IF SOMEONE’S front garden reflects their personality, then I was in love. I make a mental note to maintain a professional distance as I gingerly pick my way between poppies, sprays of foxgloves and unkempt clumps of grass before arriving at Deborah Moggach’s front door.
Ushered into a sitting room to wait by her son Tom, who is preparing a “birthday surprise”, I find further clues. Faded Eastern throws, a reminder of her years living in Pakistan, cover sofas, above which hangs a distinctive Dutch painting.
It was this very picture that proved a key reference for Tulip Fever, Moggach’s bestselling novel, inspired by the desire to “walk into a Vermeer painting”. Framed in the sunshine as she walks through the door, I am first struck by how tall Moggach is, before she settles herself on a sofa opposite me, her spring of blonde curls spilling over handsome, serious features.
“I said it off the top of my head,” says Moggach, referring to the Tulip Fever inspiration, tucking her bare feet up under her. “I was sitting on a panel at the cinema in the Empire Leicester Square.” Incredibly, this was the same place where her long-term partner, cartoonist Mel Calman, had died of a heart attack mid-showing four years previously.
“It felt a bit weird. However, a film producer was in the audience and contacted me saying he liked my idea. I walked on the Heath and thought up a plot and ended up writing it as a novel. It was this that caught Spielberg’s eye. He called me from his car, and said that he’s never been so excited by a film. It was going to be this $48million dollar film, to be directed by Shakespeare In Love’s John Madden, starring Jude Law and Keira Knightley.”
And then, as if Gordon Brown didn’t have enough excuses to be unpopular, he closed a film funding tax loophole that effectively axed any chance of the film being made. “We still had 12,000 tulips all ready to flower for one of the film scenes. I had so many spare tulips that I ended up giving away bulbs. Now in people’s gardens all over Hampstead tulips are flowering which are from my film!”
Moggach was nominated for a Bafta for her adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley. “I remember one heady moment with Donald Sutherland on set when he took me by the hand and led me through a ball scene, pointing out all the amazing faces of the extras,” she says.
Moggach turns her hand to both novels and scriptwriting, and has a keen sense for the visual, as well as for intense characterisation. Although she claims to have stopped drawing her inspiration from her life at an early stage, many of her novels seem to have their root in some home truth, such as her latest book In the Dark, a novel charting the war-time romance of a Southwark hostel keeper seduced by the wares of a profiteering butcher. The doomed affair mirrors that of her grandmother, who was born in Keats’ house.
“My grandmother had lost her husband, her brother and 11 cousins to the First World War. Then she was wooed and married by a doctor, and ended up being a very unhappy,” she remembers. “She still remembered horses slithering down Haverstock Hill in the snow and when you would hire a horse and cab for a day to go to the Army & Navy stores.”
It is often said that once rockstars make their millions they lose the inspiration that has made them famous, no longer provoked by the gilded sterility that surrounds them. Moggach, who for decades lived and wrote in the grittier Camden Town, recognizes the shortcomings of writing in Hampstead.
“I like portraying people who are marginalised, lost and washed up in life. In somewhere like Hampstead you are protected like that. The real world isn’t Hampstead. It’s a charmed existence.”
One of her depictions of marginalization came with the toecurling Porky, a tale of incest set, for true grit value, on a pig farm near Heathrow. “My father was really uncomfortable about it,” she laughs. “He said ‘I think it’s really good, but don’t write anything like it again’”.
Moggach seems quite closed when discussing her personal life - and much more game when discussing her novels. She claims not to be affected by the ‘novelist-syndrome’ – of being an interior, thoughtful character, being more comfortable with a simple, analysis-free approach.
Whilst disappointed at not being afforded a deeper delve into her creative process, her passion for all things Hampstead is contagious: “I get all my ideas from swimming in the ponds on the Heath. When you’re submerged the ideas come. The Heath is the distillation of the countryside” she says. “I’m all for development in north London as long as it’s sensitive. However, you can’t keep Hampstead in aspic!”
And with that, Deborah Moggach is gone, off to enjoy her birthday surprise.
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Should be recommended for an international PEN award.Pòease forward current photograph,
I love it!