It’s raining. It’s pouring. No sign, so far, of the old man snoring – but I have just caught a glimpse of a tall and handsome octogenarian braving the elements in this distinctly un-south of France weather. Standing under a smart chequered tan Burberry umbrella on the edge of the remote départmentale 78, it’s a case of Lady Natasha Spender to the rescue. How English. How thoughtful. How welcome. For there is surely no greater journalistic sin than that of being late for an interview.

"Not to worry" Lady Spender tells me reassuringly. "You are not the first person to struggle to find the Mas St. Jérome. And I dare say you won’t be the last." Surrounded by acres of olive groves and nestling in the foothills of the elegant Alpilles, Natasha Spender and her husband, the great, late poet and critic Sir Stephen Spender, fell in love with Provence whilst the likes of Mayle and those Brits who have followed in his Year In footsteps were still completing their elementary education. But it is so damp underfoot, so thoroughly muddy and miserable all around – that it is difficult to contemplate the notion that barely eighteen months earlier Lady Spender had fled from a devastating fire there in the thick of night. Clutching a handful of precious belongings – but only a handful, alas - it was a blaze that burned the home she and her husband had lovingly rebuilt over a period of three and a half decades almost entirely to the ground. "Terre de lune", a French TV cameraman had muttered to himself at the time, observing the blackened countryside all around - moonscape.

The Spenders’ farmhouse in the heart of the Provençal wilderness had long been a Mecca to a raft of literary and artistic celebrities – previous houseguests having included John Bayley, Irish Murdoch, Robert Graves, Henry Moore, Dame Peggy Ashcroft and David Hockney – to name but a few. Perhaps it was as well that writers had continued to flock there. For it was the wife of Sir Stephen’s current biographer John Sutherland, and who happened to be staying at the Mas St. Jérome at the time, who first spotted an ominous red glow on the horizon and sounded the alarm.

"If it wasn’t for Gilland", Lady Spender confirms, "I wouldn’t be here today." Fanned by the Mistral, the flames consumed everything in their path: including the greater part of Natasha’s horticultural showpiece – "once an arid little plot of dead vines" – and over 2,000 of Sir Stephen’s books – most of them association copies, inscribed volumes or review editions in which he had made marginal notes. "Everything went" Lady Spender says matter-of-factly. "Just where you are here there was a cupboard of glass which was transformed into a pool of molten glass. Our cat Tulip died under the piano – not from the flames but the fumes. The following morning when I returned I could see the sky through Stephen’s old window – so I knew right away that the roof had gone. The garden in the front was completely destroyed. The Sutherlands were so upset that I had some difficulty in convincing them that they had saved my life."

"I guess you must have thought of returning to London and basing yourself permanently at your home in St. John’s Wood", I venture to suggest. Not a good question.

"Certainly not", she replies a little testily. For Lady Spender, one discovers rather rapidly, does not suffer fools gladly. "It never crossed my mind. The funny thing is that you simply move into a different gear. It’s very like being in the blitz. You become instantly practical. You just deal with it. You don’t think – you simply go on to automatic pilot, exactly as we did in the war."

Aware that the clock is against me, it is time to crack on with the interview. There is the reconstruction work to talk about – not least in respect of Lady Spender’s award-winning garden. But I first enquire, albeit as an aside, as to why she had been a little reluctant to meet in the first instance – there had been cancellations, literary agents to deal with – and one or two preconditions. "Is it because you have been bitten in the past by writers and journalists?" Another bad question. So offensive, it seems, that it leads to the unclipping of my throat-mic and a glare which makes it quite clear that one more faux-pas and I might well be out on my ear and back in the rain. And without an umbrella to boot. For Lady Spender is more than a little weary, I am now in a position to report, of authors who gained interviews on the pretext of writing scholarly books about her husband and then use the homosexual interest to sell them – even though they reveal little that Spender himself had not already admitted in print. As the writer Elizbath Grice has pointed out, it was both her husband’s privilege – and burden – to have been a lifelong friend of W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood, and one of the so-called Gang of Four that included Auden, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day Lewis.

