The Diary: AN Wilson

Some mondaine friends – David Campbell, founder of the new Everyman’s Library, and his wife Alix – asked us to dinner the other day. Since wonderful food is always provided (on this occasion some sublime hake), we set out with happy hearts, though some misgiving since the Campbells “know everyone” and I feel Pooterish in the presence of grandees. On this occasion, I found myself next to Jung Chang, someone who has been a heroine of mine for a decade, since I read her book Wild Swans (1991).

For those who have not read it – do so. It is the most extraordinary account of her family’s experience of Mao’s China. Her grandfather was chief of police in the old warlord times. Her parents were good communists but fell foul of the cultural revolution. Chang herself worked as a peasant toiler while her father was in a labour camp being denounced.

The extraordinary thing about the book, as about Nadezhda Mandelstam’s rather comparable Hope Against Hope (about the experience of being married to the great poet Osip Mandelstam in Stalin’s Russia), is that both are works of totally civilised human beings who expose the horror of a dreadful regime through the prism of their individual experience.

But when I found myself next to Chang, I was totally tongue-tied. Partly bowled over by her beauty, I found myself unable to speak of her book or to ask intelligent things about her experiences. What a waste! Still, when I am asked by my grandchildren, Browning-like, “Did you once see Shelley [or in this case Chang] plain?” I can answer, “Yes.”

The historian Blair Worden, kind guardian of the flame of Hugh Trevor-Roper (1918-2003), has an annual dinner in Oxford in the great man’s memory. It is something to look forward to but this year I had to miss it because of a mild mother-in-law crisis. The world of Chang’s girlhood in Mao’s China and Trevor-Roper’s Oxford could scarcely be further apart but one thing at least links them. As a schoolgirl during the cultural revolution, Chang was made to remove the flower pots from the window ledges in her school because Chairman Mao had decreed flowers were “bourgeois”.

The last time I attended a Trevor-Roper dinner, the medieval historian Jeremy Catto amusingly recalled for us how the window boxes at Oriel College, containing some particularly suburban petunias, mysteriously disappeared one night, apparently purloined by the college’s rowing hearties. Trevor-Roper’s enemies in the college knew the truth – that the masterminds behind the thefts were none other than Trevor-Roper himself and his pencil-thin aristocratic wife Alexandra, daughter of Field Marshal Haig. Much to the chagrin of the Trevor-Ropers, the window boxes were spotted in their garage at St Aldate’s.

Flowers have presumably been arousing passionate ideological hostility since the wars of the roses. Vita Sackville-West would, perhaps, also have agreed with Mao that flowers on window ledges were bourgeois. I am so bourgeois that it was only when I had befriended the great gardener Sir Roy Strong that I discovered hanging baskets were “common”. Strong’s war on the hanging basket in Herefordshire is as fierce as Mao’s war on the flowerpot in Beijing, but less ruthlessly successful.

The death of Jonathan Cecil last year was a cruel loss to all audiences who admired his understated brilliance as a comic actor. The coming and going of Christmas, with the pantomimes he so loved, were a poignant reminder of him. He used to say – all too aptly, I’m afraid – that he would have liked to play Baron Hard-up but his agent could never get him the role. Apparently, for an actor to get a part in panto nowadays he must be a known figure from TV. This was certainly true of the Dick Whittington I saw in Wimbledon this season. Every time one of the actors came on stage, there were whoops of delight from the audience as they recognised their favourite stars from (by me unwatched) TV soap operas such as EastEnders.

I had been taken by friends, the art dealer Rebecca Hossack and her husband Matthew Sturgis, for one reason only: that is, for the moment when Dame Edna Everage, seated in a flying wombat, comes sailing across the dress circle and the stalls. Nor was I disappointed. Rebecca has been going to Barry Humphries’ shows ever since she was a girl in Melbourne. I’d often seen Dame Edna on TV but never live – and it is completely different live. The effect on the audience of Dame Edna’s arrival was palpable, quite extraordinary. She holds everyone in the palm of her hand. I tremendously admire Barry Humphries as a litterateur and scholar of the 1890s, as well as a performer. But until you have seen him live, you do not experience the sheer power. In a favourite novel of mine – Weymouth Sands (1934) by John Cowper Powys – there is a comedian called Jerry Cobbold who has an almost sinister power over the masses, a quasi-Hitlerian gift. One was reminded of it as Dame Edna went into her familiar routines. No one but Powys, to my knowledge, has ever noted the strong affinity between successful political orators and stand-up comedians.

For 18 months, I have been writing a novel called The Potter’s Hand, about Josiah Wedgwood and the 18th century. Last summer I got stuck, and showed the scrappy, unfinishable pages to my editor Margaret Stead – the finest editor I have met. After a month, she was able to hand it back, showing me which pages should be discarded, which were in the wrong order, and what needed to be written next. How did this magician know what was hidden from the author?

With great trepidation this week, I finished the book, and, having gone through it one more time with Margaret, went to lunch to celebrate with Toby Mundy, the boss of Atlantic Books. He said to me: “Now it’s out of your hands – stop worrying – it belongs to your readers now.” At which my stomach turns over. I have never felt so emotionally involved with writing a book. I grew up in Staffordshire. My earliest memories are of the Wedgwood factory in Barlaston, which was built by Josiah Wedgwood V and his great friend, my father, Norman Wilson, who was managing director of the firm. I suppose that for much of the time, while I thought I was writing about Josiah I, I was really writing about them.

It is a bittersweet coincidence that I should finish the book at more or less the same time that a learned judge has made the decision that will close the Wedgwood Museum in Barlaston. Can nothing be done to save it? The collection faces being sold to pay a company pension debt, despite the fact the collection was put in trust 50 years ago to separate it from the commercial side of the business.

Revealing himself to be a man of the big gesture, the education secretary Michael Gove recently attracted publicity by suggesting that the nation might like to buy the Queen a yacht for her diamond jubilee. But how much better if, with a nod to his ministerial responsibilities, Gove were to remind the nation’s youth of what this country once had – manufacturing skill, economic brilliance, social conscience – by sponsoring a grand national appeal to save this ceramic treasure-house. Wedgwood embodied in his own person all the qualities we so desperately need to get us out, not only of the recession, but of the slough of incompetence and pessimism that engulfs our national life.

AN Wilson’s most recent book is ‘Dante in Love’ (Atlantic)