The Night of the Nuns at Our Lady of Perpetual Motion

That Louise Washbag was on the television again last week*, mocking the protestors at St Paul’s, sneering that they couldn’t really be opposed to whatever it is they’re opposed to if they were buying coffee at Starbucks. I wish I knew what to think, but I’m afraid politics has never been my thing, despite Mother having had affairs with both Harold Wilson and Ted Heath when I was growing up; that, though, was before either of them became prime minister, and they were always very evasive whenever I tried to ask them questions about the economy or foreign affairs or ghosts, which made me tend to side with Father when he said that neither of them were to be trusted as far as he could throw them, which turned out to be slightly further in the case of Wilson. Regarding the present to-do at St Paul’s, my inclination is to say that if Washbag thinks they’re wrong, then they’re probably right. Besides, I can be absolutely murderous if I don’t get a cup of coffee first thing in the morning, but I don’t think that actually makes me a murderer, does it? Of course not. Murderess.

The whole business also reminds me, though, of the time Father insisted the Bendix Family stage a protest outside Our Lady Of Perpetual Motion in West Hampstead. Mother refused to go along with it on the grounds that it was embarrassing and she had better things to do, but I was more than game, despite not, I’ll admit, fully understanding why Father thought St Paul (the saint, not the cathedral) had got it all so badly wrong. All I knew was that being allowed to sleep in a tent and cook baked beans in their cans was exciting, and I had my new Brownie song book for if we got bored.

I’m not sure where Father got the tent from, as camping holidays had never featured on the family calendar, and it certainly couldn’t have been a relic of the war, like the old kit bag he’d sometimes produce for weekend jaunts, the old service revolver he kept in his study, or the withering contempt he had for the citizens of Ashford (Father spent most of his war in Kent), because it was one of those fancy, lightweight, brightly coloured polyester jobs which really must have been quite the latest thing at the time, with internal partitions and a clear plastic window at the front. I loved that window – being able to see out somehow made being inside even more cosy. When it rained, I used to huddle up behind it with Gussie, our labrador, and watch everyone splashing past outside. Occasionally, this would cause a small scene, as people hurrying up the Finchley Road with umbrellas flapping in the wind, or peering out through swishing windscreen wipers, generally didn’t expect to find a ten-year-old girl smiling at them from behind a small transparent square of rainsoaked plastic, pink-cheeked and glowing in the yellow light of a hurricane lamp. Once, a Pickfords van mounted the pavement and drove into a nearby Belisha beacon.

I forget precisely how long we stayed there – when you’re young, dates don’t really register. But I’d guess it was most of 1965. We’d generally work in shifts: Father would occupy the tent during the day when I was at school, and I’d take over once lessons were done, unless it was Tuesday and I had chess club. Father would then usually return at bedtime and send me and Gussie home in a taxi, though sometimes he’d forget, which could be a bit annoying. And once, due to crossed wires, we accidentally both went home, and Gussie was left to man the tent by herself. I can still see her poor worried face the next morning, peering out at us through the window that she’d licked so hard in her anxiety as to render it almost opaque.

The council or police couldn’t do anything about us because, although we were facing the main road, we weren’t actually on the public highway – Our Lady has a small patch of gravel in front of the main door which runs right up to the pavement with no dividing wall, and it was on this that we’d set up camp. We had two large handwritten placards explaining what were up to, and people would often stop and discuss the issues with me. Obviously it would have made more sense for them to talk to Father, but Father tended to discourage that, sometimes quite threateningly.

I was also very popular with local shopkeepers, many of whom would regularly pop across for a chat or to ask if I was OK; sometimes, they’d slip a doughnut or a sausage roll or a phone number into my hand before they left, which I thought was nice of them, even though I didn’t really like sausage rolls and used to peel the flaky pastry off and give what was left to Gussie, who didn’t like flaky pastry.

As St Paul’s does today, Our Lady faced something of a dilemma. Father Thomas took the view that the word of God was final, and that Father (my father – sorry, I know it gets a bit confusing) therefore didn’t have a leg to stand on; he was, though, also very aware that it would not be good for him or his church if any sort of violence was used to get rid of us, or at least not if the violence could be traced back to him.

One evening, a group of nuns turned up. They included in their number Sister Internazionale, whom I would later meet again at St Dulcima’s, where she was games mistress; at the time of our protest, though, I had no idea who she was, beyond clearly being the ringleader. At first, they just hung about, looking belligerent, but then Sister Internazionale very deliberately flicked at one of our guy ropes with her foot, and one of the other nuns stubbed her cigarette out on the flysheet. Father had gone back home for dinner and to watch Late Night Line-Up – he’d lately taken something of a shine to presenter Joan Bakewell, who’d lately taken to wearing very short skirts on national television – so Gussie and I were alone, and it was really quite scary. We knew there was no point in theological argument, so just zipped ourselves in, held our breath, and watched them through the plastic window as they milled around. Thankfully it began raining, which seemed to test their resolve, and eventually they left on a number 13 and we settled down to sleep, Gussie tucking herself into the crook of my arm so that I could play with her ears, something she knew would make us both feel better. It was only next morning, when Father arrived in an apologetic fluster carrying my packed lunch and PE kit, that I saw the crude picture of the Archbishop of Canterbury they’d sprayed on the outside of the tent, and realised what a lucky escape we’d had.

“Why have they drawn him with antennae?” Father said, staring at the fuzzy white lines.

When I told him I thought they were devil horns, he paled, and grabbed Gussie’s paw.

* I think Tricity is referring to Louise Mensch (née Bagshawe)’s recent appearance on Have I Got News For You [C.W-N]

Jilly Cooper’s Schnauzer and the Lewisham Literary Festival

Charles told me off after my last post, saying I shouldn’t go round bad-mouthing other writers, not even when they were Louise Washbag. When I asked him why on earth not, he just shook his head and said didn’t I realise that the publishing industry was collapsing to its knees around our ears and that we were all in it up to our eyeballs, so elbowing people aside who might be able to give us a leg up was just shooting ourselves in the foot.

“What?” I said. But he’d already begun pouring a pint of Staropramen for an ill-shaven young man in a trilby (when not doing his agenting stuff, Charles works part-time in a bar on the Balls Pond Road – I probably don’t need to keep saying this, do I?), and I don’t think he heard.

“Look at Jilly Cooper and Joanna Trollope,” he went on once he’d done, “they absolutely loathe each other after that business with Cooper’s Schnauzer and Trollope’s second husband, but – they still appear on stage together at Hay, all smiles, telling each other how wonderful they are.”

“I’d forgotten about the Schnauzer. Remind me, what was it precisely Mr…”

“Don’t ask, Trix. Let’s just say she’ll never chase a frisbee across a public park again.”

“But can you really blame the second Mr Trollope for that? She must be pushing eighty now.”

“The dog, Trix, not… oh, look, my point was that these days even quite well-known writers have to swallow their pride and get out on the streets and sell themselves.”

And then, before I could express my disbelief at this, he told me that someone from Smoke: A London Peculiar, the little magazine that’s been kind enough to print several excerpts from my forthcoming memoir, was appearing at the Lewisham Literary Festival the following Saturday, and that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go along and show solidarity, mingle with the crowds – perhaps even have a friendly chat with the organisers.

“These are the people that have the power these days, Trix, what with social networking and everything. Don’t be afraid to use them.”

I stared at him.

“Lewisham?” I said. “They have literary festivals in Lewisham?”

“Apparently. I always had Lewisham down as one of those places you only ever went to to get a mobile phone unlocked, but… hidden depths, it seems.”

I pondered. I’d once been driven through Lewisham by an errant taxi driver who got Blackheath muddled with Hampstead, so I’d actually seen it from both directions, and neither time had it looked like the sort of place you could imagine Mariella Frostrup fawning over Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan in front of an invited audience.

“But where are they putting the marquee?”

“No marquee, Trix. It’s in a church hall near Hither Green station.”

That sounded even less promising, but maybe Hither Green was the more bookish end of Lewisham. And I could see there was some sort of logic in what he was saying. About the mingling, I mean, not about the selling ourselves on the street – even JK would never sink that low, and she has lovely hair and would be really popular. Hair makes such a difference. Men often found my hair a bit unexpected, which is why I always tried to keep my hat on till they’d passed the point of no return. Otherwise, we’d be right back to square one.

