Category: Personal (Page 4 of 6)

CLOSER TO HOME

5th April 2019 / Esther Menell

It was in Abu Simbel, as I vomited over someone’s shoes, that I decided never to visit a popular site again. I knew I would enjoy the morning more if I spent it in the hotel garden – away from the crowds and the heat – but, at the very last moment, the fear of ‘missing something’ was too great: I climbed onto the tourist bus along with everyone else, and those chunky seated figures proved my nemesis. I have never given in to the fear of missing something again.

A lot closer to home than Abu Simbel was the little Vuillard exhibition in Birmingham, earlier this year. But not close enough. I have always loved this painter who, at his early best, was a stay-at-home of the first order*, but did I really want to spend the two hours on the train that it would take to get there, and the two hours to get back again . . . ?

Anyway, there is so much within walking distance we have never paid attention to. We have been to the Taj Mahal but not, until the other day, to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral (once an Anglican church) on our own high street.

Neither of us – even though my husband has visited more than a thousand churches** – had ever thought to go inside this gloomy hulk. It turned out to house massive chandeliers which light up murals that cover every inch of wall space: not paintings of the highest quality, but displaying a depth of feeling which makes it easy to understand why this place is second home to my elderly Greek Cypriot neighbour and all her friends. This is not a church which plays to empty houses.

Less fortunate is the Spiritualist Temple in nearby Rochester Square. If this has a congregation, it is disembodied. We could find no way in.

Inevitably, this sadly neglected building has caught the eye of a developer, who could not care less that its foundation stone was laid by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

What is both shameful and surprising – for it was Sherlock Holmes who made my American husband feel at home in England forty-odd years ago and whose stories have never lost their hold – is that we didn’t know about this building until the local paper broke the story of its imminent demolition.

Ignoring the things on our own doorstep in favour of abroad has, however, paid off in more ways than one. It is lucky we have so much left to see, now that both health and the cost of insurance make travel difficult. And luckier still to have got to the ruins at Delphi before they were fenced off, to the glorious, empty stretch of sand at Malia before Malia became a tourist Mecca, and to Tallinn, my mother’s birthplace and one of the loveliest of small European cities, before it became a popular destination for stag parties.

* See my husband Robert Harbison’s blog: Vuillard the Radical

** See The Shell Guide to English Parish Churches London, 1992

REMEMBERING DIANA

14th March 2019 / Esther Menell

Diana Athill, who has appeared several times in these blog posts, died on 23rd January 2019.

This is the story of our friendship. Told to myself, to try and make sense of it. I feel able to post it thanks to Diana’s nephew, Phil Athill, without whose approval I would not be letting it travel outside the room in which it was written. Disconcerted by the media gush that followed her death, and hoping for a serious and cool reconsideration of her life, he encouraged me to send it to a national newspaper, but I hesitate to try to publish more widely something that was written to purge my own feelings and which could cause anger and disappointment to the many admirers who knew Diana only from her books and the idealised version presented by the media.

In this form, it is in keeping with the principle of my blog, which is to talk about what concerns me at the moment of writing, or has interested me or concerned me in the past.

The funeral was only a few days ago. A joyful affair. For how can one mourn a life that lasted for over a hundred years and was fully lived until the very end? The solemn tolling of the church bell as the coffin was borne away was a fitting prelude to life-after-Diana for all of us gathered there, now drinking champagne and sharing our memories in her now for-ever absence.

An absence that I was to feel acutely the next day as I read the last page of a novel I had picked off the shelf in my son’s Brooklyn home a few days before. I had never heard of the Danish author of this remarkable book and I am sure Diana hadn’t either, for she would have told me about both it and him . . .

During all the years she spent in that Highgate home, familiar now to her thousands of readers, I would take her books I had been reading and would look forward, as I had done during the thirty years or so that we worked together, to knowing what she thought of them. Her taste (within its confines) was unerring and her love of books unparalleled.

It was this that I valued most in her, and it is this that I will miss, that I miss already. Who else would have made me think again about James Salter? Swept up, like everyone else, by the media attention he attracted on his death (I had not heard of him before) I fell for All That Is, and it took Diana to make me think again. She was not moved by this artifice and, on re-reading him, I became uncomfortably aware of how shallow the book was beneath its glittering surface.

And now that I have come across another novel whose subject is the intricacy of married life, she is not there to test it out. But I like to think she would have thought Jens Christian Grondahl’s Silence in October as extraordinary as I do, a serious challenge to one of her own authors who had made marriage and family life his territory.

John Updike is one of the authors on whom Diana’s reputation as a great editor – ‘the best editor in London’ – rests. An irony of which she herself was aware (she never claimed greatness), for John Updike, like Norman Mailer, that other giant in her stable, was actually edited not in London but in New York.

As for Jean Rhys and V.S. Naipaul, whose miraculous re-discovery and discovery are always attributed to Diana, they had already been snuffled out by that remarkable truffle-hound, Frances Wyndham. Indeed, Jean Rhys was of so little interest to anyone at Deutsch – except as an irritant to André, who had paid her an option of £25 and received nothing in return – that I, then the most junior editor, was sent down to Cheriton Fitzpaine to try and get the book out of her. The novel, which I helped assemble, was The Wide Sargasso Sea.

Without Diana, the Jean Rhys story from then onwards – or, rather, from the time, two years later, that the manuscript was delivered – would have been very different. An editor’s job is twofold: attention to the text and attention to the writer, and at the latter – the nurturing – Diana excelled. And it was this that Jean Rhys needed, and without which she would not have survived.

Despite the poverty and isolation of her life at that time, the manuscript that Jean handed in could have gone straight to the printer. Naipaul’s submissions were also word-perfect, leaving little for an editor to do. I know this from experience, as I had the unnerving job of being the first to read A Bend in the River, which came in when Diana and Vidia were barely on speaking terms (entirely his fault). I did my best to find something wrong: to be able to make a few suggestions which would show that I had read the book with attention. But it wasn’t easy. And, though I passed the test (admiration, whether genuine or feigned, goes a long way) I was very relieved when Vidia thought better of breaking with Diana and I was shot of him once and for all.

Relieved because, like Jean, Naipaul demanded (in his case, demanded rather than required) constant attention. His ego knew no bounds and I wonder if the greatest of all editors – Maxwell Perkins – would have considered him worth putting up with.

Editor of Genius is the sub-title of Scott Berg’s life of Perkins, which I had picked up in a charity shop and both Diana and I read at a gulp. Here, we agreed, was a great editor: a man of heightened sensibility who never wrote himself but who harnessed the talent of writers as diverse as Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, paying even more attention to the fabric of their books than to the fabric of their lives, whilst totally immersed in both.

An obsessive attention to the text, which is the prerequisite of the great transformative editors (like Charles Monteith or Ezra Pound), did not come naturally to Diana: too time-consuming for someone whose life was lived largely outside the office and who was to start writing herself. But this did not blunt her greatest gift to her authors, which was her initial understanding of and pleasure in their creations. After that, as far as the text went, it was broad brush strokes only. The rest could be left to the copy-editor.

