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Jean Pateman |
Novelist immortalises cemetery ‘chairman’ Jean
FOR years she has been the “face” of Highgate Cemetery, a figurehead for the Friends charity which manages the Victorian graveyard.
Jean Pateman, who stepped down as chairman of the Friends earlier this year (Mrs Pateman insists on being called chairman, not chairwoman or chairperson), earned a reputation as a stickler for doing things a certain way, for her insistence to visitors that the cemetery was not a tourist attraction but a quiet, sacred space, and for forcefully making her thoughts known on how the cemetery should be run.
Now a book by the bestselling American author Audrey Niffenegger has been dedicated to Mrs Pateman – after Mrs Pateman helped the writer get to know the cemetery, which she has used for the setting of her latest novel, Her Fearful Symmetry.
Audrey is due to talk about the book on Tuesday at the Bloomsbury Theatre, after being trained as a tour guide to ensure she did not make the sort of mistakes that Mrs Pateman has found exasperating in the past.
Mrs Pateman said when Audrey first approached her in 2004, she was wary. “I told her that it was not a very good idea,” she said.
Others had written about the cemetery, and their works, according to Mrs Pateman, were not respectful. “There was one person who made very schoolgirlish errors,” she recalls. “I found it very sad, when you have put someone up for the night, given them bed and breakfast, told them all about the cemetery and then they make silly mistakes.”
There was another caveat imposed on the writer by the former chairman. “I made some ground rules. I told her there was to be no swearing or sex,” she says. “It would not have been respectful.”
Mrs Pateman’s help has been noted on the very first page of the novel, where it says: “To Jean Pateman, With Love” – and one of characters is based on her. Her response to the question whether she felt Audrey had done her justice between the pages of the book was batted away in her usual manner.
“The character based on me is pretty accurate,” she reveals. “But make your own mind up – go and jolly well read it.”
DAN CARRIER
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