Washbag has nice hair too – and is another blonde, of course – but I can’t imagine she’d be as much fun as JK.

Sorry, where was I? Yes, so, the Saturday before last, I caught a train from London Bridge to Hither Green, and then walked up to St Swithun’s church hall, following a series of photocopied arrows someone had fastened to the railings.

I’ve appeared at quite a few literary festivals over the years, and I’m really not a fan. Panels aren’t so bad, because there’s safety in numbers – and if you get on with your fellow panellists, and there’s some wine around, it can even be quite fun. Once, during a particularly tedious Q&A at Cheltenham organised by Radio 4’s Front Row, I spent half an hour playing footsie with an equally bored Kazuo Ishiguro under the mistaken impression that the big banner the BBC had hung along the front of the trestle table was hiding our increasingly adventurous manoeuvres from the chairs set out below the stage. Which it definitely would have done, if Kazuo hadn’t somehow manage to accidentally unhook it when kicking his shoes off to, um, spice things up a bit. I should probably have guessed something was amiss from the sudden draught, but – I’m afraid I was a bit caught up in the moment. In fact, it was only when the questions began to acquire a distinctly surreal hue that we – and Mark Lawson, who was chairing the session, and was obviously just as oblivious as me and Kaz – realised something was up. Part of Mark’s job as chair, of course, was to repeat the audience questions in case anyone hadn’t heard them clearly, and I can still picture his face, poor man, as he turned, somewhat hesitantly, to ask me if, at my age, I’d still consider wearing a skirt above the knee. But he’s a professional, which is why he then strove to ascertain, on behalf of an extremely excited middle-aged woman in a floral hat, whether Kazuo had a particular fondness for electric blue, and whether he always painted his toenails. In fact, it was only when a man in the third row stood up to ask whether I’d mind uncrossing my legs again, only this time more slowly, and – if he might be allowed a supplementary – whether anyone had a torch he could borrow, that Mark decided to wrap things up and ask the audience to give us a round of applause and thank us for coming.

I don’t think Kazuo is used to encores. He’s basically a very shy man.

Solo appearances, on the other hand, really can be the pits, because it’s just you on your own, stuck there at a rickety table in a tent in the middle of muddy field in Budleigh Salterton or wherever, feeling stupid in your wellies or maybe something far less practical – if I’m there to do a reading, I always like to dress up and do it “in character”, as it helps me get in the mood – smiling maniacally at anyone who dares pop their head through the flaps.

I know that some people were appalled, for instance, when I wrote in Smoke about my treatment at the Waterman’s Art Centre in Brentford a few years ago. I was supposed to be reading from The Six-Fingered Jockey, which had then just come out, but, as the afternoon wore on, and the box office remained largely untroubled by my presence, I found myself being shunted ignominiously from the main auditorium to the studio, from the studio to the bar, from the bar to the foyer, and then from the foyer to the Guru Tandoori just across the road, who said they’d let me have a table in a corner if I’d spend 30 minutes afterwards handing out menus and free poppadoms on the High Street. As I say, people were appalled, but such experiences really aren’t that uncommon, as any writer will confirm. I bet even the sainted JK let herself be shunted ignominiously on more than one occasion when she was a young woman, just because someone told her it would help her career.

So I wasn’t at all surprised to find, on my arrival at St Swithun’s, that I constituted pretty much the entire audience. A nice young woman called Rachel met me on the door, took my four pounds entrance, and then asked me whether I’d like a piece of cake or a slice of pizza. I initially took this to be part of one of those dreadful “cat or dog?” celebrity questionnaire things all the magazines do these days in lieu of proper interviews, but it turned out she was simply drawing my attention to the somewhat over-stocked cafe area.

Then she apologised for the sparse turnout, and I tried to console her with what had happened to me in Brentford. I wasn’t entirely sure she’d grasped who I was, which was a bit disheartening, but she was very polite.

