Life and times

The novelist on the challenges of writing her first play and swimming in the wild

Novelist and playwright Esther Freud

AFTER 25 YEARS of sitting alone in a room writing novels, I decided what I really wanted to do was write a play. I needed a new adventure – sociable, collaborative – but first I had to write something that could be staged, and that involved many more hours sitting alone in a room.

The idea for the play, Stitchers ,was inspired by the charity Fine Cell Work, which sends volunteers into prisons to teach men – most prisoners are men – to do embroidery. The irony of this was not lost on me, and if I ever felt disheartened by the challenge I’d set myself, I thought of the inmates, two to a cell, locked in for up to 23 hours a day.

Fine Cell Work was founded by lifelong prison visitor Lady Anne Tree, who was convinced that making embroidery of top-notch quality would not only give convicts some money when their work was sold, but also give them a sense of calm and pride. As part of my research, I visited the sewing group at one of London’s high-security prisons. It was an uncanny experience to walk along the wing, past rows of locked cell doors, or if the inmates were on ‘free flow’ through the sudden noise and fearsome energy of hundreds of men released for a precious hour. But in the sewing room, all was calm.

‘You can’t be angry when you sew,’ one man told me as he threaded a needle. When I asked another why he came to the class, he said it was for the colours: everything else in the prison was grey. A Polish prisoner, with tattooed knuckles, thought for some time before he answered: ‘When I stitch, I have brain free.’

THIS MADE ME think about when, if ever, I have ‘brain free’, and I decided it was one of the benefits of the wild swimming I’ve taken up over the last three years.

I started one September, striking nervously out into the murky water of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond in London, and as I swam valiantly past ducks and geese, my body burning, my lips numb, I was too terrified my heart would stop to have time for any other worries.

‘That was incredible,’ I admitted afterwards, never imagining that as the year progressed I’d swim through sleet and snow, between shards of ice, and that slowly, or maybe not so slowly (by the second spring) I’d lose my fear, but never the exhilaration.

WORD OF MY new career as a playwright must have spread, because last year I was asked to be a patron of Ink, a weekend-long festival of short plays held in Halesworth Cut theatre, near to my home in Suffolk. The only criterion is that the writers should have an East Anglian connection.

This year more than 200 plays were submitted, of which 28 were performed. As the audience moved from one show to the next, it seemed as if a small Edinburgh Festival had sprung up, with every performance conveniently under one roof.

I was asked to contribute a short play and so I wrote something inspired by my cousin, who, after a life waiting for an organ donor match, last autumn was finally given a new heart.

The project gave me a chance to think about what that might mean. What our hearts are to us, what they hold, how they store pain and sorrow, longing, love, and what it takes for someone to be generous enough to promise theirs, even in the event of death, to someone else.

Esther Freud’s debut play Stitchers will run at Jermyn Street Theatre from 30 May to 23 June

On I swam, too terrified my heart would stop to have time for any other worries

Not quite Butlins, then

1. Tatiana Santo Domingo, a beer baroness worth £2.2 billion, married the fourth in line to the Monégasque throne in 2013. Here’s her hen party (she’s centre, in the red dress) aboard Princess Caroline’s luxury yacht – opulent by most standards, small beer by hers.

2. Hell, according to Sartre, is other people, but he didn’t specify who or where. Here is an answer: a Hilton sister hen party (Paris is second left, bride-to-be Nicky is in the middle).

3. Gwyneth Paltrow (centre, holding pink flowers) and friends assemble round a campfire for a session of vaginal steaming. Possibly.

From bride-to-be to divorcee

4. (Mer)maiden no more: retired swimmer Rebecca Adlington ahead of her 18-month marriage to fellow athlete Harry Needs.

5. At least Lily Allen, here on her 2011 hen do at Claridge’s, had a ready-made explanation for her divorce from Sam Cooper: It’s Not Me, It’s You.

6. Given the utter lack of enthusiasm exhibited by Kim Kardashian here, it’s a miracle that her 2011 marriage to Kris Humphries lasted as long as 72 days.