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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.

NOT the branch referred to! © Secret Artist NW5

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.

BODY PARTS

30th July 2017 / Esther Menell

In the old days, it was my car which fell to bits: now it’s me. Shakespeare, of course, knew all about this, even though he didn’t live long enough – I don’t think – to need false teeth. I forgot to put my own in the other day when I went to meet a newish friend. She took my apology in her stride: was only sorry she couldn’t lend me hers . . .

I am reminded of another spare-parts story: well, not actually spare, for when Ilsa (see below) found that her friend, Diana – guest speaker at some grand occasion – had arrived without her hearing aid, she lent her hers, and sat through the entire event without hearing a word.

Ilsa Yardley and Diana Athill

Yet another sign of true friendship was the parcel which arrived when I had pneumonia last year and all the coughing made me (temporarily, thank heavens) incontinent. Posted by a friend who lived too far away to visit, it had in it some frilly white padded knickers.

It’s lucky, of course, that when we are young, we don’t know about incontinence pads and Old Age Spots*, and not being able to reach one’s own feet, as there is nothing we can do to avoid getting old, except dying first. As it happens, though, I am more clued in than most, as my best friend used to be a geriatric social-worker and is still familiar with all the paraphernalia of old age: the things to help us see and hear, the things to hang on to, the things to help us put on our socks.

And I have learnt for myself, what she told me long ago, which is that no one changes inside. In my eighties now, I am still surprised that I can drive a car and keep track of my bank account: such grown-up things to be able to do!

So, hobbling along on a bad foot (‘weak’ not ‘bad’ I have been told to say) worrying about thinning hair and needing the telly on a bit louder than I did before, I enter old-lady-normal-land from which there is only one exit, and I am in no hurry to reach it.

• Seborrheic keratosis: a crusty version of Liver Spots (aka Senile Freckles) and just as harmless. But, oh for the time when acne and sunburn were the only ills the flesh was heir to . . .

AND WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO?

10th July 2017 / Esther Menell

The title of this post, written a day or two before the events in North Kensington, has become horribly topical, but this was the question put to me, on my doorstep, almost half a century ago, by a Camden official.

What do you mean? Where would I like to go . . ? He looked surprised that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

It took a few minutes to discover what had happened. And it took four years to fight off the Council.

It turned out the plan to re-develop the street I live in, where the ‘bijou workmen’s cottages’ (built in the late nineteenth century for railway workers) now change hands for over a million pounds, had been drawn up years before, but only passed for action at the tail-end of a meeting about CentrePoint, by which time no one was paying attention.

One of the proofs that they had not done their homework was the man with the clip-board’s surprise on hearing that I was not a council tenant, as almost everyone else was, but was buying the house (which then cost £4,500) with a Council mortgage.

And no, I did not want to move to Woolwich or Eltham or Thamesmead (nowadays it could be Gateshead or Birmingham).

But neither, to my shame, had I noticed that everyone from the other side of the street had already been decanted.

Somewhere, my husband has written of the learning curve that he experienced and delighted in after agreeing to give a course of lectures on the entire history of architecture. Every week he was tackling a new civilisation! Well, this was to be my learning curve, for there is no more sedentary and back-room job than being a book editor.

Along with my two neighbours, the only other owner-occupiers in the street, we formed a Residents Association of which the Chairman was my next-door neighbour John, electrician and Communist Party member*; the Treasurer was Bill the builder, a working-class Tory; the Secretary, me.

For the next four years, I became a mix of pamphleteer and social worker. I learnt as much about the inhabitants of this street and the weaknesses of local democracy as R was to learn about entire civilisations.

The arrogance with which people are treated! For once in my life I was glad of my middle-class accent; also of owning both a telephone and a typewriter. Not everyone had the first, and no one else had the second. In fact, in my survey of every household, I found one house had no electricity, and the old couple who lived there preferred it that way. Arguing their case (they were the age I am now) was one of my more unusual assignments.

Looking back, I feel lucky to have had the chance to do something worthwhile: my proudest achievement was arguing the Council into allowing their tenants to move into the empty houses across the street and then back again, after the re-hab which took the place of wholesale destruction.

I am not sure that my fifty-year old son has such warm feelings about this period when I was often absent at meetings and endlessly pounding the street, with him in tow, distributing roneoed information sheets.

Not that I don’t have one or two unsettling memories myself: at one door, I was greeted with a diatribe about the Jews. The old man didn’t realise he was talking to one and I didn’t tell him. And there was the young couple, one of the few tenants of a private landlord, who were embarrassingly grateful to me for getting them out of his grip, but were later to abscond with some association money . . . And then, to crown it all, by the time the long battle was over, our four local councillors had all left the area: one of them leaving behind him a house with an extra storey which still sticks out like a sore thumb, as no one since then has been granted planning permission for this most common of improvements.

You can’t win them all. And how things have changed! If the street were threatened now there would be a galaxy of lawyers, architects, journalists ready to spring to its defence. Meantime, the only topics that can be relied on to produce a torrent of e-mails are Litter, Parking, Noise and BINS!

