Father, Henry Francis (1913–1996), Mother, Dorothy Penrose (1916–2012). Francis’s early years were unsettled. Soon after she was born, the family moved to St Just-in-Roseland, Cornwall, where Francis’s maternal grandfather, the Reverend James Vavasor Hammond, was the Anglo-Catholic vicar of the parish church. Her earliest memory is from the war: she watched a solitary German plane fly over the village and drop a bomb on a house flying the Union Jack. When the owner of the house congratulated himself on his luck (because he had happened to be out at the time of the attack), Francis’s grandfather reprimanded him: ‘That was not luck, that was providence.’ The next day a cheque for £1,000 arrived at the vicarage, signed by the house owner. The money enabled Rev Hammond to put electricity in the church.
Francis’s father was colour blind, so was not sent to the front during the war. (‘This probably saved his life.’) An agricultural engineer, he was given war work around Britain, including training recruits for motorboats in Rothesay, Scotland. Francis’s mother, a classics graduate from Girton College, Cambridge, moved with Laura to Cambridge. There they lived with Laura’s paternal grandparents at Whitefield House. It was not a happy time. Francis remembers her grandfather as a harsh and unloving man. On her father’s return from war work, the family moved to Bedfordshire, where Francis and her younger sisters, Jennifer, Kate and Alison, grew up. Although she was a shy and generally isolated child, in her last year at primary school Francis’s fellow students elected her to be May Queen, but the school authorities immediately decided she was not a suitable candidate and substituted the daughter of one of the dinner ladies instead. It was a first taste of the tenacious unfairness that Francis felt pursued her throughout her life. (‘I agree with that!’)
In 1951 Francis was given a diary for Christmas, and some green ink. (‘That’s why I began writing: I liked the green ink.’)
This was the year after the family moved to Tudor House in Haynes Church End, near Bedford, a large sixteenth-century, and now Grade II listed building. ‘The place was very isolated, not even a village – just a few houses, and a church. It was over a mile to the main road, where we caught the bus for school every day (eight miles). About half a mile away was a girls’ boarding school called Hawnes, set in parkland. This was where my music teacher, Elsa Julich, was for a couple of years, until she had to leave, following a row with the headmistress. She then lodged with a kindly elderly couple who lived near our house. It was the time of the great smog in London. I remember the fog in Haynes, too.’
Francis was fourteen when she met the sixty-four-year-old Julich. Their love affair was never discussed between them explicitly, or consummated beyond a kiss; yet for twenty-six years this relationship with Julich dominated her life. The one exception was when Francis fell in love with a ninety-nineyear-old female nutritionist. Julich died in 1979.
Excited by men, impassioned by elderly women, Francis never married.
It is difficult for the reader of Francis’s diaries not to be appalled by Julich’s behaviour towards the young Francis, but in the early years of their relationship she was a kind friend who encouraged Francis’s interest in writing and music. When Julich moved to Cambridge in 1953 to become an occasional music teacher for the Perse School for Girls, Francis followed in 1956. With the help of a family friend who sat on the board of governors, Francis persuaded her parents to send her to the school, and the school to have her. It was one of her few displays of academic effort (‘I had to try twice. I was rejected the first time. But I was determined to get in’). During her time at the school, Francis again lived at Whitefield House. Now that her grandfather was dead, these were among the happiest years of her life. She took A-Levels in French (fail), French Literature (grade 2), English (grade 2) and Art (‘a bad choice’ – pass). She did not get into university.
In the early 1960s Francis pursued a series of disastrous part-time jobs as a librarian and a housekeeper-cook. For two years she was a student at the sixth-form Luton College of Technology, where she studied art. She must have appeared an odd figure. Five foot 103/4, with a disdainful manner (‘I think I was more shy’), agoraphobia and an inability to eat without choking, she was, at twenty, three years older than her teenage classmates.
From Luton, she won a place to study illustration at the fashionable Camberwell College of Art. London in 1962 was abuzz with innovative artists, musicians, writers; but it buzzed without Laura. After graduating, she worked briefly for an advertising agency and then, dogged by loneliness and lack of money, returned to Cambridge to work as a housekeeper. It was here that she met the leading nutritionist and microbiologist Dr Harriette Chick DBE, and became her live-in companion for the three years before Dame Harriette’s death in 1977, aged 102. Francis then continued in the same house and role, working for Chick’s nephew, Peter Mitchell, for almost the next quarter of a century, until Professor Mitchell’s death in 2001.
