The Threads of Memory

I remember her most vividly gliding down from the first floor of her Holland Park house on a Stannah stairlift. Generally speaking these contraptions suggest dénouement and decline. Not with P. D. James. She reached the hall with an expression of keen anticipation and great good humour – especially if I had come to chauffeur her to an evening engagement. Being driven around London at night, she used to say, was one of the great delights of her old age.

We’d met in the late 1990s through the Royal Society of Literature where Phyllis, ‘Queen of Crime’, was a much-loved trustee (‘She should be running the country,’ John Mortimer, our Chairman, used to say). She was vivacious – when amused she used literally to shake with laughter ‒ but she was also soberly aware that she might not have too many years ahead of her. ‘At seventy-seven,’ Samuel Johnson wrote, ‘it is time to be in earnest.’ And so, as her seventy-seventh birthday approached, Phyllis decided to take stock. Rather than write a conventional memoir, she chose instead to keep a diary for a year and to allow her accounts of the to-ings and fro-ings of daily life to ‘catch on the threads of memory as burrs stick to a coat’. ‘You’re not looking at me,’ the portrait painter Michael Taylor used to chide when Phyllis was sitting for him, and at the start of Time to Be in Earnest (1999) the reader feels rather the same. She kicks off with some caveats: the book will betray no confidences (though ‘some of the most interesting things I learn are said to me in confidence’), and it will not dwell on anything painful. One wonders for a while whether it will yield anything very interesting at all. But as the weeks and months pass it feels as if she grows in trust, gradually allowing her guard to drop on a long life lived with an unusual degree of fortitude. She was born in 1920, part of a generation that grew up under ‘a pall of inarticulate grieving’ for those slaughtered in the First World War. Within her own family, there was a more private sorrow. Her mother Dorothy suffered from mental illness and spent much of Phyllis’s childhood in hospital. There were grim weekend visits – an overwhelming smell of sedative, Dorothy plucking obsessively at her hospital dress and staring at her daughter with imploring eyes. Back at home, Phyllis and her siblings lived ‘on a plateau of apprehension with occasional peaks of acute anxiety or fear’. Her father, Sidney James, was strict and frightening. Birthdays went uncelebrated. At night, she could only get to sleep by entering into a private imaginary world where she lay anonymously huddled among many others in an immense bed. All this she records without a jot of bitterness. Time to Be in Earnest is dedicated to Sidney and Dorothy, ‘remembered with gratitude and love’, and although she is clear that they were ill-suited as a couple, she admires them, and others of their generation, for sticking together. There were, she believes, compensations in old-fashioned unhappy marriages. ‘Those who were able to survive the more turbulent years of youth and middle age often found in each other a reassuring and comforting companionship in old age.’ By contrast, guilt-free divorce and the ending of the stigma of illegitimacy have been disastrous for children: ‘The sexual liberation of adults has been bought at a high price and it is not the adults who have paid it.’ At the heart of her beliefs is a clear-eyed, tough-minded view of happiness. It is, she states, ‘a gift not a right’. As a child, Phyllis was prone to speak uncomfortable truths aloud, and had a precocious insight into adult motive (she remembered, as an infant, hearing Humpty Dumpty for the first time, and wondering ‘Did he fall, or was he pushed?’). Though thoroughly unsentimental, she was also a romantic, and well into old age retained from history lessons mental images of snow falling on the coffin of Charles I, Hannibal urging his elephants across the Alps, Julius Caesar falling in a welter of blood, and Wolfe storming the heights of Quebec. For a teenager of such sharp intellect and imagination, it must surely have been a blow to be forced to leave school at 16 – partly because money was short and partly because her father did not believe in higher education for women. But if this was painful, she doesn’t say so. Self-pity was repellent to her. During the year she wrote Time to Be in Earnest, Princess Diana died, and crowds flocked to lay flowers outside Buckingham Palace. Phyllis was appalled. ‘This extraordinary festival of mourning is like an infection,’ she writes. ‘A self-indulgent, almost neurotic display of emotionalism.’ And for what exactly are people mourning, she asks tartly. ‘I suspect for themselves.’ At 16, she took a job in a local tax office, from which she moved on to become an assistant stage manager. And before she turned 21, early in the Second World War, she met and married Connor White, a doctor serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps. When the war ended he returned home suffering from mental illness sufficiently severe that for the rest of his life ‒ he died in 1964 – he was confined to a mental hospital. ‘No one who has never had to live with a partner who is mentally ill can possibly understand what it means,’ Phyllis writes. ‘Two people are in separate hells, but each intensifies the other.’ And yet reflection on her marriage forms the most tender passage in this memoir:

I have never found, or indeed looked for, anyone else with whom I have wanted to spend the rest of my life. I think of Connor with love and with grief for all that he has missed: the grandchildren in whom he would have taken such joy, my success, which would have made the burden of mental illness easier to bear – as money always does – the journeys, the laughter, the small triumphs and the day-to-day living we haven’t shared.

It was while Connor was in Goodmayes Hospital that Phyllis, working in hospital administration and bringing up their two daughters, began to rise very early in the morning to write. Whether Connor’s illness was a spur, she doesn’t say, but she is clear that detective fiction was, for her, a means of proving that the most intractable mystery was capable of solution ‘not by supernatural means or by good fortune but by human intelligence, human perseverance and human courage’. And receiving the news that she was to be a published author was one of the most thrilling moments in her life. When she came to embark on Time to Be in Earnest Phyllis had published fourteen novels, ten of them about her poet detective Adam Dalgleish. But she was still amazed by every book she was ‘given’ – for ‘this is always how my writing has seemed to me; nothing to do with my own cleverness but born of a talent which I have done nothing personally to deserve’. Perhaps it was this sense of gratitude that made her so generous with her time and gifts. Nancy Mitford, she tells us, had printed cards she sent out routinely to people who wanted her to give talks: ‘Nancy Mitford is unable to do what you ask.’ Phyllis, by contrast, spends hours with her secretary, Joyce, replying to post, and joyfully crisscrossing the country by train to meet her public: ‘I have never faced an audience before a signing’, she writes, ‘without a sense of being among friends.’ She was especially pleased when a talk served some charitable purpose – as in March 1998, when she was invited to speak at a lunch in aid of the Essex Autistic Society. Partly it appealed to her practical nature to be able to help others in difficulty, but partly also, I suspect, her motivation was rooted in her faith. Of all the aspects of her life, this is the one on which I wish she’d been more forthcoming. We learn that she is a regular churchgoer, and that she serves on Archbishop Runcie’s Liturgical Commission, keeping her papers in an overflowing file labelled ‘GOD’. She treasures, and indeed needs, periods of solitary silence, often sought in churches. But was her faith a comfort to her? There is no clear indication that she believed in heaven, and she feared encroaching senility. Afflicted with insomnia in the ‘treacherous small hours’ she is terrified of a brain no longer intact, of becoming ‘imprisoned in some limbo of pain, degradation and dependence’, of ‘the dreaded Alzheimer’s’. Her anxieties were groundless. Up until her death in November 2014, aged 94, she remained as sharp as a tack, full of gratitude and continuing to make new friends. One of these was my mother. Phyllis used to call her so that they could chat about their grandchildren, and occasionally to send her letters. ‘I wish we lived closer so that I might occasionally be able to see you,’ she wrote in the last of these. She’d just celebrated her birthday, with four generations present. ‘How thankful I am for all these blessings.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 52 © Maggie Fergusson 2016