An education by Lynn Barber

Author:Lynn Barber [Lynn Barber]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographie
ISBN: 9781934633854
Published: 2010-01-29T07:05:46+00:00

Fleet Street

Our first daughter, Rosie, was born in 1975 and our second, Theo, in 1978, and I didn't go back to work till 1981 so I served my stretch as a stay-at-home mother. I did it with reasonably good grace, I hope, though I still go cold at the words ‘playgroup duty’ or, worse still, ‘papier mâché’. Luckily Finsbury Park at that time was absolutely seething with saintly mothers who would ring and say they planned to spend the afternoon making papier mâché masks and would my daughters like to join in? Would they just! The problem came when I had to offer some equivalent treat. Luckily I soon discovered that the biggest treat you could give these middle-class Finsbury Park children was to plonk them in front of the telly, because they weren't allowed to watch telly at home. There was as much puritanism around television in those days (the early Eighties) as there is around, say, recycling or food additives now. But David could say, and often did say, with the authority born of his media-studies research, that it was positively good for children to watch television. The consequence was that our daughters, who were allowed to watch as much television as they liked, rarely bothered to, while their friends sat glued to our box.

The only writing I did during these playgroup years was a hefty tome called The Heyday of Natural History about the effect of Darwinism on popular Victorian natural history books. It seems completely mad in retrospect but my thinking was that it would be easier, with children, to write an historical book based on library research than to flit around doing freelance journalism. Boy, was I wrong! The book got excellent reviews, and still counts as my calling card with people like Sir David Attenborough, but I bitterly regret doing it. It was five years' hard work, for almost no money, and proved what any of my Oxford tutors could have told me – that I had no natural vocation for scholarship. The saddest outcome was that, before I wrote Heyday, I used to love reading Victorian natural history books and searching for them in second-hand bookshops, but afterwards I could hardly bear to look at them, even the real beauties like Philip Gosse's Tenby.

It was dear old Harry Fieldhouse who got me back into journalism. He had left Penthouse and I'd lost track of him. But apparently he was working at the Telegraph Magazine and told the editor that I was an expert on natural history (ha!) and therefore the right person to interview the Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz in Vienna. The commission came completely out of the blue (I didn't know then that Harry was behind it); I hadn't done any journalism for years and in fact had never interviewed a heavyweight scientist like Lorenz, but of course I was thrilled to go to Vienna. I worried beforehand that Lorenz would be too dry a subject, but he proved to be

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