Which is why I preferred the way it used to be, and fear for the tenants who are going to be decanted from their homes to make way for the development of our local Morrisons site (see artist’s visual below).

They will be told they can return. But no one returned to the other side of our street.

* When he retired, John moved out of London and sold his house to Tessa Jowell. But that is another story.

‘A SWEET BROWN MAN’ for HEIDI

8th June 2017 / Esther Menell

It is almost thirty years since I tried to get someone – anyone – interested in publishing Heidi, and about ten since I discovered she was dead. By then she was living not far from me, in sheltered housing. I have never taken the step of searching out her death certificate to see if, as I feel sure must be the case, she decided she had had enough.

There was so much we didn’t know about Heidi when she came to work as a secretary in the editorial department at André Deutsch, only to leave, two years later, not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t live on what we were paying her. We didn’t know, for instance, that she had spent most of the previous year in a psychiatric ward. Nor that the father she had never known had been a GI. Nor that he was black.

This, of course, accounted for her dusky skin and perhaps also for a kind of quiet elegance and the self-containment which she certainly didn’t inherit from her mother, the bitter subject of almost every one of the prose poems, haikus, call them what you will, that she left me with.

She never cared for us. She should never have had children, but she gave birth so easily. She just opened her legs and the babies came out.

As for her father: the only thing her mother told her about him was that he was a sweet brown man. She did not add that he was one of many.

The village where Heidi was born was on the Norfolk coast and close to an American base. As far as I know, none of her siblings had African American fathers, but they were all neglected. Their mother paid no attention to their clothes or their food or how they did at school. What Heidi remembered was that she liked sweet things (a child would notice this) and any kind of finery. She would decorate her hats with lots of tulle and roses, and – a happy memory – the Christmas tree.

As an adult, Heidi came to equate all her mother’s sources of pleasure with her appetite for sex.

The only things she could cook well were fruit cakes. She knew the secret of making them dark and fruity. She liked her men that way.

Bananas too: She loved bananas more than any other fruit . . . They must have come from the PX. There were no bananas then. Not even in London.

Too painful to write the story of her life in a connected form, we have only these glimpses of a child unwanted by her mother, unknown to her father and looked on askance by the villagers who knew all about the comings and goings in that house by the sea.

No wonder Heidi adopted so many different names. Leafing through the manuscripts I see she was sometimes Georgia Ray, sometimes Kate France, sometimes herself. I don’t know under which name she sent stuff to Virago, but I do know their response made her happy for, like all the other readers (apart from one professional poet*) they recognised the emotional power and transforming wit of these fragments: songs, dirges, cries for help . . .

I am glad, all these years later, to have found a way to send them out into the world and, for once, wish more people were reading this.

* ‘26 little whimsical perceptions about family relationships . . . Not for me.’

IT’S NOT ALL BAD

23rd May 2017 / Esther Menell

The other night, attracted more by the venue than the occasion itself (a free bar is no attraction to a non-drinker) R and I went to a reception at the Francis Crick Institute. The event was to celebrate and promote the activities of the UCH Cancer Fund and as many of those who attended, including me, owed their lives to the UCH oncology unit there was a built-in sense of well-being and camaraderie.

Exterior view of the Francis Crick Institute. Photograph by kind permission of the Wellcome Trust.

Even so, standing still is hard on the feet and the back and, the moment the speech-making was over, R and I moved to the outer edge of the crowd and into the vast and beautiful space that stretched out beyond it. Here was a field of glass exhibition-stands each one of which, in exquisite pictorial detail, told the story of historic and on-going medical research with wonderfully lurid pictures of the killer bugs and modest photographs, often taken in a laboratory setting, of the indomitable men and women the bugs are up against.

My immediate thought was that I must bring my nine-year-old grandson here. I cannot imagine a child who would not be inspired by the exhibition, and am already wondering what QUESTION about the Meaning of Life he will write on the card that one is invited to fill in and which is then displayed on the wall of windows.

Reading these messages distracted me from studying the building itself, but it was not time wasted. Like the prayer requests in a Spanish church which reveal the lives of the congregants so, in this secular shrine, did these votives tell us about ourselves. Why me, not someone else? How did the world begin? Where do we come from? And my favourite, which had been transcribed for a five-year-old: Why is a five-year-old elephant so much bigger than me?

By now, I was flagging and we turned to go. The crowd was thinning and I caught a glimpse of the doctor who, twenty years back, had been the person who in the whole world I was most pleased to see. And I thought of all the lives he had saved since then, and also of one life which he and his colleagues had been unable to save, though they had done everything within their power.

My friend Ellen.

Even so, my QUESTION and, I am sure, hers too (albeit rhetorical) would have been: How can we thank you enough?

As R and I stepped out of the building and back into the self-destructing world, we were buoyed up by having seen great work being carried out in a great building. It seems that it isn’t all bad, after all.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, 1942-2016.

