Polly Devlin interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2004

The first thing that twenty year old Polly Devlin from Tyrone noticed about Vogue House was that it was a big building with ‘Vogue’ written over the door, so you couldn’t miss it.  But miss it she did, arriving there in 1964 to take up a position in the Features Department.  She got out of the lift on the wrong floor and when she eventually did find the right floor, the door wouldn’t budge.  ‘As usual,’ Polly said, ‘I was pulling when I should have been pushing.’
Polly Devlin is possessed of the kind of positive energy that brings to mind the character of Pollyanna, the little girl with the big heart who made the most of every situation, however pessimistic everyone else is.  Like Pollyanna, she is a heroine in the truest sense of that word, inspiring good and extrapolating potential from those she comes into contact with.  Unlike Pollyanna, Polly Devlin is also a realist, and a realist will succeed where an optimist sometimes fails.
In the hearts and minds of millions of girls the world over, ‘Working at Vogue’ is an ambition so elevated as to appear in capitals, even in the imagination.  In the life of Polly Devlin, ‘Working at Vogue’ was something that happened to her, when at the tender age of twenty she won their famous talent competition and landed a job, but it did not render her delirious.  Not like being in love, or thinking about her three children, she says.  Even though it transported her from rural Tyrone where nobody had a telephone, to a fashion magazine life in the most sophisticated city in the world.  Where the skinny, aristocrat’s daughters in mini-skirts flirted with photographers and rock stars and talked about things that Polly had never heard of.
‘It’s like being a provincial at Versailles’, she wrote to her sister Val, at home in Ardboe.  ‘It’s like suddenly accessing the future.  I feel very atavistic somehow, as if I was wearing a shawl.’
Atavistic is a word that crops up repeatedly in conversation with Polly Devlin.  Horror of horrors, I don’t know what it means.  I don’t even own a dictionary, so I can’t look it up.  I will have to guess.  It will be my little secret.  A scary secret, seeing as I am interviewing a writer of the highest calibre, a passionate, considered and lyrical writer whose acclaimed memoir of her atavistic childhood ‘All of us There’ is about to be re-launched in February at the Irish Embassy in London.
The little girl on the cover of Polly’s book is a cheeky  thing, with an open, mischievous face and reddish blonde hair.  She is dressed in a clean, well-worn smock that could date from the Victorian era. I don’t ask who the girl is.  In my fantasy she has moved my-fair-lady-like from rags to riches, from street urchin to sophisticate and I am already writing the screenplay in my head, as the real life Polly walks into the restaurant of the Ritz.
‘We all know how you can demoralize an Irishman,’ Polly writes, in her book.  ‘Nobody is easier to demoralise by parading manners and social graces, and by making him feel socially ill at ease.’
The Ritz – enshrined as it is as the epitome of elegance and expensiveness,- is a good place to examine someone’s social pretensions.  From the tourists who gape open mouthed at it to the nouveau riche who pretend to be at home with it, each and every response says something about how one sees oneself in the pecking order.  But true grace comes from within and cannot be bought, sold or put on, as Audrey Hepburn demonstrated.  Polly Devlin is dressed for the Ritz in her fur, but she is also clearly at ease with her surroundings.  Later in the conversation she will stop the tape while she informs me that she married into the English upper class, (her husband, engineer Andy Garnett was one of the Chelsea Set along with Lord Snowdon) but she doesn’t want to put it that bluntly in case it is misinterpreted as classist.  She is not a snob.
In the course of my life and work I have had occasion to mingle with rich people, poor people, posh people and not so posh people.  The most delightful of all are the kind that neither look up to you nor look down on you, but meet you head on, with interest and compassion.  Polly Devlin has all the trappings of the socially superior, but she’s not afraid to meet you head on.  So unafraid that she tells me that I’m rude to blow my nose so loudly at the table and then hoots with laughter as she informs me that in Japan it’s worse than farting.  Whether deliberate or not, it sets my mind at ease.  We are allowed to laugh about such things, it says.
The young girl from Tyrone was not, it transpires, born in a barn, but rather in a large Edwardian house with a dining room and a breakfast room and servants.
‘A breakfast room?’ I enquire, impressed.
