The Goring Hotel, a petit four’s throw from Buckingham Palace, is heavy on swagged curtains, massive flower arrangements on fluted pedestals and discreetly luxurious powder rooms; you can see why Kate Middleton and her wedding party spent the night here before she officially joined the royal family. It’s not the kind of place you would immediately associate with Nina Stibbe, the former nanny from Leicester whose letters home from her bohemian billet to her elder sister Vic she turned, decades later, into the 2013 book Love, Nina, now being adapted into a television series by Nick Hornby.
Indeed, we’ve only met here because Stibbe’s been shortlisted for a prize, and the rather grand party is being held downstairs. When her pal arrives midway through our chat, she tells him, in high comic tone, that she and I are in an “official interview scenario”, but he must sit down and have a drink anyway. “They’ll come to you,” she explains, adding to me: “He’s from Leicester like me, we’re not used to this kind of service. We think you have to go and queue up with a tray.” She is funny in a way that is also physical – as when she is being indiscreet and covers my tape recorder with her hands. No, I tell her, that won’t work. You have to say it’s off the record.
Stibbe’s semi-awed, semi-satirical outsider’s account of the goings-on in the 1980s north London household of Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, charmed readers; her 20-year-old self might have boggled at the strange ways of these freewheeling intellectuals but she was also richly appreciative of their expansiveness and latitude. From Alan Bennett popping round for supper, tinnies in hand, to Jonathan Miller lending her his saw, with cameos from Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn, this was a glimpse of brainy, arty types scraping out the last of the Marmite.
Less than a year later came Man at the Helm, Stibbe’s autobiographical novel of life after her parents’ divorce, when she and her siblings found themselves living with their depressed and volatile mother in a village that could have been bucolic but was instead simply hostile.
Stibbe, who’s now 53, had started writing the novel in the 1980s at Thames Polytechnic, now part of the University of Greenwich, where she went as a mature student – encouraged by Wilmers. After Love, Nina, she went back and “unwrote it”, taking out “all the poetic stuff”.
The novel’s title derives from the efforts of nine-year-old Lizzie Vogel and her sister to find their mother a new husband from a rather unpromising selection, which includes the local Liberal candidate, a skittish vicar and a roguish plumber. Stibbe’s ear for humorously bathetic dialogue and eye for the anarchically silly detail – a horse climbing the stairs, a child dressed up as a 50 pence piece to commemorate decimalisation – did not disguise the novel’s darker side: a woman alone, perilously close to going under, virtually ostracised from a small community that she has no means to escape.
The book is funny, but also extremely disturbing, encouraging its readers to get on side with the girls’ matchmaking exploits while also confronting them with the issue of whether the children are even being fed properly. Was she aware of the effect it would have? “I didn’t fully realise that until afterwards. A few people have said to me: ‘I was breathless with worry for you.’” In fact, she insists, in real life there was much lightness amid the precariousness and anxiety, much of it courtesy of her mother: “In spite of all the misery and sadness, she was fun and funny, like depressed people can be and are. She was a person. She surrounded us with books; not everyone can say that. She laughed at the ridiculousness of life. She laughed at stuff. And that was great.”
Her anger, refracted through a comic prism in the book but less mediated in person, is directed more squarely towards the villagers her family encountered, those whose behaviour determined that “the abiding memory of my childhood is being unwelcome wherever we went”. The thrust of the book, she explains, “is my mum sinking into loneliness and depression, thinking she’s making a great new start after her divorce, and moving from the city to the countryside and nobody wanting to give her a chance. And the very people who might have helped saying, ‘Actually, you’re not going to make it, because you’re a divorced woman, and women shouldn’t be in charge, and they shouldn’t mow the lawn, if they do, they’ll cut their toes off.’ And even teachers saying things like, ‘I would have thought your mother would have worked at marriage.’ And me thinking, ‘Well, actually, you saying that is the worst thing that’s happened to me for about three weeks. Living at home with my mum on her own is great, she’s great, but you, you and you being complete cunts about it is not great.’”
Did she feel that the children had to cover up for their mother, to present a brave face to the outside world?
“We weren’t as conscientious as that,” she answers, smiling. “I’d love to say we were. My sister learned this phrase ‘wards of court’, and at that point we thought we’d better be a bit hush-hush and keep her hidden, and not let anyone in the house to see the mess, that kind of thing. But I think we were fairly eccentric, and we weren’t as careful as we might have been. I remember saying to friends, ‘Oh, it’s great being in a divorced family, because you don’t have to go to bed ’til midnight.’ Of course that would go home, and the parents would be like, ‘I knew it.’ So rather than helping my mum, I was often exacerbating it by trying to make being divorced all normal and happy and lovely, because I felt such a freak.”
