Germaine Greer unmasked

Fifty years after The Female Eunuch, the writer tells Valerie Grove about unsexy Clive James, her transgender war and scalping herself

- Valerie Grove

Germaine Greer has been an Oldie heroine since The Oldie began. Richard Ingrams, who used to weep on her shoulder when his first marriage was falling apart, founded his new magazine in February 1992 and gave Germaine a column.

It was called ‘From Stump Cross Roundabout’ – the Essex fastness she inhabited: a pair of millhouses in dull countryside with ‘not a single handsome room’. But she waxed rapturous about the vast East Anglian skies, which she’d been ‘too busy projecting myself’ to notice in her Cambridge days. ‘I am so full of joy,’ she wrote in the first Oldie, ‘I hardly dare move in case I spill some.’

I arrive under a pall of cloud just as she is wrestling with a new problem over the sale of The Mills. The three-year saga of this sale — its price cut to less than £1 million — could ‘suck the marrow out of the bones’, as she put it. The buyers wanted her out in a fortnight, and she hadn’t yet found a bungalow to rent. She might end up sleeping on a park bench. ‘Typical Greer problem,’ she said.

I recall (she doesn’t) where we first met. It was in the summer of love, 4th June 1967, at the Granta party at Cambridge: Michael Frayn, Clive James, Ted Hughes and so on. There stood La Greer, PhD, Shakespearean scholar and star of Footlights. Long, lean and drop-dead gorgeous in pre-Raphaelite curls and a mini-dress seemingly made of chain mail, she held forth, surrounded by awestruck men.