HOME AND AWAY

The Labour peer’s account of downsizing and ditching a lifetime of objects is wonderfully told, if enviably stress-free

Joan Bakewell’s scanty new book is a kind of sequel – an outsized PS – to Stop the Clocks, which came out in 2016. Like that memoir, it too is preoccupied with the many preparations the clear-eyed should in all conscience make before kissing the world goodbye. Also like that book, it is interested in stuff: in cushions and vases, in exhibition posters and kitchen mixers; in all the accumulations of a long life. This time around, however, such engrossments are not only theoretical. When The Tick of Two Clocks begins, Bakewell is thinking about leaving her Victorian house in Primrose Hill, north London, after more than half a century. What follows is the story of this move, and of how its downsizing author comes to slough off – sometimes painfully, and sometimes with surprising ease – the many things she will no longer have room for.

I like and admire Bakewell; I always have, and I always will. At 88, her world, ever satisfyingly replete, shows no signs of shrinking. A working peer who’s still (miraculously) on the telly, she seems instinctively to understand that the secret to a certain kind of youthfulness – one that has nothing to do with how one looks, and everything to do with how one feels – is to be not interesting but interested. Bakewell makes a point of cultivating younger friends, invigorating presences to whom she may address all her questions. She writes well too. Turning the pages of The Tick of Two Clocks, I was stabbed again and again with envy at her great good fortune, a presiding luckiness that she cannot ever fully obscure, no matter how hard she tries.

In the case of this book, though, I read on mostly because I was so amazed that it exists at all. House moves are like dreams, aren’t they? No one wants to hear too much about them; we’ve all been there, after all. By most standards, moreover, Bakewell’s turns out to be as seamless as flashy hosiery. In chapter nine, she refers darkly to a “big mistake”, at which point I imagined a powerfully nasty smell emanating from beneath some floorboards. But no need to panic! After an interregnum of several weeks, during which she stays in a local hotel, with kind friends, and in Nîmes, in France, she moves in, and everything is just as she dreamed it would be. The only drama involves – wait for it – a tureen lid, which gets smashed between lorry and kitchen.

My Struggle, this is not. Bakewell is far too well brought up (and, perhaps, too conscious of her seat on the Labour benches of the House of Lords) to tell us how much she gets for her house, but even those not fully acquainted with the horror of London prices will know that grand houses in Camden squares sell for several million pounds. She can easily afford her move to a nearby artist’s studio, once the home of the illustrator Arthur Rackham and now listed. She can also afford an architect to sort out its muddled spaces, a builder to put the architect’s plans into action, a garden designer, an interior designer and, once in residence, a professional picture hanger. Other help comes in the form of an efficient woman from Bonhams auctioneers, who will sell her John Piper (she never liked it anyway), and a declutterer called Fliff, who wears “stylish artist’s clothes” and takes care of all the paperbacks she won’t now be rereading.

By the time Bakewell had installed her new Jasper Morrison chairs around her dining table, I felt like the woman in the Claire Bretécher cartoon my mother had hanging on our kitchen wall when I was a child (it showed a woman made visibly depressed by a visiting friend’s mild boasting): you could have taken away yet more of Joan’s stuff in the despondent black bags that had developed beneath my eyes. To be clear, I don’t begrudge her anything. Quite the opposite, in fact. I just wish that she hadn’t tried, via her periodic detours into such matters as retirement homes and social care, to make her experiences paradigmatic of those of her generation. Her old age, like so many things about her, is an exceptional case. Her agent should have called House and Garden, not a publisher – and I will confess now to living in hope that he or she may still do so. I want to see it all, in colour, as described. Every room, every coffee cup. The newly planted magnolia tree in the garden.