Apologies for the lack of posts. I have been super-busy both at work and home over the last few days, and I’ve barely had a moment to myself. What I can tell you is that I am absolutely adoring Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple, so big thanks to Dovegrey Reader for the recommendation.

Over the weekend, though, I did finish The Centre of the Bed: An Autobiography by one of my most favourite media people, Joan Bakewell. She was born in 1933, in an era where the norm for a woman was to get married, have children, stay at home, and do the housework, while hubby went out and earned the money. As the book says, Joan (I feel that I’m on first name terms with her after reading this book) was determined to do more. She went from state school in Manchester to Cambridge on her own hard work before getting a job with the BBC in the 1950s and going on to be one of the very first female television journalists, not to mention a sixties icon and, infamously, ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’ (and yes, she tells us exactly how she felt then and feels now about that particular moniker).

She also became a wife and a mother – one might argue that she ‘had it all’ in the cliched sense of the phrase – and throughout the book she intersperses her feelings about her home life and her difficult relationship with her own mother, a depressive, as well as covering some of the more salacious aspects of her life, which have become common knowledge over time, such as her seven-year affair with Harold Pinter. Pinter later went on to transmute many aspects of their affair into his play Betrayal.

What made this book so very interesting to me, aside from Joan being a bit of an idol of mine in many ways, was the way in which she weaved social history – particularly women’s history – into the narrative of her own life. She has, as she herself says, lived through some of the biggest social changes for women this side of gaining suffrage. For instance, she says this of the teachers at the single sex state school she attended:

They welcomed greater opportunities for their ‘gels’, but at the same time they had a rather wistful, misty-eyed view of what a woman’s destiny might be. On speech days not a single prize, or scholarship, or university entrance was ever announced from the assembly-hall platform without a final aria from the headmistress, Miss Lambrick, that a woman’s true calling was to be a wife and mother. ‘Thanks a lot,’ we would mutter, after we had worked so hard to gain these trophies. But in spite of ourselves we absorbed the message. The teachers stared blankly ahead, their young men long since dead in the trenches. (p. 62)

Their teachers, after all, were of that generation of women who were independent in many cases only because they had to be, in the wake of so many husbands, sweethearts, sons, and brothers having been killed in the second world war. It separated them from the new generation, who desired independence because they saw equality as the best way of living. It’s an interesting tension.

By the time she got to Cambridge, there were two women’s colleges: Girton and Newnham. Joan went to Newnham. Though women could now take their degrees, they were excluded from many aspects of Cambridge life, such as the Footlights and other societies. If a female student were to fall pregnant, they were immediately expelled from the university, as happened to a friend of hers. The BBC, where she would initially work after leaving university, had few women. She was at the vanguard of so much headway made into professional lives for women. But even in the 1980s, by which time she was considered a broadcasting veteran, women were in no way equal in the media:

[No women] had yet been editor, or deputy editor. None, except as holiday relief or when the men were at party conferences, had been the lead presenter. In the eighties each Newsnight had two presenters, the central leading figure – always male, primarily John Tusa, Peter Snow or Donald MacCormick – flanked by a newsreader sidekick, always a woman. We, the women that is, spoke of this role as that of ‘programme wife’; we also noted that the succession as editor was defined by what we called the ‘favoured-son syndrome’. Thus presenter and editor were gender-determined. Within this family, I belonged as some benign elder sister, one who’d been around for some time but was delighted and a little bemused by the confidence and authority of my younger siblings. (p. 268)

As well as making for fascinating reading when it comes to women in the media during the 20th century, Joan also talks passionately about her love for the arts, and her many attempts to have them as much a part of news and current affairs coverage as sport was (and is today). Sadly, this wasn’t to be, and while today there’s a sports slot at the end of virtually every news bulletin, there are no arts stories unless they are especially note-worthy.

And there is her family. As well as the relationship with her mother, she also talks very movingly of her father, and the section in which she describes his death had me actually crying. Now divorced for the second time, and with her two children now adults with lives and families of their own (she relishes her role as grandmother just as much as she loves being a mother) Joan Bakewell now lives very happily by herself. At the end of the autobiography she describes a painting that she had bought, which hangs in her house, by a Danish artist called Vilhelm Hammershøi. It is of a woman sitting alone at a table, upright, alert, and facing away from the viewer. The suggestion is that she is relaxed in her alertness, occupying her own space with authority. This is, the reader supposes, Joan herself, and the title of the autobiography suddenly makes full sense. She may have been a lot of things to a lot of people over the years, but now, alone she is in full possession of herself. She is not shifting over to make room within her own space. She is lying in the centre of the bed.

Joan Bakewell recently published her first novel, All the Nice Girls, and I must say I’m surprised she hasn’t written one before. Her writing in this book is completely marvellous. She has an eye for detail and such a lovely turn of phrase that this autobiography reads like fiction – not in content but in style – in several places. The fear when reading about one’s heroes is always that you will find them to have feet of clay – most famously in our house when J read Eric Clapton’s autobiography and declared him to be ‘a tosser’ – but I am even more bewitched with Ms Bakewell than I was when I first spotted the book on the shelf. Now, how do I get her to adopt me as an extra grandchild?