Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  My copy of Why I’m Not a Millionaire

  But there is another explanation. Perhaps this anonymous critic intended the word ‘courage’ as covert praise for her book’s daring subtext. For beneath all its frivolity, Why I’m Not a Millionaire is nothing less than a tightrope walk, an immense and dangerous gamble. It is as if Spain has made a bet with herself to see how far she can go, and the danger involved in this – the risk that she will jeopardise her place in the public’s affections, a collective embrace that has come to define her – seems only to spur her on. Imagine propriety – the propriety of the Fifties, when homosexuality was illegal and lesbianism apparently not yet invented – as a line in the sand of a pristine beach. In bare feet, her trousers rolled up to her knees (like her friend Katharine Hepburn, Nancy wore trousers most of the time: she was, by her own description, ‘a trouser-wearing character’), she strolls right up to this line. She never crosses it, not quite. But then she doesn’t need to; the feeling of the cool sand between her toes is quite bracing enough. She knows that if she keeps this up only the most wilfully blind of her readers will fail to grasp that the life of their favourite personality is built entirely around that of another woman – even if the intimate details of this relationship must, like the word ‘lover’, remain for ever unspoken.

  Nancy Brooker Spain was born on 13 September 1917 in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, the second daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel George Redesdale Brooker Spain, a land agent and volunteer soldier, and his wife Norah Elizabeth. Her grandfather was the Victorian writer Samuel Smiles, and her great aunt was Isabella Beeton, whose biography she later wrote. Spain loved Newcastle and remained attached to it for her whole life, though it was not its middle-class denizens, with their ‘pathetic routine of bridge parties and back-biting, jealousy and keeping up with the Joneses’ that she admired, but its working classes, ‘with all their faults’. What did she know of working class life? Hardly a thing. But this was typical Nancy: romanticism and rebelliousness fighting each other to be heard.

  In 1931 she was sent to board at Roedean in Sussex. She loathed Roedean but you feel, somehow, that it forged her. I don’t mean the voice, soon to become so familiar, though its fruitiness and precision must have owed something to her teachers. Rather, it was that school taught her how to keep a secret, a skill that would later mark her out. There was her diary, which she had to keep hidden from the staff, and there were her daydreams, her best form of escape. Nurturing an inner life – ‘my subconscious and unconscious mind was driven underground’ – meant she had also to develop a Teflon* confidence, a tough exterior designed to protect the softness within. ‘Girls and staff at Roedean were without exception high-minded, pure-souled conformists,’ she wrote in Why I’m Not a Millionaire. ‘Most of the time, they couldn’t make out what I was laughing at.’

  When she departed Roedean four years later she took with her a poetry prize and a pathological desire to take the mickey out of the school at every opportunity; also, more surprisingly, a determination to dress like a man. According to her biographer Rose Collis, soon after they had left school a friend called Pamela Howley invited Nancy to supper. The other guest was Douglas Fairbanks Jr – Pamela was by this time at RADA – and presumably it was his appearance at the dinner table that was intended to cause the biggest stir of the evening. It was Nancy, however, who made the greater impression, by matching her skirt with a man’s jacket, shirt, tie and shoes.

  If Pamela made plain her consternation, it had no effect. Spain, handsome and smiling, seemed not to care. In 1942, through a friend, she met Naomi ‘Mickie’ Jacob, the prolific popular novelist, who lived openly as a lesbian – visitors to her house, Casa Mickie, in Sirmione, Italy, included Radclyffe Hall – and dressed mostly in tweed suits and brogues, her sole concession to femininity being to put on a skirt when she attended mass.* At last, Spain had a role model. Jacob was, like her, from the north. She was also moderately well known as an actor, writer and broadcaster, a rackety sort of fame which Spain, a born show-off, hankered after for herself. Most of all, though, Mickie was uncompromising about her appearance. When the war ended, spurred on by her example and an ever-increasing need to save money, Nancy ‘threw off for ever the last rags of conventional dress and behaviour . . . I wore dungarees and never went to the hairdresser. I cut my hair myself with a pair of curly nail scissors and washed it every day in the bath . . . I decided then and there that I could never have another job that would demand little black suits and diamond clips . . . I didn’t want to meet anyone who would make me put on a skirt.’ Some women – especially her sister, Liz, a fashion designer – were horrified by this. ‘Darling, must you?’ came the plaintive cry. However, as Nancy later noted, only one man ever complained about her style: her friend Noël Coward, the dedicatee of Why I’m Not a Millionaire, who would tell her, not without some justification, that she looked like ‘a dégringolee farmhand’.

