Growing Old Disgracefully imagine...

This programme contains some strong language

I've planted this tree. It's taller than me now. It was about that high when I planted it.

I'd like to say thank you to Diana Athill, my first editor in England.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Diana Athill.

# Like the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom

# When the jungle shadows fall

# Like the tick-tick tock of the stately clock

# As it stands against the wall... #

It's all looking a bit shaggy. This time of day.

Whatever one puts in that corner just turns up its nose and dies.

# ..You, you, you Night and day you are the one... #

No-one writes more frankly about sex, love and death than Diana Athill.

Born during the First World War, she spent much of her childhood in her grandmother's house here in Norfolk.

She still visits her cousin in a cottage across the field.

# Night and day. #

Many of her favourite children's books are still here.

My first loves when I was very young indeed, I would rescue them,

that was how my first erotic daydreams began.

I would rescue this poor person and he would come round from a swoon

finding me leaning over him with my cloud of dark hair like a curtain.

I was the most mouse-coloured child you could possibly imagine with straight hair, but I was going to

end up with coal black hair down to my knees.

I remember awful days when I was 11 or so looking at myself in the looking glass in the bathroom

and thinking, no, of course I am going to change quite a lot,

but I am never going to change as much as that.

This programme contains some strong language

For most of her career,

Diana Athill was a publisher and an editor, not just ANY editor,

an exceptional one.

She once wrote, "An editor must never expect thanks. We must remember we are only midwives.

"If we want praise for progeny, we must give birth to our own."

And that's just what she did.

In her 80s she emerged as an author.

"Here I am almost at my end," she writes,

"and my beginning rises up to meet me,

"or rather, even when I was far away from it,

"it was always there, and now I have come back to it."

-Hi.

-Hello! I come with my entourage.

-Come on in.

Now 92, Diana has moved into an old people's home in North London.

Come in, come in! Isn't it sad that there are no men?

There used to be, apparently, a few and they're all remembered

very fondly by the people who remember them.

They would be, wouldn't they?

"The last man in my life was Sam, who was born in the Caribbean.

"I gave Sam sex that suited him.

"The first, but not most enduring attraction, was that I was white and well-bred.

"For seven years, I spent a night with him about once a week.

"We rarely did anything together except make ourselves a pleasant little supper and go to bed.

"We had little in common apart from liking sex.

"We also shared painful feet, which was almost as important as liking sex, because when you start feeling

"your age, it is comforting to be with someone in the same condition.

"Our relationship ended gently.

"He said, 'What about coming to bed?'

"but I could see he was relieved when I said no.

"The next thing I heard about him was that he had died suddenly of a heart attack."

Anne said that men do come and say, "is a room available?" But they never look around.

-It's too daunting.

-They say, "This daunting mass of old women,"

and they think to themselves, "Oh, my God, I would be lost in there."

They'd have the time of their lives!

What made you decide to come and live here then, in the Mary Feilding Home?

It occurred to me that if I was going to be ill ever, I would have to depend on

dear friends and my nephews. I've got no children to come and stand around, and this just wasn't on.

And by a great piece of luck, a friend of mine had to move into an old people's home and

I thought, how ghastly, how awful, I had this terrible image of what an old person's home must be like.

I must go and see her. I remember opening the door, and Rose

struggled up from her chair and said, "Darling, you've got to come and live here, it's the most wonderful place!"

And they're quite demanding about who they take, aren't they?

There's a wonderful sort of theory locally,

that they don't accept you unless you read Proust and Kafka!

Which is an overstatement, but they do sort of grill you fairly much...

What they like, is to get people who've had interesting lives.

"There comes a time when it dawns on you that your legs have become

"so useless that if you tried to depend on them

"for more than a few steps without some sort of

"prop such as sticks or, God help you, a Zimmer, you would simply fall down.

"At that point your car represents life.

"You hobble towards it, you ease your unwieldy body laboriously into the driver's seat and lo!

"You're back to normal." It looks terrible because I've bumped into so many things.

It looks very ancient, but it never, never fails to start.

-Scars, you call them.

-Scars. It's a scarred car!

"Off you whizz just like everyone else, restored to freedom, restored almost to youth.

"I've always liked my car. Now I love it."

I'll have to get a little bit further in.

THUD

Hello! Good evening.

I had to leave my stick in the car because I couldn't get it out...

Her neck is slightly more stretched.

'I'm doing life drawing, which I love.

'It really is a very consuming thing to do.'

The sternum is at this angle.

'It's tremendous hard work. I don't know why. You come away from it exhausted.'

What is it about drawing?

It's looking and looking and looking at the human figure

and then the actual putting down of a line that looks good.

