I must have been 15 or so, 35 years ago, a rumbustious adolescent. I recall that my mother, a writer, was cooking and tidying, and she asked me to “remove that book” from the end of the dining table in an atypically anxious tone.
“Why?” I asked. Books and papers never got moved if only one person was coming to a family meal.
“Because Doris Lessing is coming to dinner.”
I had read The Grass Is Singing, struggled with The Golden Notebook and knew that our impending guest had left Rhodesia, an ugly, faraway land where white people treated black people heinously in a system called apartheid – a land so ghastly she had to escape it at the expense of leaving her children behind.
“And why should I remove Penmarric?”
“Just do.”
Busy with her cooking, Mum didn’t notice that I didn’t move the book which I was reading and loving: a family saga set in Cornwall by bestselling commercial novelist Susan Howatch.
When the doorbell rang and the legendary author entered, I recall being struck by her understated, almost peasantlike appearance: her hair in its trademark bun, a dark full-length skirt and unremarkable grey woollen top. Only her eyes, which had something of the crocodile about them, betrayed her as being anything unusual. We went first in to the living room for a drink and I recall waiting for the great words to fall out of the future Nobel laureate’s mouth.
At first, and somewhat extensively, she talked of her plumbing problems, but then, and more in keeping with the mind of a great original, she moved on to asserting that spiders must once have been as large as dinosaurs, for otherwise our deep fear of them was inexplicable (I was too young to ask whether she knew of Freud’s theory about female genitalia). Notably also, she accused us in England of being “political innocents”. So far, so good.
But then as we got up to move through to the dining room, I saw with horror that her sharp eyes had landed immediately on the offending Penmarric, the book I had been asked to remove, which was still at the table’s edge.
My heart was in my mouth. I had forgotten about it. Had I ruined the chances of Mum’s important new friendship?
With something approaching passion, Lessing said: “Ah, Penmarric. It’s such a marvellous book, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said triumphantly, feeling all-at-one with greatness, triumphant over Mum and awash with relief. “Yes, it is.’ ■
Rebecca Swift is director of the Literary Consultancy
