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Joan Bakewell |
‘Here’s my first novel – but my next one will be better’
Dame Joan Bakewell talks to Ruth Gorb of love, libraries and how memories of ‘adopting a sailor’ in the war inspired her to finally write her debut novel
All the Nice Girls.
By Joan Bakewell.
Virago £17.99.
THE time: the bleak early 1940s, when the Allies appeared to be losing the war. The place: Stockport High School for Girls. The action: the adoption by the school of a merchant ship – a scheme set up to boost the men’s morale, and to teach the girls geography.
There is a quaint innocence about the concept, but the schoolgirls’ letters did apparently bring comfort to men in daily danger at sea.
As for the girls, Joan Bakewell puts it more earthily: “We were completely geared up with patriotic fervour and teenage adoration of anything in trousers.”
It all came flooding back when she unearthed some old school magazines.
Yes, she remembers it well; hers was only one of 500 schools involved in The Ship Adoption Scheme. And yes, to our eyes it does all seem pretty incendiary, linking up those frustrated young men with a school full of adolescent girls, with hormones raging on both sides.
All very seemly in her experience, she says: “No hanky-panky at my school.”
Call it hanky-panky or romantic potential, the seeds of a story were sown. Joan went to the Maritime Museum in Greenwich and read through dusty old files, everything written in long-hand, and was fired by the accounts of courage, by the extraordinary commitment of the merchant seamen who braved torpedoes to see that food got through the German blockade.
They were heroes – and they are the heroes of her first novel, All the Nice Girls. The title says it all: the girls, and their teachers, loved their sailors – and all too often, lost.
Suggest that to produce a first novel at the age of 75 is unusual, to say the least, and Joan is slightly defensive.
“I have always been writing – numerous short stories, radio plays,” she says. “The itch to write a novel has always been there, but my life went in other directions and I’ve always been so busy.”
The “busyness” shows no sign
of letting up as she chairs committees, writes, broadcasts, and, most recently, has been appointed Voice of the Old.
This last title seems as inappropriate as does the honour of “Dame-hood” in one who is eternally youthful (“Pilates twice a week does it,” she says), elegant and fizzing with energy.
Sternly, she says never mind the old like her who are blessed with good health and good clothes. “I am concerned with the hidden ‘later old’,” she says. “The ones who are strapped for cash, who are not well – and there’s an awful lot of them.”
With two marriages and one of the most public affairs in the history of the literary world behind her, Joan relishes her independence and the pleasure of living in the tight-knit community that is Primrose Hill.
She moved into her house, with its large rooms and high ceilings, in 1963, and sees no reason to move.
“We are an alert and assertive community here,” she explains. “Yes, we did lose our cobbler and our wonderful butcher. But we kept Starbucks out, remember? And we saved our library.
“I am passionate about libraries – I think they are one of the wonders of the civilized world.”
It is only natural that a first novel contains strong autobiographical elements; Joan admits that there is a bit of her in all her characters, certainly in the bright girls Jen and Polly, who made it to university, and in the all-consuming passion of the central affair of the story.
The spinster teachers are realistically drawn, that valiant band of women who lost their men in the First World War and who thereafter devoted their lives to their young pupils.
And there really was a Tea Club at her school – a tea-time meeting in the headmistress’s study when local “notables” were invited to talk to sixth-form girls and usually got more than they bargained for.
As for the smell of the classrooms, here it is, all plimsolls and chalk and young bodies in pre-deodorant days.
A lot of research went into the harsh reality of battles at sea, and Joan says she is so undisciplined a writer that she found she was trying to write a history of World War Two. “I’ll be better next time,” she promises.
So there will be a next time? Is she not content with having beaten Mary Wesley, whose first novel appeared when she was a mere 70, at her game?
“I’m not going to do a Mary Wesley, with a novel every year , but I am planning another one,” she says.
One suspects it will be, once again, strong on sentiment and love. Joan thinks she is quite sentimental. “I’m certainly romantic,” she admits. “I think that falling in love is one of the most exciting things that can happen to anyone, ever.” |
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