Gloucester Crescent, London NW1 was home in the 1980s to Alan Bennett, Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, theatre and opera director Jonathan Miller, biographer Claire Tomalin and novelist and playwright Michael Frayn. The novelist Deborah Moggach lived across the road and film director Karel Reisz (The French Lieutenant's Woman) lived not far away. It was, in those days, an elegant, scuffed street on the edges of Camden Town. Enter, in 1982, Nina Stibbe, from rural Leicestershire, hired as nanny to Mary-Kay Wilmers's sons Sam, 10, and Will, nine. She was 20. She knew nothing about literary London. She had never heard of Alan Bennett or anyone else in Gloucester Crescent.
The picture on the cover of her book shows a livewire of a girl with a friendly, curious, bright-eyed gaze. She is wearing jeans and a turquoise cardigan with holes in it that looks as if it was knitted on the fat needles fashionable at the time. Her hair is untidy, curly, perhaps hennaed. The book does not relate how Mary-Kay Wilmers found Nina (in any sense), nor whether she was aware that this lively, outspoken, somewhat slovenly (where housework was concerned) nanny was writing letters home to her sister, Victoria – a nurse – and giving, in comic detail, the lowdown on life at number 55.
This book is a collection of Nina's letters over a five-year period. Their publication happened gradually. Victoria found a boxful of her sister's letters several years ago when moving house. Then, in 2008, when novelist Andrew O'Hagan was collecting tributes for a book about Mary-Kay Wilmers to celebrate her 70th birthday, Bad Character, in 2008, he threw in a couple of Nina's letters. They went down a storm and an editor, hearing him read them aloud, wondered whether they might make a book.
Wilmers, who has a reputation for being formidable, has been reported as having been against it (her first reaction: "Christ, no, don't publish") but then, for reasons unknown – affection for Nina? Recognition that the letters deserved better than life in a box? Pressure from her sons who were in favour of publication? – relented. She emerges as the book's star. Her concise unpredictability is affectionately recorded, her remarks tilting between irritation and graceful leniency.
These letters would be entertaining for any reader, even those innocent of the characters featured (as Vic was). They reach way beyond literary gossip and are an antidote to people taking themselves too seriously. Nina's appetite for absurdity is shared by Mary-Kay's sons (whose father is the film-maker Stephen Frears) and most of all by Sam, subject last year of a BBC 4 documentary directed by Toby Reisz. Sam has Riley-Day syndrome, a rare condition affecting the development of the nervous system. He has a wayward intelligence and talent for unpredictable comment, like his mother.
Nina herself has an ear for dialogue that would not disgrace Pinter (although her dialogue is pacier). What makes the book special is her understanding that it is often in the most inconsequential conversations that people reveal themselves most fully. The dialogue in this book never asked to be recorded; sometimes, it is so astonishingly slight that it seems fluky it survived to tell its tale. But that is what makes it gripping. Life caught on a flimsy wing. Nina is like a photographer snapping on the quiet, but her takes on people tend to be underpinned by teasing admiration – for Mary-Kay most of all. Here is a sweet sample of dialogue between Mary-Kay and her sons:
MK: People are only horrible if they're hungry or unhappy.
Will: That could be anyone.
MK: Yes.
Will: Everyone.
MK: Yes.
Will: At any time.
MK: Yes.
Sam: They just need a banana.
MK: Exactly.
Food features prominently. Gloucester Crescent, according to Nina, smells of "coffee and floor polish and over-ripe melons". Nina seems to have been a lousy cook, although preoccupied by food – studying Mary-Kay's shopping list as if it were a set text, observing that she appears to shop randomly ("quark (German style liquid cheese)/mustard with seeds/rye bread with seeds/balsamic vinegar of Modena (black vinegar)/fresh lychees, turkey mince…") and concluding: "I think she copies other people who know what they're doing…"
We get many sightings of Alan Bennett. A great friend of Mary-Kay's from their days at Oxford, he was constantly round at her house, announcing his arrival (the sort of detail in which Nina delights) with an abnormally brief ring of the doorbell – "minimum fuss". He seems to have given Nina a huge amount of unasked-for but excellent advice about cooking. On one occasion, she complains about him showing up at the house with an unsolicited watercress and orange salad (popular in the 80s) that upstaged her dismal coleslaw. He went on to warn her against tinned oranges and salad cream. We are also given his curry recipe.
Alan Bennett turns out to be surprisingly handy with machinery:
Me: You're good with appliances.
AB: (proud) Well, I don't know about that.
Me: You sorted out the car, the fridge, the phone, bike tyres and now the washing machine.
AB: I don't think I am particularly good.
MK: But it's nice to know you've got something to fall back on.
Nina has less truck with Jonathan Miller, possibly because she got off on the wrong foot by asking him whether he was a famous opera singer. There is an entertaining saga about borrowing a saw from him, losing it and returning it months later. Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin scarcely feature but their assistant, Mark Nunney, plays a lead role (as the afterword explains, he eventually married Nina). Nunney is useful when she decides to take English A-level. Helpful tips include: "When Hardy tells us Eustacia has raven hair and she comes from Budmouth, he's telling us that she is a sensual woman and sexually active." Nina observes: "Funny to think that without knowing the literary code you might miss these important messages."
She goes on to study Eng lit with gusto at Thames Poly (now University of Greenwich) and gets mileage out of it, although she is not easy to please. Shakespeare, Chaucer and Hardy do not come up to scratch. James Joyce, Carson McCullers and Seamus Heaney fare better, although she argues, not altogether unpersuasively, that Heaney is embarrassed by wielding a pen instead of a spade.
At one point, she complains that literary critics require only that things "ring" true. Her book rings true because is true. It could not be less like the dishes she served up. It is delicious, fresh and easy to swallow. And her steady affection for almost everyone she describes is heartwarming (of the late Karel Reisz, she writes especially warmly explaining, that he "just arrives and things are immediately better for everyone and he doesn't even want a cup of tea"). Throughout, her writing has wise, amusing, unforced flair.
But it does leave one tantalised, longing to know what Wilmers, Bennett, Miller and company thought of Nina – and what they said about her behind her back. If only they had got down to it and written every day to their siblings.
