This Much Is True

At that point, it was really hard not to laugh because Agatha isn’t exactly the most glorious female name, but he said, ‘May I write to you as Agatha, Miriam?’ Naturally I said, ‘Of course.’ He wrote me letters as Agatha and we were friends until he died.

Eventually, I told my parents about what Tom Brown had told me and they were amazingly non-censorious. They accepted it; they did ask if he had touched me inappropriately, though it wasn’t called that back then. Obviously, the college authorities didn’t know, but I think his wife did and she didn’t mind. She accepted it too. She loved him, and he was a respected don and he made her a home.

I’m a repository of many confidences. People often tell me private things about themselves or about things that have happened to them that they haven’t told anybody else, because they trust me, and this was one of those times.

Many women come to lesbianism later in life, after marriage and children. I have been the confidante of a surprising number of ‘straight’ women, who fall in love with a person not a sex — and now it’s easier for them to follow their emotions and find happiness. It delights me.

Like Anton, Tom was someone whose soul interested me. I believe he liked me very much and he wanted me to know the real Tom Brown. I have always felt it an honour to be allowed to see into another’s soul. I cherished my friendship with Tom until he died; it is the vulnerabilities in people, rather more than their strengths, which allow us to love them.

Dinner with Isaiah Berlin

When the time came to apply to university, a form was required from school, and I had to find a sponsor — somebody who would support my application and vouch for my academic promise and moral repute. Very often it was the headmistress who fulfilled this role. As Miss Vera Stack was perhaps not my biggest fan, Mummy came up with an alternative solution to secure my sponsorship.

One evening, she said to Daddy: ‘Isn’t one of your patients Isaiah Berlin?’

Daddy replied, ‘Yes.’

When Isaiah Berlin came to Oxford, he brought his parents with him, and while his father, the erstwhile head of the Riga Association of Timber Merchants, was fluent not only in Yiddish, Russian and German, but also French and English, his Russian-speaking mother, Marie, was fluent in only Yiddish and Latvian. And because Daddy was quite probably the only doctor in Oxford who spoke Yiddish, he had become the Berlins’ family doctor.

She said: ‘Joe, I want you to invite Isaiah Berlin for supper and I want him to sponsor Miriam for her college entrance.’ She couldn’t have known that he was a Fellow of All Souls and Oxford’s most important intellectual figure. Yet, with remarkable instinct, my mother had fixed upon the perfect sponsor for her daughter.

Daddy said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I’m not asking him to dinner. I’m a professional person. I can’t ask a patient to do that!’

But Mummy insisted: ‘You will, and I will cook a wonderful Jewish meal’ — which she did. She was a good, plain cook. And so, Sir Isaiah Berlin^[7] did come to supper, and I was there at the table with Mummy and Daddy. It was just the four of us — and he was utterly charming. I think he was amused to be invited, although I don’t think Daddy had been able to bring himself to explain the real reason for this impromptu dinner invitation. ‘Would you come to supper? And by the way…’ That was simply against his nature: Daddy was a moral person. Mummy was an opportunist.

We sat down to eat, and we soon found that Isaiah Berlin, though friendly, was completely unintelligible. He was a brilliant man, but so thick was his accent that you did not understand anything he said — you simply couldn’t grasp a single word, not a word! Conversation was difficult therefore (an understatement), but nonetheless he was charming. So, there we were, all smiling and convivial, me pretending to follow whatever in God’s name he was talking about — and Mummy rose to the occasion. She just came straight out with it. ‘This is our daughter, Miriam. She’s leaving school, and obviously we’re putting her in for college entrance. It would be wonderful if you could be her sponsor.’

The meal was excellent, and we all had a very pleasant evening. Before he left, Sir Isaiah signed the sponsorship forms that Mummy had reminded me to bring back from school. It was done and dusted.

Getting into university was (and is) a fraught process; all of us at school knew we had to get a degree. I waited nervously for news from my chosen colleges. But when the principal of Somerville College, Oxford, and the principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, looked at my form, and saw that Isaiah Berlin had sponsored me, I was home and dry. No college principal in the world would have turned down someone sponsored by the country’s premier intellectual. Today it would be as if I was the protégée of Simon Schama and Mary Beard.