Persuaded by my friend Nicky Mayhew to celebrate my 91st birthday by reviving my neglected blog, which started life exactly ten years ago, I am relieved to find one piece that I never got round to posting, perhaps because it was already a long time since its subject had died.
And so Eric is coming to my rescue once again: described by Michael Frayn as ‘the cleverest human being he had ever met’, I know him also to have been one of the kindest. I will never forget his prompting my Hebrew at my wedding, nor how (many years later) he relieved me of the unenviable task of ending the lives of three new-born kittens for whom I could not find a home . . .
I saw Eric quite often and it is difficult to decide which occasion is most worth recalling . . . perhaps when, as best man at my wedding, he prompted my faltering Hebrew. It was a bit outlandish, my getting married in a synagogue, but when I had gone to see the rabbi and asked if it mattered that I didn’t believe in anything and that he would probably never see me again, he said No, it didn’t.
I wasn’t surprised, therefore, on finding – when reading Craig Brown’s Beatles book the other day – that it was that same rabbi, Dr Louis Jacobs (pictured left), who conducted the memorial service for the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, in a very different spirit from that of the disapproving rabbi who had carried out the funeral service.
What other occasions were particularly memorable? One was visiting Eric in his digs above a shop in the high street. We were both in our first year at Oxford. I had never before (nor since) been in a room with ordnance survey maps – dozens of them – hanging from the ceiling. It was like walking through a rain forest.
And I had never been on a motor bike until Eric, now teaching at Keele, took me out on his. Perhaps hoping to match the feats of his oldest friend, whose biking days are memorialised in that brilliantly moving film, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, Eric took the hilly terrain at hair-raising speed.
I have often wondered what can it have been like to teach a class which had Eric and Oliver and Jonathan Miller in it? All were at St Paul’s at the same time as my ex-husband, although he was studying not frogs’ spawn and molluscs but iambic pentameters.
Eric was, of course, interested in Greek too for there was no subject which didn’t interest him. No wonder he became one of the regulars on the BBC’s Round Britain Quiz and for many years wrote a dazzlingly witty and erudite column for the TLS.
But, for me, this paunchy little North London bookseller will be remembered most fondly for his many kindnesses and for not seeming to mind that I couldn’t keep up with him intellectually any more than Rabbi Jacobs had appeared not to mind my not believing in God.