Mugging Up

‘Being pretty is a major disaster for women,’ Diana Melly once told a friend, and beauty certainly had a hand in her destiny that she spent a lifetime resisting. Her parents, George Dawson, a bank clerk, and Margaret (née Timbrenell) who worked as a housekeeper, separated early, and Diana spent most of her childhood in Essex being shunted between her mother and an aunt with some haphazard schooling. The last exam she took – and passed – was the eleven-plus. She hated her grammar school and longed to leave when she was fourteen, having received a prize for not having an Essex accent, but no approval for anything else. Her parents wanted their pretty daughter to go to drama school and arranged for elocution lessons. But she started work straightaway, at first in a shop and then, at fifteen, as a hostess in a nightclub. Aged sixteen, in 1954, she married Michael Ashe, whom she described as ‘an imaginative, feckless Irishman of aristocratic origins which impressed me at the time but meant that he considered most jobs beneath him’. Patrick, her first child, was born a year later.

Maddened by the condescension of her upper-class mother-in-law, she left the marriage, returned to her mother’s bedsit, put Patrick in a creche and started to work in a coffee bar and as a fashion model. Two years later she set off with the writer Michael Alexander to Afghanistan. He was gathering material for a book, Offbeat in Asia (1960). ‘When we came back,’ she wrote in her memoir, ‘he left me and married someone else.’ Adrift in London, she got engaged to three different men; ‘I responded to almost any man who wanted me,’ she wrote later, and ‘occasionally I went to bed with men I didn’t really like so as not to seem rude.’ She stuck to the journalist John Moynihan, by whom she had her daughter, Candy. Moynihan was an habitué of Muriel’s drinking club in Soho, and it was at Muriel’s that Diana met the writer and jazz singer George Melly, whom she married in 1963, stayed with for 44 years until his death in 2007, and with whom she had her third child, Tom.

‘Mugging up’, as she put it in the remarkable memoir she wrote in her seventies, Take a Girl Like Me: Life with George, began at once. She was a consummate learner and never wasted time. She clearly needed to know about jazz and surrealism. She also had to get used to a new life, in which ‘Hello Diana’ was usually followed by ‘Where’s George?’ Her memoir is the story of their passionate, wayward and nearly impossible marriage, strewn with adulteries on both sides, with drugs and drunkenness, with unhappiness and serious mental breakdowns, and with the deaths of two of Diana’s children. Yet it was also a life studded with success and achievement, with humour and energy, and, perhaps most important, with friends.

There was disorder, but also order. Diana enjoyed managing George’s singing career, his finances and even some of his sex life. Her friend Sonia Orwell told her that she should be running Marks and Spencer, and many of her friends had their love lives, their holidays and much else organised for them by Diana. She wrote two novels in the 1970s, Girl in the Picture (1977) and Goosefeather Bed (1979), and never stopped ‘mugging up’, never stopped learning. She was always ready to admit ignorance, and happy to do something about it. Never an ace speller, she nonetheless worked with Francis Wyndham to select and edit Jean Rhys’s letters. Rhys stayed with her for several dramatically testing months.

The memoir is full of pain. Diana describes herself as ‘frozen with grief and guilt’ when Patrick died at the age of 25 from a heroin overdose. She remembers her refusal to hear what he was trying to tell her about his addiction. Candy died from cancer in 2013. Diana never got over her sense of failing her mother and her children, of not loving them enough. The adulteries often hurt, though both George and Diana eventually relaxed into something they thought of, though never referred to, as an ‘open’ marriage, and to tolerate what were often felt as betrayals. Diana’s sense of her own culpability wasn’t a form of shame. She didn’t go in for secrets, for pretence or cover-ups or even, much, for apology. She tells it all in her memoir, sometimes in brutal detail, and the book has been both admired and excoriated for its brazenness, candour and complete absence of self-pity.

Diana knew she was dying from cancer several months ago. ‘Death is boring,’ she said, ‘but dying is fascinating.’ Her capacity to be interested in other people, other places, other lives stood her in good stead. She found cancer as interesting as she’d found politics, difficult ideas and her own back garden. She was given to quoting Epicurus on the importance of friendship, and friends flocked to see her. She dressed up for them, had stories for them, and managed, extraordinarily, to enjoy those last months. She was 87 when she died on 2 February and she is survived by her son Tom and his children, Django and India, and by Candy’s daughter, Kezzie, whom Diana brought up.