Laura Francis’s distinction as the most prolific known diarist in history (according to The Guinness Book of Records, the previous record-holder is a ‘newspaperman’, Edward Robb Ellis, twenty-two million words) would have gone undiscovered but for the fact that 148 volumes of the diaries were thrown into a skip by builders after she was evicted following Professor Mitchell’s death. By good luck a Cambridge academic, Professor Richard Grove, was playing in the building site and spotted the books. He donated them to Dr Dido Davies, who five years later handed the collection over to the biographer Alexander Masters.
It took Masters five years to discover Francis’s identity.
Today, happier, though not happy, Francis continues to write several thousand words a day, much of it still about what she has seen on television. She does not know how the books Professor Grove discovered ended up in the skip; she suggests they were discarded during the solicitors’ hasty efforts to evict her from Professor Mitchell’s house following his death. She had not missed them; she never looks at old diary entries. The moment she closes the back cover on a completed volume, she loses interest in it.
Since she left Professor Mitchell’s house, the purpose of her journal has changed again. Now, she says, she no longer writes to relieve frustration, hide love, provide protection or to exhaust her teeming mind.
She keeps going now simply because ‘I like the sound of the pen on the page.’ Her style is immediate and unself-conscious. It rarely takes her more than six weeks to fill an entire notebook, often writing between two and three thousand words a day.
When Masters turned up at the door of Francis’s bungalow in 2012, sixty years after she began her diary in 1952, she was unsurprised.
‘She spoke,’ he said, ‘as if she had been expecting me all along.’
32 PS
I have seen Laura many more times since our first meeting. We have become friends. Two weeks ago I gave her the full manuscript of this book to read.
It must be a rule of writing biographies about unknown people that the subject agrees to everything you have put down. It is otherwise too easy to get some small fact wrong, or to insist on a false interpretation that might seem minor to you but could, for reasons you hadn’t appreciated, ruin your subject’s life. With famous people it doesn’t matter so much – they have lots of ways to defend themselves. But as a biographer of unknown people you must be exceptionally careful not to trash someone who has no capacity to reply. If you cannot reach a version of the book that both you and your subject are prepared to accept, then the whole thing must go on the fire.
Laura has objected to two things.
I have changed neither of them.
Both are pictures. The most prolific diarist in history is not fussed about the words.
Her first objection concerns the photograph on page 168, of a woman standing on a pedestal holding a bow and arrow.
Laura: I don’t like it that she has no clothes on.
Me: But she does have clothes on – it’s a white body suit to make her look like a marble statue. Do you object to marble statues?
The second is the photograph on page 170, of E on a bicycle, aged seventy-two. It is not a picture of E. Laura has never seen this woman before. It seems that there were two unknown bodies in the skip that day in 2001 when Richard and Dido pushed through a hedge to trespass about a building site.
Apart from that, Laura has approved the manuscript. She does not mind the fact that I suspected her of being mad; she is not worried about my exposure of her crushes on E or Dame Harriette; she is happy for me to go on and on and on about her failures as an artist.
It is all, she says, ‘jolly swerbles’.
Footnote
16 Vince, private detective
fn1 As Vince later explained in an email: ‘During the course of an interview with him – he was not a suspect, it was an enquiry about another matter to do with homelessness – he remarked upon my waterproof jacket, which was a Drizabone. He said that he would love one to keep him warm and dry on the streets. I did not say anything at the time to him because I was a bit embarrassed, but I did remember it and about 2 months later I found this same chap sitting in the rain in Sidney Street. I took my jacket off and put it round his shoulders and then walked on. Didn’t think anything of it because it was most probably one of the better spontaneous things I have done.’
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been finished without Flora Dennis (pictured here dancing, thank goodness, with me). Her superb editorial suggestions; her cunning ideas about structure and plot; her impatience with my tendency to pontificate; her ability to read (and with each reading, improve) the same pages over and over and over and over again until they are fit to be published or there is no hope left and they must be thrown out –her decisive influence on the writing of this book has been invaluable.
It astonishes me that Dido Davies is dead. I cannot believe that her name and death go together. She provided the diaries; she gave this book its direction; she worked brilliantly on the early chapters; and she taught me how to write it all, starting thirty years ago when she, a newly-elected English Fellow, crawled through the window of my college bar and said hello. Above is her last self-portrait, drawn in her hospital bed: She is buried in Coton churchyard, just outside Cambridge.