THE SAGA EXPERIENCE

8th May 2017 / Esther Menell

It was in the hope of publicising my book that I submitted a piece to Saga Magazine for their ‘Humble Treasures’, a charming series (now defunct) in which old people, like myself, wrote a few words about some object for which they had special affection. In my case, it was a handwritten recipe for chicken soup.

What I hadn’t realised was that the pieces would not be published in their original form. At the photo shoot to which I and five other contestants had been summoned – a jolly occasion, as can well be imagined – there was a journalist present whose job it was to interview us, rather in the manner of In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, and then re-write our stories in her own words. These then appeared, under our names, nice and big, along with the barely visible by-line: As told to Moira Petty.

Although – and with good reason, as it turned out – I was fearful of what the accompanying photo would be like: we had all been photographed along with our treasures – a locket and a pair of hiking boots among them – I wasn’t worried about the text, as Moira had been punctilious in allowing me to vet it. But I should have been. For not only had some meddlesome person made unwelcome changes, he or she had also misspelt my name. ESTHER MENNEL reads the banner headline above the miserable photo and the mangled text.

Here, then, on a day when I am again feeling a bit under the weather, and in memory of my mother and my grandmother, is the piece I sent to Saga Magazine for its Humble Treasures series, in its original form and with its original title.

JEWISH PENICILLIN

The other day I was feeling a bit off-colour and did what I always do if I feel I am headed for a few days in bed: I asked my husband to go and get the best chicken he could find (no chicken these days gives you the wonderful thick schmaltz that I remember from my childhood) and on his return, with the chicken and the carrots and the onions and the parsley, I set about making several days’ worth of Chicken Soup. I don’t, of course, need the recipe but I still like to keep in front of me this, in my mother’s handwriting, is how it reads.

BOILER
Wash all in cold water. Put
in sauspan and cover with water. Boil up, take of scum.
Add one onion and one carrot
cut up halfe, also parsley-
rooth if available. Simmer
all about 3–3½ hours.

As you can tell, English was not my mother’s native tongue. That had been Russian, but Russian had been abandoned when we arrived in England in 1939.

The recipe (which must originally have been in Cyrillic script) was sent to my mother by her mother – left behind in what was thought to be the safety of her home in Tallinn. Less than two years later, in July 1941, the Germans invaded Estonia, and my grandmother was murdered.

Thus does this recipe remain a precious talisman of times long past and I was delighted when the nice Irishman who comes to help in the garden found me making that batch of chicken soup the other day and said, oh yes, he knew all about the magical properties of ‘Jewish Penicillin’.

It seems that good things never die.

That scrap of aged paper, together with the leather-bound volume of faded photographs, from which these images of my mother and grandmother have been carefully lifted, are more precious to me than diamonds.

My mother, who had never had to cook before the War.

My grandmother Helena Banker (holding the parasol) with her sister Adele, taken in Lodz, where they were born.

But nothing could equal in poignancy the worn little teddy brought along by another lady in our group: it had been pinned to her gown when she was found abandoned on the steps of an orphanage. Treasures indeed.

THAT’S ALL RIGHT, THEN

29th April 2017 / Esther Menell

For several days, since North Korea’s nuclear capability has been back in the News and the Commander-in-Chief has been making pronouncements that herald the end of the world, I have been distracted by wondering whether that boy genius, with his pudgy hand hovering over the button, is setting his sights on Washington or New York.

The thing is, my only son, my only grandson and my daughter-in-law live in New York, not in Washington, and the question for me is which will excite Kim Jong-un more, the destruction of the Pentagon and seat of government or Trump Tower and the lights of New York.

Our part of New York

My guess is the latter. Especially if he is a film-lover like his dad.

So, it was like the sun coming out when my American husband – not that you needed to be American to know this – pointed out that it won’t be Washington or New York, it will be California.

So, as my friend Pat commented drily: That’s all right, then.

Well, no. And yet how hard it is not to put one’s own concerns before other people’s. Not long ago when, in a brief cold spell, our central heating gave out, it didn’t help to think of the plight of the refugees. The only ‘hardships’ it is easy to bear are those that are self-imposed. I wouldn’t choose to eat out of buckets (see below), but it was fun being in this remote part of India for a few days just as, many, many years ago, was being stranded in Agios Nicolaos – now a mecca for tourists, but then virtually unknown – when the only boat scheduled to stop there didn’t and sailed past in the distance.

It is also easy enough to put up with things that one knows will come to an end, like night cramps and toothache, but the end of the world . . . ? Laughter seems the only sane response and, as for other people, there will be no other people. Whether we like it or not, we are all in it together.

REMEMBERING JEREMY

19th April 2017 / Esther Menell

For a very short time, almost fifty years ago, I worked alongside Jeremy Lewis in a ramshackle office, partitioned to give just enough space for us to reach our desks: in my case, not actually a desk but a rickety table at which I sat for the half day each week that my infant son was looked after by a friend.