"I was drawing horses, as I constantly did, when my aunt

"leant over my shoulder and said, 'Draw a naked man.' I hesitated.

"She, seeing what I was thinking, said, 'Go on,

"'you needn't put in his, er...little arrangements if you don't want to.'

"So I drew a shapeless forked radish and she looked disappointed.

"I knew I had failed in some way, that there was something of significance

"I should have been able to do with the human body, instead of being embarrassed by it.

"So my aunt and my own temperament equipped me with eyes, and seeing

"things remained, through the dreariest stretches of my life, a reason for living."

Diana has had to shed possessions to squeeze into her small room

at the home, keeping only her very favourite books and pictures.

My two pin-ups are Cezanne and Goya.

He was a very unconventional man.

He was a strange man, apparently, by all accounts. Extraordinary chap.

No-one knows much about him.

When he was an old, old man he said to someone, "I'm still learning, I'm still learning."

Wonderful.

I'm really just living in my own head largely, just sort of letting ideas drift through my head.

By sitting here in your room, you can experience the world.

I think that so much of my experience, that is important to me,

has not been lived really by me at all, but has been read, it's voices.

Byron's letters, for instance - you are actually hearing a voice, still, over all those years,

speaking, saying what it said, thinking what it thought. It's magic.

"Everything important in my life seemed to be a property

"of that place, the house and the gardens.

"Beauty belonged to it, and the underlying fierceness which must be accepted with beauty.

"Animals belonged to it, and so did books and all my other pleasures.

"Safety belongs to it, and so did my knowledge of good and evil and my wobbly preference for good."

It was a paradise she always knew she would lose.

"I felt outraged when someone first pointed out to me

"that my grandmother's house was not mine.

"When she died it would be my uncle's.

"But whoever had given me that early, painful glimpse of the truth had done me a good turn.

"From that time, my love began, slowly, to take a wistful, nostalgic turn.

"I felt that I must treasure every detail of it against the future.

"I remember standing under the great beech tree by the lawn, trying to will

"some essence of myself into the still green air,

"so that after I was dead my ghost would materialise there."

So way back then, aged ten, Diana became a harvester of memories.

The beech tree was there. Gone, gone, gone.

There's no place for me to haunt now.

We had such fun. We were let loose with this enormous garden, with the stables, the ponies,

there was a farm, which all felt like ours once we were here.

Our own home was much smaller and simpler, but when we came

here it was like being let loose in a perfect life, really.

Here we are. This was a room which no-one ever came into until after tea.

After tea, Granny sat in her chair there

and the children came down here and were read to and played.

And that...was still here... and that was the cupboard in which the toys were kept.

So we could get out spillikins and things.

Granny always had a little round table beside her,

usually with a silver bowl full of Parma Violets.

"When I fell in love with the gardener's boy, I imagined him

"urinating, and I went through a phase of doing it myself

"in odd places. Under a corner of the carpet, for example,

"leaving a few drops here and there like a dog establishing its territory.

"I was stunned when this habit was discovered,

"and so frightened and ashamed that I must have known all along that I was committing a bad breach of the rules.

"I never again experienced that impulse to pee in corners."

The room that the children were in mostly was the morning room, a very cosy room.

The grown ups were all next door in the library, we would be rollicking about in here.

There were books, books, books, along there, book shelves up to the top.

-What were you reading?

-Actually, I read all George Meredith's novels in here, or most of them.

I remember Granny coming in through that door and saying, "Darling, are you enjoying all those Merediths?"

I don't think I was, really! I was reading things I couldn't understand.

"It was only years later when I picked up The Egotist

"for what I thought to be the first time

"that I rediscovered those sessions on the window seat in the morning room.

"I would think, 'But I've been here before, I have seen this,'

"and gradually the whole thing swam up."

-There's Grandpapa.

-How did you get on with him?

Oh, I don't remember a single word I exchanged.

He was very remote, really.

I do remember being embarrassed.

He was sitting here in his chair, my small sister was crawling about there, and I was there.

And she kept on showing her knickers.

"Laziness,

"it was laziness that made one drift

"in the direction towards which they pushed one.

"Do what is fun, don't do what is difficult - that was the principle we followed."

Did you think that the life you lived at that time

was like everyone else's or did you realise how privileged you were?

I think we began to understand we were privileged.

I remember when I rather boastfully said to some small child, "My granny's house has 20 bedrooms", and

Mum said, "You must never boast about things you've got to people who've got less," and I thought, "Oh, yes."

We were lucky.

"Reading was what one did indoors,

"riding what was what one did outdoors.

"Ours was a hunting, shooting family.

"Many partridges and hares were killed every winter for its pleasure.

"Class came into it, even for the very young. On the whole, poor people didn't hunt or shoot.

