An Education

by Lynn Barber

  Actually we were alike in a million ways – we both hated the theatre, loved opera, hated sport, loved art galleries. We once did a psychometric test for a friend who was training to be a psychiatrist and he said he had never seen two such similar test results. We were both Geminis (though of course we didn't believe in astrology!) and were delighted to be told that Geminis should always marry each other because they made such appalling partners for anyone else – we Twins are the marital lepers of the celestial regions.

  On the other hand, we were different in one very important way. David was good. He was thoroughly kind, thoroughly truthful, thoroughly decent. Whereas I was somehow morally damaged. I had become a proficient liar in my years with Simon and found it hard to break the habit. I was also apt to do bad things if I thought I could get away with them. But at least I knew I needed to marry someone good. I didn't mind having bad hats as boyfriends – in fact I was rather attracted to them – but for a husband I wanted someone 100 per cent decent. Thank God I had the sense to see that.

  We came from very different backgrounds. David was not Mexican – that was a misunderstanding – but he grew up mainly abroad because his father worked in different countries as head of the British Council. His father Maurice came from a long line of English gentry – David's middle name, Cloudesley, commemorated one of their ancestors, the admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel – and had followed his two older brothers to Eton, Oxford and the Guards. He served with distinction as a major in the war and was involved in undercover work in Greece with Paddy Leigh-Fermor (he is mentioned in Captain Corelli's Mandolin) and was then appointed head of the British Council in Greece. Later, he was stationed in Italy, Cyprus (where he seems to have played some sort of undercover negotiating role with Makarios), Belgium, Mexico, Thailand and finally Paris. Tall, upright, formal, always immaculately dressed, Maurice was every inch the traditional stiff-upper-lipped English gentleman, but he was not quite as conventional as he appeared. He wrote several rather good travel books and novels under the pseudonym John Lincoln, and he married Leonora, who was an actress and Jewish, i.e. not at all the sort of wife expected in his class. They made a striking couple – he so tall, fair, English, she so petite, dark, Sephardic-looking. David inherited the best of everything – his father's height and china blue eyes, his mother's thick dark hair and olive skin.

  As a young boy, David lived with his parents abroad – he remembered idyllic years in Italy and Cyprus – but then, when he was eight, his parents sent him back to prep school in England, and he didn't see them again for over a year. He spent the holidays with his Aunt Anna, Leonora's sister, who was married to a Leeds solicitor and kept a kosher house, so he had to learn the rituals of Judaism at the same time as learning the rituals of boarding school. He hated his prep school so much that he was reluctant ever to talk about it, but he mentioned the cold, the terrible food, the loneliness. Many years later, when our elder daughter Rosie turned eight, David sank into a strange depression and eventually explained it was because he was remembering being sent away to school when he was Rosie's age. Of course it was quite normal then (many expats sent their children ‘home’ to England at five or six), but whenever Leonora went into one of her raptures about what a doting mother she was, I always had to bite my tongue not to say, ‘But you sent David away at eight!’

  Anyway, he survived prep school, and Eton afterwards, with stoicism but fairly deep unhappiness I think. When, many years later, we used to take a friend's son out from Eton for Sunday lunch, I begged David to at least show me round the chapel, but he never would – he wouldn't even get out of the car. The one saving grace at Eton was that he had a great art teacher, Wilfrid Blunt, who allowed him to stay in the art studio when everyone else was out rowing or playing beastly games. He virtually lived in the art studio and his best friends at Eton were other artists, notably Edmund Fairfax-Lucy, who became an RA, and Nick Gosling, son of the art critic Nigel Gosling, who ran the film society.

  David would have liked to have gone to art school but his parents took the conventional line that he must get a proper degree – he could always paint in his spare time. So he went to New College, Oxford, to read PPP – philosophy, physiology and psychology – a singularly useless degree which, according to David, entirely consisted of observing rats in mazes. More enjoyably, he served on the college art committee and spent many happy days in London choosing prints and paintings for the JCR. He also drew beautiful cover illustrations for Isis and other student magazines.

