So she decided to come to London. She applied to Camden and got a job as a social worker, soon rising to become a team leader.
Margaret and I had encouraged her to come to London, assuring her she would be bound to have a better social and personal life and a working life. We said that she could stay with us for a few weeks, till she found somewhere to live and got sorted. Which of course was not easy, even in the 1970s.
I then did something which made Margaret absolutely furious. I bought another house in our street. Not quite as nice as ours, as the garden was smaller and it did not have a garage or exit at the back, but all the same, a similar three-storey mid Victorian house in what had become a very desirable street. It came with two lots of sitting tenants, with only the ground floor vacant, and was a bargain. So much of a bargain I have now forgotten how much I paid, but I think about £20,000.
Margaret said I was stupid, taking on sitting tenants, when our own tenant, Mrs Hall, had driven me mad for so many years. And also by offering Marion the ground floor flat we were influencing her decision about coming to London.
It seemed to me a perfect solution, the best way to help her out, give her independence yet be near us. I remembered how fraught my early months in London had been, sleeping on people’s sofas, not knowing anyone, or my way around in London. Margaret had never had to do that, being able to live with me in my flat, however much she criticised it, the moment she left Oxford.
I was also attracted by the price. Local house prices were shooting up all the time and I could see no sign of them coming down, ever. It seemed an obvious bargain.
There is, hidden not far away inside me, an entrepreneur wanting to get out, to do deals, snap up bargains. The reason why I had done that novel about Jake Sullivan was that I was fascinated by property developers. There were even more of them now, springing up all over London, buying and developing houses and blocks, ducking and diving, using rents to pay the mortgage on the next acquisition.
I was not going to borrow, or get a mortgage. I had spent little of the Beatles income during the seven years after we returned to London, but gradually I had started spending. There had been a bungalow each for the parents, then our cottage in Cumbria, always paying cash in order to get the best price.
I have never had any interest in shares or unit trusts or any of the other obvious investments which people with spare cash go for and which so-called experts advise. I reckoned that bricks and mortar would always be a good buy. Secondly, I wanted to be in total control of my own investments, not have someone else creaming off percentages, or playing with my money. If this meant headaches, as Margaret predicted, having to mend leaks, having tenants moaning, then I would just have to cope. So I merrily, hopefully, wilfully imagined.
Margaret never had any interest in money or investments or buying stuff, least of all buying another house, when we already had more than enough. Forgot to mention we had our Portuguese house which we had bought in 1970, the year after we came back, a small, new-built terrace cottage in Porto de Mos, which Alison our friend had taken us to see and said, look, you must buy it at once, just look at that wonderful beach down below. So we did. Cost us £4,000.
I had gone rather mad, carried away by a passion for property. It seemed such an obvious and sensible thing, if you had the money, but I did not tell many people about buying the other house in our street, nor did Margaret, who was embarrassed if not ashamed of me as a landlord and property owner. My argument was that we didn’t have pensions, as I had long left the Sunday Times staff. Margaret never had one, as she was never properly employed (when teaching, she was a supply teacher). I felt that if we ever fell on hard times, and nobody wanted our books – or even more likely, one of us might be ill for years and need constant care, which after the double mastectomy seemed a bit more likely – well then, we would sell one or all of the properties and live on that. It was our security for the future, for us and our little family. I was just being a good sensible husband and father. Margaret was not convinced.
I have forgotten to mention the flat in Swain’s Lane, which Mrs Hall was still living in. That had gone up in value, so I was no longer regretting having to buy it. So in total, counting the bungalows where our parents lived, I was the owner of seven different properties. What a capitalist pig.
The house I bought further down our street had only one floor vacant, which Marion moved into. Above her, I had two old ladies, sisters, and they did drive me mad with constant complaints about sink problems and leaks and dodgy ceilings. On the top floor was a single man, a parky on the Heath, who looked after the men’s open-air pool. He was very nice, never moaned or complained or demanded. He agreed, after a few years, to accept a lump sum to go, give up his sitting tenancy. It was his suggestion. He had found a small place of his own to buy. So I did him a good turn, enabling him to pay a deposit and become a property owner.
Marion eventually moved out to Crouch End, buying a flat of her own, and I helped her with the deposit. And then she met someone and they lived together from then on.
But then the most surprising thing happened. After several years as a team leader for Camden Social Services, she suddenly started writing about being a team leader. I never knew she had aspirations to be a journalist or a writer, had seen nothing she had ever written, or any evidence that she had been trying.
She suddenly appeared as a weekly columnist in the Guardian, in their Society supplement, writing a very funny column called Leader of the Pack, by Mary Black. I didn’t even know about it, till she had had it accepted. She had sent off three columns, on spec, out of the blue, with no contacts, which they accepted and started using every week.
During the three years she did the column, from 1991–4, she never met anyone from the Guardian. No one from the paper told her that last week’s column was good. No one asked what her column would be about next week. No one said come and have lunch. She never even knew if her column, which she posted each week, had arrived, till she saw it in the paper.
