Given the way the world is right now, I am avoiding it in the main. For the sake of my mental wellbeing, I require less bad news and more fun company. Just as George V collected postage stamps and Rod Stewart collects toy trains, I have been collecting theatrical dames since the beginning of the 1970s when I first worked with Dame Peggy Ashcroft. It’s an odd hobby, but it has proved hugely rewarding. From Dame Flora Robson (who gave me a very useful book on window boxes when I bought my first flat) to Dame Joan Plowright (who bequeathed me her husband Laurence Olivier’s favourite sun hat, which I’ve worn with pride all summer), I have bagged more than 50 of them over the years.
I recently had lunch with one of my favourites: Dame Eileen Atkins, 91. She told me how she started out as a child performer, aged five in 1939, singing and dancing in working men’s clubs in north-east London, billed as ‘Tottenham’s very own Shirley Temple’. She did not much like it, but her mother was keen and the money was useful. Dame Eileen’s father was a gas meter reader and rather chuffed at the beginning of the war when a friend told him he looked uncannily like Adolf Hitler. Mr Atkins decided to cultivate the look, growing himself a small Hitler moustache and parting his hair just as the Führer did. Throughout the war, going house to house reading the gas meters, he went about his work looking like Hitler. According to Eileen, one day in Tottenham a large Jewish lady managed to lock him inside the broom cupboard under her stairs and called the police to say that Hitler was in London and that she had caught him. Apparently, for Mr Atkins it was his finest hour.
I have been to Rye in East Sussex to honour the memory of E.F. ‘Fred’ Benson, son of my favourite archbishop of Canterbury (E.W. Benson, 1829-96) and author of my favourite comic novels (the Mapp and Lucia series, first published a century ago). Fred Benson lived in Rye (at Lamb House, once the home of Henry James) and used the town, renamed Tilling, as the setting for his beautifully observed, witty and waspish social satires featuring the rivalry between Miss Elizabeth Mapp and Mrs Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas – memorably played in the 1980s TV adaptation of the books by two should-have-been dames, Prunella Scales and Geraldine McEwan. Archbishop Benson was a great man: founding headmaster of Wellington College, Bishop of Truro (where he invented the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols), ghost-hunter (he gave Henry James the idea for his story The Turn of the Screw). Benson proposed to his wife, Minnie, when she was 12 and he was 24 and married her six years later. They had six children, all but one of whom turned out to be gay. Indeed, there was a strong gay strain in the family. When the archbishop died, Minnie moved in with Lucy Tait, daughter of Benson’s predecessor as archbishop of Canterbury. Those were the days.
I’ve just been to three book launches in a week and at each met a publisher who told me that you need to be ‘a name’ to sell a novel nowadays. The morning after one of the parties, one publisher emailed to ask me if I had any ‘celebrity friends’ who might like to try their hand at fiction. Clare Balding, Susie Dent, the Revd Richard Coles and Anton du Beke are already out there giving Sebastian Faulks and Robert Harris a run for their money. I have just started Strictly Come Dancing champion Oti Mabuse’s debut romance, Slow Burn: ‘On the dance floor they’re smouldering. Off it, they’re on fire.’ Mock not. It’s rather fun.
We need to celebrate those who bring joy into the world. I am bringing out a biography of A.A. Milne, Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh (Pooh’s centenary is this year) and I have just written to the Dean of Westminster asking for Milne to be considered for a place in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. It’s already overcrowded, I know, but if there’s room for David Frost and P.G. Wodehouse, I am hoping that they can find a window or a wall or a bit of floor on which to remember Milne. Apart from his standing as a poet and playwright, he left a quarter of his estate to Westminster School next door, amounting (thanks to Pooh) to many millions, the largest bequest in the school’s history. To differing degrees, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage and Vladimir Putin leave me feeling pretty low. The great dames and Winnie-the-Pooh have never let me down.
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