‘Yes, a breakfast room,’ she confirms.  I consider the implications of this for my movie, and decide that it complicates things, but it is a detail that can be worked on.  In real life, of course, there is no such thing as black or white.  The girl who went to work at Vogue and gushed about interviewing Bob Dylan and being driven at 100 mph by David Bailey in an E-type Jag was a girl who had been accustomed to a degree of sophistication above the ordinary.  Her mother was a blonde protestant girl, her father a handsome and relatively rich Catholic.  Her mother never really came to terms with what she had left behind.
‘  My mother was a very clever woman,’ Polly says.  ‘The thing that got me into writing was discovering a story that she had written in a magazine about the man who had helped Jesus carry the cross.  My mother wrote about this shadowy character in a startlingly good way, she could have been a great writer.  The other thing that she did was to read us poetry.  How many Irish parents would do that?’            Polly’s mother was a sophisticate who read Vogue and spoke French….
‘And she had been stuck in an atavistic life, there wasn’t a car in the neighbourhood, apart from ours. She had been having a middle class existence in Warrenpoint, with cars and tennis and telephone calls, a golden childhood.  And she went to live in a place where the women wore a forlorn black shawl.’ 
I know that Polly is an adoring mother to her own three daughters, but her mother was not adoring.
‘No, she wasn’t,’ she says simply.  The way she cuts off the thought speaks volumes.  The way she stops speaking, seems lost for words.  ‘Subtext,’ is how she herself might describe it.  Her mother noticed the one B in with all the A’s.  When ‘All of Us There’ was published, she enquired as to who Polly thought might want to read such a book.  Her father was different.  Handsome, omnipotent, charming, he told stories and sang songs and admired everything about his children.  ‘If you picked your nose, he thought you were great,’ she says, lighting up at the memory.
Polly came from a family of seven children.
‘A mother can’t bond with seven children,’ she says.  ‘It’s too many.  The great lie about big families is how close they were.  They were close to each other through survival.’
In the book, the relationship with her sisters is explored for its challenges as well as its intensity.  For the chains as well as the bonds.  She is immensely proud of her siblings and mentions in particular her brother Barry who founded the folk-rock group Horslips and her sister Marie, a writer married to the poet Seamus Heaney.  Polly’s first literary accolade came at the age of six, as a result of stealing a poem which Marie wrote and appropriating it as her own.  She felt guilty, she told a journalist.  But one has to consider the fact that she was a Catholic and Catholics always felt guilty, no matter what they did, because you could sin with a bad thought as easily as with a bad deed and some thoughts you might not even recognise as bad.  On this subject, she is deeply incisive and hilariously funny. 
It is a book that deals with enormous issues, issues such as Anglo-Irish politics, the oppression of the Irish Catholic and the subsequent repercussions of that oppression. 
‘One of the reasons that Parnell decided to do something was because he saw a man being tied to a cart and whipped on his stomach until his bowels fell out,’ she says passionately.  ‘If some little Anglo-Irish shit on a horse met a man walking who he didn’t think was respectful enough, he could horse-whip him to death.’
  As a result, she points out, the Irish learned to keep their mouths shut, never to call attention to themselves.  And it is a habit which has stuck.  As a nation, we don’t like to boast about ourselves or our achievements.  It is social suicide.  But it’s okay to brag about your kids.
‘I am very blessed with my children,’ she informs me.
‘I want you to imagine something.  Lets go back to the fifteen sixties, okay?  We are at a breakfast, you and me.  And this woman is talking about her son and she says ‘I know I am a fond mother, but I have got an extraordinary son.  You should hear the way he uses English.  He is a genius.’
And she goes out to the loo and another woman says ‘That Mrs Shakespeare, she has some notion of her son!’’
Every mother has this idea about her children, she says, ‘But my children have done it.  It’s not a fantasy, you open Vogue and you will see it.  Fashion changes because of my Bay.’
Following their mother’s footsteps, the Garnett girls are the kind of girls that movies could be written about.  Their names crop up regularly in the most fashionable places, and each one has inherited their mother’s creativity. 
‘Have you seen Vogue?’ Polly asks.  I haven’t, as yet, I confess.  ‘We must go and buy it!’ she says. Two of her girls, Bay the youngest and Daisy the second are in Vogue this month.  In fact they are almost always in Vogue.  Daisy is a writer and Bay is a contributing editor.  This month also, Bay-who is also remarkably beautiful-models for Mario Testino in Italian Vogue.  ‘Ten pages!’  Polly says delightedly.  It is evident that she takes far more pleasure in seeing her girls in Vogue than she took from her own stint with the magazine, even though Diana Vreeland famously cabled her from America to compliment her on her prose and to buy her services as a writer.
