Mary Berry: Queen of puddings

Mary Berry is very polite and very proper. "Oh, I'd never put my elbows on the table," she says, when the Irish Times photographer asks her to lean forward. There are sandwiches and cakes prettily laid out on a silver tray. She takes a bite of a sandwich and wrinkles her nose. "It's a bit salty," she says, almost inaudibly.

Later she observes a slice of Battenberg and bemoans the trend of putting “violent colourings” in cakes, but she gives credit where credit is due. “Those are absolutely beautiful flowers,” she says, of the arrangement in the centre of the table – and she must really mean it because she says it again later.

Everyone pays attention to Berry's judgments. The doyenne of food and baking, she is, on the cusp of her 80th birthday, one of the best-known presenters on television. This is thanks to the huge success of the Great British Bake Off, although those who haven't seen that programme may know of her because of particular recipes. "I first heard of you through my niece and her lemon drizzle," says the photographer. She has had a long career.

“I’m almost a war baby,” says Berry. “I was very young in the war . . . There was a shortage of food so it was all quite different, but we had home cooking. Everything was used up. You never threw anything away. . . [Stale bread was] made into rum butter pudding or made into bread crumbs to put on the top of a fish pie instead of potatoes. Things are different now.”

She found her identity through cooking and baking. She hated school, but when she was 13 she had the option to do domestic science and “we had a new department and a very nice teacher. I didn’t like Latin or maths [but] cooking was just sheer joy.”

Her father, a Tory councillor and onetime Mayor of Bath, was strict. “I look at my own children and my grandchildren and they’re praised and they have so much time with their father,” she says. “And my son cannot wait to get home to them. I think my father couldn’t wait to get home to his wife, but I don’t know if he was so keen on us children.” Once he observed that a cake Berry had baked was as good as her mother’s. “I remember that to this day.”

At 14 Berry was diagnosed with polio and was in hospital for several months. “There was an epidemic,” she says. “It was far more gruelling for my parents than it was for me really, because you’re so ill you don’t realise what’s wrong with you . . .

“I don’t remember it so well except being very cold. I was in the orthopaedic hospital with TB people. TB people had to have fresh air and I was in the same ward and I remember being cold.

“It was nice to get better,” she says with polite understatement. The polio affected her hand, arm and spine, but she got on with things. She went to Bath Domestic Science College and got a City and Guilds teaching qualification before getting a job with the Electricity Board driving around the country teaching people how to use their new ovens. “It was terrific. We were all given a Ford Popular and if you’ve ever known a Ford Popular Patrick, it was like riding a horse. The luxury of cars today!”

Her journalism career began when she was working in PR in London and her “wonderful boss” gave her an opportunity to write for a magazine. “I said ‘well, I can’t really write. I can test recipes, but I can’t write. I failed English at school.’ She said ‘You explain things to me beautifully. Write as you talk and you’re a journalist’.”

Her first television appearance was, she thinks, on Farmhouse Kitchen, but she became well known appearing alongside Judith Chalmers on ITV's Good Afternoon. "It was Judy who taught me that you never think of how many are there [watching], you just think about that one person who you're showing." Later she says: "Whether I've got six people around me or so many millions, it doesn't make any difference."

She was now married to Paul Hunnings, a seller of antiquarian books. The day Hunnings went to ask for her hand in marriage, he drove over one of her father’s prize doves. “ He [my father] really loved animals and birds and things and Paul drove down the drive and went straight over one with his car. And my father opened the door and said all sorts of things to him ‘You silly fool,’ and he thought ‘That’s not the moment to ask for Mary’s hand’ and he came back the following weekend with some wine.”

They had three children but she always kept working. “At that time it was unusual,” she says, “but it was very important to me that, having worked really hard at something that I love, I wasn’t going to give it all up. Also there are plenty of people to take your place and in those days you wouldn’t necessarily get it back.

“It was very unconventional but I was determined. And I had good friends. I shared a nanny with a great girlfriend. It certainly was difficult. You want to be there on sports day and you want to be there for the children. I felt guilty most of the time.” And now? “Back then I did.”