For the hopelessly dutiful such insouciance is enviable. What does it matter, after all, if one book slips through without one of those infernal Advance Information Sheets which we were required to dream up to try and enthuse our salesmen? The book in question was one of my husband’s: Deliberate Regression: the disastrous history of Romantic Individualism in thought and art, from Jean Jacques Rousseau to twentieth-century fascism. I couldn’t understand every word of it myself and now have a copy, annotated by the author, which explains the bits that foxed me, but I would have come up with something. I wouldn’t just have said, as she did to me, that you would need a wet towel to wrap round your head to read it, and left it at that!

But that was Diana. Enviable in her lack of guilt. An English thing. A class thing. Certainly not a Jewish thing. It is hard for me to imagine not being conscience-driven. Life without Jiminy Cricket, what licence that would give! And it did.

The whole world knows about Diana’s love life, and many of those who cared for her were glad when she stopped being a spokesperson for serial infidelity and for sex in one’s dotage, and instead became a champion of fearless dying. But during those years, while women in her audience – for many of whom sex had not ceased to matter but was contained within marriage – listened avidly to tales of deception which could have involved their own husbands, or their daughters’ husbands, the real Diana was lost sight of.

There was so much more to her than that. For it takes strength to defy convention, and this strength was manifest in behaviour far removed from the sexual shenanigans served up cold in one obituary after another. It was not only her calm acceptance of approaching death but her refusal to let the strictures of old age – the difficulty of getting in and out of a car, the loss of taste and hearing – get the better of her, which singled her out from the moaners and groaners, among whom I count myself.

She was not a complainer.

Diana in Yorkshire, with my husband, Robert Harbison

I remember her telling me how she had fallen during the night, while staying with friends,but had waited to get help till her hosts appeared for breakfast, after which she was taken straight to the nearest hospital. And when she came to stay with us in Yorkshire, already in her nineties, she was not content to look at the glorious moorland landscape from the car: we would stop and she would get out, however muddy or uneven the terrain. This, after all, was the land of her Athill forebears . . .

Most of them, anyway. For, as I learnt only a few days after Diana’s death – so we never had a chance to talk about it – the sugar island of Antigua had been the improbable birthplace of one of them. I happened to be in Antigua, on my way to New York, when Phil Athill, Diana’s beloved nephew, and perhaps closer to her than anyone else in the world, e-mailed me about the revised funeral arrangements. On learning where I was, this was his immediate response:

‘Antigua! Athill homeland. Diana’ s great-grandfather, George, was born there in 1807 to the Chief Justice James Athill and one of his octaroon slaves. He was officially a Man of Colour . . .’ And it ended: ‘Please take a walk down Athill Street for us!’

Me in Athill Street, Antigua

I did, of course. And at the same time marvelled at how history repeats itself. Diana, that lovely, leggy, horsey English girl, who was soon to have her heart broken, as all the world knows from Instead of a Letter (which remains, for me, the best and most moving of all her books) had gone on to share her life with a succession of men of non-white descent.

A chip off the old block, my father would have said. It was not until I became friends, quite recently, with a West Indian of near Diana’s age, and learnt he found her much publicised predilection for black men offensive, that I thought of how it might seem to non-white males.

It was this same friend who told me that Naipaul’s early novels did not endear him to the people amongst whom he grew up. But that wouldn’t have bothered Naipaul, and what I most admire in him was his courage in allowing his biographer a completely free-hand, which is what – some years later – Diana allowed me . . .

Some twenty years ago now, the manuscript of a book I had written about my family and my years at Deutsch was spread out on the table, when Diana unexpectedly called in. Written without thought of publication, and thus with no holds barred, the frequent references to Diana showed her both at her best but also at her worst. And now here she was, wanting to read it and dismissing my mutterings about it not always being very nice about her. ‘There’s always something we don’t like about our friends,’ she said, quite equably, and carried it off.

Two days later we met in a teashop in Regent’s Park Road where she gave me back the manuscript and, with it, an odd-shaped parcel. Inside, was the Staffordshire figure which I had always regretted not being quick enough to buy myself: an incident described in the book. Neither that nor my account of the Molly Keane affair – of which the less said the better, for it caused a rupture that never quite healed – had stopped her in her tracks: she did not ask me to change a word.

In fact, she even offered to write a foreword, though I thought better of asking her for this when, many years later, the book, Loose Connections: from Narva Maantee to Great Russell Street, was published. The eleven-year delay had ended with our one-time employer’s death. You cannot libel the dead and, as he and I were the same age, it had become a race against time. Who would go first? Now, the phone calls from friends, anxious for me to be able to publish, reporting on his health – one person had seen him in the swimming baths, another at the opera – became, like him, a thing of the past.

Diana’s magnanimity in not asking me to change anything was remarkable. But so was she. Never more so than in her attitude to the Birthday Book that her well-meaning young agent devised to celebrate her illustrious client’s hundredth birthday. This comprised thirty or so hastily written tributes from authors, work colleagues, family and friends which her publisher turned into a handsomely bound volume, to be presented to Diana at the party given to celebrate her birthday.

At the party itself, over which Diana, dressed like an empress, presided in a wheelchair, I distinguished myself by having pressed the wrong button on my new digital camera and coming home with pictures only of people’s feet. Which was a pity, as I would love to have a good photograph of Diana surrounded, as she was, by those who loved and admired her, plus a happy scattering of little people – great-great-nephews and nieces – who enlivened life below knee level. Only dogs, which Diana and her closest friend, her cousin Barbara, had loved all their lives, were missing.

Unable to do more than catch a glimpse of the book to which I had contributed as it was presented to her (and which, as I could see from a distance, she was having great trouble removing from its wrappings), I asked, the next time I went to see her, if I could have a look at it.

The answer was No. She didn’t know where she had put it and she was in no hurry to find it. She had clearly found the whole thing mildly embarrassing. The obverse of Diana’s ‘beady eye’ – that splinter of ice, which could be so unnerving – was immunity to emotional gumbo.

I am left wondering whether she even read all the entries, but I hope and believe she didn’t need to be told how much she had meant to so many people. And I shudder slightly at the thought of what she would make of this thing I am writing now: not because it doesn’t present her as perfect, but because she was impatient with sentiment. Impatient with sentiment and not easily fooled. Despite enjoying her celebrity, she never really took it seriously and remained what she had always been – an exceptional responder to beauty, in all its forms: not just the written word, but the magnolia tree outside her window, the window boxes full of lovingly chosen flowers (our expeditions to nursery gardens are among my fondest memories), the exotic clothes she could, at long last, afford to buy.

And she never lost the qualities which make her such a sorely missed friend: I love the beautifully handwritten, gossipy letters I received when I hadn’t been able to get to see her for a while. As for the visits themselves, no one was better company and though I will remember with lasting pleasure the times we spent together in the room which became her home, my happiest memories will always be of the car rides back from the office, when we would cross Russell Square to collect her car from the vast underground car park, and then sally out into Tottenham Court Road where – talking all the time, as though we hadn’t seen each other for years – we belted along, through the rush-hour traffic, as if ours was the only vehicle on the road.