The style of the column was staccato, short sentences, flat, but very effective. It was based on her real experiences as a team leader, dealing with the members of her team as well as the clients and their problems. All names were changed; nobody could be identified, least of all herself. She had chosen the name Mary Black because that was the maiden name of our grandmother, our mother’s mother. Mary Black also turned out to be the name of a well-known Irish singer, which Marion didn’t know when she began. She had to use a pseudonym because Camden Social Services would not of course have allowed her to write anything about her work.
I once went to see Glenys Kinnock, wife of Neil, then leader of the Labour Party, at their semi-detached house in Ealing. When I arrived, Glenys was sitting reading the Guardian – and by chance had it open at the Society section, on the page with Leader of the Pack, by Mary Black.
I asked her if she had read that column and she said oh yes, she always did. I told her it was my sister, and explained about her life and career – working in the factory, then Ruskin, and how now, aged nearly fifty, she had suddenly emerged as a journalist.
I would have gone mad, writing a column for three years with no encouragement or interest from the office. I need recognition and encouragement if not applause, even when I have just written my name at the top of the page. She had of course come to it as an outsider, late in life, from another world, not knowing what to expect in the wonderful world of journalism. So she just accepted being ignored.
I remember a few years earlier, about 1983, being at a supper party at Joan Bakewell’s house when James Cameron was one of the guests. Born 1911, he was one of the most distinguished foreign correspondents and broadcasters of the post-war years. He worked for many years on the Daily Express, covering Vietnam and other major wars, then joined the BBC and became an award-winning documentary maker and presenter. In 1957, he had been one of the founder members of CND – the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – along with Bertrand Russell, J. B. Pr
iestley and Canon Collins, which had enormous influence in the UK and all over the world, being the beginning of an international peace movement.
By the time I met him, in the early 1980s, Cameron was getting on a bit but was still working, writing a regular column in the Guardian, which was much liked by the paper’s readers and admired by other journalists. At the supper, I was surprised when he started moaning about the Guardian, saying nobody ever contacted him, nobody said his column was good. I was amazed at the time, that someone so distinguished should be treated like this – and also surprised that someone who had done so much, achieved so much, should care so much. From then on I always used to tell younger journalists that as long as it gets in the paper, that means they like it. Don’t expect telegrams.
When James Cameron died, in 1985, the Guardian cleared the pages, devoting acres of space to saying how marvellous he had been, how proud they were to have had him as a columnist.
So Marion’s treatment, just a few years later, was clearly typical of the Guardian, even with a newcomer, a total beginner, treating them as if they didn’t exist.
After three years of doing her team leader column in the Guardian, Marion decided that next she would do a lesbian column, a funny one. I encouraged her, but wondered if the world was ready yet for such a column, even in the Guardian.
She had also written a stage play, which got put on at the ICA and later became a BBC radio play, with a very good director, Claire Grove. While doing her column and her play, she was still working every day as a social worker.
I do like it when people take hold of their lives, change direction, do something totally different. I often used to think there must be something else I can do in life, apart from shifting words, something I should try, before it is too late. Apart from being a mini property magnate.
The other house I bought in our street, which had an empty flat when Marion moved out to live with her partner in Crouch End, ended up being very useful, despite what Margaret had predicted.
For about ten years, my mother had clearly begun to wander, mentally and physically, getting lost every time she went into town in Carlisle. She had always had a poor sense of direction. Just like me.
Once while visiting us in London, when Caitlin was little, my mother insisted on taking Caitlin to the Heath in the pram. She went off – and just disappeared. She had gone for hours, so we rang the police. She had wandered off in completely the wrong direction. She was eventually found lost and confused in the back streets of Archway.
I rang her up once, at her bungalow in Carlisle, and said, ‘Hi Mum, it’s me, Hunter.’
‘Oh, Hunter doesn’t live here any more,’ she replied. And hung up.
We had had a sequence of local carers in Carlisle coming in to look after her in her bungalow, till we realised she was becoming a danger to herself. So we decided she would be better off in London, with us, or near us. We could not very well accommodate her in our house, with three children still at home. So the ground floor of our other house down the street, once Marion had moved out, proved perfect for her. And us. We could just pop along at any time and see how she was.
As her Alzheimer’s got worse, we had a sequence of round-the-clock carers, going in night and day to look after her. One of those on the night shift was a Sister from La Sainte Union Convent round the corner on Highgate Road, a lay worker, but she wore a nun’s habit. She was Irish and very kind and willing, if a bit slow.
She had answered an advert I had put in the window of the local newsagent, and naturally I was surprised when a nun turned up. When she began, she insisted I had to pay her in cash and not to tell anyone at the Convent that she had a wee job, or that she got paid in cash. I never found out if she was spending the cash at the bookies or on Guinness or sending it back to Ireland.
So buying the house turned out to have been a useful thing to do, as it helped not just my sister Marion but my mother. My mother’s deteriorating condition, which we were now observing at first hand, also provided something else. It gave Margaret the basis for a novel, Have the Men Had Enough?
