When were you at your happiest? When I was first married and believed it would last forever. What is your greatest fear? Every mother's greatest fear: the death of a child. Who has been your greatest influence? What do you most dislike about yourself? What is your most treasured possession?
What trait do you most deplore in others? Talent wasted through laziness. Do you have a fantasy address? What do you dislike about your appearance? By the time you're my age, there's very little left to really like. Fashion becomes camouflage. What is your all-time favourite book? What is your favourite film? Your favourite meal? Who would you most like to come to dinner? Which historical character do you most admire?
That little terrier, Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, because only death could stop him. Imagine a staircase, said my friendly mathematician. At the top of the staircase two maths teachers, Pat and Alex, are happily chatting to each other about maths.
On the bottom step stands a five-year-old. On the second step stands a six-year-old, and so on. The maths teachers cannot easily adjust their communication level about maths to either of them… or a ten-year-old or a fourteen-year-old.
But a good maths teacher needs to be able to communicate well about maths on every level of the staircase. Shirley Conran. Toggle navigation Navigation. Catch a Tiger by the Tail Often, the most difficult step in starting a business is the second step: perhaps growing it from keeping a few chickens to expanding into a poultry farm, to becoming a country-wide supplier.
Five minutes into our conversation and she's describing the favourite sexual fantasy of British women and why it isn't for her we'll come back to this, fear not.
Ten minutes in and she's recommending a method for finding out whether one's husband is being unfaithful. By the time we've been talking for 20 minutes, we will have touched on masturbation, transvestite husbands and, more prosaically, what she regards as the last taboo for women: the subject of money and how best to get their hands on it.
But first, we must talk about Lace. To mark its birthday, the novel is being republished by Canongate with a new afterword by the author and a wild new cover cross an old Duran Duran video with an s billboard for Rimmel cosmetics and you're about halfway there.
Is thrilled it's being republished? Canongate have been wonderful. They've allowed me to write the word 'masturbation' back into the copy. When Lace was first published, Michael Korda [the publishing giant who was Conran's editor] said the world wasn't ready for it. We had to use a polite euphemism. But now we have the verb.
She sips her coffee contentedly. Boys see girls Essex-ed up to the eyebrows and that's what they expect: no pubic hair and I dread to think what else. Does this mean that she considers Lace a feminist novel? Certainly, and having reread it myself — I first read it at school, where it travelled like contraband from schoolbag to schoolbag — I'm inclined to agree. I'd forgotten how fiery her heroines are, the triumphant way they throw off — even if it sometimes takes them a while — bad relationships.
Its women characters love men and designer clothes they wear darling little suits by Gucci or flouncy dresses by Zandra Rhodes. But most of all, they love work. Work is a balm. Work is freedom. Work can take a girl anywhere. The book is about four friends. The story begins at a finishing school in Switzerland, where they first meet shortly after the war. It ends in , in Manhattan's most exclusive hotel, where a young woman shouts at them: "Which one of you bitches is my mother?
Maxine, who turns her husband's champagne estate into a multimillion-pound hotel operation, was based on a girl at Conran's finishing school and her career inspired by the transformation of Woburn Abbey the Dowager Duchess of Bedford is an old friend. Pagan, who recovers from alcoholism to become a leading fundraiser for cancer research, was inspired by another schoolfriend, while Pagan's lover, Prince Abdullah of Sydonia, is basically King Hussein of Jordan as a young woman, Conran spent two years chaperoning her friend while she and the king, then a Sandhurst cadet, dated.
Judy, who becomes one of America's most successful PRs, was modelled on Betsy Nolan, the publicist who first encouraged Conran to write a novel. As for Kate, a war correspondent who goes on to set up a successful women's magazine, Verve! But the book began its life as non-fiction. By , Conran was already the author of Superwoman , the bestselling housework manual in which she told women life is too short to stuff a mushroom; Forever Superwoman , which was about having young children and remaining sane; and Futures , a guide to the menopause.
Her plan was that her next book would be a guide to sex for schoolgirls. I spent 18 months researching it. But then I got so bored I thought I might as well have a go at writing a novel. So Lace is really intensely researched sexual information dressed up as a novel.
Ah, yes. The sex. The naughty bits in Lace are pretty, well, naughty and certainly a good deal more satisfactory than anything in EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey. The bit where Judy ties her married lover to the bed and covers him with olive oil is particularly, er, well drawn. So was it…?
My voice trails off. Oh dear. How to put this? Conran gives me a look. I suppose I am. I did not find it erotic. Maybe some people sit at the typewriter having masturbatory fantasies.
But not me. I'm too intent on my spelling. Has she read Fifty Shades of Grey? I'm sure that never influenced their sexuality. Look, we have to salute the achievement that it's selling millions, but I can't think why. The writing is so jerky. I mean… all those bits, sticking in your bum! I hope the schoolmaster goes underneath. You see, I'm a very practical person, being a Virgo.
These are the kind of thoughts I find intruding on me. Not erotic at all. Was she surprised Lace was a hit? She sold 3 million copies and it was made into a mini-series starring Phoebe Cates.
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