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The Sunday Times
Hey Nonny Handbook just may stop you cracking up
Being affluent and well-educated doesn't always equate to an easy life, but self-confessed middle-class 'crack ups' Julia Jeffries and Janice Warman hope their book will offer a little solace
Karen Robinson
In the tamed and prosperous countryside of the soft south of England, the middle-class dream is lived out. The Mercs and Beemers whisk commuting City husbands from expensively restored houses to Tunbridge Wells station, the privately educated, pony-riding children grow up free-range and organic, and the women . . . crack up.
At least, in the case of Julia Jeffries and Janice Warman, the clever ones do — and now they've written a book about it.
Okay, as human misery goes, the fact that "Janice had her first panic attack in Act Three of Gluck's Iphigenia at Glyndebourne" might not open the floodgates of compassion. But that doesn't mean being affluent and well educated insulates women from life's darker forces.
"I'm happy now," says Jeffries, 57. "But there was a time it was all overwhelming: the garden, the house, mother in a nursing home, children, my husband being very difficult. I had what can only be described as a sort of breakdown.
"Julia used to ring me up and ask, 'Am I normal?'," says Warman. The two women met when their children started school. They each have a girl and a boy, now 15 and 17. Both had moved from London, where Jeffries had been an art teacher until, at the age of 36, she met her (now ex) husband — 42, divorced, two kids — married and moved to a rambling former inn in the Ashdown Forest. Warman, 48, and her husband, a PR executive, had left Clapham for a converted farm cottage down the road. In the playground the women clicked over their shared love of the poetry of Louis MacNeice. Through the responsibilities of increasingly frail elderly parents, health crises, redundancy and financial black holes (Warman had to sell the kids' ponies), literature sustained and consoled them and spread to what they started to call the Hey Nonny Club, "a collection of women who had troubles in their life". Which is what the book they've written is all about.
The Hey Nonny Handbook (Harriman House, £19.99) is a "literary survival guide for women", pulling together all their favourite inspiring and edifying writers. Biography, fiction, poetry, even newspaper articles and cartoons — if they've got something relevant to say, they're in there. The power of poetry is central. "A friend's only son killed himself," Warman recalls. "They were living abroad at the time. I sent her Rilke's Autumn and Cecil Day-Lewis's Walking Away, and they were read at the funeral. Day-Lewis is recalling his son walking into school, but it's about everything to do with growing up, leaving, possibly dying."
Warman writes poems, and her coolly witty verses stud the book. Jeffries sent one to a friend who had "an awkward husband" whom she might have recognised in the lines of There Are So Many Angry Men — ". . . You can see them out at dinner / With their silent wives / Chewing steak with grim demeanour / Clashing knives . . ."
The usual female literary suspects put in an appearance: Dorothy Parker, Germaine Greer, Fay Weldon, Wendy Cope. The title is from Shakespeare's Much Ado (". . . converting all your sounds of woe into Hey nonny, nonny"); Scott Fitzgerald, Graves and Auden are represented. So are those two misogynistic old farts Amis and Larkin, though what they would make of being therapy for unhappy middle-aged women doesn't bear thinking about.
Not that this is, the authors insist, a self-help book. They loathe them, though they make an exception for a 1962 volume called Self-Help for Your Nerves by Claire Weekes. They found it a lifeline during their respective "crack-ups". Jeffries also sought solace in antidepressants, while Warman favours the alternative medical route. It's all in the book — because they believe the burdens that pile up on women as they hit middle age should be acknowledged. "You're the one trying to glue it all together, your health can suffer and nobody cares less," says Jeffries. Or, as Warman puts it:
"So many operate on the edge."
So when does the Hey Nonny Club meet? It's not really that kind of club, Warman explains. "Quite a few of us are in each other's houses and meeting for birthdays, movies, meals. That's when all the stories are shared, the support happens. But when there's a disaster, there's e-mail and phone." The network of Hey Nonnettes is about 50 women, she reckons. "The book is the expression of that friendship between hard covers, what we've all done for each other over the years."
The publisher Warman found, who specialises in business books, got very excited about the Hey Nonny "brand" and as a result a website and two more books are already in the pipeline. The women are relaxed about the brand business, preferring to think of Hey Nonny more as a state of mind. As they sometimes find themselves remarking about a troubled friend: "There's a woman who needs a bit of Hey Nonny."