  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. What was Nancy to do now she had left school? Her mother was keen that she work as a games or domestic science teacher until she married. Nancy, though, was damned if she was going straight back to the kind of establishment from which she’d only recently escaped. Luckily she was saved by her father, who gave her an allowance and told her she could live at home rent-free. Uncertain what to do next, she began playing lacrosse and hockey for Durham and Northumberland, and this had a happy side-effect. When the editor of the Newcastle Journal was casting about for someone to write reports about the exploits of the local women’s teams, Nancy was in a position to be chosen (or perhaps she chose herself) for the job. It wasn’t long before her reports, under the by-line ‘Baseline’, were being syndicated to other newspapers, the Yorkshire Post among them.*

  Spain loved team sports, but her enthusiasm for them soon had a deeper wellspring in the form of twenty-three-year-old Winifred ‘Bin’ Sargeant, a golden-haired, blue-eyed, middle-class girl from West Hartlepool who drove a green sports car, had a fondness for gin and tonic, and whose proficiency at tennis was such that she had tried, more than once, to qualify for Wimbledon. It was like falling over: no sooner had Nancy clapped eyes on Bin than she was smitten. ‘To have seen Bin flash down the left wing and shoot a goal was a sporting experience on a par with Bannister’s mile,’ she writes in Why I’m Not a Millionaire, as if her new friend had strolled straight from the pages of Bunty. At first her adoration was a secret, the slushy poems she dedicated to ‘WS’ carefully secreted in the pages of her diary. But within a year it became clear that her feelings were reciprocated. Soon she and Bin were spending every available moment together, and in the summer of 1939 they holidayed in the south of France, camping in a field near St Tropez.

  It was a blissful trip, its pleasures – fresh lobster, warm morning rolls, a beach that seemed to be theirs alone – only heightened by the fact that both girls knew there was trouble ahead. Sure enough, by the time they arrived back in Newcastle Neville Chamberlain was ready to announce that Britain was at war with Germany. The idyll was over, ‘the carefree pagan life’ Nancy had glimpsed in Provence now ruthlessly snatched away. The war, Nancy said, ‘struck my little life a smart blow. It disappeared without trace.’ Both women joined up, Bin enlisting with the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), Nancy volunteering as an Air Raid Precautions driver (later, when she grew to feel that the war demanded more of her, she joined the WRNS). But disaster struck even before the fighting had begun. On 22 December Winifred, having fallen ill with encephalitis lethargica, died at the age of just twenty-seven.

  Nancy was in shock. How had this happened? She was, she soon found, so paralysed with grief she was unable even to attend Bin’s funeral. And the pain would not go away. In the Fifties, by which time she was in love with someone else, she continued to be haunted by her friend. As she wrote in Why I’m Not a Millionaire: ‘Quite often, I still think I see her, laughing in a crowd; and once I am sure I saw her come into a restaurant. She sat down and ordered, of all things, a Scotch egg
. But when I leapt up to say hello she seemed to vanish, leaving a hard clear line for a second, as a piece of paper does when it burns in the fire.’ (If this sounds frank, I should point out that she was also careful to give Bin not one but two fiancés in her memoir, and to speculate that had she lived ‘she would have married . . . and raised tennis-playing children to the glory of County Durham’.)

  The war, though, must have helped. Her tears, like everyone’s, had to be dried quickly. In the autumn of 1940 Nancy was ordered to appear before a WRNS selection board for cipher officers, and having passed muster was dispatched to Greenwich for training. In the following January she became Third Officer Spain. There followed a posting to Arbroath, where she was responsible for servicing planes at the base, and then in October she arrived at WRNS HQ to take up a post as a press officer. It was a job that drove her mad, for all that it brought her closer to her beloved Fleet Street. Not only did she feel she was playing no part in the ‘real’ war effort; ‘tarting around with journalists’ seems to have stirred up a certain amount of envy. When her frustration boiled over and she argued with her superiors she was exiled to the north as a recruiting officer – a relentless role, she found, like being a ‘mad mouse in a wheel’.

