An Education Read online

  An Education

  Lynn Barber studied English at Oxford University. She began her career in journalism at Penthouse, and has since worked for a number of major British newspapers and for Vanity Fair. She has won five British Press Awards and currently writes for the Observer. She has published two volumes of her celebrated interviews, Mostly Men and Demon Barber.

  By the same author

  How to Improve Your Man in Bed

  The Single Woman's Sex Book

  The Heyday of Natural History

  Mostly Men (collected interviews)

  Demon Barber (more interviews)

  An Education

  LYNN BARBER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published 2009

  1

  Copyright © Lynn Barber, 2009

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ‘Tarantella’ by Hilaire Belloc from Sonnets and Verses (© The Estate of Hilaire Belloc 1923) is reproduced by permission of PFD (www.pfd.co.uk) on behalf of The Estate of Hilaire Belloc.

  An extract from ‘Sea Fever’ by John Masefield is reproduced by permission of The Society of Authors and the literary representative of the Estate of John Masefield.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193226-2

  For Rosie and Theo

  Contents

  Preface

  Childhood

  An Education

  Oxford

  David

  Penthouse

  Fleet Street

  Success

  Disaster

  Postscript

  Thanks

  Preface

  In 2002, I was chatting with a friend, a fellow journalist, when he happened to mention Peter Rachman, a notorious evil landlord in Fifties London. He started to explain who Rachman was, but I interrupted, ‘Oh yes, I knew him slightly, when I was at school.’ My friend was incredulous: ‘You knew Rachman? When you were at school?’ So then I explained that, while I was still at school, I had this much older boyfriend, Simon, who was in the property game and that we sometimes went round to see Peter Rachman (though we called him Perec, his original Polish name) at his various nightclubs. Telling it baldly, like that, I could see it sounded barely credible, and when my friend kept asking questions – sceptical questions, as a good journalist should – I gave up the attempt to explain and changed the subject.

  But afterwards I found myself thinking long and hard about Simon for almost the first time in forty years. I hadn't exactly repressed the memory, but I had effectively banished it to the very back of the cupboard. It was something I didn't like thinking about, didn't like talking about, saw no point in remembering. It was as if, say, I'd had a nasty car accident as a teenager which entailed many horrible operations but luckily I had made a full recovery so why go back over the gory details? There was no pleasure in remembering Simon so I preferred not to.

  But then the Rachman conversation got me thinking, ‘Well yes it was very odd that I knew Rachman when I was only sixteen.’ But the more I thought about it, the more everything about my life as a teenager seemed odd. Why was I, a conventional Twickenham schoolgirl, running round London nightclubs with a conman? Why did my parents let me? Almost to explain it to myself, I wrote down everything I could remember and found that, once I tapped this untouched spring of memory, there was no stopping it. So then – being a great believer in Dr Johnson's adage that no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money – I shaped it into a short memoir and sent it off to my friend Ian Jack, who was editing Granta magazine. He had asked me to write an article on my love of birdwatching so ‘An Education’ must have come as a surprise, but anyway he published it in the spring of 2003. You can find a slightly revised version of it here, in chapter two.

  Soon after the Granta piece appeared, my agent contacted me to say she'd had an approach from a film producer called Amanda Posey who wanted to meet me to discuss making a film of ‘An Education’. It was the worst possible timing – my husband was in the Middlesex hospital having a bone marrow transplant and I was virtually living in the hospital. But Amanda Posey said she would come to a nearby coffee bar and meet me any time I could get away. So, rather begrudgingly, I left the Middlesex for half an hour to meet her and her partner, Finola Dwyer. Amanda struck me as a very bright young woman but so unlike my notion of a film producer (I was thinking Harvey Weinstein) that I almost suspected she might be a fantasist. She asked if I wanted to write the filmscript myself and seemed delighted when I said no – she said she already had a screenwriter in mind. The whole meeting seemed completely unreal but then everything at that time seemed unreal, so I said ‘Yes, by all means make the film,’ and went back to the hospital and forgot about her.

  Months later I received a contract the size of a phone directory and realised that Amanda Posey was serious. I also learned that the scriptwriter she had in mind was her boyfriend – now husband – Nick Hornby. This made the whole idea more plausible, especially when I met Nick. I found it odd (still find it odd) that this preeminently ‘boy’ writer should so completely understand what it felt like to be a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who was on the one hand very bright but on the other very ignorant about the world but, miraculously, he did. He even seemed to understand my parents, which is more than I could ever say myself.