Only death could have stopped us talking, and now it has.

WHAT BELONGS TO WHO

26th February 2019 / Esther Menell

A fierce battle rages in our household. We are united in not wanting the Elgin Marbles to be ‘given back’, but we do not agree about the Ben Uri Gallery’s decision to sell off a part of its collection in order to ‘widen its focus’ by extending its patronage to all immigrants, not just Jewish immigrants.

It is not that my husband is against helping non-Jewish immigrants but he is against selling off works of art which, for the most part, have been in the public domain and may now disappear into the vaults of the super-rich.

Of course, this is to simplify both the reasons the Ben Uri has taken this step and the benefits that could accrue from it, as well as the reasons for objecting to it, which are manifold. For one thing, who now will donate works of art to an institution which may choose to sell them off . . . ?

At the Window, by David Bomberg (to be sold at Sotheby’s)

Not long ago, I put stickers on the backs of all the paintings I have been given or managed to buy over the years, so that my son will know which ones not to throw on the nearest skip. For instance, how would he know that the cat painting on the landing, which is part of the furniture of our lives, is of some monetary value because the artist who gave it to me sixty years ago now has works in the Tate?

And how would he know that the charcoal drawing of a stout lady balancing on the edge of a kitchen chair is actually the page of a manuscript which its author tore out and gave to me when I told her how much I liked it. I was returning her manuscript. She was not a writer.

Self portrait in charcoal by Halina Korn

The sticker on the back of this one reads FOR THE BEN URI and, should they want it, they will have it one day. I am sure Halina Korn would like to have her drawing seen by more people than the members of my family, even if the Ben Uri decides not to keep it, but to give it to some other institution where it can ‘generate meaningful public benefit’.

The real scandal is surely not the distribution of works of art but the staggering number of artworks that are kept from public view by the museums. That these should be sent back to their countries of origin, or given to provincial museums, seems too obvious to have to say.

But the Elgin Marbles are not hidden away. They are there for a great many people to see. And, given their history, this seems a fair case of Finders Keepers.

There does come a point where the original owner must back off. Or so it seemed to me when I re-met my Hamley’s dog-on-wheels that was left in Estonia when war began, and which I did not meet again for another thirty years. By then, two other children had thought of him as theirs.

Me on my dog, with my cousin Vicky

Every time I see him, I have a pang of regret, and have to stifle the thought that he really belongs to me. But he no longer does. Nor should he.

DESPERATE TIMES

23rd January 2019 / Esther Menell

Is it possible to do your food shopping without passing someone who has made their home on the pavement and not had a proper meal for weeks? Certainly not if you live in Kentish Town.

And what are we turning into that we can pass these people with our bulging shopping baskets and not turn a hair or, as in my case, try to salve my conscience by selecting just one supplicant for a hand-out each time I go out?

The most recent recipient of my bounty was lying under a filthy load of bedding reading a book. Always curious about what anyone is reading, I asked what it was. It was a Dave Eggers novel I have been meaning to read myself. When I get round to it, I will be sitting in a comfortable chair, under a reading lamp, in a warm room.

Fitting, somehow, that a rough sleeper, as we have now come to call them, should be reading Eggers for he, like his friend, the writer, William Vollmann, really cares about these people. Bill, who always takes things to extremes (to know what it is like to be a woman, he becomes one*) has both lived among them and given them a home on the car park that came with the defunct Mexican restaurant which he bought to use as his work room and studio. He takes in his stride both the smell of urine and shit as he comes out of his front door (he is not allowed to erect any kind of structure on the site) and harassment from the authorities**.

Where, after all, are these people meant to go? Eggers, more circumspect, also does a lot to help, but in more socially acceptable ways.

I understand Bill. Desperate situations call for desperate remedies, and yet I haven’t invited any tramps, as we used to call them, to set up a tent in our garden though, almost exactly a year ago, a builder did exactly that – set up a tent in the garden – to serve as his work-room while he built us a cedar-wood cabin for our books.

If I really cared that much, wouldn’t I be letting someone curl up on its warm wooden floor (books must be kept warm to remain free of damp) instead of sitting here filling out Camden’s ‘rough sleeping strategy survey’ which will yield its finding in five years’ time, and while my friend, Nicky, puts in another eight-hour stint at the local CRISIS centre: temporarily housed in a nearby school to cope with the referrals from the many hostels which have shut down for Christmas?

And what stopped me from crossing the road and mixing in when I saw a firm of private law enforcers using dogs to evict the squatters who were making good use of an empty building in the high street?

The times make cowards of us all.

* See The Book of Dolores by William T. Vollmann powerHouse Books NY

** See Harper’s Magazine

FOR THIS RELIEF . . .

28th December 2018 / Esther Menell

A few days ago, as we sat talking with friends in our front room, I thought I saw something move in the garden. No one else seemed to have noticed. But, as the leaves which half-screen the window seemed to be on the move again, I went to the front door and opened it, just in time to see a man doing up his flies as he headed for the gate.

This shouldn’t have been the shock that it was. Not only is someone peeing against the wall of your house small beer in the wider scheme of things, but the rampant night-time economy generated by Camden Market leaves a nightly residue of piss-stained pavements as drinkers, who have started the night’s drinking in their cars*, unload, before getting back into their cars and driving home.

And what does Camden Council do about this? Whilst tut-tutting, and even erecting a kind of retracting pissoir in the street (which is not always recognised for what it is, and is commonly misused as a waste bin) they go on issuing alcohol licences.

The culprits in this ongoing drama are, of course, male and the dirty deed is generally done under the cover of darkness, which is why it was so surprising, as we walked down the road in broad daylight, to come across a vicious spat between an angry householder and a passer-by.

The unfortunate passer-by had stopped to readjust her jacket on a spot where there was the residue of a puddle. Convinced the young woman was responsible for this, the old lady, beside herself with rage, was beyond reasoning with. We walked on and encouraged the young woman to do so too.

Tempers run high. Until now, never more so than when, about thirty years ago, a ‘caravan’ of travellers arrived on a nearby open space. Suspected of every violation of householders’ rights imaginable, the only misdemeanour with any foundation and the the one that, understandably, caused the greatest uproar, was their defecating in the street.

But where were they supposed to go? And why did we have to go down to the Town Hall to ask the Council provide a portaloo? They knew it took weeks to process an eviction order. They knew that travellers have the same demanding bodily functions as the rest of us.

That crisis was easily solved. But you can’t provide a portaloo for every rough sleeper and it was no surprise yesterday to see the trickle of urine that stretched from a makeshift tent to the pavements’ edge in our local high street.

Why on earth, when there is a housing crisis and there are people sleeping in the street, does the government not make providing public toilets – many of them sold off and converted into trendy work-spaces, even restaurants – a priority?

Rough sleepers would not be the only people to use them.

