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Margaret Drabble: ‘You can’t blame the 60s and 70s for what we have now’ |
‘I’m sorry I ever left Hampstead’
Margaret Drabble tells Gerald Isaaman how it feels to return to her happy stamping ground
THE Dame is returning.
Almost a decade after she left Hampstead, the celebrated novelist Margaret Drabble is coming home today (Thursday), to talk about her latest book as part of the Hampstead and Highgate Festival.
And it is a poignant occasion. “It’s always happy and rather sad coming back to Hampstead,” says Maggie, as her friends call her. “And every time I come I feel I wished I had never left. But I am learning to love Ladbroke Grove, where I now live, and our country home in Somerset.”
She will be, literally, within a shout of her red-brick old home in Heath Hurst Road, talking to Piers Plowright at the Magdala Tavern, in South Hill Park, about The Pattern on the Carpet, her saga about the history of jigsaw puzzles built into a mosaic of personal stories from her life.
Central to Hampstead is, of course, the Heath, whose proximity was one of the reasons Maggie and her first husband, the actor Clive Swift, paid £17,500 in the late 1960s for the house, as a home for their family of three.
Plus a vital added factor – its garden backs on to Keats House, where the poet lived part of his tragically short life. “Having Keats at the bottom of the garden meant so much,” she recalls. “It was a wonderful emotional factor to be able to look out at Keats House.
“I would go out into the garden on a perfect summer evening and think I could hear the nightingale. But, I think, it was a blackbird that was actually singing.
“It seemed an awful lot of money at the time. Even then, we thought it was very good because of the situation, being so near to the Heath, being able to walk to the shops and the cinema round the corner. I’m sorry I left because I do miss Hampstead. It was such a happy place.”
That happiness includes her rise to fame as a novelist of the contemporary scene and major biographer – last year they earned her the accolade of Dame – as well as the trauma of the break-up of her marriage in 1975 and her subsequent marriage to the distinguished biographer Sir Michael Holroyd.
They lived apart at first as her children passed through the turmoil of their teenage years. “But then commuting between two houses began to seem very wasteful and just wrong,” she explains. “Then it was time to be decisive and to put my life into one place, rather than trying to keep two bits of it going at once.
“When most of the furniture had gone and it didn’t matter if people spilt things on the carpets, we had a good house-leaving party. But it was traumatic really, getting rid of things.”
Her memories, however, remain positive. And she rejects in particular the Swinging Sixties image of Hampstead as the place responsible for promoting sexual freedom and equality, which has resulted in the death of marriage, more single-sex families and teenage births, a society ruined by drug-taking and booze-ridden kids on the streets.
“That’s absolute rubbish,” she says. “You can’t blame the 60s and 70s for what we have now, the street violence and the drug culture. None of that was going on in Hampstead at the time.
“To me, Hampstead was a family place where women were insisting on being equal, there were a lot of dedicated young mothers. We had social consciences and were very concerned for the community.”
So who is to blame for the catastrophic change in culture? “It’s a sort of broad-brush picture that’s been painted and I suppose I do blame the national media,” Maggie replies. “They have always had an agenda, some papers against single women, working women and radical ideas.
“The press will always make the best of any disaster that happens which they can blame on left-wing ideas.”
What then has brought about such a remarkable change? “I can never come up with a very clear answers,” she confesses. “Some of it was the divisiveness of the early Thatcher years, when we lost the consensus, and the sense of public good was really very brutally destroyed. And a new model was set up.
“Somebody did say greed is good. And Mrs Thatcher said there was no such thing as society. That, to me, was an extraordinary statement. I was never quite sure what she meant by it. But whatever she did mean, it can’t have been any good because there was such a thing as society, not just individuals fighting for themselves.
“There was a sense of cohesion, a sense of social home and common good. That has just disappeared. I don’t blame Mrs Thatcher alone but something did begin to go wrong with people starting to fight for themselves, think about themselves with everything being privatised and broken up.”
She compares the time when you had to go on a waiting list for a new telephone with today’s mobile communications. “Nobody wants to go back to that,” she insists. “But there were other things, like your electricity just being your electricity. All those things have become regulated and more chaotic. They are regulated for other people’s interests, not the common good. And that’s very uncomfortable, really.”
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Plowright’s prandial probes
BROADCASTER and writer, Piers Plowright, has arranged four other literary lunchtimes for this year’s Hampstead and Highgate Festival which promise to be both intriguing and revealing.
Best-selling biographer Kate Summerscale, (pictured) who has been outselling Barack Obama and Jamie Oliver, will shine a powerful torch on a Victorian murder that changed England forever, and art historian Jackie Wullschlager and actor and comedian David Schneider will uncover a fascinating and little-discussed aspect of painter Marc Chagall’s genius. Over at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution, not generally known as a platform for rock’n’roll, biographer Philip Norman will talk about his latest highly praised biography of John Lennon, including, among many other revelations, a frank assessment of Lennon’s troubled relationship with his mother. And meanwhile in Burgh House’s beautiful Music Room, actor and poet Diana Bishop, actor Valerie Sarruf, and Piers Plowright will be presenting a celebration of the magic and mystery of London in poetry and prose.
Friday May 8
‘City Songs’, celebration of London in poetry and prose at Burgh House
(New End Square NW3).
Saturday May 9
‘Cries and Whispers’, Kate Summerscale on The Suspicions of Mr Whicher at the Magdala Upstairs (South Hill Park, NW3).
Monday May 11
Philip Norman on John Lennon, Neil Sedaka, Elton John and Buddy Holly at the Highgate Literary & Scientific Inst. (South Grove, N6)
Tuesday May 12
Jackie Wullschlager, David Schneider and Rachel Lasserson, editor of the Jewish Quarterly, on Marc Chagall and the Moscow state Yiddish Theatre at the Magdala Upstairs.
All events begin at 1pm and end at 2pm
Tickets £7. Box Office 0871 594 3123
Other events at the festival
Friday May 8
10am Highgate Village Walk (meet at Highgate Tube), £7 must pre book
8pm ‘The Alpine Club’ comedy at the Magdala Upstairs, South End Green, NW3, £15
10pm ‘Night Skies’
Saturday May 9
10am and 11.30am ‘Who’s Been Eating My Porridge?’ Children’s event at Lauderdale House, Highgate Hill, Waterloo Park, N6, 020 8348 8716, £4.50, £3 conc.
11am ‘Stories from the Heath’ Walk (meet East Heath Car Park, NW3). Free,
but must book in advance.
10pm ‘Night Skies’
Sunday May 10
11.30am ‘Family Friendly Concert’ at Lauderdale House (see above), £7, £5 conc.
£1 children.
3pm ‘A Houseman Collection’ at The Highgate Literary & Scientific Institution,
South Grove, N6, £15
Tuesday May 12
8pm ‘Creativity Explored’ : Discussion at the Tavistock Centre, Belsize Lane, NW3, £10 to include wine
Wednesday May13
10am Hampstead Village Walk [meet at Hampstead Tube) £7 must pre book
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Click here for festival music listings |
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