Forty-some years later, I re-met Jeremy – who I knew only as a kindly but ghostly presence, for there had been a bubbly glass partition between us – at the funeral of a mutual friend. By then, he had long since immortalised his stint at Deutsch in Kindred Spirits: Adrift in Literary London, and I had become a devoted follower of his column in The Oldie and the well-satisfied reader of many of his books, both light and heavy.

What brought him into my life in a less shadowy form was that I wrote a book myself and was persuaded to ask for his help in getting it noticed. Having worked for André Deutsch for over thirty years, the book was as much about life at 105 Great Russell Street as about my private ups and downs. His response was immediate and generous, and led to reviews I would never have got without his imprimatur.

What happened next, and brought about our actually meeting – for at the funeral we had done no more than exchange glances – was pure chance.

I had been invited to appear at Jewish Book Week, in conversation with Peter Owen. Too good to be true! Not only was he the most interesting of small publishers but, more to the point, his name guaranteed we would have an audience. Or would have done. Shortly before the event he had to bow out. His book wouldn’t be published in time.

Panic! Alone on the platform, I would have been alone in the room. The staff at JBW, my publisher and I all cast about wildly for someone who didn’t mind being asked at the last minute and whose name would fill seats. It was Jeremy who stepped into the breach.

Jeremy at an Oldie lunch Photograph © Neil Spence

Now, in the ‘green room’ and then on the stage, we met at last and I found that, unlike so many writers, Jeremy was just as you would expect him to be: funny, self-deprecating and wonderfully relaxed, the polar opposite of the comic novelist who in the flesh turned out to be a belligerent, middle-aged soak.

And thus, in a session chaired by Michele Hanson (another comforting presence), the event went ahead after all and I experienced the joy of Jeremy in person for the first and last time.

There are not many people who will be missed by everyone who has known them. But it is hard to imagine anyone who won’t miss Jeremy’s genial, shambling presence, his wit and, indeed, his erudition. Not only a thoroughly likeable man but a literary gent of the highest order.

Jeremy Morley Lewis, born 15 March 1942, died 9 April 2017.

STAYING LOCAL

6th April 2017 / Esther Menell

Another shop has closed in Camden High Street. This time a butcher. This is not as serious a loss for me as the hardware store which closed a year ago. It had been the equal in quality and range to the John Lewis basement and had the advantage that help was always on hand from the Indian family who were finally defeated by the rates.

Across the road, and belonging to another branch of the same family, was an unusually well-stocked and well-organised stationer’s. It has gone too.

There will soon be nothing left among the plethora of cafes but the banks, the discount stores and the Money Shops. Apart, of course, from the larger chains which we all use and which have helped cause the havoc.

As for Kentish Town High Street . . . If only I had gone to Abba Electrics for all the fridges and washing machines that I have bought over the last fifty-odd years, instead of heading for the West End. The washing machine that I bought there the other day is working perfectly, and it was a lot more fun discussing it and arranging its delivery with the owner of the shop and his helpers than with the polite and well-trained staff at John Lewis.

So, too, did I enjoy buying a pair of trainers at the little sports shop just beyond the point where the High Street forks and becomes Fortess Road. Here we had a long talk about how small businesses suffer from restricted parking and also about the similarities between his race (Greek) and mine (Jewish) when it came to old-fashioned ‘family values’.

It is not that the staff in Lidl or M&S are any less human but they can’t stop and chat, though the other day, when I dropped something and the film-star handsome black store walker apologised for failing to pick it up for me, this led us into a fascinating conversation about football injuries. He was even less able to bend down than I was.

In terms more general than shopping, I ‘went local’ years ago, helping to stop a flyover being built where all we needed was a zebra crossing and preventing the council from pulling down our street. I was not among those who saved Kentish Town West Station, nor those who fought off the Council (for Council, read Developer) from encroaching on our little local park, but I do remain interested and am a conscientious reader of our campaigning local paper.

Who, oddly enough, failed to support me when my book was published. Of the three review copies we sent them, only one was even acknowledged, yet they have published every letter I have ever sent them (except one offering to help a particularly unsavoury business mogul pack his bags when it was reported he threatened to take his business elsewhere). It was disappointing, too, that my local bookshop, which I have supported since it opened some forty years ago, didn’t display my book for even a day.

Perhaps it is not surprising that one is made to feel more welcome by the small shopkeepers, who are struggling to survive, than by the thriving literati.

Many thanks to Secret Artist NW5 for use of the illustrations above, see more at www.secretartistnw5.com.

NIGHT LIFE

1st April 2017 / Esther Menell

The discovery that dung beetles navigate by the light of the stars is just one of the many wonderful scraps of news I have picked up from turning on the BBC World Service when I come down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, to take some valerian drops or make a cup of cocoa. Another is that there is a language in northern India which has no name. Its 400 speakers just call it Our Language . . .

Of course, there is also Trump.