In 1989, her middle child, William, a college student and budding rugby star, died in a road traffic accident. When I ask about this, her face softens but her voice stays clear and steady. “It is something you can’t predict,” she says, “and it is the huge sadness in your life, losing a child. But we were very lucky to have him. That’s how we look at it. And also he was 19. And I always thought if he’d been 23 or 25 he most likely would have had a wife and one child and they could have gone out of our lives.”

The day before he died, he came back from Bristol Polytechnic where he was in college. “We were all sat around the table and I remember him walking in and I had roast lamb and he said ‘Who’s coming?’ And I said, ‘It’s you. We’ve got you back.”

The next morning William went out in the car with his sister Annabel to buy a newspaper and the next thing Mary Berry knew, a policeman was at her door. Annabel was fine but William was dead.

“It took her [Annabel] years to get over it. And she’s now got a wonderful husband and very often you will hear either of them, Dan or Annabel, saying to their children ‘William would have done that’ and ‘William would have been better than you’ or whatever. And so he goes on. We always remember him.”

She is a patron of the UK Child Bereavement charity “because I know how they feel”. She talks with startling grace about how much worse it must be for parents who lose an only child or parents who lose children when they are far away. “You never get over it,” she says, “but you live with it. And really you’ve got to get on for your other half and your children and your parents. You can’t pine. You can’t just be miserable. In my opinion, you’ve got to be thankful that you had them.”

After William died, Berry chose to work at home more. She organised Aga-cookery workshops from her kitchen (she had previously produced an Aga cookbook) and she continued to make TV appearances and to write (she has written more than 70 books). In 2010, Anna Beattie contacted her about a new television programme – The Great British Bake Off. It was, she says, "right up my street" but she had qualms about judging bread, so suggested they get a second expert. Her producers suggested Paul Hollywood "and I'm so grateful, because we respect each other. We don't think alike, we've got different ways of going about things."

They had met before, he regularly tells her, although she doesn’t remember it. They tease one another. “Well, you know, he calls me his TV mother and all sorts of annoying things.”

The Bake Off has an audience of about 13 million and there are many franchised versions (She hasn't seen the Irish version; "Who's 'me'?" she asks). She is undaunted by nerves – apparently getting more nervous about "reading the lesson in church" – because of her co-stars and because "I know the subject of baking and I've just got to be fair, encourage them and try to say something nice even when it's pretty awful".

Does she ever feel she’s been too hard on anybody? “No. I’m honest.”

She thinks of herself as “a teacher”. She doesn’t want to be too cruel. She doesn’t want tears. She’s not sure what to make of angry male celebrity chefs. “I don’t know that that is necessarily the chef. Is it the television company wanting to hype it up and make bad language? I don’t know. In their real life are they swearing? I don’t know.”

The Bake Off is popular, she says, because people can imagine the bakers as their next-door neighbour and that the process is "totally authentic from beginning to end". What is that level of fame like? "There's nothing adverse that I can think about it," she says. "Except, the one thing, there are an awful lot of these selfie things.

“You know you can’t get on a plane or a bus or walk down the street without somebody coming and saying ‘Can I take a picture of you?’ and you think ‘What are they going to do with it?’ They’re going to put it on their Facebook or their going to Twitter them or whatever . . . when I’m taking the grandchildren somewhere. But I am grateful and I say ‘thank you’ and I try to say nice things, but I think ‘not again’.”

Selfies aside, she is happy to talk about food with strangers. “I’m always thrilled when someone [says] ’I made your lemon drizzle cake’.” She says she has never enjoyed life more than she does now and she uses the word “grateful” repeatedly throughout the interview. She is grateful to have her husband, children and grandchildren near. And she’s still learning all the time. The previous week on a holiday in the Canary Islands she discovered “black salt” and brought some home to use in her cooking.

Do things ever go wrong for her in kitchen? Because, I say, people would be relieved to hear it.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, it goes bad all the time,” she says. “You forget to push the button on the timer. You set it for 25 minutes for a Victoria sandwich or something – or you think you have and then there’s an awful smell. I’ve done a cake and because I’ve had to do the school run I’ve got to take it out of the oven and it sinks in the middle.” Of course, even then she knows what to do. “You cut it out and put fruit in.”