  But Nancy was ever resourceful: ‘I knew I could never go back to life on the old, pre-war terms, changing library books, playing a little tennis, helping mother about the house.’ Determined to come out of the war ‘big with experience’, by the time she was promoted to Second Officer in 1943 she had already completed Thank You – Nelson, a personal account of life as a Wren, and though the rejection letters at first piled up she eventually sold it to Hutchinson in a two-book deal (she was, she told her publisher, already hard at work on a detective novel). Whatever she had to endure until the end of the war would, she thought, now be bearable; it was marvellous to have a plan. As things turned out, she didn’t have long to wait. In January 1945, having been struck by asthma attacks, Spain was officially discharged from the WRNS. In the same month, something even more wonderful happened: A. A. Milne wrote a rave review of Thank You – Nelson in the Sunday Times. Reading his words over her dried eggs – Pooh’s creator marvelled at the fact that Nancy had turned out ‘a book all about herself, of which she is neither the heroine nor the stooge’ – she was reduced to grateful tears. Thanks to Milne, the book became a surprise best seller.

  After this, Nancy moved fast. Resting on her laurels would get her precisely nowhere. Poison in Play, her detective novel, was published in 1946, by which time she had already bagged both her first newspaper job, as a gossip writer on the Sunday Empire News, and her first celebrity friend in the form of the actress Hermione Gingold (Nancy arranged to interview her, and they fell platonically in love). ‘I love a big name,’ she would write in Why I’m Not a Millionaire. ‘I like to go where they go. I always hope (don’t you?) that some of their lustre will rub off on me.’ Failing that, it was helpful to know people, and Gingold, whose nickname among the critics was Malice in Wonderland, was nothing if not well connected. It was paradoxical. All around Nancy, London lay in ruins: ducks living on the pools built by fire fighters, pink willow herb growing over the uneven ground where buildings had once stood. But in her private universe it was as if someone had fired a starting gun, and she leapt out of the blocks unhesitatingly.

  By 1950 Nancy was well established as a writer of detective stories (her sixth, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue, would be published in April that year).* In addition, she had published, to good reviews, a biography of her relative Isabella Beeton. Her new friends included Margery Allingham, Angus Wilson and Elizabeth Bowen.† But she was also, having been sacked by the Empire News, stony broke (her naval pension had been withdrawn when her health recovered). She began to think of letters as bombs, to be touched at her own peril: ‘I never, never opened the horrible little square buff envelopes from the Income Tax Boys.’ Then, out of the blue, salvation: a publisher, T. Werner Laurie, asked her to become the editor of its monthly magazine, Books of Today. ‘It was,’ she wrote, ‘as though a man had rushed up to the scaffold on a horse, waving a parchment, crying, “Reprieve! Reprieve!”’

  According to Nancy, Books of Today was ‘a dear little moribund magazine originally published by the firm of Hatchards in Piccadilly as a sort of library list. It was sent out by Hatchards, monthly, to all Duchesses, Marchionesses, Countesses, and other good customers of this famous bookshop.’ Not for long, though: ‘When I became editor, it had a terrible shock. It burst out into nasty, crude, primary colours on the cover, and it contained some pretty pungent stuff in the shape of book reviews. So all the Duchesses and Marchionesses wrote in and cancelled their subscriptions.’ With no budget for editorial Nancy relied on her new literary friends to write for the magazine; it is a measure of her great charm, and perhaps of her pushiness too, that most of them were willing to review books for free. She also made full use of young ‘starving poets’, not to mention her own hack talents. Every week she would creep along with her typewriter to Hermione Gingold’s house in Chelsea, where she would take down the actress’s thoughts for a column they’d devised together entitled ‘This I Have Loathed’ (Gingold had wanted to call it ‘Worst Book of the Month’, but a libel lawyer put paid to that).

