Love, Nina: confessions of a north London nanny

In 1982, 20-year-old Nina Stibbe moved from Leicester to London to take up a post as a nanny. Her two charges were 10-year-old Sam (who had some disabilities) and nine-year-old Will. They were the children of Mary-Kay Wilmers (editor of the London Review of Books) and her ex-husband, the film director Stephen Frears. In literary terms, it was an extraordinary set-up. Alan Bennett lived over the road and regularly popped over for supper (sometimes clutching a tin of lager). Jonathan Miller, Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn all lived on the same street.

But her luck at landing in the middle of this classy cultural clique was for the most part lost on Stibbe, whose deliciously crisp and funny collection of letters home will likely be one of this Christmas’s surprise hits. One advance review bills it as “Adrian Mole meets Mary Poppins”. Very little of the human comedy in this clash of worlds depends on a knowledge of the literary figures featured. Although originally intended only for the eyes of her sister, Victoria, the letters reveal that for a long time, Stibbe’s only inkling that the cast of her new life were of wider interest was a sneaking suspicion that Bennett might have appeared in Coronation Street. While other young people she met were seeking his opinion on their writing or acting skills, Stibbe was much more likely to dig him out to fix the fridge or confront an intruder.

“He was incredibly handy!” laughs Stibbe today. “Brilliant with appliances. Very funny, rude, outrageous. Not at all twee or mincey. But I didn’t know who any of them were. It was a rather scruffy street in north London. A bit grotty. It wasn’t the glittering West End I’d imagined. But then it was lovely and bookish. I thought it was great that they swore and were broad minded and interested in everything. They were more interested in me than I was in them: constantly asking which wife my dad was on and how many brothers I had. So, like any 20-year-old, I thought I was the most interesting person in the house. I kept getting clues that they were accomplished in some way. I remember asking my mum if she’d heard of Alan Bennett and she said ‘Oh yes, he was in Beyond the Fringe.’ I still wasn’t particularly impressed.”

Today she tells me she’s heard Bennett enjoyed reading the letters: “Although he says I’ve given myself all the best lines. Which I probably have. But they were all funny. They didn’t sit around discussing Brecht or Pinter. They talked about cheese. Snooker. Normal things.” At the table one night, Stibbe reports that “Will began to tell us about food’s journey through the human intestine ‘from table to toilet’. AB said it wasn’t an appropriate subject for suppertime. But when S & W went up, AB, still eating (rice pudding), began as follows:

AB: X has got crabs, apparently.

MK: Who has?

AB: X.

MK: Oh dear.

AB: He’s been f------ the cleaner.

MK: Oh.”

Today Stibbe admits she may have missed many of the household’s cultural references, but she got their sense of humour immediately. Deborah Moggach has praised her book’s “beady eye for domestic detail”, while Nick Hornby says he can’t remember the last time he laughed out loud so much while reading. “My mum’s very funny and her brother is a comedy writer [Patrick Barlow, part of the National Theatre of Brent],” Stibbe says. “She’d forget to do our packed lunches and we’d get through the day on a packet of Hula Hoops then dash off to see a Shakespeare play at the Leicester Haymarket theatre because, for her, culture was more important than food. Growing up I had the sense that we were a bit giddy and irresponsible as a family but then I went to live with these ‘proper’ people and discovered that they were also silly and laughing.”

Like Stibbe’s own mother, Mary-Kay Wilmers was a single mother. She was editing at the LRB, dating and raising her sons, all with remarkable style, wit and unsentimental heart. Stibbe now realises she was a terrific role model. “Of course there were anxieties and Sam’s illness [Riley-Day syndrome, a hereditary disorder of the nervous system] was lurking ever present. I let her do the worrying and rather took it on the chin.” Wilmers, who has always enjoyed the company of difficult women (“Not just because I’m a bit difficult myself. I like their complication.”) appears to have relished Stibbe’s punkish attitude to her job, to the point of having to hire a cleaner when the nanny was too busy larking about – dropping the boys into skips, sticking rude pictures on Claire Tomalin’s windscreen and wandering barefoot around the local convenience stores – to do the chores. As a literary editor, Wilmers never kowtowed to grand, old authors. And she seems to have enjoyed Stibbe’s irreverent responses to them as the nanny – inspired by cool, Left-wing boyfriend Nunney – begins to study for her English A-level. There’s a sweet passage in which Stibbe compares Samuel Beckett to Les Dawson. “Oh, I was judgmental and awful and self-important! Oh dear!” she winces now.

The letters first surfaced when the novelist Andrew O’Hagan was compiling a book of tributes for Wilmers’s 70th birthday. “I couldn’t think what to say, and I knew she wouldn’t like anything ‘nice’,” explains Stibbe. “So I ended up sending him some letters and he loved them.” The idea of a book came up, but Wilmers said “no way”. Stibbe “felt dreadful for even suggesting it. It felt like a real kiss and tell.” But then she was invited to read more at Sam’s 40th and Wilmers relented: “She said: ‘I suppose I had better see the rest.’ Although I’ve taken out lots of the naughty bits, she still has serious misgivings about it being published. But she’s the hero. There are so many heroes: Sam and Will, Alan Bennett, my friend Stella and Nunney, who did go off to Norway and have lots of exotic girlfriends, but eventually we got together and now have two children.”

“When I look back at those letters,” she says, “I find it hard to imagine that I wrote them. But it seems to me it was a great time. Full of fascinating people who were fascinated by life.” She’s just lucky that her sister kept all the letters. “Oh I know,” she says, laughing. Still naughty. “And do you know how many of hers I kept? About three! But then, you see, they were about working in a nursing home in Leicester.”

Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life by Nina Stibbe is published by Viking, £12.99.

Read an exclusive extract here

To buy a copy of Love, Nina for £10.99 plus £1.35 p&p, go to books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 931 1515