In the early 1980s, an advert for the job of Katharine’s personal assistant was posted on the noticeboard at the Observer. I was working in promotions and I wanted it so much because I just loved her, I was a huge fan. Like everyone who read her column, I felt I already knew her – she was so bold and fearless, frank and funny, writing about current issues in her very personal way.
When she got my job application, she rang me and asked me to come and have a chat. It was the strangest interview. Not a word about whether I could type or do shorthand. It was: “Do you want a cigarette? Is there a man in your life?” We chatted, she dispensed lots of advice, then she just gave me the job – and I loved it and I loved her.
She truly cared about her readers. She received a hefty postbag of letters every week and she replied to every single one of them. She used to dictate her replies into a Dictaphone and I would type them up. Because people felt they knew her they would write to her about all sorts of things. We heard from a women who had undergone a botched gynaecological procedure. Katharine sent her to her own gynaecologist to have it put right and paid for it. She was so generous. Another time, a young couple wrote to her depressed about how they did not have enough money to ever have any fun. She paid them a surprise visit with armfuls of presents. They kept in touch and she went to their wedding.
Katharine’s husband, the thriller writer Gavin Lyall, would read her column every week before she filed it and she would either be in tears or OK, depending on his reaction. She just doted on him – he was everything to her. She had a vulnerable and insecure side you would not have guessed at from reading her columns.
As well as Gavin, she adored her sons. Jake was good looking, the apple of her eye; Bernard was her rock. And later on she loved being a grandmother too.
She worked mainly from home, but every Wednesday morning, she would come into the paper for the editorial conference. I was never allowed in but I know she held her own among the men – and it was mostly men – in the room.
At lunchtime, she loved going to the Coach and Horses pub around the corner from St Andrew’s Hill [home of the Observer until the late 1980s] with everyone else. She wasn’t grand at all; she was popular and she was great fun. Gin and tonic was her favourite tipple, although later in life she preferred whisky. And she was very sociable, adored going out to book launches, drinks parties, dinners – anything and everything. She couldn’t stop herself. Gavin used to say she would climb over hot ploughshares to go to a party.
She wasn’t just my boss: we were close. We used to go to lunch at Le Meridien in Piccadilly. We talked about clothes and liked the same books. She took me to the theatre and we went to Paris together once to visit [former Observer women’s page editor] Suzanne Lowry. It wasn’t a great trip. Katharine got her purse stolen and fell over and hurt her leg. But generally we had great times together.
She was heartbroken when her column was phased out in 1996. But then she got the job as agony aunt at Saga, which she loved. I helped her reply to the letters. And I helped her again when she came back to the Observer to write for the magazine for a while before she got Alzheimer’s.
I never really stopped working for Katharine right up to the day she died, almost. She would always call me if she ever needed anything doing, like research or difficult phone calls. If I had to choose three things I loved about her, I would say she was generous to a fault – she remembered me in her will – she was funny and incredibly clever. She was the stuff heroines are made of. Usually, when you work for someone, you get to know them so well that you’re aware of all the bad things about them as well as the good. With her, that didn’t happen. My opinion of her simply went up and up. She was just a great woman.