"We felt that those activities and the rituals which surrounded them were

"somehow part of the superiority with which our families were blessed."

How many staff were there?

There was a cook, a kitchen maid, a scullery maid, a butler, and to

begin with, there was also a footman, so that's five.

There was Hannah who was the head housemaid, two housemaids under her, six, seven, eight.

Granny's personal maid...nine.

This was a marvellous banister for sliding down.

"'You are not the only pebble on the beach'

"was often said to me during my childhood.

"But I knew pebbles well.

"It was obvious that there was an infinite number of

"them and an infinite variety, and that they were all equally real.

"I handled them, but more often I looked at them.

"It was by looking at pebbles that I began to feel their nature, and

"it is by looking at them that I feel the nature of people.

"'What are you thinking?' my lover asks, and often I am not thinking, I am looking."

So you were prepared, knowing that I was coming to the east coast.

-Yes, you've wrapped up warm.

-I've wrapped up well.

Diana was sent away to school.

It felt like a life sentence.

"It was a small school looking over the North Sea.

"We were herded down from time to time for the treat of a plunge into the ice-cold, gravy-coloured sea.

"There must, somewhere, have been some kind of land mass between its playing fields

"and the North Pole, but it did not feel as though there was."

It was called North House and South House and I was in North.

Were you called ill-grounded? Is that the phrase?

I was ill-grounded because I had had a series of sweet, dear governesses.

I didn't go to school till I was 14.

And they really hadn't taught me much.

I quite enjoyed the fact that one was able to learn more at school, really, but

it still seemed like prison because I wanted to be at home,

I wanted to be riding, I wanted to be meeting boys.

I wanted to be meeting boys and we were hardly allowed to look at boys.

I always secretly felt I was thinking about boys and sex and love more than anybody else.

And I was rather careful not to show that.

What did they make of you at the school?

They thought I was a clever but lazy girl. And I think that was probably quite accurate.

-Oh, Runton Hill School, September...

-1926-1931.

In the garden there was a thing called the dell,

it was there, I don't know whether it still exists,

where we used to put on our plays.

-RECORDING:

-'Today we present The Wind In The Willows - Toad's Adventure.'

-That's me. I was Badger.

-Oh, my God!

I was Badger in that play.

-RECORDING:

-'Oh, wise old Badger.'

There you are, wearing your trousers.

I was wearing trousers and someone lent me a pipe. That I well remember.

That was in the dell.

Well, let's see what else is here. Let's go on.

That... Oh, dancing classes!

-There I am again. There I am being Olivia.

-Looking rather beautiful.

-RECORDING:

-'Desire him not to flatter with his lord nor hold him up with hopes.

'I am not for him. If that the youth will come this way tomorrow, I'll give him reasons for it.

'Hie thee, Malvolio.'

I enjoyed that.

You enjoyed playing that part?

I enjoyed it, yes. My father said that I gave a dignified performance.

I can't remember anything happening in the dell that it wasn't sunny.

There must have been days when we were rained off.

All quite unrecognisable.

The only thing that has stayed the same is the sea.

While at school here, Diana already had a boyfriend, her brother's home tutor.

One night in the holidays, he gave her a lift home from a party.

"Halted by shut gates at a level crossing,

"Paul had put his arm round me again.

"When he turned my face up and kissed me on the mouth, we were both surprised.

"I, because his lips were cold and a little sticky, whereas I had expected them to be warm and smooth,

"he, because mine were hot and parted whereas he had expected them to be a like a child's.

"He told me later that he'd thought, 'The little devil, she has been at it already.

"'This is not the first time.' But it was. I was thinking, 'Paul is kissing me, and high time, too!'"

-You met Paul when you were 15 years old, didn't you?

-Oh, yes.

That used to be rather a comfort to think of when I was being scolded.

I wouldn't have said, perhaps, in those days, "Bugger you,"

but that's what I used to think when I stood in front of her.

"Only three weeks ago Paul was kissing me!"

Were you pursuing him at that time, or was he pursuing you?

I was waiting for him because he was about five years older than me

and I was quite realistic.

I realised that I was too young to be of serious interest to him.

I didn't expect him to fall in love with me when I was as young as that

but I intended that he should eventually do so.

-And he did, of course.

-And he did.

He was very gifted at enjoying life.

When you were with him, whatever you were doing,

it seemed intensely interesting and fun because it was for him.

And I think he taught me a lot about that.

We had a wonderful time, really.

Diana went on to Oxford.

In 1937, she and Paul got engaged and started sleeping together, pretty bold for that time.

But Paul went with the Air Force to Egypt.

Soon after the war started, his letters stopped, until eventually one came asking to be "released".

He wanted to marry someone else.

It affected my life very deeply.