Some years ago, when I was living in a remote part of Yorkshire and my lust for do-gooding had no outlet, I signed up to talk on the telephone, once a week, to a group of old people who had no one else to talk to. A wonderful scheme, but you needed the skills of a teacher to make it work.

All my five ladies – three of them Welsh and hard to tell apart – always forgot to to say who they were. But it didn’t really matter when we got on to the subject of public loos, where they spoke with one voice. In the most animated session of my short career as a listening ear, each one spelled out just how far they now had to go when, as it does for rough sleepers – and the rest of us – nature calls.

George Bernard Shaw

I could not even get a word in to tell them that we ladies have George Bernard Shaw to thank for the fact that there were ever any Ladies’ Toilets at all.

* A practice known as pre-loading.

IN THEIR WISDOM

29th November 2018 / Esther Menell

In their wisdom, our Council have proposed introducing bike lanes – at great expense and with virtually no preliminary consultation – in a street* that doesn’t need and has no room for them.

Were the plan to go ahead, this non-arterial, non-shopping street, with its mostly pedestrian traffic, would not only lose its traffic islands (of inestimable value to the old and disabled) but there would be a stretch of road where cyclists and pedestrians would be SHARING THE PAVEMENT!

How did the Council come up with this preposterous plan?

To pretend, as they do, that this scheme would save lives is nonsense. I was a cyclist myself for thirty years. Cyclists are generally young and always fit. The pedestrian traffic, on the other hand, consists mostly of pram-pushing mothers, often with a toddler in tow, or old ladies (like me) heading for the High Street with their shopping trolleys.

These are not people who can take in two streams of traffic at a glance or jump out of the way of a speeding cyclist.

One can only hope that the proposal bites the dust, as did a previous Council scheme, in the early seventies, to build a pedestrian bridge across this same road when there was nothing but an area of waste ground on one side of it.

The outcry at that time has saved generations since from having to climb up and down circular concrete ramps in order to cross from one side to the other. The zebra crossing we got instead is all we ever needed.

If only Camden Council would spend the money they collect from driving high-street shops out of business on the homeless, whose lives really are at risk, instead of on a handful of cyclists.

* Prince of Wales Road, Kentish Town West, London NW5

IN WITH THE OLD . . .

16th November 2018 / Esther Menell

The two days in the year that I most dread are the ones on which I have to concede either that it is getting too warm to go on wearing winter clothes or too cold for summer clothes. Each time I pile up the things to be put away and pull out the ones to take their place, all comfortably familiar, I am confronted by the uncomfortable truth that I have never really got the hang of how to dress.

I did realise a long time ago that for most people – most women, anyway, including my own mother – clothes aren’t just about keeping warm or staying cool: and interest in them doesn’t wane with age.

My mother

I heard only the other day that Jean Rhys, when well into her seventies, ruffled her frou-frou skirt at a male visitor, whilst my 100 year-old friend, Diana Athill, unable to afford the gorgeous clothes she secretly longed for during her working life, is now making up for lost time, and was a lot more thrilled to find herself among the Guardian’s Best Dressed Over 50s, than she was to get an OBE.

Diana Athill photographed by Patrick Demarchelier

For me, leaving school uniform behind – tunics so stiff with starch that they could stand up on their own and hats that looked like pudding basins – was not liberation, but a daily trial, only overcome by paying the matter as little attention as possible.

So little, indeed, that during the years that we spent in a rented cottage on the North Yorkshire moors, we didn’t have or need a cupboard. Our clothes – for my husband, though he cares more about the quality of his clothes than I do, hates shopping – fitted comfortably on a couple of hooks.

Now, thanks to the charity shops where I can buy anything I need – except shoes which, like so many old ladies, I get from the kindly Mr Hotter, and pants which come from a market stall – those infernal changing rooms with their four-way mirrors and tangle of hangers are just a bad memory.

Except for the very odd occasion when I feel I must make an effort – the last time was about four years ago – I am able to avoid new new clothes. But I must have lost my nerve, for the pretty garment the helpful assistant showed me how to wear languishes unworn. As for the little shop itself*, whose window displays I have enjoyed for more than forty years, it closed down a few months ago, killed by the rates.

Now, back to the ironing board to iron the summer clothes, about to be put away and moth-balled for the winter. They may be mended and stained and, in a few cases, belonged to my once teenage son, but when I wear them – for better or worse – I feel like me.

* MONICA South End Green, Hampstead

HOW TO NOT BUY A BOILER

24th October 2018 / Esther Menell

At first it all went smoothly. One phone call to the gas company and, at the hint of a sale, an engineer was on our doorstep. He looked at our unreliable old boiler, confirmed it was no longer safe, took lots of measurements, advised us which of the new range of boilers would suit us best and left us – reassured and ready to buy – telling us to expect an estimate within a few days.

After more than a few days had gone by and anxious to have a new boiler installed before the cold weather set in, I rang to chase up the estimate. A mechanical voice said there would be an 11-minute wait till someone could speak to me, but if I left my name and number, they would call me back.

It was the first time I had used this ring-back facility and I won’t be using it again. Assuming they would call back when I reached the head of the queue and being, like most women, a multi-tasker, I was putting those eleven minutes to use. I was UPSTAIRS, shaking out the duvet, when the phone rang DOWNSTAIRS, only a few minutes later.

Hurtling down the stairs – inadvisable at my age, when the sense of balance is askew – I got there in time. Only to find I still wasn’t connected to a living person.

After having to listen to a lot of Muzak, interspersed with advice which I didn’t want or need, I was about to slam the receiver down when an actual person – a male person – came on the line, took all my details and told me he would now transfer me to another department. I said if this meant I would hear more music or be told one more time what to do if I find a pool of water at the bottom of my fridge, I would put the receiver down.

I did hear more music. I did put the receiver down.

We did not manage to get the quotation and place an order for something that we needed and were ready to buy, and which would have netted the gas company several hundred pounds.

And I dread more than ever the time, not far off when – as Yuval Noah Harari* so convincingly predicts – robots will have taken over the world of work and mechanical voices will be the only voices we hear.

* Lecture on The Future of Humanity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOmQqBX6Dn4&vl=en-GB

THE BUGWUM AND THE PRICE OF SELF-FULFILMENT

26th September 2018 / Esther Menell

I was still thinking about the Bugwum – had been thinking of little else for the last couple of days – when I opened the fridge door and there was a sudden splat which, in my distracted state, it took me a while to realise was an egg hitting the kitchen floor. At once, I was transported back to the evening when the same thing had happened during a dinner party at our next-door neighbour’s and, so difficult was it to get up the slimy yolk, that we went home and brought our beloved dog to lick it up.

There were no dogs in that six-hour film Wild, Wild Country* which had us and everyone we know transfixed. No antelopes either, though the little township that the Bugwum’s followers overran had been called ANTELOPE until they – the followers – outnumbered the 46 original residents, retired folk of modest means, and changed its name to RAJNEESHPURAM.

Who needs the comforting presence of a dog when they have a divine presence among them? And who would have had time to walk a dog when working day and night, unpaid, to erect a city in the wilderness?

