Margaret had been writing a biography of Bonny Prince Charlie, which is how she came to think of the name Flora. We both liked the name. It sounded nicely but not too madly Scottish.
I had to get another car, now we had three children. At the time I had an MGB GT, a little sports car, which only had a bucket seat at the back, room for just two children, whose heads were already getting flattened by crouching inside.
We had bought a country cottage in Oxfordshire, at Wardington, near Banbury. Another middle-class fantasy, like wanting to live abroad, is to rush off out of London after school on Friday to one’s country cottage, tra la. Of course we were middle-class by now, and the country cottage sealed it, despite me still pretending I was northern and working-class, grew up on a council estate, don’t you know, though perhaps I did not harp on about it quite as often as in the past when we first arrived in London.
At Wardington, I played for the local village football team on a Saturday, then moaned all Sunday that I was in agony, by which time it was Sunday evening, ready to come home again for school the next day. So not a lot of fun for Margaret.
When we knew that Margaret was pregnant, we were driving up to Wardington one Friday evening with the two of them, crammed into the MG.
‘Something lovely is going to happen to our family,’ I said, turning round to smile at them.
Caitlin and Jake, then aged eight and six, stopped pushing and shoving each other, and moaning about the lack of space, to contemplate what this nice thing might be.
‘We’re going to have a dog,’ said Jake.
‘We’re going to have a cat?’ said Caitlin.
We had always refused to have any pets. Bringing up children seemed hard enough without any extra burdens. Feeding, watering, healing, caring, worrying about children needs enough energy and love without the worry of blooming pets. The most we ever allowed them was a tortoise, which is still in our London garden, almost fifty years later. We never feed her, except for amusement reasons, to show visitors or children, such as giving her cucumber or strawberries. We don’t water her either, or take her to the vet. In fact we do nothing for her. Perfect. Oh, if only children were like that. If we ever went away, we never gave her a second thought.
We bought her from the pet shop in Park Way, Camden Town. You can’t buy them now. Tortoises are an endangered species. In London, you now get tortoise burglars who come over your wall in the dark and steal your tortoise, selling it on the black market or eBay.
When we bought her we were told to put her in the garage every winter in a straw box so rats wouldn’t get at her during her hibernation. We did that for the first winter, and let her out in the garden again in the spring when she started stirring. Next year, as winter approached, we couldn’t find her. She had disappeared. We feared the rats had got her.
In the spring I was giving the grass its first cut with a Flymo and realised I had gone over a bump in the lawn. It was the tortoise. The silly animal had buried herself right in the middle of the lawn. Before I could stop myself, I had shaved a bit off the top of her shell. The children were distraught, convinced I had finished her off. But she was fine. The shell grew back. And every year since she had put herself to sleep, on her own, but in a more sensible position, digging a hole against a wall.
I once made some money out of her. I was approached by the BBC children’s department who asked if I had an original story which could be done on Jackanory, a popular children’s series of the time, which ran from 1965 to 1996.
The tortoise had taken to coming into our back kitchen, hauling herself up and over the back step from the garden and into the kitchen-dining room where we had a laid an ever so nice and shiny new wooden parquet floor. She would skid across it, then reach the comfort of the carpet in the living room, very pleased with herself – except we had to ban her in the end. She kept leaving her little secret shits behind our best Habitat day bed.
I wrote a story about her, how she imagined that our kitchen was a skating rink. So she skates round and makes friends with the children of the house. It was read on Jackanory by a well-known actress of the time, but I can’t remember her name.
With the birth of Flora and now three children, we moved up to a Volvo, one of those monster tank-like ones with extra seats at the very back. Awfully middle-class, but I never liked it. It never felt safe either. Driving up the M1 on a Friday after school it used to sway and shudder, yet the whole image of a Volvo was of utter reliability and safety. For someone who has always said he does not like cars, has no interest in them, I seem to have had quite a few in my long life. When not sleeping I still try to remember them, in order, and their colour.
With a third child, it was now even more important that we found a way to take over the whole house. Yet still Mrs Hall would not be moved. I offered her more and more money, and she always said no. We were beginning to think we would have to move to get more space, in order to provide a bedroom each for the children in due course.
I eventually discovered that the only condition on which she would move was if I bought a flat for her, somewhere she could live for the rest of her life, at the same rent.
The moment she mentioned this I agreed at once. I started immediately looking locally for something suitable, only to find there were further conditions she had not mentioned, one of which was the precise area. I had been to look at a very nice flat in a block at the top of Chetwynd Road, just two streets away. She dismissed that. She said it was Kentish Town. What a snob. She wanted to move in the other direction, and be in Highgate, or at least have an N6 postcode.
That of course would put the price up, but having started the process, and got her to agree to move, we had become excited by the thought of having our whole house to ourselves.
I kept looking. And eventually came across a new block, with eight flats, going up a few streets away in Swain’s Lane, excellent position, at the bottom end of Highgate West Hill, near the Heath, with some nice, upmarket shops opposite.
