Getting on and getting by
Jane Gardam
NO! I DON’T WANT TO JOIN A BOOKCLUB by Virginia Ironside Penguin/Fig Tree, £12.99, pp. 247, ISBN 057122637X ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is the sketchy diary of a 60year-old woman with an amusing, runaway pen, written over 19 months. She is scatty, impulsive, open-minded and living cheerfully in Shepherd’s Bush, which never ceases to intrigue her (‘Today I saw a man standing on his head in the middle of the pavement’). Wide-eyed and aware of men, it is easy to see her as Bridget Jones’s mother, but she is not silly. She is strong in adversity, loyal to sick friends whom she sees through to the end and she expresses her fearless if curmudgeonly opinions even at her own dinner parties, where, often, silence falls. She is a passionate atheist, though the last entry has her embracing a black evangelical priest.
Her big theme is that being 60 does not mean you have to bicycle to outer Mongolia or start paragliding. She doesn’t believe that Dr Johnson started to learn Italian at 70. There wouldn’t have been time.
What she does do is rather vague. There is obviously plenty of money and no need for a job. A husband has floated off. She is delighted with the current sexual freedoms, is unshocked by drugs and is seri ously considering giving up sex herself because something accomplished, something done should win a night’s repose; yet a widowed childhood boyfriend with thick, though white, hair and a country house is obviously going to change all that.
Her big experience in the diary is falling in love with her first grandchild and, whatever she isn’t, she’s a wonderful granny.
And she knows her own landscape and culture. She is a million miles and light years away from E. M. Delafield, but one would have loved to have watched the face of the Provincial Lady if she had read this book.
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