Reprehensibly perfect

At 88, Joan Bakewell is ‘downsizing’ – and looking back at a life of good luck

THE TICK OF TWO CLOCKS by Joan Bakewell

173pp, Virago, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £9.99

Born in April 1933, Joan Bakewell is aware of how fortunate she is. Her generation was too juvenile to fight in any major war. There were superb grammar schools, and university places for the intelligent – head girl Joan proceeded to Newnham College, Cambridge. Graduates were guaranteed secure jobs and big personal pension plans. There was global travel and free healthcare, “things to buy and enjoy, choices of entertainment”. Ah, the 1960s!

Equivalent youngsters today, faced with the shifting sands of austerity and zero-hours contracts, will find her life, where the best of everything always came her way as if by divine right, reprehensibly perfect. Especially the way at one time – a time impossible to imagine now, with our current rental and inflationary property market crisis – an easily available mortgage allowed for the purchasing of a cheap and spacious four-storey Victorian terrace in Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill. Bakewell inhabited such a mansion for 53 years, her capital gain obscene.

“We oldies with our own homes are lucky indeed,” says Bakewell with some understatement. “The sale of the big house will pay for the smaller house, with probably a chunk of money left over.” Bully for you, dear. For, at the age of 88, Bakewell is “downsizing”, moving to a studio apartment, “a queer, compact little place”, once inhabited by Arthur Rackham, “a creator of drawings for Victorian books”. Oh, that Arthur Rackham.

What Bakewell discovers – it is the subject of The Tick of Two Clocks (and try saying that with an NHS upper-set like what I have got) – is how moving house is a huge psychological upheaval, “a wrenching of memories”. She looks around Chalcot Square and realises how lovely it actually is, the tall windows and high ceilings, the mahogany banister and plaster cornices. In the old days, she muses, skilled craftsmen made “a thing of beauty” from ordinary things, door frames, mantelpieces, lamp fixtures. Today, Britain is being covered by ghastly slum housing estates, shoved up for profit not aesthetics. “The legacy we leave behind as typical of the 21st century… won’t be a good one.”

Bakewell has a good eye for architecture. She spots granite pillars and embellishments on Victorian pubs, especially the ones where she went boozing with Harold Pinter. She knows about bricks and ventilation grilles. She hates to see the marvels of yesteryear bought and wrecked by developers, turned into bedsits or an office block. It is a scandal that the Reading Room at the British Museum remains empty. Edwardian department stores have gone. Did you know Rafael Vinoly’s gimmicky “Walkie-Talkie” skyscraper reflects the sun in such a way that it melts cars parked in Fenchurch Street?

Bakewell enjoys the project of sensitively rebuilding and decorating her new pad, where she will live in solitude for the remainder of her days – though there is a “selfcontained” flatlet for a servant, or as they are now called, a carer. “I know full well I am lucky to afford it,” says Bakewell, only momentarily disconcerted to be told about rotten joists.

Simultaneously, there are bagloads of clothes to dump in the charity shop. British wardrobes contain 3.6billion unworn garments, admonishes Bakewell. Books have to be discarded – 35,000 tons of unwanted hardbacks and paperbacks are annually sent for pulping, mostly copies of my biography of Anthony Burgess, if truth be told. Bakewell’s furniture and pictures go to the salesroom. Her laminated poster collection is left in the street for passers-by to take their pick for free. There remain hundreds of boxes of kitchen stuff and family photographs. In a forgotten cupboard, she finds 40 vases. How the hell did they get there? Handbags, likewise, proliferate, rabbit-style.

Bakewell has always enjoyed an ordered life. For the first time she feels “a sense of insecurity”, as rooms are dismantled, objects are packed and dispatched to storage, and strangers introduced by the estate agents invade her privacy and examine “scuffed chair covers and chipped paint”. The place is “silent, awaiting other lives” – yet how can the future possibly measure up to the past half-century? Joan’s immediate neighbours were Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and George Melly. Wit, jazz, poems, a big gas bill. There were drinks parties with lots of smoking; candlelit dinners behind the elegant shutters.

Nevertheless, Bakewell lets slip hints of domestic melodrama (traces of which may be further found in Pinter’s Betrayal) when she mentions a memory of “bouts of shouting and hurried phone calls taken in secret. Eventually, there was a divorce.” In fact, two. Second time around, when married “to a much younger man”, the director Jack Emery (b.1944), Bakewell (b.1933) found herself “paying over large sums to be rid of a deeply unhappy situation”.

Bakewell wanted to be a professional ice skater. She ended up as a radio and television presenter. I wonder if her autonomy and conscientiousness have been a means of keeping emotions at bay. She has never forgotten the precepts of strict Stockport schoolmistresses who “controlled how I sat, stood, walked, ate”. She has been devoted to public service, and “eventually I fetched up as a Labour peer in the House of Lords”. Not many vendors can say, when a viewing is arranged (and Bakewell prefers to be absent), “I head for the House of Lords to share my misery at the state of the nation with congenial colleagues”, though maybe that is not so unusual a destination for the denizens of Chalcot Square.

At present, the Baroness Bakewell DBE is: president of Birkbeck College; a judge for the Gulbenkian Prize for Architecture; on the jury for the Tate Gallery and a founder member of its Friends group; co-chair of the Humanist Society; a member of the curation scheme for Art UK, which selects work for display from the Government’s art collection; and she is making two television series for Sky Arts. Meanwhile, the 88-yearold bags personally known to me in South Wales and the Midlands do nothing, haven’t done so for years, save stare into space and complain when the mobile podiatrist is late.

“I am both reluctant to go and eager to be off,” says Bakewell, as she embarks on her shift to new accommodation. But at least not for her a charity almshouse or maximum-security twilight home smelling of cabbage, such as the one Bakewell inspected and where she found “an actor who used to be in Doctor Who” and “an illusionist who formerly lived with a pet leopard”. She also saw, near Aldeburgh, “a small seaside town in Suffolk” (oh, that Aldeburgh), a retirement village with indoor bowling and “string quartets in the evenings”. Enough to make any of us have “Do Not Resuscitate” tattooed on our forehead.

Bakewell’s book is an eloquent poetry of departures. Her prim image is undercut here by suggestions of intricate personal mystery, fun and brightness concealing, perhaps, her life’s darker corners.

She wanted to be a professional ice skater. She ended up in the House of Lords

‘We oldies with our own homes’: Joan Bakewell, pictured in 1968 in her Chalcot Square house