The Bugwum

Of course, the Divine Presence wasn’t there from the beginning: he arrived when his followers – the sannyasin, the orange people – had already (with their bank accounts and middle-class skills) turned the wilderness into a thriving little city with its own water supply, electricity, airport, post office and lots of sturdy little houses: enough to sleep not only the 2,000 devotees but the hundreds more who came to the annual money-raising Festival and, later, to house the ‘street people’ – the down-and-outs – who were scooped up, nationwide, to swing the vote in the local election.

Of all the murderous acts orchestrated by the Bugwum’s sidekick, Ma Anand Sheela – aka Baba Yaga, Lady Macbeth, the Wicked Witch of the West: it is in fiction that she belongs – this was the worst. To collect the homeless – most of them veterans, many of them black – and then throw them back onto the streets when they were no longer needed, must be one of the most heartless acts imaginable, yet its perpetrator now owns and runs two homes for the elderly disabled in a Swiss village . . .

Ma Anand Sheela

It was also the beginning of the end and, before long, as the authorities closed in on Ma Sheela and her little band of female assassins (who had already fled the country), the Bugwum himself was whisked away from the ranch by a chartered Learjet, leaving behind 93 Rolls Royces and his followers.

As for them, the hordes of deluded westerners intent on self-fulfilment, each pursuing his or her ‘inner journey’, they began to trickle away, back, one supposes, to the families and lives they had left behind.

The Bugwum and followers

That the Bugwum, the eternal Father Figure, not only condoned free sex but encouraged it – the youthful Sheela, when she first met him, had been enraptured to find that he wore nothing under his flowing robes – was surely one of the most powerful forces in bringing these decent but innately selfish people together and, for a short time, creating a kind of earthly paradise.

A paradise for them, but not for the residents of Antelope who, during the final minutes of this remarkable film, are seen changing the signpost back from RAJNEESHPURAM to ANTELOPE.

And peace prevails.

* Wild, Wild Country (Netflix)

MY FIRST JOB

20th August 2018 / Esther Menell

Apologies for the inordinate length of this post, but I am recycling a failed entry for an Oldie competition which specified 1,000 words and provided the title.

After a series of holiday jobs which included working in a filthy Lyons teashop, supply teaching at a primary school in Poplar, where the only quiet moments came when my little charges were lying on their cots masturbating, and being moved from counter to counter in Harrods for being rude to rude customers, the sedate book-lined reception area at Methuen, where I sat waiting to be interviewed for the job of secretary to one of the senior editors, spelt salvation.

Hot-foot from a high-speed graduate secretarial course where I had almost learned to type, and could read back most of the squiggles in my shorthand notebook, my chance of passing any skills test wasn’t great. But there was no test. The pleasant, slightly grizzled man, to whose office I was directed by the pretty girl at the switchboard, was more interested in what I was interested in than in my speeds, and all I had to do was convince him that I wouldn’t be bored. And a few weeks later, for this was early December, he gave me a copy of Tolstoy’s Resurrection – which I treasure but still haven’t read – instead of the routine box of chocolates.

That my boss had over-estimated my cleverness became apparent all too soon. Not only was I painfully slow getting his dictated letters back to him to sign in a form fit to send, but I had to ask how to spell geriatrics (Gerry Atrix) which I thought was a proper name.

It is hard to imagine how a word that belongs in the Social Sciences could have occurred in any letter of his, for his bailiwicks were the more traditional disciplines of the Classics and Eng Lit, and many of my laboriously produced letters were addressed to the editors of the Arden Shakespeares and, a fair number, to the unrepentant author of a book about Greek vases which was already ten years overdue.

I loved the pace of life which took these glitches in its stride, but it would be a mistake to think that life was dull in Essex Street. Not only was there the excitement of the very first Tin Tin, which had just been translated by the editor who worked in a little room off ours, but I had been mesmerised by the androgynous creature who had joined the other secretary and me and the whiskery old lady who banged out the Rights Contracts at the corner desk in our room.

The ‘other secretary’ was a proper secretary, from a nice home in the shires, who had attended Mrs Hoster’s Secretarial College in the Cromwell Road: a sweet young thing who was soon to leave us for a job in Buckingham Palace.

The exotic dark-skinned newcomer was something else entirely. She hadn’t needed to go school to learn to type. She had been typing away for years at a hugely ambitious novel, supporting herself by ’temping’, as so many aspiring artists – and Aussies doing Europe – did in those far-off days when you could walk out of one job in the morning and into another in the afternoon.

The memory of the lunch hours the two of us spent together, she smoking her Gauloises while I ate the sandwiches my mother had made, me drinking in the story of her life, will stay with me for ever. But even her goings-on – all those men she had used and discarded like old flannels – were nothing compared to what came next.

Another denizen of that venerable publishing house was the young continental salesman who, when he was not travelling, would hang about our office and soon revealed that he, too, was an aspiring writer, and gave us his manuscript to read. Not for another twenty years, till I had Edmund White as an author and read States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, was I to encounter anything like it.

To find that this mild-mannered young man led a rampant sex life in hotel rooms all over Europe, taught me a useful lesson. I never again expected a writer to resemble his or her work and was therefore less surprised than my colleagues at André Deutsch when, years later, the author of a rumbustious novel that had made us rock with laughter turned out to be an ill-tempered, middle-aged soak.

But meeting authors was not yet part of my job. I would escort my boss’s visitors to his door, and then see them out again. Maybe I made them tea. I no longer remember, but think there was an ancient tea lady and that it was not until my next job, as Girl Friday to the exuberant Anthony Blond, that I would perform this service for his many visitors, of whom the most frequent were Simon Raven, ever courteous, ever short of cash; and a character called Burgo Partridge, who I remember only as a dark and glowering presence.

Anthony Blond

I was never to have as much fun again as I did at Anthony’s where my duties stretched from sifting manuscripts to interviewing a new cook, and where I was left to run the office on my own – and start up the Bentley each morning – during his frequent absences.

At Methuen, life had been altogether more orderly and secretaries did only what secretaries did, which was take dictation, type letters with carbon copies, file the copies and, at the end of the day, put the typed letters in their typed envelopes into a post tray for someone more junior still to collect.

But, every now and then, I would be given a set of galleys to correct. The responsibility was intoxicating! And it was these rare occasions, when I was able to leave the shared office and lay my precious burden on the massive mahogany table in the book-lined boardroom, which made me certain that though I was only on the first step of the ladder, it was the right ladder for me.

MORE DEAD THAN ALIVE

20th July 2018 / Esther Menell

It is, of course, inevitable, in one’s eighties, that one knows more dead people than alive people, and yet it was quite a shock to realise this when my friend, the novelist and blogger extraordinaire, Jon Elkon – a good twenty years younger than me – pointed this out. Nothing, of course, would surprise Jon, one of whose fictional characters was a talking dog, but it did surprise me. How could I not have noticed?

My world is now full of people who are no longer there . . .

