Barbara Amiel - Friends and Enemies

FRIENDS & ENEMIES

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

148 W. 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2020 by Barbara Amiel

First Pegasus Books edition October 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

Jacket design by Derek Thornton, Notch Design

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-64313-560-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64313-561-8

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

www.pegasusbooks.com

Lets talk about Me. The great unexpected dividend of the feminist movement has been to elevate an ordinary statuswoman, housewifeto the level of drama. Ones very existence as a woman as Me becomes something all the world analyzes, agonizes over, draws cosmic conclusions from, or in any event takes seriously. Every woman becomes Emma Bovary, Cousin Bette or Nora or Erica Jong or Consuelo Saah Baehr.

Tom Wolfe, The Me Decade

Unless you wear pearls with Chanel, a hat and unseemly bust.

The Intelligent Feminists Guide to Survival

T here never was going to be a right way to write this book. MemoirsGod what a chilling thud the word has with its suggestion of a sequence of banal insights. Years ago, sitting in Claridges tea room in London, a publisher intent on dragging a book out of me said I should write mine as fiction. Youll find it easier, he said. At the time, neither of us had the faintest idea of what troubles lay ahead for me, which would read like fiction no matter what the genre.

The dozens of memoirs Id like to read, of fascinating, inaccessible lives full of contradiction and great achievement, rarely make the page, probably because the putative memoirists are too busy achieving: Marie Curie, Clara Schumann, Joan of Arc, Catherine de Medici, or even Coco Chanelwhose demi-memoir was carefully constructed like her work, all scissored skills hiding the body beneath. The Dowager Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, mother of sixteen surviving children including Marie Antoinette, was tied up running the Holy Roman Empire for forty years while she jotted down her thoughts, unfortunately scattered in letters and archival sources, not always translated and full of anachronistic words. George Orwell said he wouldnt dream of writing his because in an autobiography you had to tell absolutely the whole truth.

Memoirs of survival under god-awful circumstances attracted me for different reasons as I aged. When you are reasonably young and reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Primo Levi, the notion of facing death is hellishly exciting, largely because you neither understand death nor feel its existence. Death, insofar as you grasp it, is that chalky-white-faced man with a scythe and sort of black headgear popping up in an Ingmar Bergman film. Death exists to be romantically invokedrather like an interesting piece of fabric worn to emphasize very alive, pretty eyes. When you are old, about the last thing you want to see coming around the corner is a damn scythe. One clings to false teeth and thinning bones with unbecoming tenacity.

Nothing in my own life has been sufficiently original to please me. Pamela Winefred Paget, later Lady Glenconner, is the sort of woman I should like to have been if, as was evident early on, I couldnt be an Anna Pavlova, Golda Meir, Edith Wharton, or latterly in this post-gender world, a Tom Stoppard, Dmitri Hvorostovsky or Woody Allen sans the Mia thing.

Pamela, daughter of an amateur scientist, took part in her aristocratic fathers experiments by throwing herself off an omnibus backwards as it went along Londons Park Lane at thirty miles an hour, to demonstrate his theory that the force of air behind her would see that she landed safely on her feet, which she did. She also had treacle poured in her ears, which led to his invention of a very successful sign language. Later, with her mother Lady Muriel, she helped newly born Czechoslovakia get on its feet, and then turned to rescuing distressed British subjects from Soviet Russia with special attention to dental care for the elderly, an area too few of us think about in our charitable giving. This is a life worth living if you have no special talent in some field of human endeavour. Admittedly, such a life requires a bit of luck in the parentage you get. As yet beyond ones control.

My own parentage neither added to nor subtracted from my chances of an original life. Both parents deviated from the ordinary only in ways that were largely unhelpful to me apart from their dollop of physical attractiveness. My birth coincided with World War Twos outbreak, but the sole discomfort I suffered came from the British governments commendable determination to see wartime children grow up straight-limbed and strong. This meant the nightmare of the brown bottle and tablespoon of cod liver oil every morning, together with something vile pretending to be orange juice. So while the Luftwaffe bombed the bejesus out of Great Britain, I was happily playing in Londons greenbelt, hanging out with the blood red poppies in my grandparents garden planted around our small Anderson corrugated-iron bomb shelter.

Those poppies stayed all summer and I rather dwelled on them at bedtime. They were sleeping like me, perfectly safe, with petals closed up so the planes overhead couldnt hurt them. There was other life outside that I worried about, most especially the butterflies with their kaleidoscope wings folded tightly under night skies lit with the red glow of explosions over London. We had fields full of silver-studded blues and purple emperors at the end of our lane. Wading into waist-high grass and seeing clouds of rainbow colours flutter up before me was a walk through the looking glass to a world of heart-stopping beauty. No danger, said my grandfather in his role as our local air- raid warden when I voiced little fears about these enchanted insects flying high into propellers, They can dive-bomb better themselves.

Seventy years later, those butterflies, or at least their butterfly relatives, became a living metaphor to explain my life. At first I felt uneasy putting that down on the page, as if this figure of speech were too neata contrivance or simply a writers device. In the end, the image turned out to be pretty much on the mark.

The war ended. By five, I could read and write quite well, blessed with a Russian-born grandmother who had been a schoolteacher. Less than ten years later, our family emigrated, in this case mother, sister, a stepfather I adored and a less divine, red-faced baby half-brother. My butterflies stayed behind. In Canada they lived somewhere else, certainly not on the bright new homes of the government-assisted housing estate we moved to in steel-town Hamilton, with gardens that were still only piles of bulldozed earth. Id run about looking for them, but all I saw were painted ladies and red admirals, alone or sometimes in pairs, never clouds of them, and anyway they were wearing rather ordinary city uniforms. Their magic had been taken from them, just as my childhood had been left behind in England. All I brought with meapart from my treasured school mackintosh, beret and a few books from the hundreds of cheap Penguin and Pelican editions that had lined our London shelveswas a vague feeling that I would be a writer.