The fact that I lost him in the end and he dumped me made me unhappy for a very long time.

Ultimately, you didn't blame him for it, did you?

Not really. I blamed him for the way he did it, but not for doing it.

I couldn't ever blame someone who had gone away,

and was facing what he was facing, probably going to be killed.

He was flying. Oh, look!

I couldn't blame him for wanting another woman, if he met an attractive woman.

But I did blame him for not letting me know what was happening, because

I was left in a vacuum and going on in a rather foolish way, as you

do when you are in love, thinking, well, perhaps it might be all right if I hang on in there long enough,

he may turn up again and then we'd be all right. And that was terrible.

That was what was so sapping of one's energy and made one miserable.

And I love the way you stayed in bed for the next 25 years.

I stayed in bed as much as I could.

Like a mole, I went underground.

For the rest of your life, you didn't raise your expectations in terms of being in love.

You obviously had your adventures all the time but you didn't...

I expected it to equate with pain, really, which was a very bad thing to have happened to me.

But, um... I didn't expect a great deal from men from then on.

Soon after, Diana found these words in her younger sister's diary.

"He told me he was not going to kiss me.

"He said I mustn't begin that sort of thing too soon,

"or it would spoil me.

"'Look at Di', he said. 'You don't want to be like her.' And, of course, I don't.

"The shrivelling sensation of reading those words is something I still flinch from recalling."

She was invited on a sailing holiday.

"Out on the Broad, the engaged couple would be whispering and laughing.

"In the boat's cabin Hugh and the girl would be holding each other close and kissing.

"I knew myself to be absolutely alone.

"It was so absolute that, for a time, I might have been my skeleton lying

"somewhere, as Paul's was soon to lie, to be picked clean by the elements.

"This is it, I thought. This is how it is.

"It put the seal on my loneliness for so much of my life."

"The gates of Eden had clanged shut," Diana wrote later.

House, happiness, love were gone.

She had to forge her own future.

Paul was killed in the war.

Diana started life as a working woman, signing up with the Admiralty in Bath.

Every morning I would get up, walk down to my work in the Admiralty, and I would walk as slowly as I possibly

could round the Crescent, enjoying every bit of it.

And the view of course was a good deal rougher then because that was

during the war and there wasn't much mowing of the grass going on.

And of course it was absolutely silent. And then I had to hurry very quickly the rest of the way.

When I was here I was in my very early 20s.

"Oh, lovely Bath! There is no city in England more beautiful.

"A man who was walking me home

"one night said, 'It's like a going into a church.'

"I was speechless for several minutes in outrage at hearing my own feelings put into such clumsy words.

"I am one of those people who are hardly ever totally involved in an emotion.

"There's always a beady-eyed watcher at the back of my mind."

It feels odd. I wish, in fact, I could have a bit of time here and just stay and potter about.

But I've got to give a talk, about being old.

One dies to go in and buy some lovely earrings or something.

Oh, dear. Duty calls, duty calls, yes.

APPLAUSE

It's my very great pleasure to introduce two of the most perceptive

and eloquent of woman writers - memoirist, Diana Athill,

and journalist, Michele Hanson, for discussion about memoirs and autobiography and how to grow old.

You're meant to not care when you hit 40, aren't you, what people think, so you can say what you like.

But I don't know because I wasn't really writing very early.

I think you do perhaps get a bit braver, don't you?

She doesn't know because she's not really very old, you see. She writes about being old.

If you happen to be 92 and someone who is 60 is

writing about being old, you think, "What's the poor girl talking about?"

LAUGHTER

67! 67! But we're all lumped together, aren't we?

Over 60, you're all old.

You said that, on the whole, one can say what one feels and one doesn't mind any more.

I think probably by the time one's 40, one still goes on minding.

And possibly by the time one's 60, one still minds quite much.

By the time one is 92, one really does not mind!

Something else to look forward to.

When I was young, I remember absolutely shrivelling at the idea of making a fool of oneself.

Your creed, I think, was that when you write, it has to be as it is.

That you can't dodge being frank.

But don't you sometimes want to leave some things out -

"I'm not sure I want to let everybody read that about myself?"

No, I didn't feel like that at all as I was writing.

By the time I finished, I wondered what my mother was going to think.

But I thought, "Well, I've written it, so I'd better lump it."

She got round it by never mentioning it.

LAUGHTER

It was very English.

I thought when I was younger, how hypocritical, how silly.

But now I think it's a pretty brilliant technique.

If you have a daughter and you love her, and she does

something that you can't like, let's pretend she didn't do it.

The unspokenness had many layers.

My mother married a very, very nice man, who she knew was a very, very

nice man but who turned out to be not physically attractive to her, which was a sort of disaster really.