In truth, there is nothing like the World Service for the range of its topics and its deep seriousness about everyone, everywhere and everything. As the public parks are (for me) the best thing about London, so is the World Service (with Radios 4 and 3 a close second and third) one of the best things about Britain. When, a few years ago, the government cut its funding to the World Service, it showed a callous disregard for the three million plus people to whom it is a lifeline, and a culpable ignorance of the benefits it brings to this country: which is why, of course, when they belatedly woke up to its value as the most useful ambassador of all, the funding was restored.

Street Parade, Soviet Estonia in the early ‘60s.

Much as I love such items as the one about the dung beetles, it is memories of what the World Service meant to people I met in Soviet Estonia in the ‘60s and ‘70s that make me so passionate about it. The two elderly men, old friends of my parents who had risked listening to it throughout the years of Soviet rule, knew – as many of my younger relatives did not – that all was not as it was said to be. No, I had to tell my cousin, Eva, a convinced Communist, we did not send little boys up chimneys any more and Yes, we could leave the country any time we wanted. She found both these things hard to believe.

And then there was the young man on the train to Viljandi (my grandmother’s birth place) who heard us speaking English and told me how much he would love to have a copy of Fowler’s English Usage. Another clandestine listener to the BBC.

As Jilly Cooper said the other day, in a lovely piece about what it is like to be eighty, being up in the small hours comes with the territory; but these broken nights have, thanks to the World Service – truly a service – opened up not only new terrestrial worlds but also the firmament itself: how else would I have known when looking at the Milky Way that every dung beetle in our garden was looking at it too?

MY TEAM: memories of St Hilda’s

23rd March 2017 / Esther Menell

The heady news that my old college was in the running to win University Challenge reached me in the St Hilda’s newsletter just before Christmas. With mounting excitement I read that ‘our unstoppable foursome’ had an ‘effortless 160 point lead’ and ‘trounced’ the opposition! For the first time ever, I had a taste of what my son – a Chelsea supporter – has felt most Saturdays for the last forty years.

That I should get caught up in the excitement about St Hilda’s victory makes no sense at all. Oxford had been a major disappointment and, though I retain a mild affection for St Hilda’s itself, it is no more than that and it hasn’t increased over the years, in spite of my managing to ward off their requests for money. Anne Elliott – my tutor, and also Val McDermid’s (more of this later) – would surely have found those begging phone calls unseemly. Her handwritten letter, sent to each one of us as she approached retirement (or perhaps, some other occasion that threatened a present) asked that no one contribute more than three pounds.

This delicacy is typical of one of the gentlest of people and least effective of teachers. Those one-to-one tutorials (actually, one-to-two) in front of her fire, which always ended with her greeting that week’s essay with the exact same words: ‘That’s about the size of it,’ as she rekindled her cigarette in the embers, were to be recalled by generation after generation of Eng Lit students, Katherine Duncan Jones, the distinguished Shakespearean scholar, among them.

Also among them was Val McDermid, now captain of the victorious team. She was brilliant. Four square, as wholesome as a ripe apple, the answers bubbled out of her: high culture, popular culture, whatever was thrown in the ring. Not that she hogged the show. She just held it together.

Even as I watched this now celebrated alumna of St Hilda’s, I remembered her account – come across, I know not where – of arriving at Anne Elliott’s for the weekly tutorial, all fired up at having discovered the writings of Kate Millet, and Miss Elliott, who did not even consider the novel worthy of study, allowing her to let off steam before saying, gently, ‘Well, dear, perhaps it is time to get back to Wordsworth.’

Which she did. But that isn’t where she was to stay forever after: and if she hadn’t known who Oor Wallie and the Bruins were, I would never have experienced the thrill of my team winning.

LOOKING FOR JUSTICE

6th March 2017 / Esther Menell

For the first time since my divorce hearing which, I think, took place there, I was at the Law Courts in the Strand the other day. I had heard of a case coming up where I would have done exactly as the person on trial had done, so I had a particular interest in seeing and hearing how things panned out.

Determined to be there from the start and experience every step in the ancient procedure, from the entrance of the judge to his or her departure, I arrived in good time but, even so, managed to miss the first ten minutes, for I got lost in the building. Street* wasn’t called Street for nothing.

It was entirely my fault, not theirs. I had got through the frisking successfully, but didn’t have the details of the case which would have enabled the friendly man at the information desk to send me to the right Court. Instead, he furnished me with the directions to Room 240 – the Administrative Court – where, he said, they know everything. And so they did.

I have kept the half-sheet of A4 on which the directions to Room 240 had been typed, on what must surely have been a manual typewriter, so bold and homely is the type face.

       Go up a few steps turn right

       Go through 2 sets of doors

       Turn left

       Continue on until . . .

Good plain English and I, who have to hold a map upside down, if we are driving South, had no trouble following the instructions.

To be honest, I was not lost at all, lost only in the best sense, like lost in a book, as I made my way through this vast and wonderful building to find myself, at last, just where I was meant to be. But it turned out this office did not open its doors until the very moment at which the trial began.