“That sounds awful,” she said, looking over her shoulder, “did the organiser offer any excuse? I mean, you’d clearly gone to a lot of trouble, what with the costume and everything.”

“He said it had probably been a bad idea to pick an afternoon when Brentford were at home. They were playing Darlington, and apparently it was ‘a bit of a six-pointer’. I had no idea what he meant by that, but when I tried to get him to explain he just started shouting something incoherent about somebody having dived and the referee being blind, so I hung up.”

She smiled awkwardly, and said she really had to get back to introducing people to each other.

Which wasn’t a task that took too long, obviously.

Not wishing to upstage anybody, I tried to sit at the back and look inconspicuous, but this proved trickier than I’d anticipated, as there weren’t enough of us to contrive two rows. Nevertheless, I made sure I kept quiet and didn’t ask any awkward questions – writers and publishers hate being asked questions – and I think the whole thing went fairly smoothly. Better than Brentford, anyway, as I made a point of telling Rachel afterwards, in case she was still feeling down.

“I mean, at least the police aren’t going to find you wandering down Hither Green Lane in rainsoaked jodhpurs and a riding hat and demand to know why you’re crying and where you got all the poppadoms,” I said to her, laughing.

There was a long silence.

“No,” she said, at last.

Louise Washbag and The Face Beneath The Hood

Charles was nagging me again this morning to post something new here. Apparently it’s important to “keep the ball rolling”.

Keep the ball rolling!?!

“Charles,” I said, fixing him across the rim of my G&T with what I hoped was a flinty glare while he played around with the optics – when he’s not doing whatever it is agents do, Charles works in a bar on the Balls Pond Road – “did Jane Austen worry about keeping the ball rolling? Did George Eliot? Did Virginia Woolf?”

And then I said something rather rude about that Washbag woman – you know, that awful Tory MP chicklit woman – because she’s been really annoying me lately, and Charles told me I shouldn’t talk like that about a fellow novelist, especially one working in the same field, as you never knew when you might need them. But all I’d been saying – admittedly slightly more robustly than Charles is going to let me do here – was that even the most cursory glance at her titles (“Glamour”, “Glitz”, “Passion”, “Desire”…) would let you know that Washbag wasn’t someone who had problems keeping balls in motion, and no doubt had the bank balance to prove it, whereas I… I’m a proper writer, I need to be inspired.

“Passion isn’t just my theme,” I told him, “it’s what stimulates my prose. But I have to wait for the moment, for my desire to be whetted – I can’t just sit down unwhetted and stimulate myself, or get passionate and start rolling balls about, simply because someone’s promising me large sums of money if I do.”

To which Charles said something which, though true – or which certainly had been true in the past, when I was younger and more impecunious – was really quite hurtful, and totally misconstrued what I’d just said.

That wasn’t supposed to be political, by the way – the bit about Washbag being a Tory – because I’m really not a political person. And that’s despite growing up in a house to which parliamentarians of all stripes were regular visitors. (Not that my parents were much interested in politics either: my mother simply had a thing for powerful men which she sadly couldn’t control, and my father had a thing for helping dogs climb trees which he sadly couldn’t control either, despite having designed it himself – it was powered by an old outboard motor – so he’d often spend whole weekends tinkering in the shed leaving Mother free run of the house.) I do, though, think you need to treat people with a bit of compassion – especially those who’ve been dealt a bad hand – which is why I got angry with Washbag’s silly comments about the riots. As I said only a couple of nights ago to my friend Harry Chuff when I met him at some literary launch do – he’s not a close chum, but we were both on the list at Bantam Heavyweight, so we often bump into each other at these things – she seems no more in touch with real life than the characters in her wretched books do.

Harry laughed when I said this, and reminded me how upset I’d been when reviewers had said pretty much the same about me when The Face Beneath The Hood came out – that I couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to be a teenage drug dealer growing up on a lawless estate in north Peckham.

“I know,” I said, “but I thought that was really unfair. Surely a writer’s background is immaterial if she has humanity and the imagination to empathise?” I took another swig of the vinegary wine-box merlot. “Also, I really couldn’t quite see why it was relevant. Time Out even sneered that I was the ‘soi-disant Balham Bukowski’, which makes no sense at all, as I’ve never been to Balham.”

