Voices of St Joan

I don’t know if this counts as name-dropping, but I recently interviewed a boyhood friend of Elvis Presley’s in Tupelo, Mississippi. The interview required a bit of patience, because his memories of the young Elvis appeared only intermittently amid a lengthy ramble through more or less anything that crossed his mind. But, as it turned out, it was also good preparation for reading Stop the Clocks.

Joan Bakewell published her autobiography in 2003 and this, as the subtitle suggests, is intended to be a far looser set of reflections. Nonetheless, it soon proves so loose as to present a reviewer with the kind of dilemma that could feature in the game Scruples: you’re sent a book by a much-loved national figure, now 82, which, if it were by almost anybody else, you’d be tempted to trash. What do you do now?

Well, you could start by saying that parts of it work just as the whole thing’s meant to: a neat mix, and occasionally perfect synthesis, of personal experience and social history. In a section on postwar attitudes to sex, for example, Bakewell provides a sharp and heartfelt explanation of why D.H. Lawrence mattered so much to readers of her generation, before regretfully accepting how dated he now feels. And — while it’s not exactly fresh territory — she’s good, too, on the transition from northern lower- middle-class life to Cambridge in the 1950s by way of the grammar school. ‘Remember, girls,’ the headmistress announced when Bakewell got her Cambridge scholarship, ‘however pleased we are for Joan, the true calling of a woman’s life is to be a wife and mother.’

Oddly enough, there are also parts that work just as the whole thing’s not meant to. ‘I don’t want this to be a book about ageing,’ Bakewell writes in the first chapter.