“I love spring,” says Mary Berry. Like the Prospera of Middle England, Britain’s eternal star baker is gazing out across a dank river bank at winter’s end, a literal Union Jack fluttering in the chill outside. “And here we are right now,” she continues happily, straight into instruction mode, keen to impart the magic in the turning of the seasons. “You see the very first snowdrops and the little iris stylosa,” she says, gesturing to the gloom, “the beautiful blue coming through, the primroses… To me, that’s lovely.”
To be frank, the Mary Berry experience is like sinking into a deep bath of lovely – this spring especially so. The cook, author, television personality, fantasy gran and all-round sapphire-eyed twinkle-machine will turn 90 in a move likely to enshrine her saint-status on these shores to something approaching apostolic. So Vogue went to Henley-on-Thames (where else?) to meet her. Martin Parr, another legend, was assigned photographer duties, while several trunks of eye-popping spring fashion were ferried through the Home Counties. “Well, if you can call that fashion…” Berry teases with the authority of someone who has a lot of opinions about Marks & Spencer. (She absolutely “loved” the black and white Valentino, by the way.) Now, a week later, she has arrived to talk at Phyllis Court, a sprawling lawn club on the banks of the Thames, of which she is a member, where she’s huddled in the pavilion by a radiator – “I’ve been cold since 1945, Giles” – as some ruddy-cheeked older gents play croquet outside under a sky of pure porridge.
As set-ups go, it’s almost as outrageously British as today’s subject. Certainly Berry’s tale seems only possible to imagine here. Heavens, what a story. Born in Bath four years before the outbreak of the Second World War, she was fighting for her life in a polio ward age 13, studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, then swung into ’60s London, devising recipes for the Dutch Dairy Bureau (as you do), living it up with gal pals in South Ken, discovering Capri pants and avocados, before working in the cookery department for Housewife and, later, becoming food editor at Ideal Home. Marriage and children followed – career throttlers for most women of her generation (“I was signing off [magazine] proofs from my hospital bed… not ideal.”) Then, improbably, came stardom.
Forget Harry Styles. Thanks to five decades on the small screen, and 12 million books sold, in terms of cross-generational name recognition, I posit Berry is only rivalled in Blighty by David Attenborough and Peppa Pig. “Ha!” she says happily. She wears fame lightly, but a combo of her fierce, morality-powered work ethic and the sort of ambition that only comes to adults who did quite badly at school is pretty fab to behold. I make the mistake of saying her erstwhile TV smash The Great British Bake Off would get up to 10 million viewers. “I think you’ll find it was 15 million at the peak,” she corrects me, sharply. “And that was up against the football.”
And now 90. How are we feeling? “There will be cake,” she says, of course. “And Champagne!” Woohoo! After marathon filming days, Berry’s husband, the long-retired book dealer Paul Hunnings, would famously greet her at the front door with a stiff G&T. It goes without saying that propriety rules on Planet Berry, but a delicious undercurrent of old-school British sozzlyness is also in play. No surprise, then, that she’s “leaning in” celebration-wise. “I’m all for parties,” she says. So she’s having a year of them, from family dinners to a series of lunches and knees-ups with old friends.
Aesthetically, there is always something reassuringly festive about her too. Today, her wheaten helmet and astonishingly clear skin – my jaw keeps slackening staring at it – are offset with a puff-sleeved jumper in vivid jade from the high street, black slacks and a teensy little wedge heel from Russell & Bromley. The hands, though… Firstly, the manicure is everything: an immaculate, framboise gel polish I assumed she had done on set with Vogue. “Oh, no,” she says, cheeky again. “That was a colour I wasn’t brave enough to have again, though everybody was commenting on it.” (Instead she has a “lovely girl called Catherine” come round on the regular; she remains incredulous “it takes an hour and a half”.) The real showstoppers, however, are the rings. For her 90th, Paul has bestowed some treasure. “He’s just given me this eternity ring,” she says, happily, proffering a glittering paw, a bespoke piece from the jeweller Verifine newly nestled in above the double diamond engagement ring hewn from a pair of her mother-in-law’s earrings, which she hasn’t taken off since – drum roll, please – 1966. “I never take my rings off,” she says.
