←Diana Melly obituary
Текст: In 2004 when her husband, the jazz musician and writer George Melly, was diagnosed with dementia and lung cancer, Diana Melly was asked by her brother if she loved George. When she got home she looked up the dictionary definition of the word “love” – “to have great attachment to and affection for; and/or in a state of strong emotional and sexual attraction”.
The first definition applied to her current feeling for George, the second to a much earlier one. Through her long, full and sometimes topsy-turvy life, Diana, who has died aged 87, loved many people, in both definitions of the word, but not always, she admitted, in the right order or at the right time.
She was married three times (at 16, 20 and 26), twice divorced, and outside those more conventional arrangements there were numerous boyfriends and lovers (some of them adorable, many not).
Her life during the 1960s was of the kind you see in films – women getting on to planes with no shoes on, and lots of hash, LSD, kaftans and sex. Her “romantic life” was distracting, as it should be, but was often distorted by her sometimes bad choices and the fact that whether girlfriend, lover or wife, she took to looking after her various sweethearts, and often at the expense of her three children, one born from each marriage.
Her relationships with men were marked by the dynamics of the time. George and Diana were married in 1963 and for the first 10 years of their 45-year marriage, she put all her energy into being attractive to him “so that he would not look away” and also made herself indispensable to him by managing his tour diary, his transport, his finances, his meals, the various homes they shared together and later his complicated medication. George called her Miss Perfect.
Her writing career, which began with a semi-autobiographical novel, The Girl in the Picture (1977), was initially born out of Diana’s need to establish herself outside the definition of “wife of George”, but went on to become an almost addictive form of self-expression and therapeutic protection.
There was a further novel, The Goosefeather Bed (1979); a small pamphlet, I Am a Cypher (2020), a wry, self-aware account of her emotional and intellectual education; and two works of non-fiction, Strictly Ballroom: Tales from the Dancefloor (2015), about what became a mild obsession with ballroom dancing that emerged in her 70s, and a memoir, Take a Girl Like Me (2005), by some distance her most significant publication.
It is an honest book, funny and knowing, and often recounting her own part in her occasional downfalls.
Diana was born in Southampton, Hampshire, the daughter of Geoffrey Dawson, a railway clerk who during her early childhood was on second world war service, and Margaret (nee Turnbull), a cleaner. After the war, the family moved to
Essex, where Diana attended Colchester girls’ grammar school. She left, aged 16, having been reprimanded by the head “for letting the school down” after being spotted in the foyer of a smart local hotel with a soldier.
Her first job was in London at the Cabaret Club, a discreet Soho club with a risqué vibe, where rich men could lounge with underclothed women and where John Profumo was later to meet
Mandy Rice-Davies. She was paid in tips and Sobranie Black Russian cocktail cigarettes that she took home to her mother, who was working as the housekeeper in a large Hampstead villa, where they shared small lodgings in the basement.
Diana met her first husband, Michael Ashe, whom she married in 1954, at the Cabaret; and she would meet George eight years later at the Colony Room, another famously louche Soho club, no less glamorous than the Cabaret but catering for a more artistically low-life crew (if you don’t count
Princess Margaret). After that she worked as an assistant at a ladies haberdashery in Mayfair from where, she once confessed, she stole a pair of white gloves.
In 1971 she began what was to turn into nearly a decade-long stint working at Release, a progressive charity set up by the radical feminist and political activist Caroline Coon and her partner
Rufus Harris. Its aim was to help addicts and lobby for the decriminalisation of drugs.
Diana’s roles included making sure there were enough teabags, working the nightshift to take calls from troubled addicts, and fundraising from any source rich enough and willing to donate.
Her major achievements included securing a major donation from the Ford Foundation following a trip to New York in 1973, but, given the hippy-ish “peace’n’love” credo of Release, the gifts sometimes took unlikely forms. Victor Lownes, the Playboy entrepreneur, had been given a large gold cast of a penis by his friend Roman Polanski, the film director, but after the two fell out he donated it to Release. It is not recorded how it got cashed in.
Diana had a tremendous capacity and drive to sort things out. She was good at it and found all sorts of people and things, wastrels and strays, rackety houses and veg patches to apply her sorting-out skills to. There were many pets that required her attention and love – Tuppy, Franny and Neko (the cats), Bobbie and Joey (the Papillon dogs), Danny (the guinea pig), Eggs (the rabbit) and, most adored of all, James Sebastian Fox (the fox). And there were many friends too.
Among others she looked after were the charismatic sprite of a writer
Bruce Chatwin, who wrote to her from the US asking if he might come and stay with her at the Tower (the Melly country retreat, an ancient and attractively ramshackle building in the Brecon Beacons, now Bannau Brycheiniog, in Wales).
He enticingly suggested: “We can both write during the day and share all the cooking.” His writer-in-residence period ended up lasting nearly five years, during which time he wrote most of his 1982 book On the Black Hill and “failed, ever once, to make a cup of tea”.
She went on to care for Chatwin through his illness with Aids until his death in 1989. Then there was the famously spiky, alcoholic novelist
Jean Rhys, to whom Diana acted as concierge, cook and companion, and the bon vivant, writer and artist
Teddy Millington-Drake. With
Francis Wyndham, Diana co-edited Jean Rhys: Letters 1931-1966 (1984).
