Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus
By Sandi Toksvig
Published by Virago
Like many people, Sandi Toksvig’s preferred London bus seat is on the front row of the top deck. This is arguably the only conventional fact about the QI and The Great British Bake Off presenter, who after 40 years as a stage, screen and radio personality has finally written her memoir.
It is a bizarre vantage point, but then this is someone who, at the age of seven, strapped her new watch to the “wrong” wrist and has been defying convention ever since. The number 12 bus meanders seven and a half miles from Dulwich in south London, where Toksvig lives with her wife, Debbie, to Broadcasting House in the West End where she works. If you can imagine each stop on this virtual and actual journey as a spider diagram of anecdotes, memories and historical facts (the geek in her ploughed through more than 100 history books in preparation) you get a glimpse of how Toksvig’s big first-from-Cambridge brain works.
Burgess Park? It was where the fabulously named Friendly Female Society asylum for elderly ladies once stood, a place where Toksvig thinks she should like to end her days. Peckham Rye Baptist tabernacle? Cue the story of her born-again-Christian games mistress taking her to a church where Cliff Richard sang. He is one of multiple household names who illuminate her stories, including Lionel Richie (who witnessed her drunkest night), Alan Coren, David Hockney, Monica Lewinsky, John McCarthy, Charlotte Rampling and the smirking David Hare.
My favourite of her musings begins with the observation that young men on the top decks of buses always have one hand down their tracksuit bottoms, leads to an encounter she had with an actual penis on the Tube (which had her — and me — crying with laughter) and ends with the death of a passer-by in 1938, killed by a falling stone phallus from a statue adorning Zimbabwe House near Trafalgar Square.
Her writing style is as kooky and digestible as Bill Bryson’s, her genius as a raconteur inherited from her Danish journalist father who “never let anything get between him and a good story”. It was the family’s peripatetic lifestyle around America and Africa that imbued her with a lifelong fascination for travel and people. If you know Toksvig only as Bake Off’s gagmeister in a loud shirt, this memoir reveals her manifold faces.
There’s the fierce Sandi who rescued a baby from a wife-beating neighbour and the sedulous Sandi who has toiled in a plastics factory. She has written more than 20 books including children’s stories, travel books and a handful of novels. She is an indefatigable campaigner for LGBT and women’s rights, but she is also the fearful Sandi, a target of wincingly cruel treatment from the press, public and Cambridge University for daring to love a woman.
Beyond her wife and three children from a previous partner, the love of her life remains her father, who died prematurely at the age of 59. She recounts numerous examples of their mutual adoration, most movingly on the deck of the Harwich to Esbjerg ferry soon after she had come out in her early twenties and been prescribed drugs as a bizarre antidote to her homosexuality. He put his arm around her and said: “You know this… business. It’s only made me love you more.”
Toksvig’s relationship with her “redoubtable” English mother, who was one of the first female studio managers at the BBC, is more oblique. She is mentioned only as being responsible for Toksvig’s “resilience” and thanked in the acknowledgments for “having me in the first place”. She is more forthcoming about how her workload and activism is taking its toll on her 61-year-old self. Her exhaustion is palpable when she writes: “I have a constant image of myself holding up a shield and never resting. I think I would like to put it down soon.”
Her enduring self-doubt extends to a get-out clause in the book’s foreword, in which she suggests the reader “change seats now” if they think her book is not for them. “Life is too short to read a book that upsets you.” Ignore her self-effacement. Hop on this bus, grab a seat up top and prepare yourself for a fun-filled, fact-packed, memorable ride.