This Much Is True

Normally, we see each other about eight times a year, but I speak to her every day on the phone, sometimes more than once. We have never lived together for long periods, except when we had holidays. Our houses in Italy and Australia have filled our lives in the way others have children.

Our farmhouse in Tuscany is where we really come together. It has meant that when we do have that time, I am always happy to say hello, and sad to say goodbye. And that’s still the case. I will try as long as I can to have these two lives. Life’s like cheesecake: you want to have as much as you can.

We often talk about whether to live together. We’ve been talking about it more and more recently. Heather’s better in the kitchen than me and she doesn’t mind my farting in bed (that’s how I knew I had a keeper). We don’t know if it would work; we’d just have to find out. I think it would, because we really do love each other. At this age, I don’t so much feel physical lust — I mean, sex is not important to me any more, although, of course, there was a time when it was absolutely everything — but I feel mental lust for Heather. I love her more and more. My happiest moments, really, are just lying in bed with her and gazing at the ceiling and talking about anything and everything. That’s my biggest joy.

It may be that we will only actually finally get to achieve that when we’re both in an old people’s home together. I always had the idea that we would build our own and gather all our friends there, and that’s what I’d still like to do. There would be a library and a garden and memories shared. And animals. And a swimming pool, with easy steps down. I’m starting to plan.

We used to travel together. It was because of Heather I became an Australian and travelled there first in 1980. She would explain Asia to me and our visits to Indonesia and Thailand and Malaysia revealed that continent in a way no one else could have. I doubt we’ll do much travelling now, but the blessing of my life has been to find the person who opened the world to me and was prepared to share my world too; she has always been my fiercest critic. ‘Keeping the options open’ is our mantra now; my home will always be where she is. Life is sweeter shared.

Coming Out

My parents controlled my thought processes, or at least Mummy did, and so, even though I was a grown woman of twenty-seven years and I knew I had found the woman for my life, I didn’t immediately shout it from the rooftops. I didn’t tell most of my friends, or even my fellow housemates, about Heather at first.

It might seem that I’ve always been stridently ‘out’. Not so. I don’t know how long it took me to feel confident about being openly gay in every circumstance. I felt safe on the sixth floor at the BBC in the Radio Drama department. I can remember working with Paul Scofield, Patricia Routledge and Fenella Fielding in Noël Coward’s Present Laughter in 1974, and I brought my copy of Gay News into the studio. I came back from lunch once and found Dame Patricia reading it, a look of distaste on her face.

In 1968, at the heady start of our relationship, when Heather stayed at my flat, I was very much not ‘out’. Once, Billy Todd (that’s the Hon. Hilary Todd, daughter of Lord Todd of Christ’s College, Cambridge), who lived in the middle flat, came downstairs into the hall where Heather and I were talking and I shoved Heather behind the front door, because I was so embarrassed about anyone seeing her. She was extremely offended — well, she was furious. And my response was less than charming: ‘Sorry, but you look so much like a lesbian.’ She says she can still feel the imprint of the door handle on her tummy where, in my panic to hide her, I’d slammed it back so firmly that she was pinioned right up against the wall.

Once I relaxed, I introduced her to the rest of the house. It so happened that the people above me were a gay male couple, who don’t wish to be named, and then above them, there was Hilary Todd and Valerie Sarruf and Erica Eames, who were not gay, and above them there was another gay couple, Alistair Durie and Colin Del Paul, who in their nineties are still living happily together in Bath. So, it was a house of much gaiety. One day, when Heather and I were making love rather enthusiastically, I fell out of bed. I made quite a noise. I was very worried about what Mr Sagar below us in the basement would think was going on. Would the ceiling survive? He came up and knocked on the bedroom door and said, ‘Is everything all right, Miriam?’ I told him I was fine. ‘Oh, good,’ he said, and went back downstairs. I’m perfectly certain he knew what was going on. But, as most of the house was pullulating with homosexuals, it was clear he and Sibyl didn’t mind.