Harry stared at me, and seemed about to say something; before he could, though, one of Bantam Heavyweight’s PR girls who’d been standing right beside us – Cassandra, I think she’s called, they usually are – butted in and said she was “really like totally soz”, but that had actually been her fault. Mine and Harry’s books, she explained, had been on the same production schedule, and she’d mixed up the stickers on the plain covers of the proof copies sent out for review. She’d only just started working there when it happened, she said, and it was her first job after leaving Cambridge, so she wasn’t really used to doing stuff.

“Oh,” I said, “that explains a lot.”

“Yes,” said Harry, “it does.” Then, downing the entire bottle of Newcastle Brown he’d been holding, he told Cassandra that it certainly, for instance, explained why Mariella Frostrup, live on Radio 4, had asked him – quite out of the blue – how easy it had been for him, a forty-six-year-old self-confessed “south London geezer”, to imagine himself inside the body of a nineteen-year-old florist from Mablethorpe who’d just fallen desperately in love with a mysterious deep-voiced trawlerman whose craggy sea-hewn features she’d glimpsed only briefly in the deep-shadowed depths of his sou’wester when he’d stopped her on the quayside at Grimsby and asked if she had a rubber band he could borrow.

“Gosh,” I said, “Mariella Frostrup. What did you tell her?”

“I told her I’d never for one moment imagined myself inside the body of a nineteen-year-old florist from Mablethorpe,” he replied tartly. “What else could I say?”

He glared at Cassandra, who burst into tears and dashed for the ladies.

“Don’t be too hard on her,” I said, “I’m sure everyone’s forgotten.”

“It’s not that simple, Trix.”

And then he confessed that, once Miss Frostrup had put the idea into his head, it was something he’d started imagining on quite a regular basis. Often five or six times a day. And sometimes, he added, she also had a twin sister, who worked in telesales and did yoga.

“I’ve barely written a thing since, Trix. It’s doin’ me ’ead in.”

Charles, No!

Charles! Why have you used that AWFUL photo of me at the top of the page?!? I told you none of those ones were to be used for publicity! Actually, if I remember correctly, I told you they weren’t to be used for anything AT ALL. I don’t even really understand why you insist on keeping them. Or why I gave them to you in the first place – the whole thing was all just a terrible misunderstanding. Please could you remove it AT ONCE. I’ve got some lovely ones of Gussie you could use instead. It’s not that I’m a prude or embarrassed by what Nature gave me, but – there’s a time and a place, and you hear such terrible stories about the internet and what bad people get up to with Photoswap or whatever it’s called. I’m actually very happy with my body, given I’m now most definitely a Woman Of A Certain Age, but I DON’T want to wake up one morning and find that someone’s stuck Melvyn Bragg on top of it.

An introductory word from Charles Welwyn-North

Good morning. My name is Charles Welwyn-North, and I am literary agent for Ms Tricity Bendix, the popular romantic novelist.

Ms Bendix, as I’m sure many of you know, is currently working on the first volume of her memoirs, “I’m Just A Girl Who Can’t Say Pwllheli”. Because this necessarily entails some element of withdrawal from public life, Ms Bendix has asked me to organise “a faceblog” on her behalf to keep fans up-to-date with what she is doing – the idea, I believe, is not only to present various pieces of work-in-progress, but also to provide a unique glimpse into the daily life of a working novelist. In addition, she has some excellent tips on the best way to bathe a labrador, which she is eager to share at some point.

Sadly, Ms Bendix prefers not to enter into direct correspondence with any of her readers, having previously got into “a bit of a pickle” as a result of that sort of thing – she’s referring, I think, to the time she unexpectedly found herself co-respondent in divorce case so messy that she briefly obtained custody of the children, despite protesting vehemently that she’d never seen either of them before in her life, and really didn’t like the look of them. If you do have any messages for her, though, please feel free to contact me at c.welwynnorth@yahoo.co.uk, and I’ll see that they’re passed on. Also, if anyone’s going to the Frankfurt Book Fair and has a space in their hotel room – I have a sleeping bag – please get in touch.