Even so, given the choice between saturation in the marble density and calm of Street’s creation or being on time, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the first. The building itself exudes confidence in what goes on within its walls – badly needed in these days of the ‘so-called’ Judge. It does not seem absurd to Look for Justice here.

As for what took place in the court-room itself: that must wait for another day.

*George Edward Street, 1824-81, architect

IN MEMORIAM: DoublePrint

22nd February 2017 / Esther Menell

For something like twenty years, I have been sending films to a cheery outfit (their garish envelopes used to greet you at every airport) called DoublePrint, and they have always come back to me, regular as clockwork, with prints in two sizes: one to fit a regular album, and the other half the size, for sending to friends, thus making those tiresome negatives, which I always throw away, unnecessary.

Completely unnecessary, it turned out when, out of the blue, someone saw some of the snapshots I had been taking to pass the time while my husband was photographing bench ends and architraves, and decided they were worth exhibiting, which is what happened next thanks to that wonderful photographer and friend, Jonathan Lovekin, who scanned them for me, and the friends in both London and Rome who helped to pin them up.

But it will never happen again. The last two films that I sent to DoublePrint have just been returned. The firm has gone out of business. Like handkerchiefs, now a luxury item, and typewriter ribbons, which it takes detective work to locate, non-digital cameras are a thing of the past. The firm which served those of us who still prefer ‘film cameras’, so long and so faithfully, couldn’t keep up with the times. So, before I plod up the high street to Happy Snaps or down it to Boots, here are a few of the photos they printed which didn’t find a place either in the Holloway Road or in the via Flaminia.

BACK ROOM OF A PUB

GOLDFISH

COUNTER IN A WELSH BAKERY

ON THE BEACH

IN OUR GARDEN

Sic transit DoublePrint . . .

FIT TO DIE

16th February 2017 / Esther Menell

A recent issue of the Camden New Journal, our crusading local paper, was enough to make one forget, at least for a while, about Trump who – a doctor friend thinks – could have a major cocaine habit as he (the Commander in Chief) apparently displays all the standard symptoms: the sniffles, the wakefulness, the paranoia . . .

Be that as it may (or may not), we have problems enough on our own doorstep.

A few weeks ago, a man dropped dead in the street. He had just left the local Job Centre where, since July – when he had been deemed Fit to Work and his benefits had ceased – he had been going each week to ‘sign on’.

It was as if I, Daniel Blake was being given a live performance.

Anyone in their senses would have recognised that 56-year-old Lawrence Bond was not Fit to Work and had no hope whatsoever of being offered a job. Just as it must have been obvious that P*** (see previous post On Being a Landlord) was also unemployable. Not only did he weigh 20 stone but he had major health problems, a prison record and was barely literate.

On one occasion, by which time, with the help of a wonderful social worker, I had managed to get him re-housed, I returned from a summer away to find he was starving. His travel card had been cancelled and he couldn’t walk as far as the nearest Food Bank.

This kind of thing must be happening all the time. And we can’t blame the people who work in the Job Centres. They have to sanction a certain number of applicants every week, or they will lose their jobs.

But we can blame the government and the U.S. firm employed by them to carry out ‘work ability assessments’. It seems that in ‘assessing’ a woman so disabled by depression that she was barely able to walk, they asked ‘How come, if she was so depressed, she hadn’t killed herself?’

And passed her Fit to Work.

You can read the original Camden New Journal report here: http://camdennewjournal.com/article/man-ruled-fit-for-work-dies-from-heart-attack-on-way-home-from-job-centre?sp=1&sq=LAWRENCE%2520BOND

ON BEING A LANDLORD

10th February 2017 / Esther Menell

Forty years ago when Camden Council decided to pull down the street I still live in, I cobbled together a Residents Association and proudly proclaimed it was there to protect the interests of everyone threatened by the Council plans, except those who owned a house but didn’t live in it – that nefarious group, the Absentee Landlords.

Thirty years later I became one myself.

To get my son off the housing list, I bought a flat from a Right to Buy family who were selling to move out of London. Two years later, my son moved out of London too. I now had to sell or to let. I chose to let, and so became the old enemy. But, curiously enough, it is still Camden Council that I am fighting.

Camden hates leaseholders the way we hated absentee landlords, who deserved to be hated, as I found when I did a house by house survey in our street. In the early ‘70s, there were still a lot of mini-Rachmans about.

But things have changed and at least some of us who, for one reason or another, own and rent out what was once a council flat, expiate our guilt by doing our best to be good landlords.

In my own case, I took the Council on to get them to pay the rent direct to me and not to my indigent tenant during an imbecilic government initiative to teach the penniless how to handle their own affairs. P***, whose last address had been a doorway, asked me to do this. I pretended not to notice what I suspected was a marijuana jungle another of my council tenants was growing in the bedroom, and helped yet another (but all the credit is due to her) start a vegetable garden in the back area, the produce of which she shared with the other flats in our entrance.

Which brings me to the entrance.

