Never Give Up by Miranda Miller

Diary of a London Writer

Just Arrived (Carrying London to the Sea) by Timothy Hyman 2016

Some of you already know that my beloved brother, the artist Timothy Hyman, died on the 5^th of September, almost exactly a year after his wife Judith Ravenscroft. Here he is in his studio, where he died. This painting he did of Judith in 2016, Carrying London to the Sea, is the one Tim and I chose for the cover of Judith’s remarkable novella, Londinia, Her People, which we published in a small edition a few months ago. She was his muse as well as being a talented writer and Tim was lost without her. I miss them both immensely and I’ve been deeply moved by the many generous messages of sympathy I’ve received from his wide international circle of friends.  

Tim was a very original painter whose canvases record his life with Judith in London over many years. He developed a unique autobiographical visual mythology as a painter and was also an inspirational and much-loved teacher. He wrote about art in a very personal way, free of the usual art history jargon. His articles appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and the London Magazine and Thames and Hudson publish his three books: Bonnard,  Sienese Painting, and The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century.

This is the cover of my ninth novel, When I Was, which will be published by Barbican Press in March. I still get a thrill out of seeing a cover, the evidence that a novel I spent years writing is actually going to be published. This one feels particularly strange because the sulky little girl is me, aged 6, at a children’s party in about 1956. The girl in front, who seems to be enjoying the party more, is my friend Claire who lived next door to me, near Swiss Cottage. This is the only photograph I have of Claire, who grew up to have a distinguished career in academic publishing. We were friends until her death a few years ago.

My new novel is about a girl growing up in London in the 1950s in a family some of you will recognise. This novel is the closest thing I’ll ever write to a memoir; each chapter is based on a memory, but as I excavated behind those memories I found I was unable to write about myself in the first person so I ended up writing from many points of view. As I wrote it, I often felt I was writing a historical novel because attitudes to sex, gender, race and class have (thank God!) changed so much.

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