Strangers live in Ilsa’s flat. There is a grave – his grave – in the wild flower meadow that had been my cousin Anthony’s pride and joy. Juliet lies among her ancestors in a Norfolk churchyard.

Michele will never walk her dog on the Heath again. But I will always cherish her very last column: she had told me, only days before her death, the story of this near-miss with some randy schoolboys and I had countered with my story of a Greek stationmaster: both of us well-brought up and hopelessly naïve Jewish girls, we almost lost our virginity by default.

Michele Hanson

Who else? There was Gillie: an Oxford friend alongside whom I spent an Easter vacation working in a Lyons Tea Shop which would have been in the shadow of Centre Point, but there was no Centre Point. Then, some twenty years later – for Gillie died far too young – the merciless run of deaths among my authors, all in early middle age. Carol Bruggen, one of my favourites, both as a writer and as a friend: a paranoid schizophrenic, who would put on a different set of gaudy clothes each morning, to keep her spirits up. Faith Addis, who had to be dissuaded from going to writing classes, even as her fan mail mounted up and her books were adapted (horribly badly adapted) for television. Madeleine St John, whose gem-like Women in Black far out-shone her later, prize-winning novels and, later still, Gillian Avery who got tired of being looked down on by her academic husband and his high-table friends for writing children’s books and came up with a splendid tome, replete with notes and bibliography.

As the list of the dead gets longer and longer, it is the thought of out-living those who mean the most to me – not death itself – that fills me with dread. Not so my father-in-law, who watched his contemporaries pass on with grim satisfaction. He had not wished them ill but he was glad – proud, even – that it was them and not him. The final duel between him and his equally long-living brother-in-law, who Dale had long suspected of cheating at golf, had itself the excitement of a sporting event.

My father-in-law, Dale Harbison (foreground)

Not long ago, Diana Athill, now one hundred years old, let it be known that she and one of her friends in the lovely, serene Home where they both live, count not sheep but ex-lovers to help them get to sleep.

Thanks to Jon, I may now go one step further: I may lull myself to sleep listing the dead.

BETTER AND BETTER . . .

17th June 2018 / Esther Menell

The other day, I heard or half-heard (Radio 4 stays on constantly in the kitchen) that ‘the Social Contract’ has been – or, perhaps, is about to be – broken, and with what dire consequences . . . And what appeared to be meant by the Social Contract was the contract between generations for children always to do better, to have a better life than their parents.

But what kind of sense does this make, unless one is talking about countries a lot poorer than our own? How could each generation do better than the one before: a snakes and ladders concept which would soon go right off the edge of the board.

It is true, as my then teenage son pointed out long ago, that we – meaning me and his various parents – hit a good moment. When I think about it, not only were we able to get onto the housing ladder (not that we then thought of it like that), but we were too young to be unduly bothered by the war. I still have my shrapnel collection somewhere and have been left with a life-long appreciation of oranges and bananas, so plentiful now, but known only from picture books then. We were, moreover, protected from childhood obesity (another of today’s hot topics) by those buff-coloured ration books which, incidentally, also guaranteed equal shares for all.

But is that really what the Social Contract was about?

I had a dim memory of coming across the term in history lessons and googled it. And the answer, of course, was that the Social Contract went way beyond the disparity of incomes between generations. What concerned these great moral philosophers was an idea of something like universal sacrifice for the greater good and, particularly, the responsibility of government towards its citizens. Perhaps, too, citizens’ obligations to each other.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Certainly all these are increasingly rare. Everyone, it seems, is out for himself, like the Carillion bosses, so vividly described recently as ‘too busy stuffing their mouths with gold . . . ‘

Thomas Hobbes

And yet, and yet . . . the other day, also in the kitchen on Radio 4, I heard one story after another of people who had given up safe and well-paid jobs, to do something socially useful: bankers becoming teachers, accountants becoming social workers.

It seems that the precept of the Social Contract comes naturally to a lot of people, but not to those with the power to make life better for everyone, not just for themselves.

ALL GONE . . .

14th May 2018 / Esther Menell

For as long as I have lived in the street I live in, which is fifty-three years, the one thing that hasn’t changed – although it has been spruced up recently – is the pawn shop on the corner.

The little tobacconist at the other end of the street, with its bad-tempered owner who became my friend when I persuaded the Council not to pull his house down but just chop it free of the house next door, is long gone. So is he: back to Goa from where he and his wife had come, via Uganda, many years ago.

They were luckier than those other refugees, just around the corner from the pawn shop, who created a magical cave-like coffee house: the seats low, the walls rich with coloured hangings and, at the corner table – a constant presence – the mother of one of them, still dressed in the flowing manner of the land from which she had come. Mercifully, she died just before these two enterprising foreigners had to close down because their landlord (also a kind of foreigner if, as I am told, he lives abroad) raised the rent beyond the means of a small, independent business.

Also gone are two of the three pubs we once had in our street.

A former pub, lost to flat conversion. Photograph courtesy of Tom Kihl, Kentishtowner.

And, round the corner, from where the tobacconist and his family lived – behind the counter, behind the curtained doorway, in that half house – a whole street disappeared! The laundrette, the Film Co-op where we sat on old mattresses watching Kenneth Anger films, the sweet shop – all gone. But, in their place, a well-designed and leafy council estate, though how many of those desirable, balconied flats are still lived in by council tenants is anybody’s guess.

Demolition of Prince of Wales Crescent, Kentish Town, early ’70s. Photograph by Jeremy Ross, courtesy of Kentishtowner.

In our own street – ninety per cent council-owned when I and my first husband (also long gone) scraped together the £1,500 deposit for a council mortgage – you could probably now count the council-tenancies on the fingers of one hand. And, where the bus garage once stood, we now have a gated community where the ‘bijou town houses’, though built on the same scale as their early Victorian equivalents, have none of their tenderness.

As for the pawnbroker, granddaddy of the Money Shops that have sprung up on our high streets, it must be doing better than ever. Even so, these days there is more money to be made from bricks and mortar than any business could bring in and I expect, before long, the Three Golden Balls will have gone the way of everything else and turned (like Cinderella’s coach) into Three Luxury Apartments.

ALSO NOT A MAN

10th April 2018 / Esther Menell

One of my most cherished memories from early childhood was being kissed by Prince Charming. I had no idea, of course, that this vision of manhood in his soft thigh-length boots and feathered hat who bent down and kissed my hand (which I would not allow to be washed for days) was a woman.

Whether I was disappointed when I found out that Prince Charming was the actress Evelyn Laye, doing a stint in pantomime at the Leeds Hippodrome, I don’t remember. But I can report still to be reeling from the discovery that D.K. Broster – writer of intoxicating novels of derring-do, which transported the twelve-year-old me from the confines of boarding school into the realms of pure romance – was also not a man!

It was trawling the internet on some quest or another (a friend calls this activity ‘falling down the rabbit hole’) that I happened on this unwelcome news. A woman! D. K. Broster? Impossible. My yelps of dismay attracted the attention of my husband. He was sympathetic but uncomprehending. And, on reflection, should I not be glad to be able to add another name to the canon of women writers? Another victory for the sisterhood?

