Maggie & Me
Page 22
My other mother.
I want to watch you walk through the world before you leave it and if you stumble I’ll rush forward to catch you. I like to think I’d show you the kindness you never showed me. I’d like you to owe me a favour. I want to show you that I did it. I want you to be proud of me.
Epilogue
The athenaeum is the most exclusive of London’s private member clubs. I am here to interview a retired senior civil servant – who I’ll call Sir Humphrey – for a feature I’m working on. ‘Be sure to wear a tie,’ he reminds me in an email. There’s no need for such a reminder, the arriviste is always alert to any code. I arrive fifteen minutes early and as usual feel like I’m infiltrating.
Sir Humphrey is twinkly-eyed and more energetic than I’d imagined. His tie is unexpectedly red. Waiters pull our chairs out and in that ritual act of faith we trust them not to take revenge on us by leaving them there when we fall back. The menu is grand and ordering is byzantine, Cunard cruise liner circa 1925. I am not allowed to address the staff directly. Sir Humphrey asks what I’d like and I tell him and he tells the waiter, who fills out a form. The food arrives surprisingly swiftly and our interview begins. But soon, very soon, we veer off-course. Sir Humphrey saw Maggie every day, she brushed past him in her tight-boned corsets, watched everything he did.
‘She changed my life the day I met her,’ he says, taking a pat of butter and smearing it on his side plate before breaking a bread roll in his hands.
I watch him and copy. She changed my life the day I met her too, on the telly, walking away from that bomb.
Soon I forget my questions. Sir Humphrey eats little as he talks almost constantly for the next four hours leaving only official gaps for official secrets. He tells me how Maggie toured her new kingdom immediately after winning and plucked him from relative obscurity in one of the many departments she didn’t trust.
‘The next Monday I was in Downing Street.’ Like her, he was a grammar school exception. ‘The Old Etonians called her the Pound Coin: “thick and brassy and thinks she’s a sovereign”. She was like an empress bestowing favour and exacting punishment.’
Lunch is turning into afternoon tea. Neither of us wants to leave. Having completed its time travel a rum baba arrives for pudding.
Finally, as the coffee cups are cleared away, Sir Humphrey leans towards me. ‘I don’t know how you’ll feel about this,’ he says, almost whispering in the now empty dining room. ‘But she would have liked you, you know.’
‘Me?’ I am aware I sound too loud. I lay my spoon down quietly.
‘Yes,’ he says appraisingly. ‘You. I think she would have liked you very much indeed.’
Acknowledgements
Writing this book has been an extension of living – and reliving – my life. For years, whenever I tried to write something longer than a newspaper feature, I kept returning to my own story – fragments, details, feelings. The sort of stuff you get out of your system and put in a drawer and forget. That drawer is now very full and securely locked, I’m pleased to say.
This self-indulgence was frustrating – surely I had better stories to tell than my own. I felt it signified a lack of imagination. I was right. Almost all of what I wrote was mortifying but somewhere in there was a voice, my own. I listened hard for a long time and among the shouts and whispers I finally heard it. I needed to remember, not imagine. This was not always easy.
The first person to hear this echo was Clare Conville – my agent and my friend. She saw something in embarrassing early efforts and her stylish combination of criticism, encouragement and martinis turned pages into a proposal and then a manuscript and now a book. She introduced me to Louisa Joyner, whose early editorial thoughts were invaluable. Thank you both and to all at Conville & Walsh especially all the Alexes.
Bloomsbury was my dream publisher and what a dream! Alexandra Pringle has inspired and terrified in equal measure, holding my book to her standards. I couldn’t have a better editor. Line-by-line and page-by-page I’ve been accompanied by the tireless Gillian Stern who somehow matches sensitivity and thoroughness. David Mann is responsible for the jacket, which I love more and more every time I see it. Thank you also to Alexa, Maria, Alice, Oliver, Mary and Sarah.
‘There is no point in describing experience unless you try to get it as near to being what it really was as you can make it,’ wrote Diana Athill. ‘Get it right,’ she said to me. I’ve tried my very best to follow her advice and I’m grateful to her for that and much, much more.
