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Leaving the World a Better Place

Talking to A. N Wilson about TOLSTOY last night was an eerie experience. It was one hundred years since the death of the great Russian novelist and reformer and our venue to reflect on his achievements was the magnificent and newly restored Normansfield Theatre at Teddington, completed in 1868 just as Tolstoy was finishing War and Peace to be published the following year, 1869. As we sat beneath the backdrop of an idyllic woodland scene with panels of Ruddigore along the walls, I was constantly reminded that this theatre represented the life’s work of Dr John Langdon Down, a pioneer doctor who believed, radically for the time, that children with learning difficulties responded well to working on stage and with a variety of theatrical entertainments. He and his wife Mary worked together in this venture, living on site and sinking their own small fortune into the Theatre. Although he gave his name to the condition known as Down’s Syndrome, he has been neglected by medical historians and is hardly known today. Yet he was born in November 1928, just a few weeks after Lev Tolstoy, and like him he worked to improve the world. Both were concerned with the education of children and desperately cared about improving the condition of the disadvantaged, both worked together with their wives yet Sofya Tolstoy as her recently published diaries show was a desperately unhappy woman. Mary Langdon Down a deeply fulfilled one. How sad that the world knows so little about this extraordinary pair of reformers. I hope to be in this wonderful theatre again and soak up some more of its sparkling atmosphere.

Remembering Tolstoy

Listening to the wonderful Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, talking with such a depth of knowledge and empathy about Tolstoy last night made me nostalgic for my schooldays. If only he had been my Russian teacher wouldn’t I have worked harder at my Russian studies, instead of scraping through O level and failing to grasp the pain of being human in War and Peace? There’s an essay about Tolstoy every night this week at 11 pm to celebrate the centenary of his death. Tonight it’s the turn of his biographer AN Wilson. On Saturday November 20th, the actual date of the great man’s death, I’ll be discussing the Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy with AN Wilson at the Richmond Festival of Literature. As ever the question for biographers like me is: should we be examining the life to help us understand the work? As the Archbishop said, Tolstoy’s fiction is Tolstoy explaining himself, pouring himself out in words. I’ll go with the Archbishop on this one.

Wimmin’s Work

I have just been to see Made in Dagenham. It’s a film about 187 women machinists who went on strike at the Ford Motor Company in 1968 initially when their work was down graded from skilled. Slowly the issues broadened out into an all out strike for equal pay for women and one of the best moments in the film is seeing the idea dawning on these brave, if rather too well dressed and coiffed women, that equal pay is not only a right it’s an achievable right. It’s a beautiful film and when the men turn against them, very moving. At least, it made me cry.

It reminded me of how, ten years later in 1978, I too faced the power of my own union, the NUJ, or at least a small part of it. I wanted to take maternity leave and come back to my job at Reuters in Fleet Street. But, as the Father of the Chapel reminded me, I was just one woman with one problem and they were in the middle of fighting a pay claim for all five hundred or so journalists. To support me in my battle to keep my job open until after the baby’s birth would divert energy and risk weakening the fight for more money for us all…surely I understood that?

I understood enough to resign from the NUJ and realise I lacked the courage of the Dagenham women. I resigned from Reuters, paid back my maternity leave and became a freelance journalist and member of the ever-supportive Society of Authors. Later that year the law changed but I had produced my baby too early. It’s hard to believe these antiquated ideas are so recent, until you see the bouffant hairstyles, black rimmed eyes and fabulous Biba dresses. I remember wearing them! Discrimination against women in the workplace still exists but not quite like it did in the sixties and seventies before the law changed. The film started from a Whistledown Radio programme in 2003, The Reunion, in which the Dagenham strikers were brought back together to share their experiences and at the end you get to meet the real women…

What some people do in bed

Me? I take a hot water bottle to bed with me as my bed partner (aka the husband) doesn’t like the electric blanket on his side. Some people, according to Curtis Brown agent Karolina Sutton, take an ipad to bed with them. But the really exciting news is what they do with it. It’s called instant gratification. They order new books which are immediately downloaded and this impulse buy gives the author royalties that would not otherwise have accrued. This is what is called an additional sale, a sale that would not have happened if the ipad owner had to go into a bookshop and buy a book in daylight hours. We’ve heard so much about the death of the book that it was a blessed relief to hear about this thrilling nocturnal trend at the Society of Authors AGM on Monday evening. Fionnuala Duggan, Director of Random House Group Digital, identified another exciting new ipad trend; high volume sales on Boxing Day and Christmas Day when new ipads are given but have no books on them. These, too, she identified in ringing tones as that most cherished of all things: a new market. So authors, we can breathe again – The book lives on. Unless, in a generation, no one can read and ipads are just for games. Me? I still like my hot water bottle even though everyone said once the electric blanket was invented….