Daily Grind Of Still Water

When I was a little child, her day used to begin with breakfast in bed and chatting to her friends for a few hours of the morning. I knew I didn’t want to live like that.”MacCarthy implies that she embarked on her new book partly because family reasons now make it impossible for her to undertake the kind of travels her biography of Byron had required. At 8.30am people come in and start making knives and forks, and I go up the path to my wooden cabin and start writing. There’s quite a buzz of activity; it has a kind of latter-day Arts and Crafts feel.”Although MacCarthy often comes down to London to see friends, her working life is highly disciplined, something she attributes to “self-consciousness about coming from a very frivolous world where ideas were shunned – girls were ridiculed for any aspirations to intellectual life I had a slightly frenzied need to be taken seriously I was rather haunted by my mother’s life. But if it was ever intended as a potboiler cobbled together from memory and “a few trips to Colindale to look up old Tatlers, Sketches and things”, she soon realised that the era of the “last debutantes” was actually far more interesting: “I thought of it as a sort of silly season, but it was also symbolic of so much else.

I work where David’s factory is, about 12 miles from Sheffield, in a wooden hut up on a hill, which is completely by itself, with no phone and no interruptions. It’s part of a working complex which is also a cutlery factory with a design office where my son comes each day So there’s a lot going on. “That gave me a new focus,” she says now, “and I got rather carried away by the working-class ideal.” It was hardly a place where one could ever admit that one’s first love had been a Master of the Eton Beagles.MacCarthy left her first husband and, fascinated by people who actually create, who make things with their hands, found her “working-class hero” in a designer and silversmith called David Mellor. She now works in an environment which sounds like a pragmatic modern version of Gill or Morris’s ideal community of craftsmen: “I have a son who’s also a designer-maker, who’s married to a photographer. Her own tone is notably cool and unshockable, sympathetically amused but seldom impressed or outraged by the bad behaviour or sheer sexual appetite of Byron and Gill.

(Others were a good deal more upset by her frankness in discussing Byron’s homosexual side and Gill’s incestuous relations with his sisters and daughters.) Along with her tireless research, it is this that makes her accounts of some very well-trodden lives – Byron had 400 previous biographers – so contemporary and compelling.
All these books explore worlds very different from the demure dances at the Dorchester that MacCarthy attended in her youth. She “came out” and was presented to the Queen in 1958, one of the last batch of 1,400 debutantes. Shortly after graduating from Oxford three years later, she achieved the ultimate deb’s dream and married an up-and-coming businessman from “the county set”. Yet a job at The Guardian in 1963 exposed her to values strongly opposed to those of her in-laws’ “sociable military family”.

She attended a girls’ boarding school and, following her “season” as a debutante, a women’s college at Oxford. Yet it was biographies of three powerfully radical men – Eric Gill (“the Roman Catholic patriarch and sculptor, whose back-to-the-land communities purported to be cells of good living”), William Morris and Lord Byron – that have brought her great acclaim.In the last of these, Byron: Life and Legend, she notes how the picture of Byron as heroic freedom fighter and lady-killer has been kept alive by “literary wishful thinkers, male biographers who portrayed their subject according to the image they wished to appropriate for themselves”. If it figured in her life at all, it was as something she had reacted against. Yet in writing off her fellow ex-debs as merely snobby and frivolous, she was not only excising a part of her own past but a fascinating slice of English social history. It is this that she has set out to resurrect, in all its absurdity and poignancy, in Last Curtsey (Faber, £20). MacCarthy grew up in a fairly sheltered, all-female household with her mother and sister – her father was killed in the North African desert in 1943 – where they were “always off to dancing classes”.

For well over four decades, Fiona MacCarthy’s brief season as a debutante remained “one of those jumbled, intermittently beautiful and slightly shaming dreams”. She took the Berlin-based award, worth $50,000, against a shortlist whose origins ranged from Colombia and China to Nepal and France, home of runner-up (and also a major novelist), Eric Orsenna.. The Grand Design, co-written with Leonard Mlodinow, will materialise from Bantam in 2008. * Gratifyingly, it was an indie publisher which caused real excitement on the opening day at Frankfurt, with news that it had signed a memoir by Norman Kember, the British peace activist kidnapped in Baghdad and rescued by the SAS. The 74-year-old former academic decided to go with Darton, Longman & Todd, the religious publisher whose backlist includes books by Martin Luther King. Described as honest and emotive, Hostage in Iraq – due next March – will recount his four-month ordeal.
* Still in Germany, the novelist and journalist – and Independent reviewer – Linda Grant has picked up the coveted Lettre Ulysses Award for reportage with her non-fiction account of Israel today, The People on the Street. Sir Cliff Richard, whom many a publisher has tried to tempt, will be working with ever-busy Penny Junor.