Nesta Roberts
Last night I had the long-expected call to tell me that Nesta Roberts had died.
Nesta Roberts, journalist, 10.1.1913 - 16.1.2009
When I first knew Nesta, she was already entering her fifties. I knew her in two roles: as my brother's godmother, and thus a sort of honorary aunt who often came to us at Christmas, and at the same time as the Paris correspondent of The Guardian. The importance of this position was brought home to me by the French teacher at my primary school, a Parisienne married to an Englishman, who exclaimed to the class one day "When I see the paper in the morning, do I read the front page? Or the features? The leaders? The letters? No! I go straight to Nesta Roberts's report from Paris."
She was in France in the 1960s and 1970s, and there's a characteristic glimpse of her in Geoffrey Taylor's Guardian history, Changing Faces, set during les évènements of 1968:
"During the summer disturbances of 1968 her natural sympathies were with the students. Had they not been so to start with they would swiftly have been pushed in that direction when she found herself repeatedly bolting from the riot police and choking from tear gas over the story she dictated to Ethel Alsoe, the copytaker in Manchester. Once, after a heavy day at the barricades, she went to 6 o'clock mass at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. (Her persuasion was High Anglican, but in France Rome had to suffice.) She was conscious of noise outside and although M. le Curé administered the mass as usual he hastened out immediately afterwards. He then reappeared on the chancel steps to announce that things outside were a little agitated, and recommend a safe route home for those who had received the sacrament. Outside the church Miss Roberts resumed her reporting role as the paving stones were once again hurled across the boulevard, to be answered once again by the tear gas."
But Paris came at the end of her career, which stretched back to the 1930s. As you could tell from her name, though not as far as I could detect from her voice, Nesta came from Wales (and sometimes tried to convince me of the superiority of rugby to other sports). She worked her way through the local papers there and in Lincolnshire before she finally arrived at The Manchester Guardian in 1947, when she was already 34 - though she had been writing "back-pagers" - 1,000 word essays - for the paper since she was 19. She described herself as its first woman reporter; there were certainly women journalists on the MG before that, but it may be true that she was the first taken on in a reporting role. It led to what she described as "a fine, confused and immensely enjoyable career, which included feature writing, small-time dramatic criticism, covering horse trials and being a very bad News Editor and a rather good Health and Welfare Correspondent". Her spell as news editor came when the Guardian first started to print in London, in 1961, and was probably the phase she enjoyed least; health and welfare were more to her liking, and she wrote and co-authored various books on social services and mental health.
Then came France, where she felt her Celt roots gave her a natural sense of belonging. In her 1976 book, The Face of France, she describes a moment of yearning for Paris:
"Home has nothing to do with England, and is more specific than just Paris. As for so many of the French, it means a quartier, which is something far more restricted than the arrondissement, being a clearly defined, though often irregular area within which one is a known member of a known community, where life proceeds on familiar tracks, where on a ses habitudes. For me, its core is the narrow canyon of the rue du Dragon in the sixth arrondissement. It contains the little bar where I sometimes have breakfast on Saturdays, and the lady in the wine shop who tells me about her rheumatism, and the small family restaurant where I have watched the son of the house, the third generation, grow from a little boy who went to bed early into a tall lad capable of giving a hand in the enterprise, and M. Guy who does my hair and is good for a loan in extremis, and the shoemaker and his wife who were among my earliest friends and counsellors. There are extensions. On the one side they reach down into the boulevard, with the Flore and the Deux Magots and Lipp, but not the drugstore, and the bookshop that stays open until eleven p.m. and the place, with the church, and the rue de l'Abbaye as far as the place Furstenburg. On the other they go along rue Cherche Midi as far as the wonderful baker whose wood-fired oven lies under the street, along rue du View Colombier, where there is the pâtisserie that makes the best tarte au citron in Paris, to the place St. Sulpice, for the sake of the fountain and the shops that sell crib figures at Christmas, and, beyond that the Marché St. Germain where, daily, the country comes into Paris. That is it, and within those few acres, with a dispensation to go up to the Luxembourg Gardens or down to the quais for exercise, any reasonable person can lead a full life."
In Manchester Nesta had lived a few minutes' walk from where I am now, but, given her flats in London and Paris, I thought of her as a cosmopolitan; we were a little surprised when she chose to retire to Louth, in Lincolnshire, where she had worked in her youth. But she seemed to settle happily into that community, and especially its church - perhaps she saw it as her quartier - and remained in her own home until after she suffered a stroke in her nineties. She was the obvious person to give the address at my father's funeral; I am not sure who is left to speak at hers.