  Tottering or not, Books of Today changed Nancy’s life for ever. In an upstairs room at the office in Piccadilly there lurked the daughter of the firm’s founder, a redoubtable creature called Joan Werner Laurie – Jonnie to her friends. Nancy was often urged to go and speak to Miss Laurie, the company’s production manager and an expert cost-cutter, about her budget, and when she grew thoroughly sick of hearing such advice, this is what she did. Climbing the stairs, she expected to be bored into submission by an elderly spinster in a high-necked blouse and cameo brooch, but there followed instead a coup de foudre. ‘She was very full of her love for Joan, and her excitement about it, and how bowling over it was,’ her friend the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard told a Radio 4 documentary in 1993. ‘She couldn’t stop talking about Jonnie and how immediate the whole thing had been, and how the moment she saw her she was sure, and how amazed she was when Jonnie reciprocated.’

  In Why I’m Not a Millionaire she was only slightly less circumspect. She describes their first encounter in a girlish rush, unable to resist its drama, but knowing, too, that she must sweep over its central feature: her physical attraction to Jonnie. The result is rather odd: ‘You could,’ she writes, ‘have knocked me down with a little statue by Henry Moore with a hole in its stomach when I walked into her office and found a girl four years younger than me, very good looking with rather a long nose and a very small waist. She was married, she had a little boy called Nicky. All of which gives no idea of Jonnie’s excellence. Her friendliness and generosity are such that she is always surrounded by lame ducks and doting boyfriends. And very rapidly, I was a lame duck, too, living in her house, rent-free . . . She had a very small red MG with brakes that seldom worked. Using this splendid vehicle . . . we moved my belongings to 35 Carlyle Square, Chelsea, where Jonnie lived.’

  There follows a description of the Sitwells, who lived opposite (Nancy would sometimes spot Sir Osbert creeping slowly down the road), and a mention of Paul Seyler, Jonnie’s dead husband, ‘who had obviously been a darling’. But soon she is off again, three unstinting pages of praise for the extraordinary Jonnie: ‘What a difficult thing to write objectively of a relationship in which I have been happily bound up for five years, and which is still going on! Jonnie is, I think, one of the most remarkable people I have ever met . . . She is certainly the only person who has ever let me be myself . . . therefore the only person with whom I can cheerfully live in close harmony . . . I have no judgement at all. Jonnie has enough for twelve. But when we work together, we are equal to most things. You must have noticed that, although I have only written about the funny bits, until I met Jonnie I was a miserable sort of creature, a failure, hating everybody, living in a sort of ivory tower of work, refusing to allow Rea
l Life in the shape of Family Life to intrude on me at all. I had become a terrible cynic, chiefly because all my boyfriends had darted off and married someone else . . . It is impossible for me to take a step without consulting Jonnie . . . Oh, how difficult it is to write of gratitude . . . My pen dries and my heart spills over and cannot express itself when I think of everything that Jonnie and Nicky have done for me.’ The ellipses are mine; Spain, usually wonderfully concise, errs on the side of verbosity here.

  Nancy’s account of Joan makes her sound a darling, just like her dead husband. But this was not quite the case (and as for the dead husband, he had been about as reliable as quicksand). While people were drawn to Nancy, so warm and funny, Joan kept the world at bay. She was cool and steely and rather humourless. At work she could be terrifying: a stickler, and a martinet. When the internal telephone rang three times – the signal that Miss Laurie was on the line – her staff would shiver inwardly. What now? Getting a rocket from Miss Laurie was the worst.

  Joan had left home at sixteen after a row with her father. She wanted to be a doctor but she became instead a wife, marrying a man of whom her family did not approve. The marriage was short-lived. Paul Seyler was abroad during the war – Joan meanwhile was, like Nancy, a Wren – and he continued to serve with the Gurkhas after it ended. By the time Jonnie gave birth to her son, Nicholas Laurie Seyler, in March 1946, she was effectively a single parent, and living with a friend, Vivyen Bremner, in Sevenoaks, Kent. It was Bremner who taught Joan ‘how to grow and how to use my grimmer experiences in the process’, and it was Bremner who looked after Nicholas when she went back to work in London. Seyler is supposed to have left England for South America in 1948, where he worked as mercenary and a cattle rancher; he died in Argentina two years later. No wonder she was tough.