Were you aware of that at the time or was it something that...?

Well, one knew that they didn't get on.

One knew that he irritated her out of her skin.

And my brother and I used to say, Oh, God, he's done something silly.

He was slow, and she would sit there getting more and more tense

and we would think, "Oh, God, why does he have to do that?"

He's going to set her off.

And it always did, all their quarrels were about something quite trivial.

And of course one didn't realise, as a child, why this was.

It was because of a physical mismatch between them

which was on her nerves, but one knew something was wrong.

Her mother never let on that Diana's younger sister was the product of an affair.

And Diana never let on to her parents about the life she was leading.

"One device for filling emptiness was promiscuity.

"Lack of energy prevented me from ranging about

"in pursuit of men but if they turned up, I slept with them.

"Several of the painless affairs involved other people's husbands.

"If a wife ever found out, it would have been from her husband's carelessness, not mine.

"I wish now that in my youth I had loved my family less.

"I might have had the courage for revolt, instead of going quietly underground.

"If I had been open about the sexual freedom I was practising, if I had pressed political arguments

"instead of sliding out of them into silence, there might not have been the breach I expected and feared."

I never had a confrontation.

I was cowardly about confrontations.

If I didn't hold with the same ideas as they had,

I just sort of shut up about it, went my own way.

Because one didn't want to have a quarrel with them, really.

During the war Diana had moved to London. There she met a Hungarian Jewish emigre called Andre Deutsch.

He offered her a job in a publishing company he was planning to start when the war was over.

When you first met Andre, you had a brief affair.

I did yes, very brief, really.

-Why so brief?

-We just didn't really sort of suit each other

as lovers, but on the other hand we became friends in a strange way.

And so we ended up being much more like brother and sister.

And Diana would become editorial director

of one of the great independent publishing ventures in Britain.

For the next 50 years she worked with some of the best known writers of the twentieth century -

Philip Roth, Simone de Beauvoir, Jack Kerouac,

John Updike, Stevie Smith.

Their first big hit was with Norman Mailer's The Naked And The Dead.

How did you manage to get The Naked And The Dead?

Nobody else dared do it.

The word "fuck", which appeared - he, he was writing about soldiers and

war, naturally that's what they mostly said with every sentence.

The American publisher said, "We can't publish that," and so they'd

substituted the word, which is too absurd really, they'd substituted "fug".

F-U-G. But, I mean, what could be sillier?

It sounds just like "fuck", everyone knows it means "fuck", but yet they felt that that made it decent.

But the English wouldn't accept even that.

Six bigger publishers had turned Mailer down.

So Andre Deutsch got it.

On the front page of the Sunday Times, written by

the editor, there was a small thing about this perfectly revolting and

evil book has been published, that no decent man would leave about where his woman or children could see it.

He literally used those words.

It became a cause celebre, there was an injunction against it, a question

in the House, loads of free publicity, but no ban.

It was a wonderful, wonderful event because it made us.

We from being quite unknown, became quite a respectable firm.

Eventually Andre Deutsch was able to buy these offices in Central London.

They were later shared with an art supplier, who has since taken over the building.

-My original office must be there.

-Yes.

It was off the passage which went right through to the back. Here we are.

Back home, how extraordinary.

-I loved being here because I had a big window looking out.

-Yes.

And it was too small to share with anybody.

Andre used to be a great one for getting the maximum out of everything.

Any space that could be inhabited by two people had to be inhabited by two people.

The rest of the editorial department was condemned to the basement and bitterly resented it.

"Dictatorships work, that is why they are so readily accepted, and if they

"are demonstrably more or less just,

"as they can be to start with, they are accepted with a gratitude

"more personal than can be inspired by other kinds of regime."

I was supposed to be a director but, I mean, no-one was a director in this firm, excepting Andre.

I would like to say thank you to my very first editor in England

who was Diana Athill who was with Andre Deutsch

way back in 1969 when they took a chance on a Canadian young person.

APPLAUSE

How did the relationship work between Andre Deutsch, Diana, and you?

Well, Diana was the editor, and she worked out of a broom closet,

as far as I can tell - it was a very, very small space.

And I didn't know that she was Andre Deutsch's partner, but she was.

Whereas he had an enormous office with a huge desk.

Their relationship seemed to be that he insulted people and

she went around and mollified them.

I always liked her, she was very elegant.

Writers came and sat here.

Vidia came often and walked out of here in a huff, too.

Sometimes even Diana couldn't mollify people.

Vidia Naipaul was a handful.

If I have to cheer myself up, I say at least I'm not married to Vidia Naipaul.

You said that, having enjoyed him for a while, you then had to endure him.

I mean, I admired him very much as a writer, always - that was sort of, unquestioned.

