We had a wonderful trip, a seven-day trip, talking and sitting in the sun and so forth [with Bernard Leach]. And as we were approaching England, Leach said, "Do you have a place to live?" And we said, "No, we didn't." We hadn't worried about that. But Bernard had just separated from his second wife, which we had not realized, and Bernard was a person who could not stand to live alone. So he said, "Would you like to share my house with me?" Naturally we said yes.
In fact, [Bernard Leach] was several generations removed from us. At that time we were there, I think Alix [MacKenzie] and I were 26 and 28, and Leach was about 63, and we thought he was a very old man. I used to always want to help him up the stairs in the house for fear he'd fall. Actually, he was in excellent condition and lived to be much, much older than we ever expected.
In fact, when Bernard [Leach] would be called away to go up to London for something and we'd be living alone for a couple of days, we would dig into the storage areas in the house and we'd get out all the pots that we might not see in the course of our daily life, because we weren't using them in the house on a steady basis. But we found some fantastic pots in there tucked away, and we could look at them and examine them and handle them.
Bernard [Leach] had acquired many [Shoji] Hamada works. Some of them, it was interesting - first of all, Hamada worked in St. Ives for about four years before returning to Japan to start his own pottery. He had exhibitions in London, and if these exhibitions didn't sell out, the galleries were instructed to send the remaining work down to the Leach Pottery, where they would go into the showroom for sale. If Bernard saw one that hadn't sold that he really admired, then he would take it (he would buy it), and it would go into the house.
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