Five years ago – they must have time to waste or, perhaps, a friendly manufacturer they want to support – Camden notified leaseholders that they intended to install a new ‘entry system’. This meant replacing a perfectly good front door and set of ‘loud-speaker bells’, with the door you see below. And we now have fobs instead of keys.

The cost of this door to me – the bill arrived the other day, five years after the estimate – is £1,290. Multiply this by six and, Behold, a door which cost £7,740!

At the moment a numerate friend is looking over the figures for me: not because I can’t afford to pay, but because there are now many families throughout the borough who have bought their flats in good faith and been driven to sell their homes by these lunatic and inexplicable costs.

Something is wrong. And it needs to be put right.

THE WRITING MUMMY AND THE WRITING DADDY

3rd February 2017 / Esther Menell

Two years ago, at the age of eighty, I published my first book, thus inverting the work of a lifetime in which — as an editor — I had nursed other people’s books into existence. It was, and remains, quite an experience.

The actual writing of my memoir is hard to describe, but what it most felt like was pulling a thread: no effort was needed, just a few uninterrupted hours — surprisingly hard to come by even though I was by now long retired.

My husband (also a writer, but a serious writer, whose many subjects do not include himself) manages to get time for himself every day, but it seems that a woman’s work is never done, even if it is only answering the door bell, scrabbling through the freezer for tonight’s supper or getting a late birthday card into the post.

But the days on which I was able to pin ‘GONE FISHING’ on the door of my room mounted up and, at the end of three years, this record of my life — three decades of which were spent working alongside the legendary Diana Athill at André Deutsch Limited — was complete.

It was only then, reading what I myself had written, that I realized how indignant I felt on behalf of women, both at home and in the work place: a dyed-in-the-wool feminist, without even knowing it!

Here follows just one example from my book which, in recalling all those years as a literary midwife, contains many others.

‘A parental “Where’s the novel then?” or words to that effect were, apparently, what finally spurred Howard Jacobson to get down to his first book, but the havoc that writers create in the lives of their nearest and dearest spreads in all directions: not just the worried parents, but the partner who may never know the luxury of a regular income and the children whose childhood is one long admonition to keep quiet: the thud of the football against the back door, the beat of rock music, intolerable to the writing Daddy who expects to have a decent stretch of quiet every day. The writing Mummy, of course, doesn’t expect to have stretches of time, let alone quiet time, when there are children at home and finds different ways around this.

One Deutsch author who began writing when her four children were not yet at school, would snatch time before anyone else in the house was up. (It was her youngest son who told everyone that his mother had written six books after helping her to open the parcel of six complimentary copies . . .) Another, her third child on the way, had, in two years of Monday mornings, completed her third novel and handed it in just days before the baby’s birth. Then there was the twice-divorced father who wrote four entire books (typed on the back of Council minutes) on the train to and from work, returning home to cook the supper and put his four children to bed. For this is to do with mothering, not gender. But most mothering is done by mothers and many, like Shena Mackay, put their careers on hold while their children grow up or, like one of my oldest friends, don’t really get started until their children leave home, getting their first royalty statement at much the same time as their Freedom Pass . . .’

I must, in all fairness, add that not all male writers have an easy time of it. There are men with nine-to-five jobs who find themselves in much the same boat. But one can’t help noticing that it is still almost always the women who have to be the most accomplished jugglers of domestic priorities.

ON TRYING TO TAKE ONE’S OWN ADVICE . . .

29th January 2017 / Esther Menell

For the thirty years I worked as an editor – a job which could be described as being a Book Doctor, but a doctor whose duties don’t end with caring just for the book but also for the person who wrote it – I would tell authors crushed by bad reviews to ignore them unless they felt the reviewer had made a valid point, in which case best to take it on board.

Well, as an author myself and recipient of a less than friendly review in a journal so prestigious that everyone told me I was lucky to be there, I realised this is more easily said than done. I would not prefer to be there. I would rather have had a few friendly words in a parish magazine than that rambling put-down in a journal with a world-wide circulation.

In a vain effort to follow my own advice, I tried to ignore the review after deciding (as so many authors in the same situation have done before me) that there was nothing to be learnt from it, but the next step was even less easy to take.

Even if – in my estimation – the reviewer had it all wrong, it still rankled. Who was this person who had taken such a dislike to me and my poor book? Why hadn’t they handed it back to the Literary Editor and said it wasn’t worth reviewing (as my friend Diana Athill does, if sent a book in which she can find nothing to like)?

Pondering this question led me, inevitably, to the www (not available to my authors, as I retired more than twenty years ago) where I discovered that the person who could find nothing of merit in my book had been on the permanent staff of the offending journal. I began to fantasise about their state of mind. I even began to sympathise, having had very rough treatment from my own employer. Ah yes, I thought: here is someone being given the occasional unimportant book to review to make up for past wrongs . . .

