What the nanny overheard in the heart of literary London

 
Alan Bennett speaks to an audience at the ICA with chair Kirsty Lang
NIGEL HOWARD
7 November 2013

Love Nina: Despatches from Family Life by Nina Stibbe (Viking, £12.99)

In 1982, Nina Stibbe, then a 20-year-old girl from Leicestershire, arrived at 55 Gloucester Crescent, a leafy Victorian street in Camden, to take up the position as nanny to Mary-Kay Wilmers — at the time deputy editor at The London Review of Books — and her two sons, Sam, 10, and Will, nine. Wilmers, a wealthy American whose family trust has poured millions into the highbrow but loss-making literary mag, was already divorced from the boys’ father, the film director Stephen Frears, and Gloucester Crescent was in those days an intellectual hubbub of writers, publishers, playwrights and artists. For the next five years Stibbe recorded her life there in the form of letters home to her sister.

Stibbe is funny and has a sharp ear, and these snippets of dialogue and vignettes evoke the characters and atmosphere of the place brilliantly. The most frequent visitor to No 55 was Alan Bennett, who lived opposite and was always cadging supper; Claire Tomalin and her “unofficial boyfriend”, Michael Frayn, lived a couple of doors down — although Stibbe was more interested in Claire’s son’s manny than them. Then there was Shirley Conran, whose garden backed onto theirs, with an alarm that was always going off, and up the road was Jonathan Miller, from whom she once borrowed a saw, which Wilmers then mislaid.

Stibbe, who moved out of No 55 after two years but stayed in the area for another three years while doing an English degree at Thames Poly, went on to make a career in publishing. She has reassembled her letters here, more or less as she wrote them, she says, apart from “some fine tuning”, but it’s hard to know exactly how much fine tuning, with the benefit of hindsight and given her track record with the truth — it’s clear she could be a little economical with the actuality. She pranged the car and didn’t own up, she kept shtum about throwing Sam — who had Riley-Day Syndrome, a rare genetic condition — into the swimming pool when he wouldn’t get in, she lied about an A-level grade and thought nothing of stealing a towel from Wilmers when she moved out. There’s more too, but, to her credit, Wilmers, who emerges as likeable and clever, didn’t bat an eyelid at what most mothers would have considered instantly sackable offences. The real star, though, is Bennett and the book is funniest when he’s onstage, which, since he was always popping in, is quite often. As for Stibbe, she now lives in Cornwall, with the manny and their children.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £10.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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