Breathless anticipation, I hear, is sweeping the Cotswolds smart set from Cheltenham to Chipping Norton about the likely arrival of the semi-Royal family. “It is the talk of the school WhatsApp groups”, says my friend Katy, who has lived in the area for 12 years and has three young children. “Some of the mothers are pretending they aren’t excited but everybody is, really”, she tells me over coffee at Soho Farmhouse.

It now seems all but certain that Prince Harry and and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, plan to relocate to the now hugely desirable area, and it isn’t hard to see why. Oxfordshire childhoods are the best kind of childhoods and I should know: I spent 19 years growing up there and return frequently to see my parents. In fact, the lure of Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds grows stronger the older I get.

At 19, I was desperate to escape for the bright lights of London, but as my school friends started trickling back to Oxfordshire in their thirties once they started having children of their own, I too started to appreciate its significant charms all over again.

But my Oxfordshire youth was decades ago, long before the mega money arrived, and before anyone had heard of Soho Farmhouse, Daylesford Organic, or Jeremy Clarkson as a TV farmer. And the only Americans you’d find were military families based at RAF Upper Heyford near Bicester, where if you knew the right people, you could buy real Baskin-Robbins ice cream takeaways, which was wildly exotic for 1980s Oxfordshire.

Of course, we don’t know yet where Archie and Lilibet are going to be educated, but the smart money is on Kitebrook Prep School near Chipping Norton, an idyllic co-ed set in 20 acres of stunning countryside, where fees set you back £8k a term and many pupils go on to elite public schools. But if they end up within a manageable drive of Oxford, the prestigious Dragon School is another good bet. The Dragon is now one of the most expensive prep schools in the country - an eye-watering £17,250 per term for full boarders (equivalent to selling 2,000 jars of Meghan’s As Ever blackberry jam) - and has educated, amongst other acting and monied luminaries, Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, Princess Beatrice’s husband. Could Edo have persuaded Harry and Meghan into it?

At my co-ed, independent Oxford primary in the 80s, we played sport in the vast Dragon playing fields nearby, because our school didn’t have enough space. Then overwhelmingly a boys’ school, the pupils seemed to be permanently in cricket whites, and collected at the school gates by glossy mothers in flowery Laura Ashley dresses, or fathers in cords and straw trilbies.

The academic families were scruffier, and collected by parents with tatty briefcases and bicycle clips on their ankles. Nowadays, money trumps academia amongst Dragon School parents - who can afford those fees on an academic’s salary? - so Harry & Meghan would no doubt find plenty of likeminded friends at the school gates. Kitebrook, I am told, has a similar vibe, minus the academics.

Unlike most Oxford residents, I doubt the Sussexes would break into a sweat about the controversial new toll charge to drive into the city centre, where Archie & Lilibet would not find themselves short of activities, assuming the Sussexes can find somewhere to park the Range Rover. Oxford’s sometimes eccentric, town-and-gown atmosphere would be an excellent antidote to glittery, celebrity-obsessed, vacuous California.

For Sussex family outings, they are spoilt for choice: there’s the world famous Dodo at the Pitt Rivers natural history museum, the enchanting Story Museum - and for a classic 1980s retro experience, Oxford’s ice rink (but the Sussex children would be well advised to avoid the vape-strewn wasteland next to the rink where Oxford’s feral teenagers pass their time.)

We know the Sussex couple went on one of their first dates at Soho Farmhouse near Chipping Norton, the exclusive member’s club half an hour from Oxford, with a waiting list as long as the list of relatives Harry and Meghan won’t be inviting to their house warming. We know they love the place: Meghan had her hen party there and the couple would frequent the club when they lived nearby on the Great New Estate after marrying in 2018. Archie and Lilibet can use the new children’s swimming pool, and they’ll feel at home with the club’s on-site Montecito-style roaming chickens, while Meghan browses the uber fashionable Soho Home interiors shop, where cushions cost £250. Beware weekends though, when its twenty-something members flock in from Hackney.

