Status Updates From The Children of Lovers

After my father won the Nobel Prize in 1983, many film crews descended on my parents' cottage, heaping cameras and cables in my mother's sitting room. The place filled up with casual groups of strangers, nipping through the flower beds or into bedrooms in search of a better angle. I was staying there with my two children during one such invasion heavily pregnant with my third child. ... (p. 78)

... He was strong, full of self-will, full of the need to succeed, to be different from or better than his peers. It was the need which helped him become a writer. He told me privately once, with shame, but also with a kind of bravado, that he wrote Lord of the Flies partly to prove he wasn't 'just an ordinary schoolteacher'.
... (p. 73)

His knowledge seemed inexhaustible and I took him for granted as a source of information. Only after his death forty years later did I realise how accustomed I was to stretching out my hand for that fund of knowledge. It was like pulling a book off the shelf except far easier. And often he was wise, broad-minded and learned. He carefully explained to me, when I was about fourteen, that Antonio's remark ... (p. 44)

... Alastair Sim's wife once upbraided me for saying my father wasn't very good at tennis -- which her certainly wasn't -- as if I was committed sacrilege. The irony was that I believed he was far more important, more extraordinary, than anyone else.
... I apparently emerged from under a table, aged four, announcing in deep accents, 'Bill's being rude to me.'
This was regarded as tremendously good.
... (p. 34)

I admired his disregard for the whole business of clothes, and I imitated him, unsuccessfully, since in my heart of hearts I rather liked them. But I wished passionately to be a part of that world, the warm, exciting world of tweed jackets and tobacco, deep voices and excitement. I did not so much want to be a boy as long to be a man, to be among them. I still catch myself now, ... (p. 28)

But the great luxury was books. My father bought masses of them. He never lost his hunger for them, nor his surprise and delight later at just being able to go and buy them. And he passed this on. When I was at university, both Sussex and Oxford, he set up an account for me in a bookshop, and told me I could put any book I wanted on it, English, Persian, hydrodynamics, anything, if that was what I wanted. ... (p. 20)

The earliest image I have of my father shows me the two of us walking together along the London Road, then on the outskirts of Salisbury. I am ver small,,three perhaps. It is raining and I complain, shrilly and with no fear of irritating him. Walk behind me, he says. He strides ahead, a huge grey slab, a huge man in a long grey mackintosh. He shields me from the rain. ... (p. 7)