Elspeth Barker
Award-winning writer who enjoyed a rowdy and exhilarating marriage to the poet George Barker
ELSPETH BARKER, the writer, who has died aged 81, had a lifelong love affair with words. She spoke and wrote with slow deliberation in perfectly formed, and killingly funny, sentences. The faintest Edinburgh burr gently underlined a formidable clarity.
She might have been the heir to Muriel Spark had she not prayed to the moon to bring her a poet at the age of 12. The tornado that was George Barker swept her away a decade later.
Elspeth Langlands was born on November 16 1940, the eldest of five children. When she was seven the family moved to Drumtochty Castle, a Gothic revivalist pile on the edge of a Kincardineshire forest, where her parents set up a boys’ preparatory school. At its inception Elspeth was declared an honorary boy.
The eccentric school, which ran until 1971, produced the writers David Maclennan, Ross Leckie and Allan Massie, the last of these marrying Elspeth’s sister Alison. It fostered her own erudition in literature and the classics, and her deep love of nature, untameable pets and poets.
The castle also gave her the setting for the darkly comic novel
O Caledonia (its title taken from a Walter Scott poem), on whose scant pages a mighty reputation now largely rests. The book’s plot was weirdly autobiographical despite opening with the teenage heroine lying murdered and “oddly attired in her mother’s black lace wedding dress”. She is mourned only by a pet jackdaw, who “like a tiny kamikaze pilot” commits suicide by crashing into a wall.
Elspeth read Modern Languages at Somerville College, Oxford. She looked like a Pre-raphaelite model with Biba mascara when, while waitressing spectacularly badly and working in Foyles bookshop, she met George Barker in London. She was 22; the answer to her prayer was 50. They were together in a tricky but ultimately triumphant marriage until his death in 1991.
Living in financial and domestic disorder, they moved to Itteringham in rural Norfolk with funding from Harold Pinter. The tenants of Bintry House, rented from the National Trust, became bohemian national treasures. George, who would have been a riveting Poet Laureate, was periodically banned from the village pub.
Saturday nights saw rampageous gatherings in Bintry’s Drinking Room – a chamber of legendary coldness warmed by the host’s fiery temper when whisky flowed. Elspeth recited poetry to a stunned audience (“We’ll to the woods no more, / The laurels all are cut”) as George heckled.
She gave this wild talent five children. There were 10 previous offspring by three mothers to his certain knowledge, but maybe more. He once accosted Alan Fry (father of Stephen) with: “How many children have you got?” “Three,” said Alan proudly. “You lazy bugger,” George replied.
A vast extended family of blood and literature was welcomed by Elspeth Barker to Bintry House. Her generosity matching her humour and glamour, she befriended Elizabeth Smart, whose devastating affair with George had been chronicled in the prose poem By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. But perhaps it was no coincidence that Elspeth had five Barker children to Elizabeth’s four. She was the primary muse, enabling George’s most lyrical poetry.
Elspeth taught Latin and Ancient Greek at Runton Hill girls’ school on the Norfolk coast for a decade to bring in some money. She wrote plays in Latin for her pupils, and latterly learned to speak and read Russian for pleasure. Long before passing her driving test at the 18th attempt, she took to motoring illicitly, disguised in the bright wig and purple sunglasses which would have alerted any passing police patrol. She always stood out anyway.
When George Barker died, Elspeth rejected the term “widow”: his children were still his children; she would stay his wife. Her gift to the bereaved was to edit the wonderful anthology, Loss (1997). In 2007 she surprised everyone by marrying an American, Bill Troop, and announcing that they would live in Sobriety. Wherever that might be, it was nowhere near Bintry House. Divorce followed.
O Caledonia, published in the year of George’s death, won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, David Heigham Prize, Scottish Book Prize and Angel Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread. In a rare lack of clarity Elspeth insisted ever after that a follow-up was “nearly finished”. It may exist in fragments.
In a chaos of cats, dogs, chickens, horses, donkeys, goats, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig called Portia, children, stepchildren (three older than herself ) and five grandchildren, she became a brilliant reviewer, and, ironically, taught – from Norwich School of Art and Design to the University of Kansas – the creative writing she partly resisted in her own case. Her story was novelised in Come and Tell Me Some Lies, the first book by her novelist daughter Raffaella.
In 2010 the Norwich publisher Peter Tolhurst reissued O Caledonia (with two new short stories and seven old ones), and brought out Dog Days, her collected reviews, two years later. Her masterpiece appeared again last autumn, with Ali Smith naming it among the best leastknown novels of the 20th century, and Maggie O’farrell confessing in a foreword to targeting someone for friendship just because they both adored this book. Elspeth Barker died wearing pink-flamingo pyjamas and pearls in an Aylsham nursing home, after final sips of champagne. She was surrounded by her family as a jackdaw hopped on the lawn.
Elspeth Barker, born November 16 1940, died April 21 2022