H.S. ('Jim') Ede created Kettle's Yard, a lovely home and haven from the busy streets of Cambridge, in his own impeccably aesthetic image. Among its art objects are several important paintings by David Jones. Jones, the author of In Parenthesis (see review, PNR 197) was a decidedly untypical modernist artist, while Ede was a curator at the Tate and discriminating art lover. He was one of the network of 'friends in need', on whom Jones came to rely for psychological and financial support. They had much in common. Born in the same year, 1895, both served on the Western Front in the First World War, albeit as officer (Ede) and eternal private (Jones); both were wounded in action, and enrolled at London art schools when demobbed in 1919. Jones, whose father was Welsh, became fixated on Wales; Ede, cosmopolitan in taste, was born there. They became close friends in the early 1920s, about the same time that Ede and his wife Helen became friendly with Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Christopher Wood, who, like Jones, were members of the Seven and Five Society of artists.

Jones had already joined the commune of artists and craftsmen at Ditchling, Sussex, presided over by Eric Gill, a fellow convert to Roman Catholicism and, when the Gill entourage removed to Capel-y-ffin, in the Black Mountains, near Abergavenny, he became friendly with a young Irishman, René Hague, who fell in with the group there. Jones had something in common with Hague, too, for he ...