  Luckily I had the nous to put a clause in the contract saying I was allowed to see and comment on (but not alter) any script Nick Hornby wrote. This was an education in itself – as the years and drafts went on (I think there were eight in all) I learned a great deal about the art of screenwriting from watching Nick's scripts evolve. The first draft stuck very closely to my story which cruelly exposed the fact that it had no proper ending – it reached a dramatic climax and then dwindled away. Over the next few drafts he battled to create a good ending and eventually did; he also fleshed out characters who had been no more than names before and created whole scenes that were not in my story at all. The girl who used to be me became a cellist in the school orchestra, and bought a Burne-Jones at auction, and went to Walthamstow dog track, none of which I did, while her parents slowly mutated from infuriating dinosaurs into perfectly reasonable human beings. By draft eight I found myself actually weeping with sympathy for my father – a weird and possibly even therapeutic moment in my life. The only bad thing Nick did was to change Simon's
name to David, which was my husband's name. I have changed it back to Simon (though that was not his real name either) in this book.

  Years passed, draft screenplays came and went, possible backers came and went. I would have given up by year two, but Nick and Amanda and their partner Finola Dwyer persisted and eventually, last year, the film went into production. Amanda invited me to watch some of the filming, and then the first screening of the rough cut. I loved it and started talking proudly about ‘my’ film. But I was completely thrown when people kept asking me ‘How does it feel to see your sixteen-year-old self on screen?’ Is there any polite answer to that? I mean, how daft would you have to be to believe that an actress, albeit an exceptionally good one (Carey Mulligan) was your sixteen-year-old self? But it set me thinking about memory, which has never been my strong point, and trying to remember as much as I could before it vanishes for ever.

  I am of an age (sixty-five) where most people start worrying about Alzheimer's and panicking if they forget a name. But I won't even notice when I get Alzheimer's because I've had such a flaky memory all my life. I can do short-term memorising. I can bone up for an exam or, nowadays, an interview by reading up the subject the day before and retaining it for precisely 24 hours but then – boof! – it's gone. That's why it's terribly embarrassing bumping into someone I've interviewed – they expect me to remember all this stuff about their lives, but of course I had to erase it to make room for the next interviewee. Nowadays I can't even always remember whether I've interviewed someone. Or, come to that, slept with someone. I am always a bit embarrassed meeting men who say they were my contemporaries at Oxford. Did we ever hit the sack, I wonder?

  There are whole subjects I used to know that I have since forgotten. I have a certificate that says I can do shorthand at 100 wpm – how did I acquire that? Did I bribe the examiner? I got top marks in A-level Latin – eheu fugaces, I can't translate a line of Horace now. In my brief, improbable career as a sex expert, I wrote a manual called ‘How to Improve Your Man in Bed’ that was accepted at the time as an authoritative guide. How did I have the chutzpah to do it? I also spent five years researching and writing a book, The Heyday of Natural History, which involved reading all the popular natural history books of the Victorian era. Gone, all gone. I seem to have an auto-erase button in my brain that says that once I have ‘done’ a subject, I no longer need retain it. This is fine for my job, journalism, but not so good for real life. It hurts my friends' feelings that I don't remember conversations we had just weeks ago. ‘But I told you, Lynn!’ is a frequent cry. ‘I know, I know,’ I say quickly, ‘but it was so interesting I wanted you to tell me again.’

  I have certain strategies for remembering. I have kept a daily diary ever since I was thirty (and patchily before that) so I can always look things up. Last year my elder daughter, pregnant for the first time, asked how long I was in labour before she was born. I had no idea, but found my 1975 diary, looked up 3 May and found – wow! – only two hours. If I'd told her only two hours, she wouldn't have believed me, but then I wouldn't have believed me either. But my biggest mainstay for most of my life was David, my husband, who remembered everything. Most usefully, he remembered people's names and when we'd met before and what we talked about, so he could often give me discreet prompts in social situations. But even he was shocked once at a dinner party when someone was talking about China and I said ‘Oh, I'd love to go to China!’ And he said, ‘But you did, Lynn. In 1985. You hated it.’ And everybody stared.

  This is all by way of warning that you are in the hands of a deeply unreliable memoirist whose memory is not to be trusted. Where possible, I have checked facts either against my diaries or articles, but I'm never exactly a slave to facts at the best of times. But does it matter? Who owns memories after all? I once wrote an account of my Fifties childhood for the Independent on Sunday and my Aunt Ruth (Dad's sister) violently objected to my saying that I ate nothing but scrambled eggs on toast for a whole year. She said it was slanderous rubbish and a terrible slur on my mother. But how would Aunt Ruth know? We only saw her once a year at Christmas and presumably then I was eating turkey. My mother, typically, says she has no idea what I ate. She is ninety-two now, and remembers what she wants to remember, and forgets the rest. That seems fine by me.

  Childhood

  I know memoirs are supposed to begin with ancestors but alas, I don't have any, because I come from the lower, unremembered, orders on both sides. There is no Barber ancestral seat, nor even, so far as I know, any Barber ancestral village. The only remotely distinguished ancestor I ever heard of was a great-great-uncle on my mother's side who was stationmaster at Swaffham in Norfolk. Of course being a stationmaster was quite a big deal in Victorian times, and I remember once seeing a sepia photo of him in his stationmaster's uniform which was indeed very grand, but I don't think I need tax you (or myself) with any Swaffham stationmaster research.