  So this was the David I met in 1966. He was far more cultured than me. He had spent more time abroad than he had in England; he had been to the opera at La Scala, and to lunch with Harold Acton at La Pietra; he had visited the Grand Canyon and all the great Mayan temples; he could speak good Italian, French and a little Spanish; he had eaten at Michelin three-star restaurants and could talk about truffles; he knew famous writers and artists like Leonora Carrington, Stephen Spender, Lawrence Durrell, as family friends. On the other hand, I was often surprised by what he didn't know. He had hardly been anywhere in England and was thrilled when I later took him to Cornwall and the Lake District. He was terrified of bills, of tax forms, of policemen, of doctors, of any kind of authority. He was also weirdly scared of working-class people – it was always left to me to sort out which cleaner, gardener, plumber, electrician we should hire because he was equally alarmed by them all. Later, when he claimed to have become a Marxist, I said he couldn't really be a Marxist and hate the working class. He said he didn't hate them at all – but he worked on the assumption that they all hated him.

  When we first lived together in Stockwell, he was painting and drawing but making no effort to sell his work or even show it to anyone. He had just enough money to live on because his parents were still stationed in Mexico and had put him in charge of letting Little Haseley, their house outside Oxford, and had told him to keep whatever rent was left over when he'd paid the maintenance bills. He filled the house with Oxford friends and we used to go down at weekends to have hot baths and collect the rent.

  But when we left Stockwell we needed more money to live on, so David had to get a proper job. An Oxford friend, Paddy Scannell, was helping to set up a brand-new course, media studies, at the Regent Street Polytechnic and said he could get David a few hours a week teaching ‘general studies’. David was soon fascinated by the course, and switched from teaching general studies to the history of television, which he thought had been seriously neglected. He and Paddy wrote a book on the early years of the BBC. And, as the course expanded, so did David's responsibilities, until at one point he was head of department. He loved those early years at the Polytechnic, when they were still mapping out the territory of media studies and working to get it accepted as a degree subject.

  (I still get furious with people – including, alas, many of my journalist colleagues – who knock media studies as a somehow worthless or frivolous pursuit. I know that the calibre of teaching is not always great, but I don't see how anyone can fault media studies as a subject, given that we live in such a media-dominated age. Isn't it important to give young people some idea of how the media works? Can anyone seriously maintain that Latin is more relevant?)

  After Stockwell, we had a peripatetic few months, scrounging rooms off friends – one of the advantages of David having been to Eton was that he had plenty of rich friends with spare rooms. We stayed for a while in Oakwood Court, Kensington, one of those grand mansion blocks populated by spies and retired civil servants, and then briefly in Mayfair, in the caretaker's flat in the attic of a beautiful Georgian house. It was a wonderful address and a sweet flat – but unfortunately designed for dwarves. There was only a small patch in the middle of the sitting room where we could stand upright and the double bed was smaller than most children's bunks – we could only make love in the position called ‘spoons’. Mayfair, it turned out, was a hopeless place to live. It had no food shops or tobacconists, still less launderettes, and the only place where we could a
fford to eat was a ‘drop-in centre’ run by a cult called The Process. We learned to eat very quickly before the sparkly-eyed loonies started asking if we'd found the meaning of life. ‘Yep, yep,’ we'd say, ‘pass the ketchup,’ and gulp a few more forkfuls before bolting for the door.

  Eventually David ran into a schoolfriend, S, who asked if we wanted to take over his flat in Haverstock Hill, Belsize Park. It was a fabulous bargain – £8 a week for a well-furnished, three-bedroom garden flat overlooking an absolutely glorious half-acre garden. In theory the garden was our responsibility but luckily Mrs Franks upstairs asked if she could sit in it sometimes in return for her tending it. This proved to be an excellent deal because she was a brilliant gardener and responded well to my occasional orders – ‘More sweet peas’, ‘No marigolds.’ She only put her foot down once when I said we wanted to grow vegetables and she said in her strong German accent, ‘This is a nice neighbourhood. I cannot allow.’ For once in my life, I had the sense not to argue.

