Living in Someone Else’s Life

In 1982, an advertisement for a nanny ran in The Lady. It read: ‘Disabled boy and his brother are looking for someone to look after them.’ The person hiring was Mary-Kay Wilmers, the co-founder of the London Review of Books, and the woman who answered the ad was 20-year-old Nina Stibbe, from Leicestershire. Stibbe didn’t have much experience of London or nannying. She had left school at 14 and was working in a nursing home, where copies of The Lady floated around. Stibbe drove down to Camden for the interview and her potential charges, Sam (10, with a neurological condition called Riley–Day syndrome) and Will (9) asked the questions. Eventually she was offered the job, packed up her stuff and moved into Wilmers’s large, terraced house at 55 Gloucester Crescent.

Stibbe missed her sister Victoria (Vic), who was still living and working at the nursing home back in Leicestershire. It turned out – thank goodness – that Vic didn’t have easy access to a telephone, so instead Stibbe wrote her letters full of domestic snapshots, usually animated by dialogue. It is these letters that form Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life (2013). Here’s an excerpt from the first letter in the collection, which is a good representation of how things generally go:

Dear Vic, Being a nanny is great. Not like a job really, just like living in someone else’s life. Today before breakfast Sam had to empty the dishwasher and Will had to feed the cat. Sam: I hate emptying the dishwasher. MK: We all do, that’s why we take turns. Will: I hate the cat. MK: We all do, that’s why we take turns. Sam: Anyway, Will, the cat hates you. Will: Don’t talk shit, Sam. Sam: Don’t say shit in front of the new nanny. (Drops cut lery on to the floor and shouts, ‘Trevor Brooking’.) Will: Don’t say Trevor Brooking in front of the new nanny.

I remember reading that opening in a library copy at my desk during the early days of maternity leave with my first son. I was pathetically sleep-deprived, with a brain like Swiss cheese, but Stibbe’s jokey, worm’s-eye view of a rarefied slice of 1980s London swallowed me up. I finished it in a day. The supporting characters who drift in and out of Wilmers’s house, some associated with the LRB and many simply friends and neighbours, are almost all ‘brainboxes’ (a Stibbe descriptor). They include Claire Tomalin, the biographer and then literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, and her partner, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn, who live two doors down; Jonathan Miller, the theatre director, who’s across the road and loans Stibbe a saw; Alan Bennett, the screenwriter and playwright, who comes for supper more often than not, contributing tubs of rice pudding or watercress salad, and fixes the refrigerator; and Mark Nunney, the young man employed by Tomalin to help her disabled son Tom, who carries a slab of Chaucer with him when he eventually goes hitch- hiking in Europe. Stibbe isn’t particularly aware of who most of Wilmers’s ‘mates’ are. Early on she claims that Bennett is an actor in Coronation Street. In explaining the LRB to Vic, she says ‘[It’s] not just about books, but a brainy take on world events etc. You have to be a PhD to get it, or at least a professional intellectual.’ There’s no indication that Stibbe cares one way or the other about reading the magazine. She’s unsnobbish and open-minded, more likely to get a kick out of pranking Sam and Will or Nunney, who at one point discovers that Stibbe has tucked a photograph of him on the toilet on to Claire Tomalin’s parked car. That guilelessness makes Stibbe an addictive narrator. Here are handfuls of the sharpest minds in London, churning around one another with a friendly interloper within earshot, who not only has a wonderful ear for dialogue but has also zeroed in on how they take their tea. Conversations are often conveyed to Vic like scenes in a play, which makes it easier to get the hang of the atmosphere. The house is comfortable but by no means a shrine to domesticity; slugs come up from between the floorboards, the television blares in the background (usually football matches), the garden is a desolate patch with nowhere to sit down. Moreover, Stibbe is in charge of some of the cooking, which is heavy on tinned fruit-pie filler and turkey mince. But as far as we can tell from the letters, it’s a happy, invigorating place, and Stibbe finds a role model in Wilmers, who is magnetic and divorced and bringing up her children as a single parent (her ex-husband, the director Stephen Frears, appears in the letters fleetingly). In the introduction to the book, Stibbe writes that Wilmers allowed the letters to be published ‘in spite of misgivings’, but if there’s a star of the story, it’s her. In Stibbe’s portrayal, Wilmers is deadpan and aloof, clever and allergic to showing off. Everyone in her orbit – well-known journalists, novelists, critics, actors, film- makers – seems to crave her approval, apart from her sons who already have it. There’s a spin cycle of boyfriends, all of whom like her more than she likes them. She’s also an unfussy employer, shrug ging off Stibbe’s shortcut-cooking, untidiness and tendency to ‘prang’ the family car and not say anything about it. This dynamic makes them both even more likeable: Stibbe for not being Mary Poppins, and Wilmers for not minding. Late in the letters, Wilmers gets into a minor car accident herself. Stibbe describes the incident to Vic:

Good news. Mary-Kay has pranged the car at long last – a relief after all mine [prangs]. She drove into a rope, which was ‘the same colour as the road and the sky’. Plus it was roping off an area that isn’t usually roped off.

Sam: It’s mum’s first time crashing. Me: Yeah, but it’s worse than any of mine – in terms of damage done. MK: Hmm. Me: Mine never required any action to be taken. MK: Only the untangling of deception and denial. Me: You dented the number plate – irreparably. MK: True, but my credibility remains intact.

Proximity to privilege and creativity, and to the linguistic dexterity that can make a car prang into a story of ‘deception and denial’, nudges the author to pull up her socks. While continuing to nanny in Gloucester Crescent, Stibbe studies for an A level in English Literature, a project that yields a treasure trove of observations on Great Writers (‘Got some of Hardy’s poems out of Holborn library . . . Most of them are rubbish and do not help me understand him. They make me think of him as wallowing and moaning and wishing for the olden days and that he hadn’t been such a cunt to his wife’), and earns her a place at Thames Polytechnic, today part of the University of Greenwich. Stibbe moves out of Wilmers’s house when she becomes a full time student, to make space for a new nanny, but she soon moves back in again, now part-lodger, part-friend of the family (the new nanny takes herself elsewhere). The letters continue until 1987, and wrap up with Stibbe finishing her dissertation on Carson McCullers and about to sally forth into the world. One of the many satisfying aspects of Love, Nina is that you can still check up on what the main players are up to now. Wilmers is still a consulting editor at the LRB, Sam is an actor and runs a café in Primrose Hill, and Will is a film director in New York. Alan Bennett disliked his portrayal as a sensible, appliance-fixing neighbour in Love, Nina and said so publicly. Stibbe responded, also publicly, but still seems to have huge affection for him. Stibbe worked in academic publishing before Love, Nina became a runaway bestseller. She married Mark Nunney, Claire Tomalin’s helper. They had two children and moved to Cornwall, before divorcing decades later. After separating from Nunney, Stibbe wrote a sequel to Love, Nina, entitled Went to London, Took the Dog: The Diary of a 60-Year-Old Runaway (2023). I find it rather thrilling to know that Nina Stibbe, once the youthful, toilet-snapping nanny surrounded by grown-up intellectuals, earwigging details to amuse her sister, is now famous in her own right. I returned that first copy of Love, Nina to the library, by the way, and now keep a permanent one on my nightstand.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Jo Rodgers 2025