I meet Daisy at the very same Vogue building that her mother wrote home about.  But Daisy’s route to Vogue had nothing to do with nepotism.  She was living in New York, five years ago, simply having fun, when she met a man at a party.
‘His name was Charles Gandee,’ she tells me,  ‘And he was some kind of editor at American Vogue.  I told him that I wanted to write and that I had already written an article.  He said I should show him something I had written.  I hadn’t written anything at all, so I went home and wrote a piece that night and showed it to him the next day, and he used it.  He didn’t give me a job, but he began to give me regular work.’ 
She was lucky enough, she says, to have been in the right place at the right time and to have had the nerve to blag a job.  For a couple of years, she freelanced, and was then offered a full time position.
‘I really learned how a magazine works,’ she says.  ‘I wrote everything, even beauty stories.  It was great.’  And after Vogue, she moved to ‘Talk’, Tina Brown’s famous publication, where she stayed for a year and a half, before deciding to go freelance again.  Since moving back to London, a few months ago, she has worked full time at Vogue, commissioning and writing features.
Arriving to meet her, I had just finished reading ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, a satirical comedy about a fictional fashion editor, loosely based, it is claimed, on Anna Wintour, the notoriously frosty Vogue editor.  I was, therefore, half expecting to meet a very glamorous bitch, so was relieved and delighted with the gentle, understated and utterly sincere young woman that I met.
‘Daisy is the most competent woman I have ever met,’ Polly says.   ‘But she is also delightfully modest, even though she is a seriously sought-after writer and when she cooks, she cooks like a dream.  You say to her ‘How did you learn to cook like this?’  Because she is your daughter and everything you make tastes of cauliflower cheese!’
When she left New York, Daisy sailed the Atlantic on a small boat, with a few friends.  She had never sailed before and it took two months to complete the trip, but she couldn’t turn down the opportunity, she says.  She has always been adventurous, having hitched a lift to the Antartic at the age of eighteen, while back-packing around Chile and Argentina.
‘It was very cold a very beautiful, ‘she says.  ‘We swam in thermal baths and saw hump back whales and penguins everywhere we looked.’  Just her and a girl friend and a hundred and twenty sailors.  Were the sailors nice?  ‘Oh the sailors were fabulous,’ she laughs.
While writing for the New York Times, Daisy was asked to do a pilgrimage.  There was one that she had always wanted to do, a camel ride across the Syrian desert in the footsteps of such Victorian heroines as Lady Jane Digby and Hester Stanhope, so off she went on her camel.
‘ Even though it’s notoriously difficult to ride a camel!’ her mother laughs, admiringly.  ‘But the thing that I really admire is the way she writes.’
She told me that she will never be as good as you, I say.
‘Did she?  She’s a much better writer than I am!”
I later bought this month’s Vogue, as advised, and had to agree that Daisy writes beautifully, although it wouldn’t be possible to pit one against the other, as they have entirely different styles.
Bay, the youngest, is the most visual of the girls.  She  co-edits a magazine called ‘Cheap Date’ an anti-fashion publication which describes itself as a ‘low budget quarterly for thinking thrifters’.  The fact that the magazine specialises in second- hand bargains makes it ironic that it is now being celebrated by the most glamorous fashion editors in the world, including those at Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, and  Tatler.  Jerry Hall, Anita Pallenberg, Sophie Dahl and David Mamet are contributors to the mag and  Bay has been included in the best dressed lists of American Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, so again I am nervous about meeting her.  I have invested in a Juicy Couture tracksuit for the occasion, which is met with approval by Polly.
  Bay arrives dressed in a beige headscarf and a long skirt, with a wide belt.  The green handbag is vintage Balenciaga.  It’s an eclectic, individualist look that says that the wearer is confident, comfortable and self assured, with innate style and humour.  I don’t think it would suit me, but I am not six feet tall, blonde and gorgeous.  We order decaff-soya cappuccinos in my suite at the Ritz, just to be fashionable and she is delightfully enthusiastic about the experience in a girlish, guileless way.  I kick myself for having doubted her.  While we are chatting, we are interrupted briefly by Matthew Williamson, for whom she is a style director.  Bay apologises profusely and elegantly.   Her ‘Cheap Date’ party, for London Fashion Week, is surely the hottest ticket of the season, and yet this girl, like Daisy, is the antithesis of the fashionista bitch.  She’s warm, likeable and utterly human and she dismisses her achievements casually, assuring me that she has had a tremendous amount of support, in her life and that she doesn’t know how she would have turned out without it.