  Belsize Park was still in those days a markedly Jewish area with some good delicatessens that closed on Saturdays, opened on Sundays. We lived there for seven years – the only slight mystery was why David's friend S had surrendered this miraculously cheap flat. Eventually Mrs Franks upstairs enlightened us: the man who shared the flat with S had committed suicide one weekend and S came back to find the body. After that, he was unable to live there. Years later, when we left the flat, this had an odd postscript. The landlady asked if we would like to sell her all our carpets, curtains and furniture so that she could let the flat as furnished. We had always assumed that it was furnished, by her, but it turned out that all the stuff in the flat belonged to the man who committed suicide. David got in touch with S to ask if he wanted it – he didn't – so David and I acquired this useful legacy of beds and bedding, carpets and armchairs, saucepans and casseroles from a dead man we never met. David would occasionally say, morbidly, ‘We're eating off a dead man's plates’ and I would say cheerily, ‘Yes – aren't they nice!’ I still have some of the plates now – it was a strange present from beyond the grave.

  We married in 1971, while we were at Haverstock Hill, not because we were particularly hooked on marriage but because in those days you had to be married to get a joint mortgage and we decided we had to buy a house. But we wanted to get married with minimum fuss, in Hampstead Registry Office just over the road. I bought a lovely red Gini Fratini dress, and David wore his best Carnaby Street suit. I said, Do we have to ask our parents? And David said yes, we did. So it was wedding with parents at the Registry Office, followed by lunch at the flat and then a party in the evening for all our friends, once our parents had gone. I dreaded our parents meeting I knew I would squirm with embarrassment – and on the morning of our wedding day I woke up with the most obvious psychosomatic illness of my life: I was literally struck dumb, unable to speak. I managed to croak ‘Thank you’ when Leonora presented me with a beautiful emerald and diamond ring that had been her grandmother's, and ‘I do’ in the Registry Office, but when we went back to the flat for lunch with our parents, I spoke not a word. Even when our friends came in the evening, I was still unable to speak, but next day my voice was perfectly normal.

  We left Haverstock Hill eventually because it was the Seventies and everyone said you had to get on ‘the housing ladder’ and buy a house, though we were heartbroken to leave our lovely flat and move from the border of Hampstead Heath to the unknown badlands of Finsbury Park. We arrived at Finsbury Park by the simple process of moving eastwards till we found a house we could afford. Like Stockwell, Finsbury Park was considered way beyond the pale, but we managed to find a very pretty four-bedroom Victorian terraced house with all its original fireplaces and cornices for £14,500 and although, as with Stockwell, everyone said ‘You'll be raped and mugged all the time’, we weren't even burgled in the ten years we lived there. We were so house-proud, we picked out all the cornices with toothpicks and lovingly sanded and polished the floorboards – the only downside was that huge brown slugs came up through the gaps in the floorboards every night until eventually I insisted on carpets.

  I had no decorating taste whatsoever at this stage, but luckily David had more than enough for both of us and, over the years, I learned from him. We made the house really exquisite, though the garden never attained our Haverstock Hill heights. And then, when the house was ready, I stopped taking the pill and waited to get pregnant. David had always been very clear that the whole point of marriage was to start a family – he longed to have children. I wasn't sure I did – I seemed to lack any maternal instinct, never played with dolls as a child and never cooed over babies. But David was reassuring: he said if I found I didn't like looking after children, he would do it. I am eternally grateful. If I had married a man who was iffy, who said ‘Oh well, you have children if you want to, but on your head be it’, I might well be childless today. Thank God David was so sure.