But I don’t want D.K. Broster to be a woman. And what about Violet Needham and Harrison Ainsworth and all my other childhood favourites? Could they have been deceiving me too? Was John Buchan, perhaps, a Surrey housewife? Could P.C. Wren have been a lady, and the writer of Jean’s Golden Term a man?

Not only has the swashbuckling (as I had imagined) author of The Flight of the Heron turned out to be a woman, but also an alumna of my old college! More astonishing still was the discovery that while I was devouring her books behind the walls of Battle Abbey School, D.K. Broster was living down the road with a long-time female friend and companion.

Dorothy Kathleen Broster, born in Liverpool, 1877, died in Battle, Sussex, 1950.

ANSWERING THE DOOR

20th March 2018 / Esther Menell

Some years ago now, I came back from the High Street to find someone washing our car. It turned out that Peter, as we will call him, had rung our doorbell and asked my husband, who happened to be in, for a bucket. Peter had no tools but wanted to work. He did not like begging, he told us when we sat round the kitchen table having a cup of tea but, for reasons which became all too clear, he had no other option.

From that day on, for several years, he came by often and I heard both the sad story of his life and the various stages in his rehabilitation, which is now happily complete. He has been housed by the Council and is looking for work, and you would not know from his appearance that he had ever been wandering the streets, hungry and penniless.

All well and good. But coming to my door had become a habit with Peter and, after being disturbed by him for the nth time, I asked him to stop coming, just as I had asked friends not to drop in when I used to work at home.

But how, oh how, can I stop the ON LINE shopping?

Only yesterday, a very wet man with two big, wet packages (see below) almost wept with relief when I said he could leave them with us. But why am I taking in shopping when I have shut the door against someone needing a bit of human warmth?

There is never a time when the doorbell is not an interruption. The only time I am not in the middle of doing something is when I’m asleep. The rest of the time I am listening or reading or on the phone or in the loo and not best pleased at having to answer the door: even less pleased if the bell has woken me up.

We like all our neighbours and the concept of neighbourliness, but when people are out at work all day, what do they think is going to happen to the things they are having sent to their home addresses?

Oh for the days when we all did our shopping at weekends or after work, and brought it home with us. The only things sent were the things too big to carry. There was less traffic in the street and there were no drones in the air frightening the London sparrows: they, too, now a thing of the past.

NOLI ME TANGERE

15th February 2018 / Esther Menell

Like a lot of women of my age, I find it hard to understand what the fuss is about. When I was young, we would, of course, brush off wolf-whistles and pats on the bottom but to come back from, say, Italy, without any such memories, would leave a girl wondering what was wrong with her.

Raymond Bessone ‘Mr Teasy Weasy’

For myself, a holiday In Turkey when I was in my late teens did more for my confidence than being taken to Mr Teasy Weasy for an expensive hair cut. Turkish men don’t or, anyway, didn’t then, prefer their women to be wafer thin . . . .

Be that as it may, what began with stories of young women confronted by an ugly giant of a man with his flies undone has become a maelstrom of remembered incidents ranging from the truly horrific to the frankly absurd.

The horrific – the rapists, the stalkers, the serial predators, the husbands who beat up their wives – should be locked up. The others should be laughed out of court. Is it not pathetic that some middle-aged roué believes his exalted position as a politician or business magnate gives him the right to fondle anyone who comes within reach?

But how much damage can it really do to a normal young woman to have to brush off or even, temporarily put up with, this kind of unwanted attention and why, oh why, do they sometimes walk willingly into the mangy lion’s den?

How can anyone not regret that these stories, which trivialize a serious issue, fill the newspapers while stories of real atrocities – the Yazidi women among them – are side-lined?

Something has gone horribly wrong with a world in which a cheery equivalent of ‘Hey, good lookin’ evokes anger, and an unwelcome hand on the knee can cause a lasting trauma.

And this touch-me-not epidemic doesn’t stop there. There is my friend – a grandmother, like myself – who gave up a voluntary job at a local primary school because she wasn’t allowed to touch the child she was coaching. She didn’t mind sitting in a corridor with her pupil, but she did mind not being able to give him or her a hug or a pat on the back.

How absurd it has become. But, to end on a more cheerful note, for I dislike the crude behavior of men and resent their superior strength as much as anyone, I did enjoy the recent newspaper story of the burglar who inadvertently woke the lady of the house: a rugby player who gave chase and frightened the life out of him.

WITH THE RIFF RAFF, OF COURSE . . .

19th January 2018 / Esther Menell

Not many years after the birth of the NHS, I needed to have my tonsils out, and I will never forget the GP asking my mother whether she wanted me to have this done ‘properly’ or ‘with the riff raff’.

I recalled that phrase just the other day . . .

I had arrived for my appointment at a well-known London hospital a few minutes early. Although the waiting area was crowded, there was no wait at reception and, after signing in, I made for a chair at the very far end of the room. I didn’t want to catch anybody’s anything, if I could help it.

From this vantage point I saw very little movement for some fifteen minutes, until the first name was called. There was now a bit of rustling while someone got their things together and disappeared through the swing doors.

By the time an hour had gone by, three more people had been summoned and I had reached the second murder in the Agatha Christie picked up from one of those random book exchange points I happened to pass on my way in.

When I finally heard my name called, another hour or so later, I had reached page 110.

And here, before we come to my six minutes with the doctor, I must interrupt my story to report how a member of the non-medical staff came round to all of us weary waiters – today’s intake of riff raff – with a big box of chocolates: an oasis of kindness and consideration which I will not soon forget.

As for the doctor! After I had been in the consulting room so long that I thought I’d been forgotten, he catapulted in, told me his name and asked me why I was there.

I told him as briefly as I could of the arthritic hip for which I had first received treatment twenty years before. It was now a lot worse and I feared for my mobility. I was there to find out just how bad it was and what to do about it.

Dr H had not yet looked at me below the neck, but his answer was immediate: ‘nothing to do about it’. The GP had mentioned cortisone injections, and earlier hospital visits had led to hydrotherapy and exercise regimes . . . All these were a waste of time, he said, and then, almost as an afterthought: ‘I’d better look at it.’

I lay on the bed. He raised and rotated first one leg – now bare, except for an ankle sock – then the other, as if they were the hands of a clock. He delivered his diagnosis: an arthritic hip!

As for his advice, given on the run: CYCLE. SWIM. WALK. No suggestion of physio. No talk about the doubtful wisdom of delaying an operation for someone already in their eighties. He was gone.

Many years before, at a poly clinic in Soviet Estonia, a doctor who really did have nothing to offer – except mustard plasters and Chinese Tiger Balm – to deal with my badly bruised ribs (I had slipped on the ice while peering through the dirty windows of the house in which my mother had been born) at least took an x-ray, told me what I had done and what to expect.

And then, a few days later, somewhere between Vilnius and Riga, a bedraggled group of English-speakers boarded the train my husband and I were on. Returning from a Bahai conference in some desolate seaside resort, between them they collected and gave me a fistful of painkillers. Like that Agatha Christie, the gift of some person unknown, the riff raff had come to my aid.