Once, when Stibbe mentioned looking forward to her own children – now both teenagers – getting old enough for her to enjoy a lie-in, her mother confided that she could never stay in bed once awake; guilt over her maternal shortcomings would soon crowd in. “Since Man at the Helm she can. I think it’s that it’s set down on paper, it’s out there, and people’s response has been not, ‘You evil woman.’ On the whole, it’s been, ‘Yeah, you had a really tough gig, and you came out of it great, and all your kids love you.’ My siblings have had the same response.” The book is dedicated to her “unobtrusively brilliant” stepfather, who confirmed that she should go ahead with the book when Stibbe worried that her mum was agreeing just because she thought she ought to. Her father, a keen but unpublished writer, has also been supportive: “He would love to have done what I’ve done.” When I ask what his books are like, she replies, “Some of them have been wonderful. But he didn’t have Alan Bennett on his side.”
Ah: Alan Bennett, one of the big stars of Love, Nina, with his caustic asides on the youthful nanny’s culinary experiments and his unexpected way with domestic appliances. When the book finally came out, after something of a battle to gain Wilmers’ agreement (“When I first mentioned the letters to her, she said, ‘No way. Forget it. What are you thinking?’ She made me feel awful. I was crushed”), Bennett’s reaction was slightly underwhelming. What does she think about that now? “Well, I feel disappointed that he didn’t love it … he said that it made him look like ‘a dismal Jimmy’”. She does wish, she says, that “I’d had Bennett being a bit funnier. But you see, Bennett, to me, was a middle-aged man, and Vic wasn’t interested in Bennett. I was definitely selling my life to Vic. I was saying, ‘I’m having a great time, it’s wonderful, and it’s very reassuring because there’s this great bloke here who fixes the washing machine.’ If I’d have said, ‘Oh, he’s writing this ground-breaking television stuff,’ she’d have been like, ‘So?’ So I didn’t. And I wasn’t interested either.”
I ask her whether she thinks there was an element of her encroaching on his territory, chronicling the comic absurdity of everyday life? “Well, I don’t know. But it’s not the first time I’ve used him to scramble up,” she says, referring to the time she dropped his name in an interview to get her first job in academic publishing, in which she worked for many years. “Put it this way. Would that book have been published without Alan? No. It wouldn’t.”
Love, Nina’s beginnings came when Andrew O’Hagan asked everyone in Wilmers’ life – from Hilary Mantel to her hairdresser – to write something about her to celebrate her 70th birthday. Stibbe said yes, then thought: “I can’t write anything nice because she’ll hate it; I can’t try to be clever, because that’s just not me.” A flash of memory led her to ask her sister if she still had “that box of letters”. She remembers rereading what became the very first letter of the book – “Me saying ‘she plucks her eyebrows and says fuck and cunt. And they have semi-skimmed milk’.”
Wilmers’ objections eventually overcome (“And she’s so brilliant in it, isn’t she?”), Stibbe spent a couple of weeks typing up the disorganised, undated letters. At Wilmers’ house, she met publisher Mary Mount, who was writing a short book about Sam, Wilmers’ son with Stephen Frears. Mount, who told me she sees Stibbe as “very much part of the great English comic tradition – part of the canon that includes Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Sue Townsend”, signed her up.
I ask Stibbe straight: did she change the letters? Did she make them funnier? She tried, she says, at that precise point. “But it was too late. Mary said, ‘We can’t publish it if we can’t stand behind it as authentic.’ And I said, ‘But I look such a bitch.’ I thought I looked so judgmental and grumpy and unbooky, hating Shakespeare and all that. Hating Thomas Hardy. And she said, ‘No, it’ll be fine, everyone will love it.’ Anyway, when the proofs came, I did put some changes in.” What sort of things? “I had myself saying slightly nicer things like, ‘Dear Vic, I really love the boys. They’re so wonderful.’” You were Pollyanna-ising? “Yes!” she cries. “Well, wouldn’t you?”
Mount caught her out and excised the changes. She was right; it was the ring of truth that would make Love, Nina such a hit. Now, Penguin have signed up two more books, with Stibbe reprising the adventures of Lizzie Vogel. Meanwhile, Love, Nina will appear on BBC1 next summer, in five 30-minute episodes that are Hornby’s first TV project.
Way back, when Stibbe was working in publishing, and later, when she and her partner Mark (AKA Nunney, from Love, Nina), had moved from Crouch End to Cornwall, she wrote all the time: “I thought everybody did – I know that sounds corny, and a bit pseudy, but I thought everybody did. Don’t they?” There were bits and pieces, vignettes, more of Man at the Helm. “I used to send my stuff to Faber, and I’d get really nice letters back. One even said, ‘We’d really like to see more of this, we really like it.’ And I went, ‘Oh, I don’t know, no.’ I just thought, ‘I’m not up to it. It’s not my thing.’ And I still slightly feel that. It’s interesting: I was thinking, ‘I’ve snuck through. I’ve definitely snuck through.’ It’s almost like going skiing, when you’re in Europe and you see everyone just ski up to the gate and push through, and you think, ‘That’s a bit rude,’ but then you get used to it and do it.”
It’s time for Stibbe to go to the party. As we get up from our silver service tea, she says, “I don’t sound serious enough. I sound too flippant.” She looks at my tape recorder and recoils in mock-horror. “Is it still on? Jesus! That’s off the record!”
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