My brother had taken it upon himself to supervise her care, in collaboration with the vicar, as her health declined and she accepted the move into a nursing home in Louth. He frequently drove over to see her, and as her speech began to fail used to entertain her by reading out the Guardian letters page. I went with him last summer, by when she was beyond words and recognition, though in case she could still absorb some sense from speech I described the village in France where I was about to return for le quatorze juillet. Since then, my mind has kept returning to an article she wrote about Colette, and her wondering sympathy as she contemplated Colette's last days as "a writer who could no longer write". Did she foresee that she might reach that pass, and further?
Nesta was very good to me; I have read the postcards she sent me when I was a child, in which she mimicks the rambling style of childish prose perfectly, and I remember her taking me to the theatre, as well as sending me books. (Sadly, I don't think she ever finished her novel set in Florence, The Lily and the Rose.) Later, she sent me thoughtful advice when I drifted into journalism. But she doted on my brother, her godson, from the days when she used to come round to give him his bath in the early 1950s. Though she had women friends, there was a general understanding that she was a man's woman; she never married - I believe her fiancé was killed in the war - but had a few close men friends (not, I think, boyfriends; my brother said the one he knew best was gay). I am not sure whether she called herself a feminist; she was one by force of her example, rather than through the active campaigning of Mary Stott. They were colleagues and friends, but the time I met them together I detected a hint of mutual exasperation. I do know that as a High Anglican Nesta opposed the introduction of women priests.
Thinking it over, I wonder if her strongest influence on me was not in the field of journalism, but in her devotion to public transport. She would have loved the recent introduction of the free bus pass for over-sixties. I don't know whether she ever learned to drive - I never saw her at a wheel - but she revelled in buses and trains, and writing about her journeys on them, and impressed upon me that this was the most interesting way to travel.
She loved travel, so it's as strange to think of her life shrinking to Louth, and then the nursing home, and finally her bed as it is to think of the gradual vanishing of her language. But I think her religious faith means that she would have accepted it as the conclusion of her story, and it's done now.
Geoffrey Taylor's obituary of Nesta in The Guardian
Nesta Roberts, journalist, 10.1.1913 - 16.1.2009
When I first knew Nesta, she was already entering her fifties. I knew her in two roles: as my brother's godmother, and thus a sort of honorary aunt who often came to us at Christmas, and at the same time as the Paris correspondent of The Guardian. The importance of this position was brought home to me by the French teacher at my primary school, a Parisienne married to an Englishman, who exclaimed to the class one day "When I see the paper in the morning, do I read the front page? Or the features? The leaders? The letters? No! I go straight to Nesta Roberts's report from Paris."
She was in France in the 1960s and 1970s, and there's a characteristic glimpse of her in Geoffrey Taylor's Guardian history, Changing Faces, set during les évènements of 1968:
"During the summer disturbances of 1968 her natural sympathies were with the students. Had they not been so to start with they would swiftly have been pushed in that direction when she found herself repeatedly bolting from the riot police and choking from tear gas over the story she dictated to Ethel Alsoe, the copytaker in Manchester. Once, after a heavy day at the barricades, she went to 6 o'clock mass at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. (Her persuasion was High Anglican, but in France Rome had to suffice.) She was conscious of noise outside and although M. le Curé administered the mass as usual he hastened out immediately afterwards. He then reappeared on the chancel steps to announce that things outside were a little agitated, and recommend a safe route home for those who had received the sacrament. Outside the church Miss Roberts resumed her reporting role as the paving stones were once again hurled across the boulevard, to be answered once again by the tear gas."
But Paris came at the end of her career, which stretched back to the 1930s. As you could tell from her name, though not as far as I could detect from her voice, Nesta came from Wales (and sometimes tried to convince me of the superiority of rugby to other sports). She worked her way through the local papers there and in Lincolnshire before she finally arrived at The Manchester Guardian in 1947, when she was already 34 - though she had been writing "back-pagers" - 1,000 word essays - for the paper since she was 19. She described herself as its first woman reporter; there were certainly women journalists on the MG before that, but it may be true that she was the first taken on in a reporting role. It led to what she described as "a fine, confused and immensely enjoyable career, which included feature writing, small-time dramatic criticism, covering horse trials and being a very bad News Editor and a rather good Health and Welfare Correspondent". Her spell as news editor came when the Guardian first started to print in London, in 1961, and was probably the phase she enjoyed least; health and welfare were more to her liking, and she wrote and co-authored various books on social services and mental health.