Bay, like Daisy fell into her position at Vogue, by doing what she loves doing and being in the right place at the right time. 
‘I  always loved clothes and magazines and I have always shopped for second-hand clothes,’ she says.  When she left school, she was offered an internship at the Guggenheim museum in Venice-Peggy Guggenheim is her sister Rose’s godmother.  She loved the work and when she returned to London, she was asked to help out with a magazine called ‘Cheap Date,’ which had been set up by her friend Kira Joliffe.
‘I went to New York and did an issue with her, and stayed for five years,’ she says.  A year ago, she was approached by Vogue and asked to become a contributing editor, and is now well established as a style queen.
Rose, the eldest, is also a writer, she has written plays and films and helped to set up and run the Gate theatre in London’s Notting Hill, where she produced cutting edge plays for four years, but right now she’s engaged in being a mother, having just given birth to her second son.  And being a mother, Polly says, is a full time career.
          Polly herself gave up writing for Vogue to get married and have children, but she always wrote something while the children were growing up, even if they weren’t aware of her working. 
‘I am not nor ever have been a journalist,’ she stresses. ‘I am a born writer.  My talents as a writer are used and sought after by editors because editors love good writing.  So I write for magazines, when they ask me to pick a subject that I like.  Recently, because the book is coming out, I wrote a few things because I really wanted to publicise the book.  It is a very quiet little book which has gone into five editions, and now I want it to reach a wider audience.’
She was lucky, she says because she and her husband lived in a large Elizabethan manor house in Gloucestershire, ‘with all the accoutrements’, ideal for bringing up children and they had nannies and helpful neighbours.
          She met her husband at a dinner party, while she was at Vogue.  It was his party, but she didn’t know him.  On the way to his house, they stopped to collect a French model, who was rather agitated.  She informed Polly that she intended to propose marriage to the host.
          ‘Which would be forward, even now!” Polly says.  During the dinner, the girl banged on her plate for silence and duly asked Andy to marry her.
          ‘Andy handled it beautifully, he said ‘Simone, what a lovely idea!  Lets talk about it later.’ ’
          After the meal, Polly sidled up to Andy and asked him if he intended to marry Simone.
          ‘‘‘Oh no,’ he said.  ‘I’m going to marry you!””
          Was this a turn on?
‘No,’ she says, definitely.  ‘I went out of my way to avoid him, after that.’
When Polly relented and decided to marry him, he had changed his mind.  Polly was heartbroken, but luckily he changed it back again and they have been in love ever since.            Daisy says that it gives her a very positive role model for marriage and makes her feel confident that she too will find the right man and have a family, without having to fret and stress about it.
          ‘I take it for granted that it will just happen,’ she says.  Bay, also, looks forward to having children and Rose is already on her second.  I envy Polly’s girls as I watch their mother watching her mobile phone in case they call, and as I hear her praise them to the heavens, even if it is deserved.  But the children are not the only passion.
          ‘Bugger the great novel!” she says.  ‘My main interest in life, apart from my children is conservation.  Do you know about that?’
          I don’t, I confess.
‘We have about two hundred acres which we have turned into something utterly remarkable,’ she says.  ‘We have planted six thousand trees, made ponds, made lakes.  And we never use fertiliser.  As a result we have one of the greatest orchid fields in England.  Oh, God, Victoria.  Not tens or twenties but thousands of orchids!’
And she speaks with passion about the birds that are disappearing. 
‘In May I went to the Hebrides to find the corncrake and I sat for three days in a field and found it.  If I had a wish outside of the obvious one of my children being well and happy, it would be that before I die, I would hear the corncrake in my field.’
As I am leaving her Holland Park home, armed with a library of press cuttings and photos, I casually mention that we haven’t talked about her OBE.
‘Oh that,” she says dismissively.  ‘That was just for services to literature!”
‘All of Us There’ by Polly Devlin is published by Virago, 9.99 euros.