Writing Home

Polly Devlin, Joan Bakewell

From Shelf: Wish list

In the pieces brought together in Writing Home, Polly Devlin OBE, most bewitching of writers, covers subjects that range over her whole life and thought

In the pieces brought together in Writing Home, Polly Devlin OBE, most bewitching of writers, covers subjects that range over her whole life and thought. She writes about places: about her childhood deep in the countryside of Northern Ireland (where, in the late 1950s, the first electricity poles looked 'literally out of place'); her sudden transition, at the age of twenty-one, to Swinging Sixties London, where she worked for Vogue and became very much part of the scene (although - 'it's like being a provincial at Versailles'), on to New York, back to London, then to the English countryside, and to Paris, Venice, the world over - and always back to Ireland, London and New York. She writes about the people she has known, among them Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, Peggy Guggenheim, Diana Vreeland ('as fantastical as a unicorn'), Jean Shrimpton ('she looks as though she sleeps in cathedral pews and sucks artichoke hearts for sustenance'), Princess Margaret (who came to dinner and did the washing up, 'which I gabbled she didn't need to - she looked at me frostily and the royal hands went back into the Fairy Liquid'). And she writes about the issues that have preoccupied her: about emigration, feminism ('I grew up in a society where men were fundamental and women were secondary'), reading, writing, collecting, shopping, houses, dogs, rooks, hares, dreams, friendship and the kindness of strangers; about daughters and mothers; and about wishes . . .