Stop the Clocks

Joan Bakewell

Virago, £18.99

Review: Rosemary Goring

In the churchyard of the village where she has a weekend cottage fit for Mrs Tiggy-winkle, Joan Bakewell scans the headstones: “I try to find someone who reached my own age and fail.” Perhaps that’s not so surprising, the former denizens of this sleepy idyll, on the banks of the Avon, like those across the country, whose lives were hard, and often short. Not so for Baroness Bakewell, who is 82, and even less so for upcoming generations, for whom modern science is slowing if not stopping the clock. If this episodic, rambling work is not written entirely with this younger readership in mind, it seems Bakewell would nevertheless be gratified if they would find in it proof of how far her origins, habits and influences have been from theirs.

With an impartial (or fence-sitting) outlook that might reflect years of working with the BBC, she acknowledges the gap between the generations: “an it-wasn’t-like-that-in-my-day attitude is both too facile and far from intelligent. As I’m busy demonstrating, virtually nothing was the same in my day: the nature of change means we oldies simply can’t know what it is to be young in today’s world. And it’s not our fault.” Both sides of the age divide are thus largely exempt from criticism, in theory at least, as they behave according to their years.

Yet this determination to remain non-judgemental sometimes fails her, as when in a voice that any in middle age and beyond will recognise, the grandmother of six observes: “Today there is almost nowhere to go with the skimpiness of dress: hem and neckline are virtually converging”. And one area in which she would like the young to be less heedless is binge drinking. Such fogeyish views aside, however, she shows remarkably little of the sourness of old age, much of which is usually triggered as much by envy of energy and opportunity, one suspects, as real outrage.

This follow-up to her autobiography, The Centre of the Bed, is less of a memoir than a scrapbook of reflections triggered by memories and belongings. Interleaved with vignettes from her country idyll, as she sits watching the river flow past, or waits for the rain to end, Stop the Clocks is Bakewell’s attempt to identify what mark she will leave on the world when she is gone. It is a vain exercise, one we are all likely to indulge as we reach our later years, assuming as it does that the waters cannot possibly fold over our heads without leaving a single ripple. But this rag-bag of personal and social history, which mirrors the life-long clutter she admits to hoarding, is not as serendipitous or casual as it first appears. With the journalistic instinct that has made her name as a broadcaster and commentator, Bakewell holds to a firm thread throughout, to which all her anecdotes, reminiscences and ideas are pegged.

Thus, from descriptions of her early years and upbringing in Stockport, where she and her mother tussled with increasing acrimony as Joan grew up, but where her engineer father was a constant source of affection and comfort, she reaches her years at Cambridge University. It was there she lost her regional accent, an act she describes as taking place at lightning speed, as she realised the drawback her midlands vowels and working class vocabulary would prove to her ambitions. Marriage, motherhood and a freelance career in radio and television are lightly covered, her focus more upon the wider setting in which her own CV was unfolding.

There is a sense at times of wandering through a museum, looking back at a time only just out of reach, thanks to our parents or grandparents, yet which even to those of us whose formative years shared some of the elements of old-fashioned correctness or etiquette feels utterly antiquated. Whether it’s changes in language and grammar, the lost art of darning, or the sexual revolution, she charts the second half of the twentieth century, a period of unprecedented social and technological upheaval, through her own domestic detail, including two long marriages sandwiched by her now famous affair with Harold Pinter.

If hardly a rivetting read, it is companionable and insightful, likely to be of particular interest to those whose own advancing years and lifetime of changes it will help set in context. There will be knowing nods, for instance, as she compares the relaxed attitude to child-rearing in the 1950s and 60s to the alarming “micromanaging” of children today. “I smoked and drank through two pregnancies –the doctor even suggested that as I went into labour I celebrate with a glass of champagne.” And while the fight for women’s equality was essential, might the rise of feminism, she muses, be responsible for a backlash from men, leading to misogyny, violence and increasingly strict fundamentalism in those religions, like Islam, that do not approve of women’s higher profile in society?

Always open to new ideas, but no slave to fashionable attitudes, Bakewell’s attempt to weigh up what she leaves behind is by turns entertaining, frank and – when dealing with death and loss – unflinching. It is, then, true to the spirit of a most accomplished woman, who has always had the knack of making whatever she does look easy. When it comes to facing down old age with such style and honesty, that is perhaps the most impressive achievement of all.

Joan Bakewell will be speaking at the Aye Write! book festival in Glasgow’s Mitchell Library on xx March