Then came France, where she felt her Celt roots gave her a natural sense of belonging. In her 1976 book, The Face of France, she describes a moment of yearning for Paris:
"Home has nothing to do with England, and is more specific than just Paris. As for so many of the French, it means a quartier, which is something far more restricted than the arrondissement, being a clearly defined, though often irregular area within which one is a known member of a known community, where life proceeds on familiar tracks, where on a ses habitudes. For me, its core is the narrow canyon of the rue du Dragon in the sixth arrondissement. It contains the little bar where I sometimes have breakfast on Saturdays, and the lady in the wine shop who tells me about her rheumatism, and the small family restaurant where I have watched the son of the house, the third generation, grow from a little boy who went to bed early into a tall lad capable of giving a hand in the enterprise, and M. Guy who does my hair and is good for a loan in extremis, and the shoemaker and his wife who were among my earliest friends and counsellors. There are extensions. On the one side they reach down into the boulevard, with the Flore and the Deux Magots and Lipp, but not the drugstore, and the bookshop that stays open until eleven p.m. and the place, with the church, and the rue de l'Abbaye as far as the place Furstenburg. On the other they go along rue Cherche Midi as far as the wonderful baker whose wood-fired oven lies under the street, along rue du View Colombier, where there is the pâtisserie that makes the best tarte au citron in Paris, to the place St. Sulpice, for the sake of the fountain and the shops that sell crib figures at Christmas, and, beyond that the Marché St. Germain where, daily, the country comes into Paris. That is it, and within those few acres, with a dispensation to go up to the Luxembourg Gardens or down to the quais for exercise, any reasonable person can lead a full life."
In Manchester Nesta had lived a few minutes' walk from where I am now, but, given her flats in London and Paris, I thought of her as a cosmopolitan; we were a little surprised when she chose to retire to Louth, in Lincolnshire, where she had worked in her youth. But she seemed to settle happily into that community, and especially its church - perhaps she saw it as her quartier - and remained in her own home until after she suffered a stroke in her nineties. She was the obvious person to give the address at my father's funeral; I am not sure who is left to speak at hers.
My brother had taken it upon himself to supervise her care, in collaboration with the vicar, as her health declined and she accepted the move into a nursing home in Louth. He frequently drove over to see her, and as her speech began to fail used to entertain her by reading out the Guardian letters page. I went with him last summer, by when she was beyond words and recognition, though in case she could still absorb some sense from speech I described the village in France where I was about to return for le quatorze juillet. Since then, my mind has kept returning to an article she wrote about Colette, and her wondering sympathy as she contemplated Colette's last days as "a writer who could no longer write". Did she foresee that she might reach that pass, and further?
Nesta was very good to me; I have read the postcards she sent me when I was a child, in which she mimicks the rambling style of childish prose perfectly, and I remember her taking me to the theatre, as well as sending me books. (Sadly, I don't think she ever finished her novel set in Florence, The Lily and the Rose.) Later, she sent me thoughtful advice when I drifted into journalism. But she doted on my brother, her godson, from the days when she used to come round to give him his bath in the early 1950s. Though she had women friends, there was a general understanding that she was a man's woman; she never married - I believe her fiancé was killed in the war - but had a few close men friends (not, I think, boyfriends; my brother said the one he knew best was gay). I am not sure whether she called herself a feminist; she was one by force of her example, rather than through the active campaigning of Mary Stott. They were colleagues and friends, but the time I met them together I detected a hint of mutual exasperation. I do know that as a High Anglican Nesta opposed the introduction of women priests.
Thinking it over, I wonder if her strongest influence on me was not in the field of journalism, but in her devotion to public transport. She would have loved the recent introduction of the free bus pass for over-sixties. I don't know whether she ever learned to drive - I never saw her at a wheel - but she revelled in buses and trains, and writing about her journeys on them, and impressed upon me that this was the most interesting way to travel.
She loved travel, so it's as strange to think of her life shrinking to Louth, and then the nursing home, and finally her bed as it is to think of the gradual vanishing of her language. But I think her religious faith means that she would have accepted it as the conclusion of her story, and it's done now.
Geoffrey Taylor's obituary of Nesta in The Guardian