Richard Grove is another shock. Before his accident Richard was the leading academic in the field of environmental history, a subject he helped to found. His enviable (and sometimes maddening) wayward character led him to break into a building site where he had no business to be, and discover the diaries. It is because of people such as Richard that the best things happen.
Laura Francis: for a moment she held four years of my life in the balance. As I sat in her bungalow, explaining that I had read her private diaries and wanted to publish her biography, she would have been quite within her rights to kick me out of the door. I expected her to. But without hesitation she agreed to let me continue work, and has been nothing but delightful ever since.
There have been a great many people who have helped me with this book, either directly, or indirectly by their support and friendship. Barbara Weaver (graphologist), Patricia Field (graphologist) and Vince Johnson (detective), three of the experts I consulted, are different characters but shared one essential quality: an immediate understanding of the importance and interest of Laura’s forgotten life. Richard Goldthwaite, Gian Mario Cao, Iain Fenlon: the richness of their humour and their curiosity about Laura were central to the final third of the story. Graeme Mitchison has been vital in two areas, as a pianist and as a scientist. He explained and demonstrated the importance of the Pathétique, and checked (and corrected) my forays into physics metaphors. I could not have done without this insightful and cultured man. Here is a picture of me chasing after him on a bicycle:
I want also to thank Vanita Damodaran, Richard’s wife, for her permission to include Richard and the story of his car accident, and her heroic support of Richard; Caroline and Nick Dennis, who were among the first to read the diaries: their interest in them, and encouraging comments, inspired me to push on; Joan Brady made, as always, clever and helpful suggestions about how I should write the story; John Rogers, my ex-school teacher and first publisher, for his memorable thoughts about the Trinity.
James Blishen, Adrian Clarke and Brendan Griggs, Fanny Johnson, Miraphora Mina, for reading and checking the ms; Ruth Ur, for her comments, and also her enthusiasm for the idea and her lovely house in France, where she makes me repaint the window ledges; Sarah Burbidge, Nathan Graves and Lucy Graves, for editorial suggestions, gin cocktails and being blissful gougers. Belinda, Diana and Curtis Allan, for the use of their house in Italy – it is the best place to write. Andrew and Otto Barrow, Charles Collier, James Cormick, Jonathan Foyle, Andy Grove, Hugh Hardinge, Cathy Hembry, Diane Johnson, Michael Lee, Kate Lewis, Annie Maccoby, Cornelius Medvei, Colin Midson, Natalie Shaw, Julia Walsh – all of these have given good advice, cheered me up when I’m low and made the four years it took me to write this book, and the fifteen years it took me to think about it, a pleasure.
To whom this may concern at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport: whatever the funding for public libraries is at the moment, please double it. The Cambridgeshire Collection at the Cambridge Public Library has been an essential resource. My thanks also to the Perse School for Girls, in particular to vice-principal Dr Helen Stringer and to Catherine Hanlon, the excellent (but now former) librarian.
At Fourth Estate, I have been supported by four first-class people in particular, who have been there from the time I first joined this publisher: Nicholas Pearson, Michelle Kane, Julian Humphries and Robert Lacey (sitting in the office, his pen is scratching out the last dangling participles from the proofs even as I write this). Every three or four years I pop up babbling about something or other; they always receive me with generosity and coffee. I also thank Vera Brice, for her help in designing these picture-strewn pages. Peter Straus, my splendid literary agent with a scary habit of going suddenly silent on the phone – he has been the perfect guide and companion.
Denise Knowledon typed up many passages from the diaries, including several entire volumes, encouraged me to press on and helped me to understand the best way to keep track of the themes and characters in Laura’s notebooks; Dominic Nutt had nothing to do with this book, but a lot to do with the other work I did during the time of writing it, and so that was good; Elisa Vedova, Alison Tyler and Helena Greer, for their help in looking after baby Ida and the house. To Sabrina and Charles Harcourt-Smith, my thanks for being sympathetic landlords. To Amanda Harcourt and AJ, Leslie and Dave, my thanks for being good neighbours. Nothing is worse for the concentrated study of five million words, cramped into 148 volumes of diaries, than the wrong people next door.
Finally, to Ida:
who is two and cannot read.
Also by Alexander Masters
Stuart: A Life Backwards
Simon: The Genius in My Basement
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Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded
A Life Discarded Page 17