Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe - a really enjoyable read

This book is comprised of letters. In 1982 the 20-year-old Nina came to London to work as a nanny to the lively sons of  a single parent who lived in Camden. The mum worked at the London Review of Books and lived in the most literary street in town! Across the road lived Alan Bennett, who came round to dinner every evening and made helpful suggestions about the food, and everything else. Along the road lived the Millers. Jonathan Miller seemed to be famous for his operas. Nina got the impression he was an opera singer, and when she mentioned his singing everyone thought her hilarious. Next door lived Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin, with their son, and further along lived Debbie Moggach. These are just some of the characters who pop up in the story of Nina: (Nina and how she discovered literature!) the best thing about it being that Nina had no idea these letters to her sister, a nurse back home, would ever be published. She wrote about the minutiae of life: like the fridge making a noise, what the other nannies said, what the boys said, what Mary-Kay said.  She reports many conversations exactly like writing a play.

The reason her style is so great is that she lets all the characters speak for themselves.  She has a quite simple way of writing about her likes and dislikes, but she finds other people so interesting that she doesn't seem to write about herself much. (She is hardly going to describe herself to her sister, is she?) So we have her voice and we have all her comments about everyone, and she is young and fun, having a good time, with a great talent for taking people as they come. I didn't find the letters funny to start with but she becomes very funny as time goes on.

An article by Nina takes me back to that time, they were great times to be young. There was a rush to get into the few good jobs but it was equally OK to take low-level jobs and save to travel. But of course we worried that we were missing the boat. It's only natural.

(This is the 2nd half of it. It's all here. )

Being a London nanny was fantastic. The family was fun to be with and I fitted in like an older sister. To start with, I was preoccupied with domestic stuff, and my letters reveal much about the grocery shopping, the choice of soap powder and Mary-Kay's hair cuts. Then I met a friend, the helper at biographer Claire Tomalin's house (next door but one) and he dispelled the "You can't go to university" myth. In fact, he said "You should go" and my boss agreed, even though it would be quite inconvenient for her.

And it changed me. It wasn't that I had been excluded or underprivileged, I had had my share of devoted teachers and my family home was crammed with books, but the double whammy of not being entered for O-levels and being told I would never go to university had defined my adult life up to then. Having clever, trustworthy people around me saying I had all sorts of options marked a change of outlook for me. I stopped worrying about whether or not someone made their share of cups of tea or what shoes they wore and picked up a book. It sounds corny, but it's true.

So I read books that were interesting enough to captivate or stuffy enough to annoy, and I went to study humanities at Thames Polytechnic. It was marvellous: the learning, but more so "being a student". I was surrounded by silly 18-year-olds such as my friend Stella who lazed around and took it all for granted, earnest mature students whose work was well thought out and always typed, dropouts who should have been at Cambridge or Bristol, and local people who gained access and were as thrilled as I was to be there. It was a beautiful mix, and our tutors were of the modern type who had read Stuart Hall and Terry Eagleton and scrapped with the fuddy‑duddies. They took us to see plays and to hear thinkers think and talk, and I think we learned to think and to talk ourselves.

In 1987, we graduated and most of us just got jobs in shops or cafes. Some got stalls at Camden market and sold handmade trinkets or multicoloured candles and had the weekdays off to make the trinkets in front of the telly. We earned enough to pay the rent and buy paperbacks and have a niceish time reading and chatting in our dingy flats until the moment seemed right (a couple of years later, usually) to move into our "professional career". Unlike graduates of today, we didn't think we had missed the boat, we didn't panic about not having stepped on to any sort of ladder.

I don't think it was just me. Graduates back then were confident that opportunities were there but, mainly, we weren't made to think of ourselves as successes or failures, particularly at such a young age. Of course, there were fewer graduates then and most of us had grants so we didn't have huge bills to pay when we left. There was less parental expectation and, consequently, less parental involvement. We never expected to live at home again as many have to nowadays. We probably also never considered working for free (in internships or work experience).

In the 1980s, graduates I knew chose to earn enough to pay the rent and to work in "dead-end" jobs for a while. Graduates now have to do the same but the difference is that they feel they have failed by doing so, that they are wasting their time. Is this just about student loans or is it part of a bigger panic about losing out? Is it forgetting part of the reason why they went to university in the first place? And should we stop this rushing into adulthood, this panic about success? Quite possibly, reading a wonderful novel behind the till of an empty shop is a good, and, dare I say, more "productive" way to spend your early 20s.