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Saturday 17 May 2008

A pin-up for Scottish pensioners

‘I’m a pin-up for Scottish pensioners’

Clarissa Dickson Wright speaks her mind

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But I also know, as I begin my approach, that to pity Clarissa would be idiotic. For one thing, she’s had a much more exciting life than most, and for another, she’d hate it. And if I’ve learnt one thing from Clarissa’s book it’s that it’s a mistake to annoy her. Her TV co-star, the late Jennifer Paterson, used to cook for The Spectator and once, furious, threw a drawer of cutlery from an upstairs window. Clarissa’s temper is if anything more formidable. At the Sacred Heart school in Hove, she ‘lifted up the school bully and threw her against a radiator’. Later (under complicated and extenuating circumstances), she ‘picked up a rent boy and pushed him through a window’. She’s even socked a copper in the face.

‘Yes, it’s true,’ she says, after we’ve said hello and I’ve broached the subject of her impressive rage, ‘I do have a temper. In fact my nickname when we were shooting Two Fat Ladies was Krakatoa, because I’d suddenly explode!’ She laughs, and I laugh too, nervously. ‘I inherited my anger from my father, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘He was a brilliant surgeon but quite a frightful man. One of his nurses was responsible for taking a special rubber mat to the operating theatre, so that he could jump up and down on it and scream.’

Clarissa grins, but the doctor did more than just jump: behind the closed doors of their home in St John’s Wood he drank, he raged, he demoralised, punched and swiped, giving Clarissa and her mother black eyes; sometimes breaking bones. ‘I was terrified of him, but it did teach me that there’s a world of difference between smacking a child to discipline it, and hitting out in a temper,’ she says, looking philosophical. ‘Children can always tell the difference between the two.’

Snip snap, no room for self-pity — but the monstrous Mr Dickson Wright can’t be exorcised as easily as that, and if pushed a bit Clarissa will admit that the story of her life is, in some ways, the story of recovering from his influence.

‘I’m upbeat about it now, but I’ve had, you know, 20 years in Alcoholics Anonymous and ten months in therapy. I mean, I don’t love him but I’ve grown to accept that I’m very like him. I have his gift for public speaking, his memory and, though this was hard for me to accept, I get my love of food from him.’ Clarissa sighs and rests her head on her capable hand. Enough digging, I think, so we skip forward to jollier times, when the young Clarissa had just qualified as a barrister. It was the late Sixties, and she was in her twenties — ‘blonde and skinny, with great legs, though I say so myself!’ — and with an appetite for japes and romps. ‘We all had tremendous fun, I had sex with an MP behind the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons!’ she says. ‘I think of that every time I see the chair.’ As will Michael Martin now, I expect.

More articles from: Mary Wakefield | this section

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