The next step, was to moan to friends – writer friends – every one of whom came up with similar stories and one of whom said she knew the reviewer, who was a very nice person but literal-minded and with not much sense of humour. Both these qualities (or lack of them) figured. By no means all my friends had liked my book, which made me like them no less: we need the literal-minded, and a sense of humour often indicates a cruel streak. Nevertheless, it was bad luck for mine to have been given to that particular reviewer and I wish that he had taken Diana’s line and turned the job down.

But, of course, to quote the Pub Landlord ‘It is Much More Complicated than That’: reviewers get paid and not everyone can afford to turn work away. Even so, the system provides fertile ground for an abuse of power where the writer is at the mercy of someone who may simply have got out of bed on the wrong side, or happened (in the case of a memoir) to have liked someone the writer doesn’t like.

There is, of course, a way round this for the writer. No one can make anyone read a review and there are those who, like my own husband, avoid them altogether. He has never read the two-page diatribe in a long-ago London Review of Books in which he was accused of not knowing how to write English. My ‘bad review’ wasn’t anything like as fierce as that, nor as far off the mark.

Of course, it goes without saying that reviewers must be free to write whatever they like, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t wonder why so much space is given to reviews which deter readers rather than sending them out to the nearest bookshop.

Many thanks to OK David for use of his image, originally drawn for the Hatchet Job of the Year Award. See more of his work at www.okdavid.com.

THE THING ABOUT DOGS

20th January 2017 / Esther Menell

Of course, not everybody likes them. Some people prefer cats. My friend Jane wore her cat round her neck like a comforter; as for my erstwhile friend, Andrea Newman – one of whose characters remarks that friends are like pot plants: both have short lives – her kitchen, was festooned with litter trays, no more objectionable to her than are a baby’s nappies to a doting mother.

But, for us, it has always been dogs, starting with the little mongrel bought at the local pet shop the day after my then husband moved out.

Patch

Patch, for so we named the puppy, remains for my son and me the dog of dogs, a paragon of doggy virtue, and he gave us immeasurable pleasure. We still remember the day he jumped out of the car window when we were stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the seaside, and his dazzling smile when we opened the front door to let him in after his trips to the dustbins on the local estate. We knew so little about dogs then that we used to let him out on his own. His cast-iron stomach and happy temperament kept him with us for eighteen years, a longevity also, and more surprisingly, achieved by Topsy, who came next: a sweet-natured, neurasthenic Australian Terrier, whose owners didn’t want her because her legs were ‘too long’. Topsy was shaking life a leaf when I met her and for weeks never left my side. She did not seem long for this world.

With Topsy

I hadn’t thought Jean Rhys had long to live either, when I met her at the door of that wretched little bungalow in Cheriton Fitzpaine. I had been sent down to try and get her novel out of her: the novel that became The Wide Sargasso Sea. But, like Topsy, Jean was a survivor. Frail and neurotic though she was, her glory years were still ahead. As for Topsy, it was not until she started bumping into the wall and circling the table legs in advanced dementia that we stopped spoon-feeding her chicken and rice (her diet for her last five years) and accepted it was time to let her go.

That should have been the end of it. We were no longer young and we were also spending part of every year on a sheep farm. But fate (in the person of Ira Moss of All Dogs Matter) intervened and, before long, we had adopted a stumpy little Patterdale terrier with no social graces but a big, big heart. More important still, she had been trained by the farmer who raised her and then, alas, died on her, not to chase sheep.

We only had Choci for eight years. The animal hospital reckoned that she was probably quite old when we got her. But what spirit! What speed! The rabbits on the North Yorkshire moors were getting a run for their money.

And the greed! For months after she died, I was still moving all edible food out of reach. She had jumped up onto the kitchen table and downed a bowlful of radishes, scattered the kitchen waste bin all over the floor to achieve quite a respectable ‘installation’, and also eaten an entire box of chocolates, without suffering ‘muscle tremors, irregular heartbeat, internal bleeding, or a heart attack’.

But even Choci, though she was built like a little tank, wasn’t indestructible and one day her back legs gave out. It was only thanks to a wonderful man-and-wife team who live near Bridlington and fitted her with the made-to-measure contraption seen below, that we had her cheerful company for another two years.

Choci on her wheels

But nothing lasts for ever and nor did Choci, now buried in that Yorkshire farmyard. But we never forget her and she and the whole doggy tribe were brought to mind the other day when I heard from a prisoner friend – 30 years into a 68 year sentence – that he has become part of a dog programme in the not-quite-so-high-security American prison to which he was recently moved (a feisty Scotsman with the nerve to take on the Aryan Brotherhood) for his own safety.

Tom’s description of the relationship that develops between the prisoners and their dogs – ‘ I have seen many an otherwise cold hard man sink to his knees voicing nonsensical babble while a tail swishing dog licks the smile from his face’ – and his conclusion, for the dogs are released for sale to the public when they have been successfully retrained, moved me to tears. ‘As each dog is set free, a part of me is freed with it.’

If only we could be as loyal, trusting and non-judgemental.

That’s the thing about dogs.

AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR MYSELF