“The thing is,”, says Caroline, another Cotswolds mother, “they’ll just be driven from gated residence to gated residence and probably won’t mix much”. Which would be a shame, because Oxfordshire offers an idyllic upbringing for children, far away from the gritty urban stresses of London.

As a child, my favourite outings were the Cotswold Wildlife Park near Burford, and the mini train in the grounds of Blenheim Palace - the latter so joyously fun that even as an adult, I will do anything to encourage visiting friends to join me on a ride. Both are still thriving. There’s also the delightful 1930s model village in picture perfect but touristy Bourton-on-the-Water, the crocodile park near Burford, and of course, farm animals and beautiful country walks around every corner. What’s not to like?

Meghan & Harry are no doubt already familiar with what must be poshest farm shop in the country - Daylesford Organic, in Kingham. Owned by the billionaire Bamford family, who have close social ties to the Royal family, it is opulence in the extreme - beautiful mountains of strawberries and sausage rolls, painfully tasteful - and painfully expensive - homeware, and jam to rival Meghan’s - but at £5.50 a jar, it is comfortably cheaper than the Duchess’s at £8.80.

“There are already a lot of celebrities living out here who maintain privacy, so they’ll suit the lifestyle”, Katy tells me. “They were already here before [in 2018] and it didn’t make any difference to our lives, if anything it will probably make the Wi-fi signal better because they’ll have lots of security, but they’re not Royal any more so hopefully there won’t be any huge drama”, she says. We wait to see.

I think there's a certain expectation that if I have worked in the media all my life, and mingled in so-called "metropolitan liberal elite" circles for so long, that somehow I must have come across it.

My parents certainly did: my mother recalls apple cores being thrown at her in her south London primary school in the early 1950s where she was the only Jewish pupil, and later being forced to eat pork at her strict Christian boarding school; my father's north London boys' school had a quota of Jewish pupils, believe it or not.

Thankfully, I didn't experience anything like that in my comfortable Oxfordshire childhood, or indeed very much as an adult working as a journalist, predominantly at the BBC.

But what that means is that when antisemitism has reared its ugly head, they are moments I remember vividly. The incidents seem to have lodged themselves in my mind in a place where I just cannot shove them aside. They shocked me so much that I felt a physical pain in the pit of my stomach.

Perhaps the fact they came from the mouths of highly educated, so-called "liberal elites" means they were all the more shocking, because I do not expect people I know and work with to hold such absurd, medieval views.

As BBC journalists, we are trained to discuss sensitive and highly charged political or racial issues without conveying an opinion. I know many people find this hard to believe - but I genuinely could not tell you how most of my former colleagues voted.

You simply couldn't get by in a busy newsroom if you were highly partisan - and mostly, anyone who did dare express a political viewpoint or a controversial opinion in an editorial meeting was met with stony silence or dirty looks. I don't think all of the BBC is like that - but certainly in the newsrooms I worked in, that was the ethos, and it worked well.

Perhaps I should have been more demonstrative some years back, when a senior editor said to me - in response to my documentary suggestion looking in-depth at the rise of antisemitism across Europe - that perhaps there was too much focus on Jews, and that people will say, "what about Islamophobia?". The film never got made. I didn't make a fuss.

But the occasion that left the deepest stain and came out of nowhere was a casual lunch with colleagues. We were all young(ish) - nobody over 45 - and had worked in various editorial roles, some fairly senior. We got along very well.

About six of us arranged to meet for lunch. As we sat outside, tucking into our BBC canteen sandwiches and chatting about colleagues and summer holidays and rotas, the conversation turned to staff changes, as it so often does when you get two or more BBC employees together in their free time. A new controller of Radio 4 had recently been appointed.

Suddenly, the journalist sitting next to me - a man with whom I had recently been away filming and got on well with - said to the group: "I'm sure she's Jewish".

