ONE PROBLEM WITH MEETING Clarissa Dickson Wright is that she is so widely known by such a rude nickname. Although she is definitely fat – and a lady – she is so formidable, and so nice, that you would never call her a “Fat Lady” in her presence.

Besides which, she has lovely eyes, clear and blue, and once you are sitting next to her, you notice them much more than the fatness.

Her pretty eyes are a clue to the fact that before she was a fat lady she was an elegant and brilliant girl, who ruined her looks and her finances with drink. She has borne many difficult things in her struggle to overcome alcoholism, and I suspect that losing her looks was not the easiest.

Accepting the “Fat Lady” moniker, with the late Jennifer Patterson, brought fame and fortune with their Two Fat Ladies television cookery series, but the price was to become something of a figure of fun. Her autobiography, Spilling the Beans, has amusing moments but insists that the reader sees the traumatic life behind this large, jolly lady. She checks out the young dads as we have lunch, and advises me to learn how to cook puddings to entice men, and I think that this brisk and practical countrywoman must sometimes miss the glamorous life.

And what a life it was. She says that she sees herself as a raconteur rather than a writer, and Spilling the Beans is rammed with anecdotes. She once had sex in the House of Commons with an MP. She chuckles mightily: “I honestly don’t know the name of the MP,” she says. “I don’t even know what party he was in. If he is still alive, he’ll be quite elderly so I hope that the shock of reading about it doesn’t kill him.”

But much of her life has not been jolly. She writes about her alcoholic father’s violence, and the contrast between his life as a brilliant surgeon and the stingy bully he was at home. “It was quite toxic setting it down,” she says. But there is no self-pity in the book or in her conversation, only a pragmatic justification of the frankness. “The reason I went into my father’s violence so particularly,” she says, “was because when I’d talked about it before I’d had very good letters from people. They said: ‘Thank you. That was such a help; because you’ve become a success and it makes me feel less on my own.’ ” She writes about her drinking and recovery in similar agonising detail. Her alcoholism began the moment that her mother died. “Even after all these years,” she writes, “it is impossible to describe what I felt.”

On discovering the body, she rushed to her friend’s flat: “He offered me a cup of tea but I asked for a large whisky, poured myself four fingers . . . whenever the pain showed signs of coming back I reached for the whisky and made another cup of tea for everyone else.” This continued, worsened by the death of her boyfriend, for more than a dozen years.

Her recovery, in a treatment centre, is detailed at length. Again, she hopes that this will help others. “You get all these celebrities now who write that they took drink or drugs, and then they go to a treatment centre for two weeks and live happily ever after.”

Dickson Wright’s battle took months, and 20 years later she still attends regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “The idea that rehab is an instant cure is a very damaging one. It isn’t like that. You have to do a lot of work.”

Work is the most impressive thing about Dickson Wright. Unsupported by her father, she became a barrister at 21. Having drunk her way through her inheritance, she worked as a cook. When she came out of recovery, she took another job as a cook in a bookshop, eventually building up the Books for Cooks business into a thriving concern.

Sacked from that, she built herself up once more, finding success with Two Fat Ladies. When she stopped getting television work – which she puts down to her passion for hunting – she took speaking engagements, for £5,000 a speech. She churned out her life story, now a bestseller, in ten weeks.

In the afternoon sun, we talk about food and other chefs. She is gloriously blunt: “It is a well-known fact that I loathe Jamie Oliver. He has sold out and sold out and sold out.” and “In the days when Marco [Pierre White] used to cook at [his restaurant] Harvey’s, one of the dreads was always that he would find time to come and talk to you.” She gives me a recipe for saltimbocca of rabbit and discusses Britain’s eating habits.

Forgoing coffee, she excuses herself. She is driving around the country, alone, on a mammoth publicity tour among her rural fanbase. Tomorrow she will be in Abergavenny. Walking slowly, but talking endlessly, she takes her leave. As much as she may describe herself as a “battered old cook,” no one who hears her story would write her off so easily.

Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright
Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99; 336pp

Clarissa Dickson Wright appears at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Friday October 12 at 4pm
Call 01242 227979
www.cheltenhamfestivals.com

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