18 of his books he did with us, you know? He was sort of like family.

In the way that you could be really quite fond of someone in the family, who's awful.

Yet Naipaul once said that Diana was the best editor he'd ever had.

Her gift for storytelling proved invaluable, even to the demanding and meticulous Jean Rhys.

Her prequel to Jane Eyre is the story of the Caribbean first wife.

Diana made suggestions for building up the character of Mr Rochester,

in Wide Sargasso Sea, letting him love his first wife passionately before the marriage fell apart.

This really helped the book enormously.

Jean Rhys wrote...

"I am in touch with Miss Athill who wrote me the kindest of letters.

"Miss Athill suggested a few weeks of happiness for the unfortunate couple."

Jean Rhys took the suggestion and ran with it...

"As soon as I wrote that bit I realised that he must have fallen for her, and violently, too.

"The black people have a good word for it, 'she magic with him'.

"Because you see that's what it is, magic, intoxication. Not love at all."

Diana always says that she learned a lot about how to write from Jean Rhys.

The extreme precision of her writing -

cutting, cutting, cutting, she'd say cut.

And, when you're writing, don't think about, how you're writing,

try to think very hard of how it was, what you're writing about.

Try to envisage it very clearly.

It's really interesting, isn't it? She's a fiction writer and

yet what she writes is very close to her own feelings and experience.

"And getting it just as it was" -

that phrase obviously meant a lot to you when you started to write.

It was always very close, really, to her own life.

As it got complicated in difficult situations, she got it to be

exactly as they really were, so that you knew what it was like.

Has writing always been partly getting things off your mind?

Yes. Very much so. I find it almost impossible

to absolutely make up things. It would have to be something I know.

I suppose you can write about being unhappy and that can make you feel a bit better.

Oh, yes. When you write about a thing, you forget it.

Or at least, it doesn't worry you any more.

'She was so ashamed of quite a lot of

'what had happened to her and what she'd done,'

that she couldn't face it. Being known that it was... I mean, she had to go into fiction.

She was quite incapable of coping with life, really.

She was one of those writers so perfectionist, that every word was thought out right.

But she needed a great deal of looking after.

Now, Diana herself began to create.

She writes of the energy, "something bubbling inside of me". At first, it was short stories.

"A feeling would brew up and then the story would come,

"as though it had been there all the time.

"'By God,' I thought, with jubilation, 'I'm going to get it just as it was.'

"It was something I had done spontaneously, for the pleasure of it,

"something as much a part of me as the colour of my eyes."

Your desk is now pastels.

Lovely pastels.

Look at them, aren't they marvellous?

Honestly, they make my mouth water. That's a wonderful colour.

I'm going to buy one of these.

You have one, but there's a price for this, which is you have to sign

-all the copies of your books that I've collected over the years.

-Oh!

This is the most successful book I have ever written,

described by my publisher as "a bona fide bestseller",

because it's rather cheerful about being old, it has cheered people up.

Yes. And this was the first book of yours that I ever read.

Ah, Instead Of A Letter. I never have liked that jacket very much.

I wrote this, you see, in the early '60s.

I thought, "Why have they given me such a horrible old hand"?

Now my hand does look rather like that, I don't mind it so much.

It was her first memoir.

After 20 years of pain and humiliation, she was happy at last.

"You do not look up because you know you cannot climb the tree.

"You have forgotten by now that there is fruit hidden among its leaves.

"Then suddenly a great velvety peach falls plump into your hand.

"It happens to other people, perhaps, never to oneself.

"I am still licking peach juice off my fingers."

And then, another peach. She met the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord.

"I slipped off a rock into clear, warm water," she wrote.

I got over that sense of being on the downhill, with Barry.

I had a very happy time in my 40s.

-ALAN WHICKER:

-Today, even where British rule remains, it is strongly challenged.

These were the early '60s, days of decolonisation,

with black and African writers getting into print. This was the world Barry moved in.

Any writer feels that he is part of a civilising influence.

He is defining feelings and if you define a feeling then you widen

the emotional currency of your society.

That relationship with Barry lasted, has lasted an incredibly long time, hasn't it?

Very long time, yes.

It was a very easy relationship.

Yet it was also very unconventional in its own way, because he was a married man, after all.

He was a married man until she divorced him, very sensibly!

Why do you say "very sensibly"?

He just simply couldn't stand the idea of being possessed by anybody.

"I can't remember whether I felt a passing scruple at taking up

"so quickly and enthusiastically with yet another married man.

"I can remember thinking what a comfort it was that he had a nice,

"competent wife to look after him, so I need never worry on his behalf.

"Being the other woman suited me so well."

When his wife kicked him out,

Barry moved into Diana's North London flat and stayed for 40 years.

