The difficult thing about writing a memoir is this: how do you avoid numbing the reader with endless thumbnail sketches of the hundreds of characters who have crossed your path? It’s easier in a novel, where you might have seven to ten main characters and can take time to delve deeply into each one. In a memoir which spans a long life from pre-war Eton to modern-day Yorkshire, you need to be a very good writer indeed to bring alive, for instance, Mrs Tedder, who did the washing-up at Sunningdale School in 1953. Are you interested?
Well, I’m happy to tell you that you are. Wild Writing Granny is a book full of delight. It is shot through with love, anguish, light, darkness and fun. If you enjoy reading about English schoolmasters, matrons and schoolboys, you’ll adore it. Mary Sheepshanks is a skilled and wise writer. Her thumbnail sketches are so controlled, so accurate, so honest and concise, that within three lines of being introduced to the 130th character you have laughed and almost cried.
She was born Mary Nickson, the daughter of an Eton junior master who later became a housemaster, and the first chapters of the book describe Eton as seen through the eyes of a little girl living in Baldwin’s End Cottage, with a view of horses grazing on Fellows’ Eyot out of one window, and of Windsor Castle out of another. Her father was much loved, a man who ‘created virtue by imputing it’. He drew cartoons on the boys’ fortnightly order cards and flipped them frisbee-like across the classroom, accurately aiming for each boy in turn.
I felt my eyes aching with dazzlement as I read her evocations of summer afternoons with starched nannies under the chestnut tree on the newly mown grass of the playing fields, followed by meanderings in the darkness and shade of School Yard and the cloisters. Rarely can Eton have been so enchantingly described. The household cavalry swimming their horses across the Thames; Mary’s bee-keeping mother cycling through the Eton lanes in full anti-bee regalia; Mary making up her own words in chapel for the Benedicite (‘O all ye taps in the bathroom, bless ye the Lord’); going to Girl Guide classes at Windsor Castle with the young Princesses… On every page there are vignettes such as these to savour.
Aged 20, Mary marries Charlie Sheepshanks, who is twice her age and about to take over as headmaster of the boys’ prep school Sunningdale. This is in 1953. Mary is honest and therefore utterly readable on the subject of her dread of taking on the role of headmaster’s wife — and on the subject of her genuine fear of Matron Wilson. But it is a role she grows into and comes to love. ‘Oh, good, beans for supper,’ she recalls one of the boys saying. ‘Bubbles in the bath tonight!’ (And there were ten baths in one bathroom, so, quite a sound.) Charlie is a natural schoolmaster, a ‘pied piper to the young’, with enthusiasms for boyish pursuits, such as bug-hunting expeditions in the New Forest. Charlie was somewhat disconcerted when a boy introduced him to his mother with the words, ‘Oh, Mum you must meet our new master, Mr Sheepshanks — he’s the most terrific bugger!’
How is Mary able to put words on the page which are so bright that you almost need sunglasses to read them? I think it is because she knows sadness all too well. She has really lived and really lost. Her lightness is thrown into relief by occasional shafts of darkness and tragedy. On three pages towards the end of the book, sorrows start coming, not single spies but in battalions. She maintains control of her material, never becoming self-indulgent. In between each chapter are two of her poems. By the end, having lived her life with her, I was moved to tears by these.
What’s more, she’s an inspiration to any woman who hopes to come late to writing, because she had her first novel published in her sixties. Now I’m going to track down The Bird of My Loving, her book about grief and loss. I’m sure it will be worth reading.
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