Now if name-dropping is not your tasse de thé then Lady Spender is clearly not the person for you. Not that its name-dropping for name-dropping’s sake, mind you, rather a reflection of the most extraordinary life she and her husband have led. And it is indeed difficult to find a subject which does not trigger off some lively memory of friends who appear to have walked out of the pages of a 20^th-century Who’s Who. "Now who was it who translated that letter for us", she muses in reply to one question, "was it Bertie or Isiah, I simply cannot recall." Got the picture – that the Spenders were rubbing shoulders with the crème de la crème de la crème – the greatest thinkers, writers, musicians and artists of the last century. Isaiah Berlin and Bertram Russell certainly – but Igor Stravinsky, Sir John Betjeman, Leonard Woolf, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Ted Hughes too.

Jaw back in place, its time to hear more about her valiant efforts, currently underway, to restore her garden, as depicted in the sumptuously illustrated booked published by Harvill, An English Garden in Provence. "That book is now less a celebration than a memorial to what we achieved", Lady Spender reflects. "Over there we a replanting a shrubbery as a windbreak. Oh listen to me, there I am still using the Royal ‘we’ – when in fact now its really just me."

"Was it very much a ‘we’ garden then?"

"Stephen loved the garden – and it was certainly very useful for his work. He would wander around when he would come to a pause in his writing. Simply to think. Other writers who have stayed here – like Iris Murdoch and John Bayley conducted themselves in a similar manner. In fact John used to tap away at his typewriter in the Lilac Walk at the bottom of the garden – I used to call him the woodpecker!"

Not that Lady Spender was born with green fingers. Far from it - although her fingers would in due course serve her well. The daughter of a Jewish Russian émigré actress, Natasha Litvin met Stephen Spender when she was a 21-year-old music student. She went on to pursue a career as a concert pianist before a life-threatening muscle disorder put paid to her career.

"I have always loved certain gardens. I had a love affair with plants before I ever had occasion to plant them. But this is a very different assignment from England. I did make a garden in St. John’s Wood, mind you. Not that Stephen was very encouraging then. I remember that I had a passion for pale yellow carnations at one particular time and Stephen would always ask why I had planted the border to look like lumps of custard! When we acquired the property here in France I immediately sent a sample of our soil to the Royal Horticultural Society. Who promptly replied that it was the poorest soil they had ever analysed. In fact before we managed to get a reliable supply of water Stephen used to make another quip at my expense - that ‘Natasha runs a concentration camp for flowers’!"

Well, he who laughs last laughs loudest. Or so they say. And as the Spenders’ garden began to flourish, transforming itself into one of the wonders of the region, the glamorous couple would refer to the Mas St. Jérome and its environs as ‘the most magical place on earth’. And Lady Spender is happy to admit that both pre and post fire she has never ceased to be possessed by the beauty of the site in Provence. "I think we must have oversold it", she adds with more than hint of irony, "because there now seem to be English people in each and every corner of Provence."

"As you can see I am living rather primitively at the moment. It’s like being a student all over again. All of these activities – poetry, music, gardening – they have always been concurrent. It’s just that there are times in one’s life when one can explore one thing more than another. The real lack here, though, is my piano – that’s a real deprivation. It was very badly damaged in the fire – but is in the process of being restored in Montpellier."

I have time for just one more inappropriate remark.

"I can see that you keep yourself busy then."

"I don’t need to keep myself busy", Lady Spender retorts. "I am busy willy-nilly. I don’t have time for leisure, you know."

For between homes and gardens, Lady Spender is writing her memoirs. Keeping up with her whereabouts, even by telephone, has been an exhausting task. "All set for the interview next week then", I would enquire from time to time. "I’m terribly sorry – but I am off to the Cheltenham Literary Festival." "How about the week after?" "Sorry, but I will be in Texas for quite some time." That’s not bad going for an octogenarian who still thinks nothing of driving the 750 miles alone from London to Provence in a day.

"You know it’s a funny old thing", Lady Spender concludes. "There was a poet living here on and off for the best part of four decades. We might have been well-known in a certain milieu – but in truth hardly anyone had ever heard of us. One spectacular fire later – and suddenly we are in the news."