Well, you see, at a certain point, Barry and I stopped being lovers

and we just became very old friends.

Barry very much disapproved of romantic love and I did, too.

We both agreed that we did love each other, but in a very unromantic way.

Then you embrace his young lover, Sally.

Oh, well, then, that was a huge piece of luck in my life.

Sally's really lovely now, isn't she?

Sally was one of the nicest people I've ever known.

Hello, Diana. Nice to see you.

Hello! This is my friend, Sally.

-Hello, Sally.

-Dear, my goodness! Look at the door.

'And to this day, Sally is terribly important in my life.'

I'll ask the Highgate Library to get it.

"Quite soon, it occurred to me that since she was spending almost every night in Barry's bed,

"keeping on her bedsitter was a waste of money, so I suggested she should move in with us.

"What I felt was that now I had a lovely new friend in the house,

"as well as a darling old one and the next two years were some of the happiest I can remember."

Do you know, I made a mistake.

I thought that time when you were living with me and Barry, I thought it was about two years.

-It wasn't, it was much longer.

-It was six!

-Six years, yes.

A marvellous time.

I think disapproved of, by some people, at the time.

I don't know, everyone was always much too polite to say anything,

-but I think people thought it was odd, don't you?

-I do.

-They may have thought it was an active menage a trois.

-Exactly, yes.

Barry wasn't the only one who had been having affairs.

"In the course of my close relationship with Barry,

"I had come to feel more at home with black men than with white.

"I did, from then on, start out with a bias towards the black, or at any rate the un-English."

I think curiosity came into my relationships a lot. I think it was, wanting to find out about people.

It was just terribly interesting to, to get under the skin of someone so completely different to myself.

Barry was working abroad when she met a young writer from Egypt, through editing his book in 1964.

She fell in love at once, though he didn't reciprocate.

He was your author, of course, and your lodger, but he also became

for a moment, at least, your lover and very much a part of your life.

In fact, I sort of looked after him.

And I've sometimes thought that,

I've never been, basically, a very maternal woman.

I never particularly wanted to have children,

excepting for one very short time and I've never minded now not having them.

But I'm not sure that this thing about Didi wasn't just a form of, of using the maternal instinct.

One looked after him in the end.

She let him stay in their flat for three years.

It became a poisonous power play, with a mad mutual intensity.

Just as with her sister 30 years before, she read Didi's diary.

"My own name jumped out at me at once. 'I find Diana repulsive.

"'I find it impossible to live in the same flat with someone whose physical body seems to provoke mine to cringe.

"'This has led me to detest everything she does, says and writes.'

"The blood rushed up into my face and my hands went cold."

She confesses things most people never would, with a detachment that can be chilling.

When they finally sleep together, Didi asks her not to tell Barry.

"Of course, I won't, I promise.

"I was already mulling in my head the written account,

"as exact as possible, which I was going to show him one day."

Didi was a depressive and in 1969, he killed himself in her flat.

His note read, "I am going to kill myself tonight.

"I'm leaving you my diary, love.

"Well-edited, it could be a good piece of literature".

He involved me in painful experiences

and because my first book had been a therapeutic thing,

in a way, that's what writing seemed, at that stage in my life, to be for.

That if you had a horrible, painful experience, you were feeling

haunted by it, the way to get rid of it was to write it out.

Didi, whose real name was Waguih Ghali, is about to have his only book reissued.

I've got to write an introduction

or preface, to Waguih's book, after all these years.

It's not going to be easy. I think probably I shall

have to read much more of it to get myself back into the mood. But I'm going to start, hoping for the best.

I remember, at the funeral, crying and crying, which I wasn't expecting to do at all.

It was just very sad that a life should have been so ruined.

Diana wrote about her private hell with Waguih long after the events.

In the '70s and '80s, she was more an editor than a writer.

One book, in particular, proved a monumental task

and, finally, an extraordinary achievement.

"The Road to Heaven was a path ten feet wide,

"with ten foot fences of barbed wire on each side,

"through which the naked prisoners, in rows of five, had to run

"the hundred metres up the hill to the 'baths' - the gas chambers."

Gitta Sereny brought to Andre Deutsch a unique series of interviews

she had done with the commandant of Treblinka death camp, Franz Stangl.

It was so huge, the bulk of the material, I couldn't look at it

at my desk in the office, I had to take it home and put it on a table, it covered a whole table.

Stacks of stuff.

That is a night I shall never forget.

It was the raw material of the interviews she had made.

And, of course, there was stuff in that so absolutely blood-chilling.

"Stangl said, 'Usually I'd be working in my office.

"'There was a great deal of paperwork, till about 11.

"'By that time, they were well ahead with the work up there.'

