The 'How To' memoir course

The 'How To' memoir course room

Well, we all got on like a house on fire, expertly led by Peter Parker whose distinction and industry (biographies of J. R Ackerley, Christopher Isherwood, A E Housman in progress) sent us all scurrying off to GET ON WITH IT

Cold War memories in Chelsea

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - George Smiley's house no. 9 Markham St Chelsea

 

 

 On Tuesday evening this week,  I watched the first in the BBCTV series The Cold War, followed by the first two  episodes of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and a documentary about Kim Philby. On Wednesday, I passed the house where George Smiley,  the fictional protagonist of John le Carre's novel lived: no 9 Markham St. My house a little further down the King's Road was used for one scene in the series. The first floor drawing room was transformed for a week into George Smiley's bedroom. Alec Guiness sat in my little office on the ground floor, or in the garden, between takes. I am indebted to the BBC for the fee which allowed my two daughters and me to swan off to Sardinia for a very good summer holiday. On our return, I discovered that our cat had given birth to a litter of kittens behind my filing cabinet, and the office carpet was alive with fleas.

Chinese paintings at the V & A

It is well worth the return ticket to London to see Masterpieces of Chinese painting at the V& A

Launch of UK-Russia Year of Culture 2014

Here is the bright hard-edged logo for the UK-Russia Year of Culture 2014, which Moffat Book Events will be supporting  in half a dozen events through the year.

Alan Bennett's cat

A highly recommended book of letters is just out: 'Love, Nina' by Nina Stibbe (Penguin £12.99). The joke is that Nina aged 20 arrived from Leicester to look after a household in north London that resembled the late lamented 'Stella Street' - the John Sessions comedy show where everyone on an anonymous street with a corner shop was famous. I had a glimpse of this world one evening when in the course of the job my husband was doing at the time running cultural relations with the Russians we went for supper with Ursula Vaughan Williams in the same street where Nina went to be a nanny. Ursula, widow of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, had invited her next door neighbours the author V S Pritchett and his wife to meet us. During dinner, a cat strolled in to the room. 'Oh bother. That's Alan Bennett's cat!' said Ursula - Alan (known as 'AB' in Nina's letters) lived in the house on the other side to Ursula. Two doors down were Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin, and - read on to know exactly how far down the street - was Jonathan Miller.

 

The Two Mrs Abbotts

'The Two Mrs Abbotts' - set in wartime Britain

  'The Two Mrs Abbotts', the third in a trilogy by longtime Moffat resident D.E. Stevenson has now been published by Persephone Books Ltd

In 'Miss Buncle's Book', the heroine wrote a novel about the village she lived in. She then had hastily to depart because the true identity of 'John Smith' was about to be revealed. In 'Miss Buncle Married' she and her publisher husband leave Hampstead for Wandlebury, a village within commutable distance of London.

'The Two Mrs Abbotts', the third and last sequel, set in WWII, has great good humour and a real understanding of the difficulties involved in keeping the home fires burning.

Table collapses

My kitchen window

A curious series of coincidences occurred when I was at the Wigtown Book Festival. An old friend, David Ross, who I had not seen for thirty years was there talking about the Caledonian Railway. David is a former publisher turned author whom I first met in London in the 1960's when he was sharing a flat with friends from uni and who kindly offered me a job as his secretary when I was an out of work journalist and he landed a good job in marketing at Associated Book Publishers.  One of the authors David was responsible for launching on an unsuspecting world in those heady days was the notorious Govan-born anti- psychologist R D Laing.  David has written an impressive history of the Caledonian and other railways and places near where he now lives in Herefordshire. We had dinner together and I am hoping he will come to Moffat to give a talk to the group hoping to re-open the station at Beattock. His history records that Moffat was a favourite watering-place for railway engineering legend George Stephenson and his apprentice Joseph Locke. Both  David and I have written 'Xenophobe's Guides' - his, being a Scot, to the Scots,  and mine to the Russians. He has sent me the Russian language edition of his Xenophobes Guide, which I think will amuse our friends at the Library for Foreign Literature and the Institute of Translation in Moscow who were in Moffat for our conference last month.

At Wigtown I had a uniquely eerie experience. One morning I went to a talk by Peter Conradi, about a visit of the Royal Family to the US in 1939.  Conradi described an episode where a dining table loaded with Limoges china collapsed from the weight of silver, glasses, china etc much to the consternation of President and Mrs Roosevelt who had borrowed some of the china from a rich friend. That same evening, I was at a dinner with various writers and the organiser of the festival when lo! The table collapsed under the weight of etc etc. Luckily there was no great damage done, amazingly nothing was broken because it happened quite slowly, caving in from the middle, and everything was caught by the table cloth, other than the wine. Then when I got back to my hotel there was a satisfactory 'third' collapse when the little Ikea table I had put my case on suddenly gave way. When I reported this the following day to my fellow diners at Wigtown I was accused of being a poltergeist but I am happy to say there has been no repeat.