NOTE: This is one of the very few times – whether as an in-patient or an out-patient – I have been disappointed in an NHS hospital. Without them, I would not still be around to tell this tale.

ANYONE FOR SLEEPING PILLS?

15th October 2017 / Esther Menell

Would anyone like a cheque book or, for that matter, a supply of sleeping pills?

I have just got back from the bank, where I found that the cheque book I have been ordering and re-ordering since March, and waiting for in every post, had proliferated. There were now five cheque books neatly stock-piled in a pigeon-hole behind the reception desk. Every one of them clearly addressed to me.

Had no one thought of ringing me? I asked the manager, who had been lounging in a chair in the customer area, but now hurried back to his cubicle. Didn’t it strike anyone that the person to whom these were addressed must be either needing them or dead?

There was, predictably, no satisfactory answer. Taking refuge behind a swivelling computer screen, the best he could do was offer to destroy one or two of the surplus books ‘for safety’, and I left him sitting with the detritus in his lap.

Very few people, of course, would want a cheque book nowadays, except to use as scrap paper: perfect for shopping lists. But a lot of insomniacs, who have to face their doctor’s disapproval each time they ask for sleeping pills, would be glad to share in the stash that I have accumulated.

This abundance is thanks not to my doctor over-prescribing, but to the now widespread system which allows the patient to by-pass the doctor and order repeat prescriptions direct from a designated chemist. All well and good. But in my case, the system broke down and I wasn’t only getting the medication requested, but everything I had ever asked for! So, in the middle of winter, I was getting ointment for insect bites and a hay-fever spray.

I tried more than once to straighten this mess out. It proved surprisingly difficult. But there was one good outcome. By the time it was sorted, I had collected enough sleeping pills to be sure that, when the time comes, I won’t need to go to Switzerland.

MOTHER LOVE

14th September 2017 / Esther Menell

The scene on a bus the other day reminded me that we are not all natural mothers. The young woman looked desperate as her baby, scarlet with rage, screamed and screamed and screamed. I remembered just how it had felt. The angry mutter of a city gent – ‘I hope I never find myself in a carriage with you and your child and your dog again’ – as we bundled off the train in Worthing. The tantrum at the end of a birthday party when my three-year-old didn’t want to give away the going-away presents . . .

With Aaron and Patch on Worthing beach

The myth of the happy, dimpled baby is hard to dispel. If mothers only knew what they were in for. Hours spent alone with a small person who can’t talk to you. Can’t tell you why he is screaming the house down. Can’t tell you what it is that he wants. The broken nights, the broken days . . .

I can still remember the day when there was a knock at the door and two little girls asked if they could wheel my baby round the block. I had reached the point which many new mothers – especially single mothers – will recognise; when they would be ready to hand their offspring over to Dracula himself.

Of course, I didn’t. But I did put the now beaming infant in his pram and we all walked down the road to meet the children’s mother. Nothing could have been more reassuring. Mrs B, a cleaning lady, and Ron, a handyman, along with their two daughters became – and still are – a part of our lives.

For Mrs B (or Auntie Doll, as she was to become) babies and small children were no more trouble than the dogs, cats and rabbits that all lived, happy and well cared for, in that small terraced house where my five-year-old would later stay for two whole weeks while I went to St Louis, Missouri, to visit the man who would soon become my second husband.

Those two weeks gave my son, an only child, a precious taste of family life: sleeping on a put-up bed between the two little girls, doing everything to the background of non-stop television, drinking lots of sugary tea . . . and, perversely, happily doing what he was told!

He told me, not so long ago, how safe it made him feel to know that Doll meant what she said.

What supremely good luck it was that these people lived round the corner. Doll would not have believed how difficult and isolating I and many of my friends found those early years.

Mother and Child (after Vincent) by R.B. Kitaj

Mother love, the overwhelming love that nothing can extinguish and remains as powerful a force when one’s child is no longer a child, does not preclude moments of desperation. When I chose this painting of Kitaj’s for the jacket of a novel which was, in effect, one long and powerful scream, it was in recognition of something I knew about for myself.

A QUIET DAY

15th August 2017 / Esther Menell

Not long ago, my husband took off on a five-day ‘business’ trip which was, in fact, more of a jaunt than anything else but, instead of being cheesed off (to rescue another quaint expression) my heart leapt! Five evenings when I don’t have to think ‘What are we going to have for supper?’ and listen to stories about President Trump, who I would prefer to forget.

But, before ‘Me Time’ could begin there was a bit to do, for my husband – who taught himself French by reading Rousseau and reads Finnegans Wake for fun – does not pay much attention to things around the house; a small price to pay for the time-honoured privilege of the shtetl wife: to look after the needs of a male person who lives not in the everyday world but in the world of thought.

But the tidying didn’t take long and now three hours of uninterrupted reading in which my dislike of T.S. Eliot reached new heights, as I entered further and further into the sad and hectic life of his ‘mad’ wife who, at this juncture is – along with the poet – the plaything of the demonic Bertie: not the nice king of my girlhood, but Bertrand Russell whose History of Philosophy accompanied me through my teenage years, when I still had aspirations, but still sits on the shelf unread.

T.S. Eliot

Now, a brief visit from an old friend where we let our soup get cold as we exchange news about the wretched state of our feet, the efficacy of our various physios and our NHS insoles.

Then things began to go wrong. Just as I had put on a CD and was settling down for my nap, a phone call to report that the front door of my tenants’ flat (see post ON BEING A LANDLORD) was open. The kindly neighbour who had observed this did not know what to do. If she shut it, would she be locking my nice young tenants out? If she didn’t . . . left unsaid was what she might find if she went inside!

So, over to the flat where, gingerly – for I too have read my share of murder mysteries – I opened every door to find neither bodies nor signs of a forced entry. Clearly, one or other of them had left in a hurry and failed to lock up behind them.

Back home and about to fall asleep to Schumann’s Liederkreis when the doorbell rang and there was the electrician, come to do a few small and non-urgent jobs before lingering to chat. Do I know anything about Neil Sedaka? No I don’t. What about Bessie Smith? Yes, I do. By the time we had run through a gamut of mostly unfamiliar names (for he had mistaken the nature of my cassette collection) it was time to put on my supper.

I never got back to Eliot and his unfortunate wife* but, with the kettle on for my hot-water bottle and the Evening Pill Box – lovingly curated by my absent husband – at the ready, I did manage to tap out a testimonial for one of my long-ago authors** who, at seventy, is starting a new career as a hired-hand memoirist, to support her true calling as a brilliant but neglected writer of popular fiction.

So the day wasn’t wasted. But it wasn’t quiet either.

* Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot by Carole Seymour Smith

** Laurie Devine whose description of the ‘cutting ceremony’ which occurs early in Nile, the first of her epic novels, is as devastating and – as we know from the vivid testimony of Nawal El Saadawi – as topical as it ever was.