My plan for the future is to die on a weekend

I was born in 1942 during World War II on a farm, and our ponies were my brothers and sisters because I didn’t know any other children until I went to school aged four. Then I went to a girls’ boarding school in a castle I think of as a holding camp for virgins.

At 15 I’d passed three GCEs and went home to the farm and rode horses. I read a novel called When The Kissing Had To Stop about a communist takeover of Britain and I thought, ‘Is there another war coming?’ 

At 18 I got a job at MI5 to help protect Britain from what hidden dangers might exist. Then I married a poet who took me to America, and we lived above a 24/7 takeaway called Don’t Cook Tonite Call Chicken Delite. The smell of frying chicken still makes me nauseous. 

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Our baby boy was born and we named him Brer because that year, 1964, is when civil rights in America finally became law and racial segregation ended and the word ‘brer’ is how black American people in the South greet a friend, like: “Hi there, brer George.” 

We moved to Harvard University and I worked at The Kennedy Institute of Politics created after President Kennedy’s assassination. Politicians came to hear what ideas Harvard professors had about problems like how to deal with violence in America, and how to end the Vietnam War. 

Then the poet’s great-aunt gave him an Irish castle in need of repair. The Hideout pub had Dan Donnelly’s arm mounted on the wall in a glass case to honour the Irish bare-knuckle boxer champion in 1815. 

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I left Ireland and came to London and tried to be a lawyer; tried to be a poet; tried to be a journalist and then, miraculously, got a job at The New Review literary magazine. Our office was in Soho above a strip club, but mostly the editor used the Pillars of Hercules pub in Greek Street for an office.

I learned about writing and writers, but I was paid almost nothing so I went for an interview at Jonathan Cape publishers. The chairman said we’d like to offer you a job, but I should tell you there is not and never will be any possibility of promotion for you in this company. I thought three things: ‘You’d never say that to a man’, ‘I’ll show you’ and ‘I don’t like you.’

I worked at Cape for 15 happy years and remarried and had a baby girl. I started up a literary agency at home because I thought my 20-year-old son’s drug addiction had started partly because I was out at work when he was growing up. 

We lived in a flat by Primrose Hill that I’d found when I came to London in 1969 and rented for £15 a month. Nowadays the street has millionaires in entire houses but back then it was almost all teachers and nurses and people who had no homes whom Camden Council housed in bedsits. This summer I’ll have lived here for 57 years. 

I wrote a book called Bertie, May and Mrs Fish about our farm in the war, through the 1950s when my dad was away in the army and my mum had to hand-milk around 30 cows mornings and evenings. After wartime my mum lived in a cottage on her own, and she started up a local riding school for disabled children with two borrowed ponies, raising enough money to build a riding centre for disabled children by Cheltenham racecourse.

My mum said if you are having a hard time, try to do something for someone else and you will very soon feel better. Volunteering in our local Primrose Hill youth centre has been wonderful. 

Ways of Telling, a book of stories that I wrote, is published in April and is a big surprise. I have a plan for the future, all thanks to my grandson who, when he was nine, said to me, “I’ll be really sad when you die Gran Gran”, and I said, “I know sweetheart it’s always sad when someone you love dies but it’ll be OK.”

And he said, “But I don’t want to be really sad at school so I don’t want you to die on a weekday”, and I said, “OK then, I’ll die at a weekend.” 

For now I’m very happy and I find London is great for grannies. People help me onto buses and neighbours carry heavy things up the steps to my front door. I’ve never liked my county voice I inherited, because as soon as I open my mouth I sound like I’m being superior – but when I write stories I can try different voices.

The poet WH Auden once said to someone, “How do I know what I mean till I see what I say?” and for me writing always is an adventure. 

Ways of Telling by Xandra Bingley is out on 28 April (Notting Hill Editions, £11.99).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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