

Clarissa Dickson Wright speaks her mind

Fan exits, clutching book, Clarissa orders another Orangina, and so we talk about drink. ‘After my mother died, I just took off, boozing, and in the beginning it was lovely,’ she says. ‘I was still good-looking and I had lots of money. But alcohol takes away ambition, you know, and it sure as hell took away mine, and I stopped doing law and then the law stopped doing me… And then I got into cooking!’ Her face brightens. ‘And I discovered that I had a natural talent. I began to cook for clubs in London, and I think I saw myself as one of the great club queens, you know, sitting on my bar stool!’ I do know. Clarissa holding court: it’s a terrifying thought. I look gratefully at the Orangina.

By the mid-Eighties Clarissa was a very, very serious drinker. Her mother had died and so had her great love, a banker and bon viveur called Clive; she was between homes, and downing epic, unfeasible amounts of booze to keep the sadness at bay: ‘Half a bottle of vodka to get out of bed,’ she says, totting up. ‘Two bottles of gin throughout the day, beer and wine with meals and anything else I could find!’

So how on earth did she survive? It’s not absurd to call it a miracle.

‘The moment I knew I had to sober up, I was cooking for a family called Greene,’ she says. ‘I forgot to keep an eye on the jam and it bubbled over onto the tiles, where it stuck fast. I was on my knees trying to clean the jam off, shaking and crying and though I hadn’t prayed for years, because I was on my knees, I said: “Please, if you’re up there, I can’t go on.” Nothing happened, of course, but when I look back, I know my recovery began at that moment. Take it or leave it,’ she says.

I take it. Despite all the talk of sex and booze, Clarissa has a sort of innocence about her which makes it easy to believe that there’s some exhausted angel deputed to keep hauling her back from the brink.