  The other day, driving down the M3, I saw a turn-off to Bagshot and thought, ‘My birthplace! Maybe I should go and see it?’ But by the time I'd debated the pros and cons, I was miles past the turn-off so Bagshot, like the stationmaster, remains unknown. I was only born there because my mother was staying with her parents in Sunningdale, Berkshire, and Bagshot was the nearest maternity home. No doubt it is a charming and salubrious place but all I know about it is that I was born there, on 22 May 1944, and survived.

  My mother was staying with her parents because my father was still away ‘fighting the war’ or actually mending tank wirelesses in Catterick. He had such bad eyesight he was never sent on active service, but spent an uneventful war in England. He met my mother when they were both stationed in Birmingham, she driving ambulances, he guarding a mental hospital. He tells me she was the most glamorous woman he'd ever seen in his life – and that was before her teeth fell out. All through her girlhood and twenties, she had terrible goofy sticking-out teeth. But then – as apparently often happened because of calcium deficiency during the war – all her teeth fell out. It was the best thing that could have happened. With her smart new set of non-goofy National Health gnashers, she emerged as a real beauty, often compared to the film star Rosalind Russell. She had thick black wavy hair, hazel eyes, peachy skin, a huge bust and long legs. People must have wondered why such a stunner should marry a bespectacled geek like my father, but the explanation lay in her premarital teeth.

  My memories begin after the war when we were living in a rented flat over a shopping parade in Ashford, Middlesex. I can remember seeing a caterpillar on the curtains, and a rat nosing round the dustbins in the yard. But the main thing I remember is that until I was about three there was a big pram in the corner of the sitting room and then one day it wasn't there. I asked my mother where it had gone and she said she'd given it away, but there was an awkwardness in the way she said it that made it memorable. I suppose it was the first intimation that I was to be an only child.

  Being an only child is clearly the defining feature of my character. It meant that I was very lonely for much of my childhood, and relied entirely on books and my imaginary friend Kay for companionship. I didn't have any friends till I was ten or eleven, which was tolerable in term time but painful in the holidays. Worst of all was the annual seaside holiday – a week at a guest house in Lowestoft with my parents – when I would sit on the beach with my nose in a book, envying the other children who played around me. Envying them but also despising them. How could they be so childish? I sniffed. Why were they laughing just because they were chasing a ball? But apparently this was what was meant by having fun. I longed for it, but also recognised that I was not cut out for it. Even if the children on the beach had asked me to play (they never did) I wouldn't have known what to do.

  I was not only an only child but also, I think, an exceptionally isolated one, because my parents didn't seem to have any friends. My father had his bridge club (he was a county champion), my mother her amateur dramatic society, but if they had friends there, they never brought them hom
e. Nor did we have any relatives in London. My mother was an only child so her only family was her parents. My father did have siblings, two of whom had children, but we rarely saw them because they lived in Lancashire. I longed to be part of a big extended family, a ‘tribe’, with lots of cousins – I thought cousins would be ideal, much better than brothers or sisters who might encroach on my power. Most of all, I yearned to know, not just other children, but other families, to see how they interacted. But I never did, in fact not until I was an adult.

  My parents were effectively first-generation immigrants to the middle class, having arrived by way of grammar school. My father's family was grindingly poor – his father, a millhand, died of ‘inanition’ when Dad was four and his mother raised four children on a tiny widow's pension. They lived in Bolton, Lancashire, in the shadow of the textile mills, and Dad remembers the great family treat was going round to his uncle's on Sunday afternoons to eat bowls of mashed potato with gravy left over from the Sunday lunch. Occasionally there was even a bit of meat. He remembers winning a prize at school and going on stage to accept it wearing new boots his mother had managed to obtain for the occasion – but they were bright orange and everybody laughed.

  My father won a place at Manchester university to read maths but couldn't afford to take it up – instead he joined the civil service and did a law degree at night school when he came back from the war. I remember when I was very young, Mum saying, ‘Shush, Dad's doing his Torts.’ I never knew what they were but I knew they were frightening – as finals approached, the back of his neck was covered with flaming boils. He got his law degree and gradually rose through the ranks of the Estate Duty office but, although he had a middle-class salary, he somehow remained working class. He was formidably intelligent but socially untamed. He still said ‘Side the pots’ in his broad Lancashire accent, whereupon I would say to Mum ‘Shall I clear the table?’ and she would sigh and say ‘You know your father told you to.’ We also sighed over his habit of leaving the house with bits of paper stuck to his face when he cut himself shaving. My mother was far more civilised but, as I told my father, she had only a beta or maybe even beta-minus brain.