Every time I fell in love with anyone they used to make me a reading list but I
Every time I fell in love with anyone, they used to make me a reading list but I never caught up with it because I was in love with someone else.Interview by Jonathan Sale. It was a year’s course but I was so homesick, I kept breaking the pudding basins, so I had to stay an extra term.What did you do in the war, Mummy? I got a partial scholarship to the London Mask Theatre School, in 1940. This went on until I was 16.Cooking the cooks? I wanted to be an actress and wanted to crack my homesickness – I was so homesick that I couldn’t go out to lunch. I got my parents to send me to boarding school – a domestic science school, in Beaconsfield – which was an excellent establishment, though it was full of girls whose main ambition was to be debutantes.
After a while, two other girls and a boy, John Craxton, who is now quite a famous painter, came as well. She taught everything – Greek and Latin – but not French, so I had a series of terrible French governesses in the afternoon I had a painting class with a gloomy young man. When I was eight or nine, I was sent to the Francis Holland School in Graham Terrace, Belgravia. After a week, I was moved to a class where everyone was a year or more older than me. I was bullied mercilessly; I was too terrified to learn anything.
My family was musical; they would give me any music I wanted but not any books. I had to buy them; on sixpence a week, I was always short of books. I started writing at about nine because I ran out of books.
A different kettle of fish? When I was five, my mother, who knew people with children of the same age, found a nice lady, Miss Kettle, to teach us in our house. I got ill with frightful tonsillitis and was moved to my grandfather’s house in the country with a sort of nurse, ostensibly with the idea that I would go back, but in fact I returned only for piano lessons.French with tears? Then my mother provided me with an old lady who had been her governess, and she came every morning We read Shakespeare’s plays out loud.
`Casting Off’, the last of her autobiographical `Cazalet’ novels, is out in paperback. A new version of `The Lover’s Companion’ came out at the end of last year, and her gardening anthology, `Green Shades’, will be published in March
Introduction? I only went to school for two terms I haven’t got a single credit to my name But I knew Shakespeare backwards and I read a lot. To take just one example, acknowledging the importance of economies of scale in industry tilts the cost-benefit analysis of Economic and Monetary Union in Europe decisively in favour of the single currency. For many people have assumed that the potential economic costs caused by the loss of the ability to devalue the currency are on a par with the somewhat nebulous benefits of “completing” the single European market.But what if creating a single economy bigger in size than the US could lead to a 20 or 30 per cent gain in productivity levels? That is the possibility held out by this solution to the productivity puzzle.. Elizabeth Jane Howard, 74, is a novelist, playwright, TV writer and former actress and model.