My Literary Salon at Shoreditch House allows me to share ideas, and cocktails, with incredible writers. I’m thankful to them all for inspiring me and especially: Jake Arnott, Louis de Bernières, Chris Cleave, John Crace, Geoff Dyer, Helen Fielding, James Frey, Patrick Gale, Janice Galloway, Richard Holloway, Howard Jacobson, Andrew Miller, David Mitchell, Maggie O’Farrell, D.B.C. Pierre, Alex Preston, Rupert Thomson, Colm Tóibín and John Waters (for telling me how to sign a colostomy bag – should I ever be asked to). Thanks, of course, to Russell Finch, Nick Jones, Dan Flower, Vanessa and all at Shoreditch House and all the fabulous Salonistas! And to Peter Hutton – the world’s best assistant.
Thank you to the following friends for being kind and brave enough to read very early on: Naomi Alderman, Caz Biss, Brian Halley, Alexandra Heminsley, Henry Jeffreys, Eleanor ‘cousin’ Moran, David Nicholls, Jess Ruston and Sister Sophia. Particular gratitude to Polly Samson and David Gilmour not just for reading and thinking and caring but also for taking in my wayward chickens. Feathered thanks to all my Girls.
For encouragement, cocktails and kindness: Alex Bellos, Ella Berthoud, Susie Boyt, Sally Chatterton, Jessica Fellowes, Max Ginnane, Katy Guest, Anoushka Healey, Liz Hoggard, Richard Holloway, Nick Ib, India Knight, Jonathan Lee, Sam Leith, Stephanie Merrit, Kirsty Milner, Jojo Moyes, Tiffany Murray, Rowan Pelling, Dotson Rader, Ann Siegel, Sathnam Sanghera, Craig Taylor, Shaun and Polly at Tilton House, Janice Turner, S.J. Watson and Zoe Williams. Thank you all. This round is on me!
Lucy Aitkens, Neil Byrne, Joshua van der Broek, Sham and Clive, Rob Kendrick, Simon Lock, Eileen and Bertie Maccabe, Jeff Melnyk, Bakul Patki, Iram Quraishi and Ruthe Waineman have all put up with my endless book blethering. Thank you for listening lovingly. Now, what was I saying?
Much of this book was written at Aikwood Tower in the Scottish Borders. It’s almost intimidatingly inspiring. I’m very grateful to Rory and Vicky Steel for their generous hospitality and to Roddy for caretaking me.
Of all the things I’ve written this feels the most important – not because it’s all about me. Yes, it’s a memoir but my story is shared. I’ve done my very best to be careful with and faithful to all the people you’ve met. Names have been changed. Some things have been forgotten. Some things can’t be. You’ve read it so you know and they do too. I am most grateful to my mum, dad, sister and brother and to Miss Campbell, Mrs Shaw, Heather and Mark (wherever he is now).
And, of course, Maggie.
A Note on Milk Snatching
‘Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’ will follow Maggie to her grave. It is true that she ended free school milk for all over sevens in 1971 when she was Education Secretary under Edward Heath. Until then every pupil under eighteen was entitled to a third of a pint a day under the Free Milk Act introduced in 1946 by another pioneering woman, Ellen Wilkinson, the first female education minister (Labour). Despite Thatcher’s cuts many local education authorities continued providing free milk and in 1977 the EEC School Milk Subsidy Scheme was introduced. If, like me, you got free school meals you continued to get free school milk – this remains true today.
A Note on the Author
DAMIAN BARR has been a journalist for over ten years, writing mostly for The Times but also the Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Evening Standard and Granta. He is the author of Get It Together: A Guide to Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis, featured on Richard & Judy, and has co-written two plays for BBC Radio 4. He is a Fellow of the Royal Soc
iety of Arts, Faculty at the School of Life and host of his own infamous Literary Salon. He was Stonewall’s Writer of the Year in 2013 and lives in Brighton.
Follow him on Twitter @Damian_Barr
By the Same Author
Get It Together: A Guide to Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis
First published in Great Britain 2013
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2013 by Damian Barr
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of Damian Barr. In some cases names of people have been changed to protect the privacy of others
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