The novel was about a woman with Alzheimer’s, at a time when such people were rarely written about in fiction. Margaret seldom, if ever, based any of her novels on real-life events or real people, as opposed to her non-fiction.
It got good reviews and won some awards. I always thought it was one of the best and most moving novels Margaret ever wrote. And also funny.
Margaret could be witty in real life, and in her letters she always managed to find some amusing story or funny dialogue, even if she made some of it up, but in her serious fiction, she rarely allowed herself any comedy. She left that to the Davies side of the family, to me and to Marion, who despite being a late starter had turned out to be a witty writer. Well, we both thought we were funny . . .
15
NOW FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT
And then I became a publisher. Among other things.
Being a publisher was one of several new projects and amusements I first took on in the 1980s. I suppose I could have bought a fast car, moved to a posh house in Hampstead, started a proper property company, or even bought some decent clothes, the sort of supposedly modern gear I often acquired in the sixties, but I didn’t fancy any of that.
I gave up my regular Sunday Times work around 1980, the one I had been doing roughly six months of each year during the seventies, and soon hankered after doing something else, now and again, instead of just sitting at my desk writing books.
When I finished on the Sunday Times Magazine, I was so relieved not to have to go to an office ever again, not to have to waste all that time travelling, listening to people chuntering on, moaning about their secretary, their expenses, the size of their office, their dopey ideas for an amazing story which would mean them flying to Cuba this very afternoon.
But after a few months at home, writing away every day, all on my own, I began to realise there was one thing I missed – lunch.
I was moaning on about this when Margaret said why not organise your own lunches? I had already organised my own football team, Dartmouth Park United, which played only a few hundred yards away on the Heath, at a time of my convenience, with me as captain, picking my own team. I think they allowed me to score all the goals as well.
I sat down and in thirty minutes had made a list of forty writers I either knew or knew of who lived within two miles, all of whom were working from home and probably, like me, interested in a regular lunch with fellow hacks, at which we could rubbish agents and publishers.
Only two out of the forty said definitely no. One was A. J. P. Taylor, the eminent historian, who lived two streets away. He said if I was organising a regular dinner, he would come, but he no longer ate lunch. David Cornwell (John le Carré) said he would rather meet his fellow writers in the next world, not this world.
I booked a room in a cheapo Greek restaurant at Camden Town, near the Tube, which I thought would be handy for most people. The idea was that once invited, you were invited forever, on the last Wednesday of every month, even if you never showed up for months or even years. And you could bring another writer.
The first lunch, on 30 March 1983, was packed, with lots of drinking and shouting and eating. Those attending included Margaret Drabble, Joan Bakewell, Kingsley Amis, Eva Figes, John Hillaby. Later writers who attended included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie. One of the visiting writers was Jessica Mitford, over from the USA.
After the first lunch, I got a distraught phone call from a young novelist, who had just had her first novel out to great acclaim, to say she would not be coming to the next lunch. She could only afford £5 a week to keep herself alive – and she had spent it all on that one meal.
I had decided at the first meal that we would divide the whole bill exactly by the number of people. Just to keep it simple. What I had not realised was that Kingsley Amis had drunk whisky all the way through, practically doubling the drinks bill. From then on, only the food was divvied
up. You had to pay for your own drinks.
The lunches went on every month for several years – though it later moved to a Hampstead restaurant in the High Street called Fagin’s. The hardcore members by then were mainly Hampstead-based, and mainly women, such as Bernice Rubens. I had given up attending by then. A new job I had acquired, at about the same time as I started the lit lunches, had suddenly changed its timetable and I could no longer go on Wednesdays from then on. That was our recording day. The lunches fizzled out after about ten years.
This new job was on the radio, presenting BBC Radio Four’s Bookshelf programme. In 1983, out of the blue, the producer in charge of it, Helen Fry, rang up and said I was on their shortlist to present it, would I come for an audition.
Margaret and I had always listened to Bookshelf. Then, as well as now, regular programmes about books were few and far between, so if books are your main occupation in life, you would obviously want to listen to them. And Bookshelf was the best, a programme totally devoted to books. Frank Delaney, who had a wonderful Irish voice, and was so fluent, was giving up presenting Bookshelf to do more TV work.
I had been on the programme once or twice when I had a new book coming out and had enjoyed it, but never thought I was very good at it, not being fluent enough, going off at tangents, not being able to act. I had always gone through life thinking I had a rotten voice. Not just the accent, but a tendency to gabble, speak too quickly, which is what the editor of the Cumberland News had told me when he turned me down for a job when I was a student.
My Carlisle accent had faded, after all these years in London, not deliberately losing it, as Joan Bakewell ditched her northern accent when she went to Cambridge, but it just disappeared with time. I was still taken, and still am, for a northerner, but no one can ever identify the original location.
In my Durham days, even when I became Senior Man of the Junior Common Room, and conducted JCR meetings, I envied all those people, usually public schoolboys, who were such natural, effortless talkers. At the Sunday Times, it was full of very plausible, immensely fluent people, many of whom I dismissed as chancers, but they were impressive.
A Life in the Day Page 17