Revisiting a life of letters

Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life

Author: Nina Stibbe

ISBN-13: 978-0670922765

Publisher: Viking

Guideline Price: Sterling12.99

In 1982 Nina Stibbe, a 20-year-old ingenue from rural Leicestershire, was taken on as a nanny for a well-heeled, bookish family in north London. Her employer for the five years she lived at 55 Gloucester Crescent, in Camden, was the acerbic but delightful Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books. Stibbe had no experience of nannying or of life in the big city; the letters she sent home to her sister Victoria chronicle a world of warmth and rackety good humour. They are collected in this volume, Love, Nina.

All manner of "brainbox" neighbours drop by to visit MK, as Stibbe refers to Wilmers. Among them are the playwright Alan Bennett and the director Jonathan Miller. Stibbe appears unfazed by fame and has little idea who these neighbours might be anyway. Miller, she surmises, is an opera singer, Bennett the star of a soap opera. "Of course he's the Alan Bennett," she writes to Victoria, adding: "You'd know him if you saw him. He used to be in Coronation Street. He's got a small nose and Yorkshire accent."

Her pre-adolescent charges, Sam and Will Frears, are the sons of Wilmers and her former husband, the film-maker Stephen Frears. Charmingly opinionated, the boys admire Stibbe, yet they comment on her cooking and josh her continually. Stibbe gives as good as she gets. Having prepared a supper for Bennett and the boys, she reports an exchange:

“AB: Very nice, but you don’t really want tinned tomatoes in a beef stew.

“Me: It’s a hunter’s stew.

“AB: You don’t want tinned tomatoes in it, whoever’s it is.

"Who's more likely to know about beef stew – him (a bloke who can't be bothered to cook his own tea) or The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook?"

Love, Nina is distinguished by a deadpan comedic timing and ear for dialogue. Stibbe skewers pretension and marvels teasingly at the contents of MK's larder. At the pine kitchen table MK is seen to eat "hippy bread" and enjoy a bizarrely cold "European soup called gazpacho". Garlic is used in almost all the household dishes ("always garlic, garlic, garlic").

Stibbe pokes gentle fun at other nannies working in the area. One, Pippa, insists on talking in code about her sex life in front of Will and Sam; Granny Wilmers’ helper is critical of Stibbe’s efforts to cut the Frears boys’ hair. “Not that she’s a hairdresser; she’s just an ordinary posh person who’s been taught to share her opinions with all and sundry.”

Granny Wilmers (born Cecilia Eitingon) was descended from wealthy Russian fur dealers, yet Stibbe seems unaware of her employer's background. Another of MK's extended family, Max Eitingon, had worked as a psychoanalyst in Vienna alongside Sigmund Freud, and may have been a Soviet spy. MK's English-born father, Charles Wilmers, had bequeathed a fortune. (More English than the English, his forebears were German-Jewish emigres who came to England in the 1870s and eagerly embraced the national rituals of roast beef and empire.) All this Mary-Kay Wilmers relates in her 2009 memoir, The Eitingons, which Stibbe has surely read.

At times the dialogue looks so trivial as to seem hardly worth recording. Yet that is partly the point of Love, Nina: it captures life in all its trivial evanescence.

Besides its behind-the-scenes account of the nanny’s life, the book chronicles 1980s literary London. For many the 1980s were a decade seemingly bereft of character, but really they were momentous: striking miners, the fall of communism, Margaret Thatcher.

MK and her “brainbox mates”, Stibbe notes, are mostly SDP voters, having become disillusioned with Labour. Among them are the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn and his partner, the biographer Claire Tomalin. A third and frequent visitor to 55 Gloucester Crescent is the American theatre critic John Lahr, who edited the diaries of the playwright Joe Orton. Orton’s irreverent spirit hovers over these letters; like Stibbe, Orton was a child of Leicester, and loved to mock middle-class proprieties.

After two years at MK’s, Stibbe goes on to study English literature at Thames Polytechnic, and subsequently marries the Tomalins’ volunteer helper, Nunney.

It might be asked if these letters have been edited with a view to publication. If one or two of them appear to show the artifice of afterthought, that hardly matters. Love, Nina is funny and life-affirming.

Ian Thomson's The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica won the Ondaatje Prize in 2010.