As bling goes, what a bookend. No wonder she’s upbeat about 90, though she’d never be so glib as to suggest age doesn’t seep into the marrow. Not literally, by the looks of her. Despite a broken hip in September 2021 – she fell at home in her garden, lying stone-still by the sweet peas for more than three hours waiting for the ambulance – Berry retains something like the whippet movements of a gymnast, though time must have its way. With lots of life comes lots of death too.
When she turned 80, she recalled how of those South Ken girlfriends two had passed, one was in ill health. A decade on and – with a wide social circle and an extraordinary facility for keeping up with all her mates from over the years – funerals can feel as much a part of life as birthdays. Her own mother, Marjorie, lived to be 105 and was in “rude health” until “nearly the end”. Her father, Alleyne, a chartered surveyor and Bathonian of note, died some 20 years earlier, and with her friend group dwindling, Berry learnt from Marjorie that even if you’re lucky on the health front, mental and emotional fortitude is required to go the distance.
“She was devastated when my father died because she had never had a night apart from him,” says Berry of her mother. “We thought that she would go into a shell, but she didn’t and I think Mum enjoyed life.” Berry would call her every day at 8pm without fail. “She made the most of life after my father died. She continued with all things that she liked – bridge, friends, family, of course – and I think that made the difference for her.” Ever the realist, albeit the jolly variety, Berry is loath to sugarcoat anything that isn’t a lemon drizzle, though. “She did say the weekends were always lonely for her…” she says, a rare note of ennui creeping into her voice. Then she’s back to being practical, echoing the Jane Fonda maxim: use it or lose it, ladies. “She didn’t go to gyms and I couldn’t agree with her more,” she huffs, happy to lay scorn on today’s Skims-clad workout obsessives. “She would walk every day, though, round to the church and back. She said she ought to be able to carry a bag because she wanted to be able to carry her shopping. She was very slight, which I think helped. And she continued to cook for herself all the way through.”
This Berry-branded creed of common sense – firm, fair, merry, authentic, the cornerstones of her appeal – is part inherited, part thrust upon her. Call it faith, call it psychology, but her clear-eyed view of life’s hardships is necessity not indulgence. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, as her career boomed, she had three children: Thomas, William and Annabel. Berry was a low-key phenomenon – and an innovator. “I didn’t look left or right,” she says of her working MO while a social revolution raged around her. She interviewed Mary Quant for her recipe pages and made her first appearance on the small screen with Judith Chalmers on Afternoon Plus, cooking a lasagne. For the best part of 20 years the books and public appearances kept coming. Life was good.
Then it wasn’t. On an unusually sunny January morning in 1989, William, aged 19, was home from his studies at Bristol Poly. Berry had done roast lamb the night before – William’s favourite – and, full of enthusiasm for his new business studies course, he asked to borrow the car to go and pick up the weekend papers. The clock ticked, lunchtime came and went, then a knock at the door. “You just know,” says Berry of seeing the policeman’s face standing in her driveway.
A fluke car crash had taken his life. Mercifully his sister, Annabel, a passenger, survived. “He just looked so beautiful and so lovely,” Berry has recalled of seeing his body laid out at the local hospital. “His little cold face.” It is the unimaginable. Yet when I ask Berry if it’s OK to bring up William’s name today, it’s as if a shaft of sunlight has taken over her features.
She loves to talk about him. “How many years is that then?” she wonders aloud. “Is it 30-something?” Thirty-six. She is visibly surprised. “It’s absolutely amazing in my 90th year to think that William died all that time ago. If he walked in that door over there, I would say: ‘Where have you been?’ It wouldn’t surprise me at all.”
“You know,” she continues, “we were so lucky to have him. He brought us such joy. I feel for people who have lost their child in a skiing accident or when they don’t know where they died. We got to be a family unit [right up until] those few hours before he died.”
“Every family has disasters,” she says, the smile somehow still in place. “You know, a partner that dies very early, a much-loved mother, whatever it may be. And this was our tragedy.” She doesn’t want to underplay it. “It was a huge tragedy, but we did have two more children, you know. We always think we were fortunate to have had him for 19 years. We still talk about him – the grandchildren particularly, the boys who love rugby,” as William did. “[Annabel’s 16-year-old son] Hobie will come [home from school] and say: ‘I scored. William would have been proud, wouldn’t he?’” Berry smiles. “Yes,” she says, her usually keen eye contact drifting off for a moment. “He would be proud.”
