I’ve just got back from a 70th birthday party.
I sat on a garden settee surrounded by young folk, elderly gentlemen and retired nurses. I sat with my hands clasped like a genteel spinster, which I sort of am now. Looking up at the luscious canopy of friendly trees.
The catering was sublime.
Choux buns stuffed with mackeral. Spinach falafels. Tubs of spicy potatoes and little lumps of chicken, followed by a saffron paella with chorizo and snipped runner beans.
I drunk my fill of fizzy cola and stroked the head of a three week old baby.
There were women there who remembered my scent from the 90’s. They shared their stories with me.
I felt the pressure of my lack of standing. No stories to speak off. Nothing to show off about.
I looked up at the sky and remained silent – mostly.
One of the young women worked in publishing. I felt a pang of excitement.
I was asked to write a memoir in the noughties. ‘ALL BY MOUTH’.
Hodder and Stoughton were interested in my life. I was given time, an editor, a literary agent and then I proceeded to fuck it up majorly.
The editor was a young man. A Cambridge graduate who probably knew more about grammar than I ever will. But he weeded my words and I didn’t like it.
His suggestions left me cold. I was three hundred yers older than him and knew he didn’t understand my East Endery.
The litery agent was lovely. Posh and extremely well placed. but I found myself bobbing about in a boat that made me sea sick.
Letting people into your ideas is a sensitive issue. Allowing somebody else to shape sentences, remove words, rewrite paragraphs, takes an abnormal amount of courage. I didn’t have it. In the end I left the agent and the publishing house ran out of patience with me.
Now I don’t have the traction to secure a deal.
‘Weren’t you Jeni Barnett?’ they say.
I’m not sure I’ve got the will to tout around my ego any more.
I read years ago that the most competitive of all the creatives were writers.
I could care less about whether I’m good or bad at presenting.
I couldn’t give a toss if my performances are less than perfect. But writing evokes in me a strange frisson.
I’m scared of criticism but want it madly – badly.
I first noticed my need to win when I was ten years old. I was cast as ‘The Queen of Hearts’ in the school play.
I knew where the laughs came and would have trodden on the heads of anybody who dared to step on my lines.
I never lost a ‘Monopoly’ game and cried when the Romanian tennis player Ilie Năstase lost at Wimbledon.
He was my champion and he let me down.
I had no idea just how competitive show business was. I was lucky, work came to me, had I realised quite how tough the competition was I would have stayed well away from it.
I didn’t give a fuck as long as I was getting paid. Climbing up the greasy pole of ambition meant I rarely enjoyed my work. I just grafted.
Opportunist to the end.
It slowly dawned on me that I was a pawn in everybody else’s game.
In a voice over studio there’s the engineer, the director, the writer, the producer, sometimes the client and then the ‘TALENT’.
No name, just the voice that is the vehicle for their ideas. It’s sobering to realise that if you get it right you keep the job, get it wrong you’re out the door. No sentimentality. Keeping your distance, being the nameless talent keeps you sane.
Writing, on the other hand, requires putting your very self on paper. Taking a punt that somebody will read it, that they will enter your world for a moment, that they will take time to read between the lines.
I gather up all the compliments I can get and remember them. Sometimes reading the comments twice.
David Hare the playwright, said the act of writing is finding out what you believe, he also said.
‘Write only when you have something to say.’
I have a lot to say it’s debatable whether it’s worth sharing though.
So here I am telling my stories. Retelling my stories, telling other peoples stories and nicking ideas left right and centre.
I sat in the garden party marvelling at my ability to remain quiet. I didnt entertain, I didn’t steal anybodies thunder. I just sat and listened. Praps I have arrived at some peace.
I was torn knowing that the old git was home alone in his bed and the cat needed feeding. But I was out and about and facing life without him and without any kind of status.
I was the oldest person there. I sat with my knees together and my hands clasped. I sat under a wooly blanket and gratefully accepted the food served me. I made sure I didn’t dribble and kept a close watch on the crumbs round my mouth. Weirdly that’s how I knew I was in love with the old git.
We were in Sweden and I was given some knacker brod to eat. A crumb landed on my bottom lip and I was too embarrassed to wipe it away.
The Northern actor had done what nobody else had managed, he made me vulnerable and self conscious.
I blushed and left the crumb until he turned away.
That was fifty years ago.
I miss him.