PEOPLE: Alannah Hopkin meets biographer Victoria Glendinning as she departs her home in west Cork
As we pass through the kitchen in Victoria Glendinning's house in Coolnaclehy, west Cork, I comment on some beautiful writing in Arabic script on the kitchen beams. Victoria points out that two different scripts are used, and apologises for not knowing what they say: "They were put up there by my Persian step-son-in-law." It is a typical remark, combining the genealogical precision of the biographer (Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Rebecca West, Vita Sackville West, Anthony Trollope, among others), and the familial complications of a life lived to the full, with three husbands, four children and now grown-up step children.
She is expecting the removal van, for she is leaving Coolnaclehy, her holiday home of 14 years. Ever well-organised, Victoria is happy to take a break from the last of the packing, to talk over coffee and a cigarette.
Coolnaclehy is notoriously hard to find, tucked away off a back road on the unfashionable, inland side of Skibbereen. An unpromising approach across a bog leads to a modest old house surrounded by trees, situated on a bend in the River Ilen. When Victoria bought it she was married to her second husband, Terence de Vere White, at one time literary editor of The Irish Times.
The words "Nothing is Forever" are painted over an alcove in the dining room. "That was one of Terence's mantras. In very good times it makes you keep your feet on the ground, and in bad times it makes you think, well it won't go on forever. He had another mantra, which is carved on a stone down by the river, 'Nothing is Wasted'. If you think like that, the dreariest jobs you do, and the oddest times you go through, can teach you something. So I really don't need much more philosophy after those two." She follows this remark with a long burst of laughter.
Terence was 25 years her senior. He died 10 years ago after a long illness. Glendinning is surprised when she works out the figure of 10 years. "It seems like yesterday," she says sadly.
Yet when I ask her to sum up what west Cork means to her, she pauses only briefly before giving the one-word answer, "happiness".
Victoria Glendinning was born in Sheffield, and read Modern Languages at Oxford. She married her tutor, and had four children by the age of 25. She is enormously energetic, and worked as a teacher and social worker before joining the Times Literary Supplement as an editorial assistant in 1974. As well as her biographies, which have won numerous awards, she has also written four novels and has four honorary doctorates and a CBE. She is currently working on a biography of Leonard Woolf.
Glendinning is far from the drab, earnest, stereotype of the literary female. She is a warm, down-to-earth character, full of child-like enthusiasms. She enjoys cooking large, informal meals, and hacking away at her garden. She is just as happy entertaining Bruce Jeffs, "the friend who looks after my house while I'm away", as she is hanging out with her more famous neighbours, who include Jeremy Irons and David Puttnam.
When she first arrived, Victoria was quite unaware of what she calls "the Chiantishire aspect" of west Cork: 'I hadn't realised that so many Anglos with an Irish connection, or English people who'd been coming here for 30 years, were already here. It wasn't for that I came, rather the reverse. It was quite shocking when an awful lot of English leftie-media people discovered west Cork and wrote all these articles about it."
She came across the Coolnaclehy house when she was researching her biography of Anthony Trollope, who worked in Mallow Post Office. "It was one of those situations of good things coming out of bad things. The very bad thing was that both my parents had just been killed in a car crash, which was about the worst thing I could think of. But with the money my father left, I knew I could buy a house in Ireland, and a house is what I really, really wanted. Houses were not so expensive here back then.
"The agent in Clonakilty had a very bad photo, and he said in a rather ominous voice, 'it's not everybody's house'. So I thought, maybe it's my house. We drove down, and the artist Terry Searles was living in it, and there was a lovely shaggy entrance. Yes, I thought, it's my house, and I'd hardly looked at it, I just assumed there were bathrooms and bedrooms and things. And my whole life for 14 years has been fighting back the brambles. And the brambles have won really. I'm not here long enough these days to win my battles."
One reason for the change in Glendinning's lifestyle is her marriage to Kevin O'Sullivan, a London-based businessman, who has a place in the south of France. "We had this conversation on a terrace in France, where you go round the table, and you've got to say what you really want, not thinking, and when it was my turn I said I want to know where home is. It is nice having a foothold in the Mediterranean, but we want to simplify. So we are looking for a house in Dorset or Somerset, and then we could give up London, and maybe even France."
The other big bonus is that she will not have to get on an aeroplane to reach Dorset or Somerset: "I would really like never to have to fly again, no more airports and all that business. Somebody said to me, you'll never see Peru, and you'll never see Goa, but if that means I never have to go on an aeroplane again, I'd say fine."
It has not been an easy decision. "The only way I can get around leaving here in my head is by saying we're not leaving west Cork, we're stopping owning property in west Cork. We know so many people who rent out houses, or aren't in their houses all the time; we actually think it might be very nice coming back and doing the things we always do, and seeing the people we always see, and not having to worry about the slates on the roof and repainting the windows."