I took Mrs Hall to see the block just before it was finally completed. She agreed she would move there, but demanded a flat on the first floor. I was surprised, at her age, assuming she would have preferred to be on the ground floor. She said the ground floor might attract burglars.
It had one bedroom, sitting room, security entry phone, her own front door to her flat, modern bathroom and kitchen and full central heating, none of which she had in her/our house. The price was £7,500 for a 99-year lease. I was furious at having to pay so much. It was 50 per cent more than we had to pay for our own house, just to get her out. And she didn’t seem at all grateful.
I was the first purchaser of any of the flats in the block but the other seven quickly sold – almost all of them to Russians. The Russian trade delegation had a big residence nearby, overlooking the Highgate ponds on the Heath. They had featured in various newspaper stories and scenes in John le Carré-type stories about hidden letter boxes, rendezvous with spies behind trees. Allegedly, MI5 had managed to bribe a window cleaner, who was cleaning the windows in their residence, to fix a listening device to every window.
Many of the Russian families sent their children to Brookfield School, the local primary that Caitlin and Jake attended. The Russian children integrated well, but the parents never smiled and chatted, though I got to recognise a few in the playground. When you met any of the mothers coming towards you on the Heath, they would suddenly stop talking, as if they feared you might understand their Russian.
The Russian fathers played football on the Heath on a Sunday. We played a game against them once. By ‘we’ I mean Dartmouth Park United, a Sunday morning team I began with two other local dads which went on for many years.
Not long after Mrs Hall had finally moved in, I got a call from a posh-sounding man who wanted to ask me about her. I was a bit suspicious, but he seemed to know all the details, of the flat, that I owned it and that she was my tenant. He just wanted to know who she was. I asked who he was and he muttered something
about some government department and gave me a genuine-sounding official number and address. I said all I could tell him was that Mrs Hall was a single woman, aged about seventy, born in Dublin. He hung up.
Not long afterwards I got a similar call from a Russian-sounding voice, asking the same sort of questions. They explained they were the owners of some of the other flats, which I knew was true. When I mentioned Mrs Hall was Irish and seventy, they too hung up.
The first was clearly MI5 or one of our security departments, the second was the Russian equivalent. Each was obviously suspicious that Mrs Hall had been planted. Or could be planted. She was for a long time the only non-Russian living in the building. I suspect their lack of interest in her, once I had given them a few details, was ageism.
Getting Mrs Hall into that flat was a triumph of persuasion and money. Getting her out of our house was wonderful. At long last we had our own house, all to ourselves.
11
BACK TO JOURNALISM
I began to miss journalism. I didn’t really enjoy being stuck at home all day long, every day, even though we now had the whole house to ourselves. I didn’t need the money journalism might bring in, or the work, as I had enough books being commissioned. I just missed the fun of being a journalist.
I had been doing it full time for around ten years, from 1958 till 1968 when we went abroad for that year. Margaret never felt the need to do anything else other than sit and write books, or sit and read books. She never wanted to be with other people, far less sit in an office.
In the early years of being published, feeling so grateful to your publisher, most authors do what they suggest, so Margaret did do some bookshop signing sessions, appeared on TV and radio programmes, talked now and again at literary festivals – and was brilliant at it, being so fluent, intelligent, far better than me. She always had complete silence, people hanging on her words. It was the actress in her coming out. All public appearance is acting. But she did not enjoy it, in that she did not like herself liking it, did not approve of herself doing it, feeling it was catering to her worst instincts. She did not feel anyway that it was an author’s duty to appear in public. She much preferred being at home, on her own.
I did not want to want to go out full time, as I loved being at home, but I also wanted to go out, now and again, be in contact with people. I fancied some sort of part-time journalism, keeping my hand in, if only now and again. I told myself if I had been a plumber or a carpenter, and had enjoyed it, I might still have wanted to go back and do a bit of plumbing now again, even if I did not need to.
I had come off the Sunday Times full-time staff, once we were back in London, and stayed full time at home for a couple of years working on books. Then, Harry Evans, the editor, suddenly offered me a part-time position, any time I wanted it. Nothing was written down, it was just a verbal arrangement that I would come back to the paper for around six months every year and do whatever he felt the paper needed. I would not be a threat to other people, scheming to get their jobs. They would know that in six months, whatever I was doing, I would be off, back home, working on a book.
This strange off and on routine ran for most of the 1970s, doing other things at the same time, such as books, but for longer or shorter periods I would put on my journalist cap and become a hack again, going to the office, working with other hacks.
It began when Harry asked me to become the women’s editor of the Sunday Times. That was not the exact title. In fact it was all a bit hazy. Harry just blurted it out one day, on the run, throwing off ideas as usual.
I had never been an executive before, only ever been in charge of one other person when I ran the Atticus column, but had always fancied myself running a team, enthusing them, thinking of ideas. I had had such fun as editor of Palatinate, our student newspaper at Durham, where most of my staff were women, and vaguely imagined that running the women’s pages might be much the same.
