Di Humphreys pulls out a photo of her late mother, Ruth. Perched on their parents’ knees, Ruth and her sister Hana, smiling into the camera lens, are a vision of contentment. But in 1939 Ruth found herself on a train from Prague to London, one of 669 largely Jewish children rescued from Nazi clutches by Sir Nicholas Winton as part of the Czech Kindertransport mission.
Arriving in London, a numbered tag strung around her neck, a salami stowed in her bag, Ruth was separated from her sister. “My mother was taken in by a family in Birmingham. She never saw her parents again. They were sent to Auschwitz,” says Di. Ruth later married an Englishman and settled in the Midlands. “Throughout her life she never complained. She was so positive about everything – especially family. That’s something she passed on to me.”
That sense of family pervades the Buckinghamshire home where Di, a costume designer, lives with her husband Martin Hutchings, a film director whom she met on the set of The Insurance Man, Alan Bennett’s play about Kafka.
On a winter’s afternoon their cottage is clutter-free but convivial with log-burning stoves, bright paintings and slouchy sofas where Ruth – known as Oofie – used to babysit the couple’s children, Milo, 23, and Emma, 28. Both have moved out, but return regularly to a home imprinted with their personalities.
Walls are peppered with Emma’s exuberant artwork; in Milo’s room, tangerine paintwork sings a teenagerly protest against the all-white interior. The kitchen table, designed by Martin’s father Victor, an architect whose projects included the Oxford University Press building, is part of Emma’s history. “It’s the table she did her homework on. Now she’ll use it for conference calls. And we still have be silent,” says Martin.
The next generation also have a hand in their parents’ business: Umoya Design, a line of pared-back but colourful homewares, handmade from natural materials by British craftspeople. “We’ve always designed things for our home so it seemed natural to add a string to our bow,” says Di. “Milo does the photography and sales. He’s good with people, like my mother. Emma is artistic and practical. She scrutinises the accounts. Both are vocal about their likes and dislikes, but at our age criticism is curiously energising.”
The Umoya look – “Scandinavian with the warmth of African pattern” – sums up the three-bedroom house, bought from All Souls College, Oxford, which, donnishly, not only insisted on sealed bids but a written explanation of why future owners would be fit custodians, too. “I think they chose us because we described our vision of a family home, despite the dilapidation,” says Di.
Nick Wood, an architect and protégé of Martin’s father, added the light-filled extension and distinctive wood and wire staircase which, 17 years later, feel timeless. So, too, does the patchwork-bright kitchen, painted by an “eccentric” friend. “All he wanted in return was a bottle of gin and a hot bath at 6pm.”
Everywhere, objects evoke chapters of family life. In Emma’s room, where she painted the African-inspired frieze, a toy dog reminds them of a brief, Manon des Sources sojourn in rural France in the 1990s. “Interest rates were high; property in France was cheap and we thought we could commute between there and England. We were wrong,” says Di. Downstairs, the landscape by Barbara Leaman travelled from their last home on the bohemian Rycote estate in Oxfordshire where neighbours, including Will Self, gathered round the pool: “A hole filled with freezing water.”
Di picks up a photo of Ruth, beaming features framed by a cloud of white hair, snapped at Emma’s graduation. “My mother didn’t talk about her experiences for years. But later she decided it was her duty to tell a younger generation. She became quite powerful, speaking at the Oxford Union and schools, reducing the boys to tears.”
In 2009, mother and daughter re-trod Ruth’s childhood journey, travelling by steam train from Prague to London alongside other of “Sir Nicholas’s children”, now scattered across the world. “Family became everything to my mother – and to us. So perhaps what she lost, we gained.”
