Memorial Service: Diana Athill

Diana Athill was The Oldie’s oldest contributor when she died aged 101 in January.

Author, publisher, editor and poet, she was very family-minded. Nephews and nieces, great-nephews, great-nieces and cousins were all listed in the service sheet for her funeral at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, as speakers, readers, pallbearers and flower arrangers.

Charles Athill, a nephew, read the Prayer of St Francis. James Athill, another nephew, read from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. William Athill, another nephew, read from Lucky Woman, her poem about geese: ‘You flew gently from this bleak but wonderful foreshore / As determined as the winter geese going home. / Yesterday, they were everywhere in the sky, like words covering a page…’

The Rev Simon Grigg said she was warm-hearted, the best editor in London and a national treasure. ‘Just after the end of the war, she invited me to join her in her little groundfloor flat in York Terrace just behind Madame Tussauds,’ said her cousin Barbara Smith. ‘Dinah’s career as prop and support to André Deutsch and the hundreds of writers who published with him was kicking off. The flat was dark and shabby, awaiting demolition – so the rent was tiny. We sometimes shared it with rats, one of which popped up in the bathroom while Di was in the bath.

‘After that, Dinah joined me in my Primrose Hill house in 1960. She took the top rooms and made them her own. Primrose Hill was not at all grand, much nicer to live in than it is now, and we stayed there for a very long time. Eventually our priorities diverged. I had children. She had her growing fame, a new sort of writing life, her great friend and one-time lover Barry, her wonderful family of nephews. But we still saw each other most days. Finally, when we were pretty old, we shared the small house my mother had built in south Norfolk.

‘She found the whole business of being a national treasure amazing and though, like Judi Dench, she laughed at it, I think she also thought it her due.’ JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW