THOSE months of lockdown during the pandemic weren’t all bad: people bought chickens, learnt to play the banjo, read War and Peace. Andrew Wilson wrote a memoir. ‘It was a kind of therapy,’ he tells me. ‘Much of it I’d never said to anyone, most of it, in fact.’ We are in a newly acquired London house, where he is briefly camping before the builders move in, and sit in the gloomy dining room papered with a brown, 1950s William Morris pattern. He is wearing a three-piece suit in spring-green linen. I had expected nothing less.
Memoirs can be tricky things, I suggest, upsetting people, causing collateral damage. He agrees: ‘A publisher friend proposed it and I said no at first because people in the family would find it painful, but then I decided, rather cruelly, to go ahead.’ His wife, Ruth Guilding, read the first draft: ‘She was horrified and saved me from some of the worst indiscretions.’ Like what? ‘I won’t say.’
In 2006, he wrote a biography of John Betjeman: ‘His partner Elizabeth Cavendish said how glad she was it was me doing it. She was a friend of the bosom, but the minute it came out she became an enemy. You never know what will upset people.’
Esta historia es de la edición September 07, 2022 de Country Life UK.
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