John Julius Norwich - My astonishing mother (50/136)

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John Julius Norwich (1929-2018) was an English popular historian, travel writer and television personality. He is the author of histories of Norman Sicily, the Republic of Venice, the Byzantine Empire and 'The Popes: A History'. [Listener: Christopher Sykes]

TRANSCRIPT: She [my mother] was absolutely astonishing by any standards, she really was. Did you read the letters she wrote... the 'Darling Monster', the letters she wrote to me? They're marvellous.

[CS] Yeah, she's such a good writer...

Wonderful writer.

[CS] And I've been dipping around on and off into her...

Yes. No, she was really very, very extraordinary.

[CS] Was it... you know, one does wonder what it would be like to be, I don't know, Jean Simmons' daughter or something. Did it have a distorting effect?

No, I don't think so. She was my mother, you know, and that was the important thing to me, much more than... I mean I never thought she's the star of 'The Miracle' or she's this famous society beauty. In fact, I could ever see her beauty at all because I think one can't when it's your mother. You see it every day of your life. And people would say, 'What's it like to have such a beautiful mother?' And I would say, 'I don't know.' I really couldn't see the beauty at all until once, very shortly before she died. She was in bed – she spent her last three or four years in bed – and she was in bed and suddenly I came in and I remember the light was particularly good and I suddenly saw the beauty of this face on its pillow. But this was when she... I mean, it had taken me 70 years to do it. Well, not 70, 55 or 6 years to do it; I was, what was I? I was 56 when she died. But it always... everybody said she's so beautiful but I say it was only really then that I could see it myself.