When Take a Girl Like Me was published, it received some good reviews, but also some disapproving comment of the “promiscuous, hedonistic and self-indulgent” kind. Diana’s life clearly did lean towards the libertine and sometimes happily so, but the fun was not always harmless.
It led to difficulties in her relationship with her children and she herself also suffered greatly at times from low self-esteem and depression. There were two fumbling attempts at taking her own life and two nervous breakdowns requiring hospitalisation, one following the death from a drugs overdose of her eldest child, Patrick. Her daughter, Candy, from her second marriage, to John Moynihan, a sports journalist, also predeceased her.
She wrote that she found wearing the invisible cloak that envelops most women over the age of about 50 comforting and she sailed through the often choppy waters of middle-age quite contentedly, spending much of her time raising Candy’s daughter, Kezzie, sorting out George and listening to Radio 4.
After George’s death in 2007, she swapped Radio 4 for Radio 3 and at last, with nobody to please but herself, she developed a late-life love of physics, algebra and the Greek philosophers, and a tremendous passion for opera, which took her at the age of 84 across the Atlantic, economy class, to see two performances in three days at the New York Met.
She is survived by her son Tom, and by Kezzie.
Diana Margaret Campion Melly, writer, born 26 July 1937; died 2 February 2025
‘It feels enveloping and calming’: the London house wrapped in cork
Текст: For most homeowners a request from a passerby to touch the exterior of their house would probably raise eyebrows. But for the owner of Nina’s House, which is covered with unusual and striking cork insulation panels, it is not only a common occurrence but is welcomed.
The conversations may start with curiosity but much of the time lead to lengthy, passionate discussions on how to make homes more energy efficient, says the house’s owner, Nina Woodcroft. “We are new to the neighbourhood and it has been a really nice way to engage with our new community. A lot of delivery drivers will be like: ‘What’s this?’, and we’ll have a chat for 10 minutes about cork, you know, instead of just like this transactional, thank you, bye.”
Woodcroft and her family moved into their home in south Tottenham, London, at the end of 2023 and it has now been nominated for a number of awards including Don’t Move, Improve and
RIBA London. The house was a “leaky” 1970s property built originally as a clergy house. Woodcroft, who runs the design company Nina+Co, decided that instead of an extension they would design a renovation, with the help of architects ROAR, to transform it into an energy-efficient, fossil fuel-free, cosy family home.
“Our architect was saying that it was unusual the way we’ve decided to spend our budget. That most clients would be like, well let’s do a loft conversion, let’s add another floor or let’s do a side return, but the motivator for us was to make what we have already future proof and really efficient,” says Woodcroft.
After removing the gas supply entirely, Woodcroft and her team installed an air source heat pump in the front garden. To maximise the pump’s efficiency the radiators downstairs were stripped out and replaced with underfloor heating. Sheep wool, wood fibre and a recycled plastic fleece, with cork granules, were used to insulate the home internally. The annual energy bill is about £1,088, significantly below
the national average, with only electricity used.
They chose dark expanded cork, an increasingly
popular building material, to cover the exterior of the house because of its insulating properties, sustainability as a material, and aesthetic appeal.
“The way that it’s manufactured is cork granules, bits of the bark of the cork oak tree are heated and pressed into a panel at the same time. Something is released called suberin, a natural substance as it’s heated, which is what sticks those cork granules together. So there is no added binder. And that’s what makes that product really natural,” says Woodcroft.
The inside of the property, designed with running children in mind, is as thought through as the property’s exterior, with joinery made from local and reclaimed timbers, kitchen countertops constructed from recycled plastic and a kitchen island formed from a
London plane tree that was felled in Soho Square by Westminster council.
“I feel grounded and connected in this house because of the natural materials I think. It’s warm underfoot, which my feet really appreciate. The house feels enveloping and calming, like a little retreat from the busy world outside,” says Woodcroft.
The design company was born out of Woodcroft’s frustration with the lack of care for the environmental impact of materials used in the design industry. Nina’s House is the latest in a string of projects by Nina+Co to transform property interiors into sensual, textured spaces with a minimal environmental impact, such as the interiors for the restaurant Silo in Hackney Wick, east London, the world’s first zero-waste restaurant and winner of a Michelin green star. The Silo design used offcuts of timber, foraged seaweed, mycelium (a biodegradable fungal material), and crushed glass bottles.
Woodcroft says: “I am kind of always thinking about what life this [material] is going to have next: a restaurant, a shop, a home … it will have a certain lifespan that’s actually not very long in the grand scheme of things of the planet. And so I’m always trying to think what’s the next life of this and how to retain longevity and value in something.”
She hopes her renovation will inspire others to be more conscious of the types of materials used in property design and take small steps to make their homes more sustainable and energy efficient.
“I’m really up for sharing knowledge with people … Not everyone will have the financial resources to do a project like this, or the time and the energy because they’re busy with work and just need to pick a floor … but if it can inspire just doing one little thing, swap out one material, that would be amazing.”
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