Priestley’s very good companion
Quirky, affectionate, pin-sharp... but this memoir by the secretary of the great writer (and legendary grumbler) nearly didn’t see the light of day
Priestley At Kissing Tree House: A Memoir Rosalie Batten Great Northern Books €27.99 ★★★★★
Rosalie Batten became J B Priestley’s secretary in 1968. Aged 74, Priestley had for decades been one of Britain’s most successful and respected men of letters, the author of countless novels, plays and essays. In those days, his fame and reputation were such that he would be invited to No.11 Downing Street to have a chat about tax reform with the then chancellor of the exchequer Roy Jenkins, while next door, prime minister Harold Wilson, would regularly give his wife the latest JB Priestley for Christmas.
Priestley also fostered a reputation as a gruff North of Englander and a bit of a grumbler. This image was helped by his appearance. ‘I have a sagging face, a weighty underlip, a saurian eye and a rumbling voice,’ he once wrote of himself. ‘Money could not buy a better grumbling outfit.’
Small wonder, then, if at first Batten felt nervous. She had been an avid Priestley reader since the age of 15, when she first read his bestselling The Good Companions. Luckily, she failed to mention that joyful early novel at her interview: she later discovered how much he resented the way it overshadowed his other works.
‘I was soon to learn that he did not like it being brought up first, as though it were the only book worth remembering… When, as it so often was, The Good Companions was mentioned, he would sometimes emit a low growl, or a grunt, or a sigh and his lower lip would pout.’
From the start, theirs was an old-fashioned master-servant relationship. He called her Mrs Batten and she called him Mr Priestley. Keen to get the job, she reluctantly agreed to work every day from 9.30 to 4.30, with just two weeks’ holiday a year. Later, she couldn’t help noting that he combined a lifelong advocacy of higher wages for the poor with peculiar personal stinginess when it came to those in his own employ.
‘It seemed… rather strange to me that his own staff were paid well below the going rate but then that tends to be the way of things.’
When he dispensed gifts they were invariably items he no longer needed: crusty old tubes of oil paint or stale chocolates with centres that did not appeal to him. Naturally, he disliked Christmas, a time when he was, in his words, ‘expected to pour out money like water’. He preferred to spend the Christmas period working and was upset when Mrs Batten expected to take a break. After some discussion: ‘He saw me off for my two days of leisure, smiling benignly, well pleased with his own benevolence.’ Yet despite these little failings, over the 16 years Mrs Batten spent working for him, she grew increasingly fond of Mr Priestley. ‘You could not know him without admitting that he had his faults but then you could not know him and not forgive him for them,’ she concludes. She remained his secretary to the end. He died, aged 90, in 1984, still with plays running in the West End, but in many ways a relic from another age, an old man who had been a child when Queen Victoria was on the throne and who, in the Edwardian era, had worked as a junior clerk in a wool office
in Yorkshire. He had served in the British Army throughout the First World War and was once buried alive.
All his best friends had been killed in that war. In An English Journey (1934) he recalled a reunion of the survivors from his old platoon, 14 years after the war ended. Several of them had chipped in to offer free tickets to the dinner to those who could not afford them but Priestley noticed that one or two had still not turned up. An old comrade explained that ‘they were so poor, these fellows, that they said they could not attend the dinner even if provided with free tickets because they felt that their clothes were not good enough. They ought to have known that they would have been welcome in the sorriest rags but their pride would not allow them to come’.
Priestley then launched into a powerfulattack on the country that had abandoned them. ‘We could drink to the tragedy ofthe dead; but we could only stare at oneanother, in pitiful embarrassment over thistragi-comedy of the living, who had fought for a world that did not want them, whohad come back to exchange their uniformsfor rags.’
Over the years she worked for him,Rosalie Batten noticed that, beneath his bluntness, 'the war had left a great melancholy in him. He referred to it often, grieving for the loss of life... feeling the immense tragedy and waste.'
It also left him with a sense of the randomness of fate and the duty on the survivors to relish the gift of life. Asked for a message on his 90th birthday, he said: 'I would simply say this. Try to enjoy as much as you can.'
And despite his grumbling - his bug-bears included conifers, people who left the 'e' out of Priestley ('I am not an adjective'), afternoons (`they seem to hang about with no purpose), motorways and dogs ('like drunken men, pestering you, pawing you) - the abiding impression he left on his secretary was one of a cheery benevolence.
He was, she says, 'a roly-poly Pickwickian figure of good nature'.
Priestley had always encouraged Batten to write a memoir of him. Soon after he died, she embarked on Priestley At Kissing Tree House. Having finished it, she showed it to a single publisher, who turned it down. Sadly, she was discouraged and she never sent it to another.
She herself died three years ago, in 2015, leaving the forgotten manuscript behind hen Now, more than 30 years since she first wrote it, an enterprising small English publisher, Great Northern Books, has published it, and a very fine piece of writing it is too: quirky, affectionate, unassuming, honest, subtle and, perhaps above all, pin-sharp.
I imagine she kept a diary, as all her day-to-day reminiscences of Priestley seem wonderfully fresh. She notices lit-tle things, like how small his feet were and how he moved 'light as thistledown' as he went from room to room.
And she catches his childlike delight in natural wonders. 'He would call me sometimes to come and watch a hedge-hog crossing the lawn, taking as much pleasure in it as a small boy might take in a toy train.’
Their relationship remained utterly respectable — Mrs Batten also worked for Priestley's wife, Jacquetta Hawkes — but Priestley liked to flirt, perhaps spurred by Mrs Batten's slightly prim reserve. On one occasion he complimented her on her knees — 'You've got very nice knees' — which made her edge away from him and pull her skirt down.
Her memoir is all very old-fashioned. `If we were alone sometimes it gave him a satisfying sense of sin to use my first name.
"Ssh! Ssh! When there is nobody about, I shall call you Rosalie. It will be something we keep to ourselves!' He waited expectantly but to me he was by then settled as Mr Priestley.'
Much. of this evocative book reads like an elegy to a bygone age. Even the names of the celebrities and grandees current at the time - Robert Robinson (radio and television presenter and author), Marghanita Lash (journalist and author), Mortimer Wheeler (archaeologist and British Army officer), C P Snow (scientist and novelist), Professor Joad English (philosopher and broadcaster), Sybil Thorndike (actress) -have by now accrued a kind of poetry.
And, in this age of fear and bombast, Priestley's values retain an eternal quality 'We have to hope,' he said on one of his last television interviews, 'because despair is useless. We have to love... So if anybody wants a short guide to a decent life, let me offer this [from Wordsworth]. 'We live by admiration, hope and love.'
From his secretary, he acquired all three. 'In his company the world was a more secure place, she recalls. And I had a part in it.'