An Education by Lynn Barber Page B

studies, at the Regent Street Polytechnic and said he could get David a few hours a week teaching ‘general studies’. David was soon fascinated by the course, and switched from teaching general studies to the history of television, which he thought had been seriously neglected. He and Paddy wrote a book on the early years of the BBC. And, as the course expanded, so did David's responsibilities, until at one point he was head of department. He loved those early years at the Polytechnic, when they were still mapping out the territory of media studies and working to get it accepted as a degree subject.
    (I still get furious with people – including, alas, many of my journalist colleagues – who knock media studies as a somehow worthless or frivolous pursuit. I know that the calibre of teaching is not always great, but I don't see how anyone can fault media studies as a subject , given that we live in such a media-dominated age. Isn't it important to give young people some idea of how the media works? Can anyone seriously maintain that Latin is more relevant?)
    After Stockwell, we had a peripatetic few months, scrounging rooms off friends – one of the advantages of David having been to Eton was that he had plenty of rich friends with spare rooms. We stayed for a while in Oakwood Court, Kensington, one of those grand mansion blocks populated by spies and retired civil servants, and then briefly in Mayfair, in the caretaker's flat in the attic of a beautiful Georgian house. It was a wonderful address and a sweet flat – but unfortunately designed for dwarves. There was only a small patch in the middle of the sitting room where we could stand upright and the double bed was smaller than most children's bunks – we could only make love in the position called ‘spoons’. Mayfair, it turned out, was a hopeless place to live. It had no food shops or tobacconists, still less launderettes, and the only place where we could afford to eat was a ‘drop-in centre’ run by a cult called The Process. We learned to eat very quickly before the sparkly-eyed loonies started asking if we'd found the meaning of life. ‘Yep, yep,’ we'd say, ‘pass the ketchup,’ and gulp a few more forkfuls before bolting for the door.
    Eventually David ran into a schoolfriend, S, who asked if we wanted to take over his flat in Haverstock Hill, Belsize Park. It was a fabulous bargain – £8 a week for a well-furnished, three-bedroom garden flat overlooking an absolutely glorious half-acre garden. In theory the garden was our responsibility but luckily Mrs Franks upstairs asked if she could sit in it sometimes in return for her tending it. This proved to be an excellent deal because she was a brilliant gardener and responded well to my occasional orders – ‘More sweet peas’, ‘No marigolds.’ She only put her foot down once when I said we wanted to grow vegetables and she said in her strong German accent, ‘This is a nice neighbourhood. I cannot allow.’ For once in my life, I had the sense not to argue.
    Belsize Park was still in those days a markedly Jewish area with some good delicatessens that closed on Saturdays, opened on Sundays. We lived there for seven years – the only slight mystery was why David's friend S had surrendered this miraculously cheap flat. Eventually Mrs Franks upstairs enlightened us: the man who shared the flat with S had committed suicide one weekend and S came back to find the body. After that, he was unable to live there. Years later, when we left the flat, this had an odd postscript. The landlady asked if we would like to sell her all our carpets, curtains and furniture so that she could let the flat as furnished. We had always assumed that it was furnished, by her, but it turned out that all the stuff in the flat belonged to the man who committed suicide. David got in touch with S to ask if he wanted it – he didn't – so David and I acquired this useful legacy of beds and bedding, carpets and armchairs,