"He meant that by this time, the 5,000 to 6,000 people who had arrived that morning were dead.

"The work was the disposal of the bodies. 'You didn't feel they were human beings?' I asked Stangl.

"'Cargo', he said tonelessly. 'They were cargo.'"

One couldn't just sit. I kept walking around the room trying to escape from it, really.

But the only thing I was sure of, at the end of that was,

the one thing is we'll have to do without adjectives,

cos if you said, "Horrifying. Ghastly. Monstrous,"

They were inadequate.

It was if they were just little bits of paper just flicking, you know, pointless to say these things.

All you could do really was to present what had happened.

She's a superb critic.

It's good for me, because she's quite demanding.

-In what way "demanding"?

-Well...

In exactitude.

And the not exaggerating, in keeping it unemotional and yet strong.

That's quite difficult.

Yes, especially with material like that.

Yes. She was quite exceptional as an editor.

She was a wonderful reader

and a very, very good questioner and that's what you need.

It's wonderful thing to talk to somebody who shows being touched.

You know? I don't mean, makes a thing of it.

But in whose face you see a reaction.

That is, for the one who is telling the story, I think, it's just a gift.

Of course one ended up, in a funny way... The horror went off it, because it became a job.

I think it was, without any question, the most important editorial job I ever did.

Diana was 75 when she retired from publishing.

Seven years later, in the year 2000, she broke through to literary fame

with Stet, her book about her life as an editor.

It was swiftly followed by an outpouring about her childhood, her lovers and her mother.

Barry got ill and she cared for him, until it became too much.

'I was coming up to 90 and he was really beginning to need nursing. I couldn't do it.'

If Barry's niece hadn't rescued us, I don't know what... I'd probably be dead by now.

This wonderful niece said, "I tell you what, I'm going to take him back to Jamaica."

Before that, Diana had looked after her mother.

She was a very keen gardener, all the family were.

"The discomfort of guilt made me take on the job of carer.

"Perhaps a wonderfully unselfish person gets satisfaction from making a good job of it.

"If you are a selfish one, you manage by contriving as many escapes and compensations as you can.

"It is not an admirable solution, but I don't suppose I am the only old person to resort to it."

Once I'd planted a few things with my own hands and they actually flowered, it was a sort of miracle.

To my own amazement, I became my own mother!

Her mother was living near Diana's cousin Barbara's cottage in Norfolk.

DOGS BARK

Calm down, calm down, calm down.

Oh, please hush. That's better. That's better.

"The fact that death was, so to speak, up in the attic

"of her house, waiting to come down and do something cruelly and fatally painful to her frightened me.

"I was not afraid of her being dead, but I was terrified of the process of her dying."

In fact, Diana's mother died peacefully, the day before her 96th birthday.

"After a long sleep, she turned her head a little and said,

"Did I tell you that last week Jack drove me to the nursery garden, to buy that eucalyptus?"

"Her last words before sleeping again,

"out of which sleep she didn't wake, were, 'It was absolutely divine.'"

I've just seen a magpie.

These graves look like they've been here for centuries.

Some of them have been here a very long time.

None of them, I think, more neglected than ours.

Ours are really rather shameful.

They're not anything that I bother about, or any of us do, really.

Once one's dead, one's dead.

I wouldn't mind being scattered here myself, but I don't particularly want to have a stone or anything.

Have you given instructions?

No, people keep on telling me to.

I say, "Whatever they like." It got nothing to do with me, really.

Here's us. That's Mummy and Daddy. There's my father. And my mother.

Are they both together in here?

No, she's not. She's sprinkled in the garden.

-She's sprinkled in the garden?

-It's what she wanted and so I sprinkled her in the garden.

I put her on here so she would be remembered somewhere.

'Recently, Diana has been diagnosed with cancer,

'which doctors are watching, but not treating, at the moment.'

Does coming here make you, now you have this wretched cancer,

does it make you think more about the end than you even did before?

Being dead doesn't matter a hoot.

One does hope that dying can be done decently.

I hope I don't go screaming in agony.

I've got this thing sort of threatening me,

which might become vicious, if I manage to die before it does I won't really mind.

It's that unflinching gaze that makes her writing remarkable.

I thought Somewhere Towards The End was so beautifully written.

And it's her success as a writer that has made a life she is happy to contemplate.

I quite agree with you talking about death before.

The more one comes to terms with it the better.

Yes. I can't tell you what this has meant to me, reading that book. Excellent, thank you.

"I had seen it for so long as a life of failure, but now when I look back, who would believe it?

"It was nothing of the sort!"

We used to catch newts in the stream in the kitchen garden, there used to be dozens of newts.

I can't remember what we did to the newts.

Along here there were the peaches,

which we used to come in and steal and then eat them in secret.