Her figure may suggest gluttony, but it is drink not food that dominates the life of Clarissa Dickson Wright, the sensible, scholarly one of television’s Two Fat Ladies (the other was the late, altogether more eccentric Jennifer Paterson). Eating features in Clarissa’s memoirs only sporadically, as a pleasant business – a delicious cold sausage she consumed at a picnic aged three; her fondness for cardoons; her mother’s roast beef; a crab risotto she devoured at a hotel while filming the series that made her famous. By contrast, her demons are all to do with alcohol.

As a child in the 1950s, Clarissa knew that she must never touch the jugs of vodka and orange juice with which her brilliant surgeon father started his day. An alcoholic, Arthur Dickson Wright flew into drunken rages and delivered vicious beatings to Clarissa and her aristocratic mother, Mollypop, sometimes going so far as to break a rib or sear a jaw with a red-hot poker. Then there were the copious cocktails and champagne drunk by the love of Clarissa’s life, a strapping 6ft 5in alcoholic called Clive, whose penchant for drink killed him in 1982. Finally, there were the pints – yes, pints – of gin and tonic drunk by Clarissa to blot out the pain of Clive’s and her mother’s deaths. Amazingly, the drink didn’t quite finish her off – she found AA just in time (she includes the Twelve Steps as an appendix). But it did leave her fat. It wasn’t even the gin. All the quinine in the tonic water did permanent damage to her adrenal gland “which drip feeds constantly; it’s also why I have a lot of energy. Funny old world, eh!”

As the title suggests, Clarissa’s approach to her travails is mainly arch (she has a lawyer’s sense of humour, reflecting the fact that she was the youngest woman called to the bar, aged 21, in 1968). No amount of jauntiness, however, can disguise the fact that up to the age of 40, her life was overwhelmingly painful. Her father comes across as a genuine monster, a man who made his four children suffer, while playing the public role of the noble doctor. As the youngest child by far (the eldest sibling, Heather, about whom Clarissa is curiously mean, was 19 years her senior) Clarissa probably got the worst of him. When his children were given presents, Arthur often donated them to Cancer Research, but still forced the children to write thank-you notes. When Clarissa’s sister June was lying in a plaster cast “following a terrible car crash”, he told her she was so ugly that no man would ever want her. What he said to Clarissa’s brother Anthony “caused an inferiority complex that lasted a lifetime”. Anthony died an alcoholic aged 57.

The reader cheers when Clarissa and M o l l y p o p finally escape the clutches of this beast; monstrous to the end, he instructed his lawyer to deliver divorce papers to his wife at breakfast one day, before delivering a final beating. After he moved out, Mollypop and Clarissa enjoyed a few years of something close to domestic happiness, throwing bohemian supper parties and cooking fish pies. We feel the force of Clarissa’s grief when Mollypop dies, suddenly, after all those years of “the buffets and the blows”, just “when things were improving”. Clarissa recalls how she gulps down four fingers of whisky and realises that here “was the answer to everything, the key to the universe”. She is brave and unsparing in her descriptions of her drinking years: the half a bottle of vodka with which she started her day just to stop the shaking, before she even got going on the gin; the way her pretty face changed to “bright red, verging on mulberry”; the tawdry one-night stands with Irish men she picked up in rough Kilburn pubs.

It is nothing less than miraculous that she should have emerged from this state to become such a subtle and graceful cook, capable of knocking up a gigot of monkfish larded with anchovies, or an airy Hungarian chocolate cake. Perhaps inevitably, the later, happy sections of the book, when Clarissa is managing Books for Cooks in Notting Hill and then becoming a television star and the rector of Aberdeen University, are less compelling than the early misery. Still, she is always good company and packs her story with marvellous anecdotes. I relished this one about Tony Blair, who studied law around the same time as she did: “He was regarded as a poor sad thing with his guitar and his rather girlish looks, and was also considered as something of a fantasist; his story about attempting to stow away on a plane to the Caribbean from Edinburgh was a great source of amusement as there were no transatlantic flights from Scotland back then.”

Surrounded by so much dishonesty, Clarissa retained a keen eye for a fantasist; but as this heartfelt book shows, she never became one herself.

Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson
Wright Hodder £18.99 pp328
Buy the book here at the offer price of £17.09 (inc p&p)

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