  But then I didn't get pregnant for a whole year. It was probably good for me – once I started thinking I couldn't have children then I wanted them badly. And I was haunted by thoughts of the abortion I'd had at Oxford. I'd fallen pregnant almost the first time I slept with an undergraduate, but his brother arranged an abortion at a Harley Street clinic, and I'd had it very quickly and easily and gone to a party the same night. I felt no tremor of guilt or doubt at the time, or for ten years afterwards, but during the months I was failing to get pregnant with David, this blood-spattered baby would come to me in my dreams and say, ‘You could have had me, you had your chance.’ We were actually booked for fertility tests, when we went on holiday to Portugal and bingo!, came back pregnant. Much to my surprise, I loved being pregnant, loved having Rosie, loved breastfeeding, and was very happy to do it all again two years later with Theo. I always wish I'd had more children but we ran out of money and I had to go back to work.

  Marrying David was the best, most sensible and ‘right’ thing I ever did. I believe that to some extent his goodness was catching and that he made me a better person, and certainly a better parent, than I would otherwise have been. I was and still am profoundly selfish, probably as a result of being a spoilt only child, but at least with David around I had some notion of what selflessness looked like. He was very indignant when one of our friends called him a ‘saint’ – especially as the clear implication was that he was a saint for putting up with me! – and I don't think I would have enjoyed being married to a saint, but I am grateful that I had the sense to marry a good man.

  It was an unconventional marriage in some ways. When we first got together in the Sixties, it was extremely unusual for the man to do the cooking, and even our friends often made jokes about it. David's mother was outraged. She was always trying to teach me ‘easy’ recipes. I resisted. David loved cooking, I hated it; he was good at it, I was bad. Ergo, why mess up an arrangement that suited us both fine just to fulfil his mother's idea of what wives were supposed to do? Similarly, it was unusual back then for the wife to be the higher earner, as I was for most of our marriage, but it never bothered us – it was just a fact of life that journalism paid more than painting or teaching. I think people who try to run their marriages according to other people's expectations are insane. It is quite hard enough to keep a marriage together till death do you part – which I think should be the aim, even if it can't always succeed – without trying to do it to please other people. A good marriage is whatever suits the participants, and our marriage suited us fine.

  Penthouse

  Marriage first, career second – that was certainly my order of priorities on leaving Oxford, but on the other hand I did need to find some sort of employment, and it was by the purest fluke of luck that I stumbled into Penthouse magazine. My original plan – to become a film star/billionaire/femme fatale – had not made any progress and when I went to the Oxford careers office the only suggestion they came up with was that I should join the prison service and hope to be fast-tracked into becoming a prison governor one day. What a
prospect – especially when I'd put so much hard work into becoming a hedonist! However, it did have the effect of making me think I should apply for some jobs or traineeships, if only to avoid prison.

  Like everyone else, I tried for a BBC traineeship but I knew the interview was going badly when they asked what political issues I was interested in, and I scratched my head for a bit and eventually said, ‘Er… abortion?’ – the rejection letter came the next day. I had one secure sellable skill, shorthand-typing, but on the other hand I'd done enough of it to know I didn't want to do any more. The only other thing I knew I could earn money from was journalism, because I'd written a column for the Richmond and Twickenham Times while still at school, and kept my hand in at Oxford by writing occasional features for Isis and Cherwell. But the trouble with journalism in those days was that it was tightly controlled by the NUJ and in order to join any national newspaper you had to go on one of their far-flung training schemes which meant spending two years in the provinces. No way could I do that when I'd just met David, and was in hot pursuit. Anyway, as a lifetime Londoner, Oxford was as far into the sticks as I was ever prepared to go.

  So then I started applying to magazines. But they too were largely controlled by unions and also, like the BBC, had this infuriating scam whereby, if you were a woman, they encouraged you to join the organisation as a secretary and ‘work your way up’. I didn't fancy two years typing for the editor of Practical Knitting while aspiring to the giddy heights of deputy sub-editor. So then I went to see the formidable Beatrix Miller, editor of Vogue, who asked what I was interested in. Someone had advised me not to say fashion because that's what everyone said so, bizarrely and quite untruthfully, I said travel (I'd been overland to India in one of my Oxford vacations), and she offered me a job as assistant to the assistant travel editor at £14 a week. I was still mulling this over when I got a better offer from Penthouse.