Nina
Nina Bawden by Annabel Cullen
7/7/05 – a hot July morning, ten years ago – I was working upstairs at my friend the novelist Nina Bawden’s house in Islington. Nina was two floors down in her study. Jo, the cleaner/housekeeper, who arrived each weekday, was in the basement where the kitchen was, and as I came down the four flights of stairs to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, I noticed that, unusually, the radio was on. They were the first reports of what became known as the London bombings, the nearest of which was perhaps a mile away from where we were. Afterwards you thought, ‘Yes, there seemed to be a lot of sirens,’ though the sound wasn’t unusual on a summer’s morning with the windows open in North London. A week later I stood in silence on Upper Street as all (or most of) London stopped to remember the fifty or so dead, one of whom was a young woman coming to work close to where I was on that usually busy main Islington street.
I was staying with Nina as part of the stopgap arrangements which preceded (and put off) the full time carer who would eventually arrive for the last four or five years of Nina’s life. Nina had been seriously injured (and her husband, Austen, killed) in the Potters Bar train crash of 2002. By 2005 Nina’s injuries had more or less healed. The problems were elsewhere. She wished she had been killed along with her husband, and, after some initial efforts after the crash - we went swimming together, I remember - had little desire to live. Which wasn’t to say that at her best she wasn’t still a scintillating companion. I had adapted a couple of her books for television, become friends of she and Austen, visited them in Greece where they had a house, was a regular round her dinner table. And thereby met a segment of English literary society that was new and interesting to me: mainly novelists – Drabble, Lively, ‘Phyllis’ James.
When we were trying to get Nina on her feet again, we took her with some trepidation to see ‘The Quiet American’ at Islington Picture house, arranging that she sat at the edge of a row (on a matinee) and warning her about a bombing that dominated the last quarter hour of the movie. She was fine – a great admirer of Graham Greene and a fan of Michael Caine. Afterwards we went to Maria’s, an Italian restaurant you entered up a half dozen steep steps in nearby Camden Passage. It was old fashioned, family run. The waiters were older than you, presented the unvarying specials solemnly, and we always got the best table in the window. I watched the film ‘The Quiet American’ on DVD last night, paid little attention as it unrolled, and thought of Nina, dead almost three years now. The fun we’d had. Of the novelist in her prime – a ‘Stakhanovite’ according to her husband. She wrote too much, probably, but fluently, seemingly untroubled by a household full of folk and phones ringing. Above all I remember her drawing room, early evening, guests arriving, the champagne being poured. When company (or at least in those numbers) was abhorrent to her, and it was just me and her, I remember leaving the dining table downstairs, to come up to that first floor drawing room where I put on a CD – Rachmaninov’s Third Piano concerto. Nina – having finished a phone call from her son, who rang in the evenings - following me up stairs, entered the drawing room and said, ‘Oh, it’s nice to hear music in the house again.’
There was too little music about Nina’s last years, and I was relieved – frankly – when other people took over my temporary role. But I miss her - even her sharpness and contrariness. She didn’t like radio plays much but listened to mine and was – generally – appreciative. Lately I’ve written her house, and the Rachmaninov, into a radio play we’ve just recorded, ‘A Severed Head,’ an adaptation of the Iris Murdoch novel. Nina knew Iris, of course – she knew everybody from PEN conferences and long ago 1950s literary gatherings. She may even have reviewed their books, the way novelists did (and still do). The Islington house is sold, her library scattered, her own (over forty) books – bar ‘Carrie’s War’ (‘a nice little earner’) now not specially fashionable. It’s the queen of the drawing room remains for me: ‘Ah, Stephen,’ she’d say, as I’d arrive, not dressed in my scruff, ‘Smart clothes suit you.’ And, later, a hand on mine, ‘Why don’t you get on with that novel? I liked what I read.’
I was staying with Nina as part of the stopgap arrangements which preceded (and put off) the full time carer who would eventually arrive for the last four or five years of Nina’s life. Nina had been seriously injured (and her husband, Austen, killed) in the Potters Bar train crash of 2002. By 2005 Nina’s injuries had more or less healed. The problems were elsewhere. She wished she had been killed along with her husband, and, after some initial efforts after the crash - we went swimming together, I remember - had little desire to live. Which wasn’t to say that at her best she wasn’t still a scintillating companion. I had adapted a couple of her books for television, become friends of she and Austen, visited them in Greece where they had a house, was a regular round her dinner table. And thereby met a segment of English literary society that was new and interesting to me: mainly novelists – Drabble, Lively, ‘Phyllis’ James.
When we were trying to get Nina on her feet again, we took her with some trepidation to see ‘The Quiet American’ at Islington Picture house, arranging that she sat at the edge of a row (on a matinee) and warning her about a bombing that dominated the last quarter hour of the movie. She was fine – a great admirer of Graham Greene and a fan of Michael Caine. Afterwards we went to Maria’s, an Italian restaurant you entered up a half dozen steep steps in nearby Camden Passage. It was old fashioned, family run. The waiters were older than you, presented the unvarying specials solemnly, and we always got the best table in the window. I watched the film ‘The Quiet American’ on DVD last night, paid little attention as it unrolled, and thought of Nina, dead almost three years now. The fun we’d had. Of the novelist in her prime – a ‘Stakhanovite’ according to her husband. She wrote too much, probably, but fluently, seemingly untroubled by a household full of folk and phones ringing. Above all I remember her drawing room, early evening, guests arriving, the champagne being poured. When company (or at least in those numbers) was abhorrent to her, and it was just me and her, I remember leaving the dining table downstairs, to come up to that first floor drawing room where I put on a CD – Rachmaninov’s Third Piano concerto. Nina – having finished a phone call from her son, who rang in the evenings - following me up stairs, entered the drawing room and said, ‘Oh, it’s nice to hear music in the house again.’
There was too little music about Nina’s last years, and I was relieved – frankly – when other people took over my temporary role. But I miss her - even her sharpness and contrariness. She didn’t like radio plays much but listened to mine and was – generally – appreciative. Lately I’ve written her house, and the Rachmaninov, into a radio play we’ve just recorded, ‘A Severed Head,’ an adaptation of the Iris Murdoch novel. Nina knew Iris, of course – she knew everybody from PEN conferences and long ago 1950s literary gatherings. She may even have reviewed their books, the way novelists did (and still do). The Islington house is sold, her library scattered, her own (over forty) books – bar ‘Carrie’s War’ (‘a nice little earner’) now not specially fashionable. It’s the queen of the drawing room remains for me: ‘Ah, Stephen,’ she’d say, as I’d arrive, not dressed in my scruff, ‘Smart clothes suit you.’ And, later, a hand on mine, ‘Why don’t you get on with that novel? I liked what I read.’