In the aftermath, the family did their best. For several years, Berry ran a thriving Aga cooking school from her home in Penn, Buckinghamshire, keeping Paul and the children close. “The one thing that helps so much is the great outdoors, being busy and getting on with things. But that’s not what you feel like at the time. You feel that you want to stay and suffer. It’s better to be out and to talk…” At this, she catches herself. Berry is in possession of a wisdom that doesn’t permit blanket decrees. “You can’t preach. Some people keep it to themselves – they never want to discuss it with their other half. Sometimes it ends in divorce. You know, it’s different for every person.”
Her own marriage has been long and loyal. Come on, I demand, give us your tips. “Respect,” she says simply. “Love, of course, but respect is so important. And I don’t count the decades too closely,” she says, a well-worn humour creasing her cheeks. “Also we never raise our voices at each other because, you know, we love each other. If I’m a bit miffed, I very often think, ‘Well, I’m not gonna say that right now.’ I’ll go to the greenhouse and do some cuttings.’” Beware, though: “Never go to sleep on a quarrel,” she cautions. “Happiness is very, very important, but it can be elusive sometimes. You have to look after it.”
An hour in Berry’s company and, despite her considerable star wattage, one almost forgets about the fame. From 2010 to 2016, as a judge on The Great British Bake Off, she became about as well known as it’s possible to be on this sceptred isle. Her manoeuvres were front-page news – how dare they use her fellow judge Paul Hollywood’s scone recipe instead of hers! Had the BBC lost its mind! – as did her fashion. In 2012, a floral Zara bomber jacket she picked up for herself in Sloane Square became a national talking point, driving scores of customers in store and turning the then 70-something into a high-street style star. “I thought, ‘Oh, it’s quite big. I’ll be able to get a hot-water bottle under there,’” she recalls of the fateful purchase. “And it was £19.99…”
Now Berry enters her 10th decade as one of the Beeb’s most valuable assets. Classic Mary Berry, Mary Berry’s Simple Comforts, Mary Berry’s Ultimate Christmas, Mary Makes It Easy – you name it, she’s popped it in the Aga with millions watching. For her most recent series, Mary’s Foolproof Dinners, she was cooking and nattering with celebs, and the accompanying book of recipes was a smash – another tome is due later this year.
She doesn’t like to talk about fame. “People are always very nice,” she says, noncommittally, when I suggest life must have changed radically for her post Bake Off. She shrugs lightly, saying she likes it when she gets a tap on the shoulder in Waitrose and a smiling stranger tells her that her fast quiche or beef Wellington came out a treat. She’s not wild about selfies – “Where do they go? Who are they for?” – but largely she doesn’t place her attention on attention. Church on Sundays, coffee with “the girls”, developing recipes with her right-hand, Lucy Young, gardening, walking, lots of work, lots of family. All of her grandchildren cook, by the way. Before Christmas, her granddaughter, Grace, came to the house with her boyfriend, George. “‘Granny, can you show us how to make mince pies?’ she said. ‘George wants to take them to his office party the next day.’ So we did. They made the pastry from scratch themselves and off they took them.” What a mega flex for George…
As she stares at me warmly – so much life in her eyes, so much steadiness – you sense the amount of change she’s seen, the amount of curiosity she retains. She’s always learning, always trying things. Flicking through the pages of her most recent book, you’ll find ingredients ranging from mango to miso. No foam, though, I discover when I ask what she makes of whipping chickpea water into an egg-white substitute? “Stupid,” she says, laughing heartily.
It’s the simple joy of perfecting the basics that pleases her most – in life and in the oven. What cake will you be having at your 90th? “You know, it’s a bit hackneyed, but there’s nothing better than a Victoria sandwich,” she says of the confection she’s been making in one way or another since she was scrimping on rations for it during the Second World War. “It’s an act of love, isn’t it, baking a cake?” she says. “It brings people together. It’s a celebration.”
Cover look: wool dress with velvet bow detail, Valentino. Hat, Valentino Garavani. Hair: Adam Reed. Make-up: Bea Sweet. Nails: Robbie Tomkins. Set design: Miguel Bento. With thanks to Violet Cakes by Claire Ptak and Alexander Young Flowers