Harry did not explain properly what was in his mind, but it appeared to be running a new section, the Look! pages, which would in effect be the women’s and home section of the paper. The real reason was that he had hatched a plot to get rid of the fashion editor Ernestine Carter, a diminutive American woman in her mid-sixties, very powerful in the fashion trade, highly thought-of by shops like Harrods. He could not sack her, as she was so distinguished and had been awarded an OBE for services to fashion, but he realised she was becoming out of step with modern fashion and modern journalism and modern young readers.
This often happens in journalism and in publishing, and other forms of fashionable or creative life, and in sport. People once deemed superstars appear to have lost their touch, or are thought to have lost it, but are hard to budge because of the status and contacts they have built up. Their end is often very cruel – and of course the person doing the knifing often ends up in due course being axed themselves.
Harry’s plot was quite simple. He wanted me to create some rival pages, run different sorts of family and domestic stories, the more outrageous and vulgar the better. If it upset Ernestine, who would be left only with her high-fashion page, and she threatened to resign, so much the better. He could always blame me.
The first day I arrived in the department I found two people sitting there who thought they were the editor of this new section. The first was Mark Boxer, who at one time had been editor of the Colour Mag, and was now generally hanging around. When I told him Harry had made me the boss of Look! he was more than happy to disappear. Yes, it did have an exclamation mark. Not my doing. I have gone through life hating exclamation marks, considering them the work of amateurs.
The other was Molly Parkin, who arrived one day and told me Harry had made her women’s editor. When I looked into this, it turned out that Harry meant her just to be fashion editor of the Look! pages, doing modern, young fashion, while I was the editor in charge of her and the new section. Molly accepted this, which was just as well. She could not type, had very little editing experience, but was a larger than life character, wore outrageous clothes, and seemed to be in touch with all the new young designers. She had gone to art college, been a painter, then moved into fashion, working for a while with Barbara Hulanicki at Biba and Mary Quant, then did some fashion editing for Nova and Harpers and Queen. She was in her late thirties, four years older than me, and had been married to a posh, public school- and Oxford-educated gallery owner called Michael Parkin. After five years of a stormy marriage, Molly had walked out. When she left their Chelsea home, Molly used some spray paint to delete the G on a local NO PARKING sign.
Molly was now fancy free, despite having two young daughters, and every day kept the office in hysterics about her love life, telling us the most intimate details of her various blokes, some of them very well known such as two eminent playwrights.
I also inherited a new columnist called Jilly Cooper, a failed secretary, who had written a funny piece in the Magazine which Harry had liked and so he’d hired her. I took her out to lunch and discovered her husband Leo had been married before. I encouraged her to write a personal piece, about being a second wife, and to be more serious now and again.
Jilly became the most popular writer on the whole paper – much to the astonishment of the Insight team. They thought readers bought the paper for Insight.
When I joined the Sunday Times in 1960 the star names were Cyril Connolly, Harold Hobson and Dilys Powell. Now it had become Jilly. The paper had not promoted her at this stage, nor was she appearing on radio or TV, yet she had acquired this enormous following – all on her own. She had had no experience of newspapers or of writing columns. So, what made her successful?
Women had written newspaper columns for decades on so-called women’s pages of the national newspaper and magazines, but they were ever so sensible, giving sensible advice. Jilly played it mainly for laughs – but she was also revealing herself, telling true, personal stories.
After writing about being a second wife, there were few personal subjects she would not consi
der, such as sex, marriage, class, but all done amusingly, without hurting anyone. On sex, which she has written about constantly since in her bestselling books, she doesn’t really write sexily, not in the erotic or smutty sense. It’s ever so wholesome, and fun.
I used to try to cut out her puns, many of which were excruciating, and try to keep her concentrating on herself and her husband Leo.
People think it’s easy, writing that sort of column, because it is made to look easy. But you have to have a likeable persona and a distinctive voice – and enormous discipline, to keep it up, week after week. Jilly was always totally professional.
When I meet her today she turns to other people and says, ‘He was the best editor I ever had, isn’t he wonderful, isn’t he marvellous.’ Then a waitress approaches and she says, ‘Darling, you are so wonderful, the best waitress in the world.’ Or she meets someone from her publishers. ‘Darling, you are so sweet, I owe everything to you.’
Is she being cynical? Not in the least. She loves everybody and everybody loves Jilly.
After a couple of months editing the Look! pages, the readers’ letters were streaming in. I did my best to annoy Ernestine with series like ‘Me and My Vasectomy’ and also a feature on what happens when men’s underpants go yellow. That did have Ernestine yelping.
I only did it for six months, leaving Harry to gently and gracefully ease out Ernestine, but looking back, my time on Look! was the most fun I ever had in journalism – since my days editing Palatinate. Apart from Jilly and Molly, there was also Lucia van der Post and Lesley Garner on the staff of Look!, both excellent, who went on to greater things. Ian Jack, who was the chief sub, was also a close friend, later editor of Granta and Guardian columnist. Oh, the lunches we had, went on for days, in hysterics all the time.
A Life in the Day Page 12