There was a confused silence. I was a little dumbstruck.

"Is she?" said somebody. "I've got no idea", mumbled another, quietly.

I'd worked at the BBC for a long time but had never heard of this woman, and nor did she have an obviously Jewish name. And it's just a fact of life that if she was Jewish and had risen so far through the ranks, I think I would have heard of her. There would have been a double-page profile in the Jewish Chronicle; my cousins would have asked me if I knew her, and I would have looked her up on LinkedIn to see if we knew anyone in common.

My head was whirring. Why is he so interested in whether she is Jewish or not? Why does he think that the most important thing to mention? And why the hell is he saying this out loud?

Turning red, feeling my insides start to boil up, I eventually pipe up: "I don't think so. Anyway, why do you care?"

"Well there are so many Jews at Radio 4", he replied.

I'm stunned and virtually speechless. Suddenly everybody looks awkward; I feel eyes turn towards me.

I decide to go on the offensive. "Well by the same token you could say that there are a lot of gay people at Radio 4!", I say rather pathetically. ("What the f*ck are you talking about, you pathetic racist!" is what I now wish I'd had the courage to say.)

The person sitting on the other side of me senses the putrid fumes that have blown over our table and comes to my defence. "Ha, yes that is very true. I don't think she is anyway." There are nods of agreement and reddening faces.

Our Jew-obsessed friend carries on digging. "Well maybe her husband is or something. I'm sure I heard that."

What is this, the west London Jew police? Does this man - whom I am not going to name - sniff out every single Jewish gene from everyone he works with so he can establish their exact heritage? Is that what he talks about with his friends? And what on earth must he have said about me, knowing full well that I'm Jewish?

In that precise moment, I suddenly saw him in an entirely different light. A man who I had worked closely with - who seemed open-minded and intelligent and had a successful BBC career that would no doubt make many people envious.

Would he say this in front of his bosses, I wonder? I expect not. His guard was down, he was relaxing over lunch and, I suspect, had forgotten that he was in the company of someone Jewish. I dread to think what more he might have said if I had not been there.

A few days later I did the pre-woke equivalent of cancelling someone - I unfriended him on Facebook. It felt very satisfying. I also made a mental note that I would not work with him any longer.

Nobody ever mentioned it again, but I often wonder to myself what the others were had been thinking - did they consider that what he’d said was antisemitic? Or was it a pretty standard lunchtime chatter that unfortunately offended a Jewish colleague?
I'm clear in my mind what I'd heard: and it made me question the views of people I thought I respected.

I was cross with myself for being so naive as to think antisemitic sentiments didn't exist amongst my friends and colleagues. By no means all of them - but amongst a small minority. I felt betrayed. But most of all, I felt depressed that the world's oldest hatred was still alive and kicking where I had least expected it.

Rafi was not my son or my godson, but for half an hour each week, it felt a little bit like he was.

Rafi - not his real name - was one of three 8 year-old boys chosen by his inner London headteacher to receive extra reading help. The children selected were those struggling with reading in various ways, and most were recipients of the ‘pupil premium’: extra school funding for disadvantaged children.

Rafi was very much in that category. He was from a low income, large immigrant family, the youngest of several siblings, and received almost no educational support in his chaotic home. He lived on an estate in an inner city area rife with gang crime. He ticked all the boxes.

Every week, I would spend half an hour with each of the three pupils. The purpose was to improve their reading, of course, but we didn’t just read: we would chat, play games, choose books, discuss schoolwork and holidays - and after several years doing this (under the auspices of the literacy charity, Coram Beanstalk), I’d developed a whip-smart radar for their chosen methods of distraction.

Insects were a favourite distraction for Rafi. He could spot an ant on the other side of the room and spend three minutes watching it and urging me to look at it too, if it got him out of reading a difficult paragraph. After so long reading together, I knew all his tricks.

Typically, the children would do the weekly sessions for a whole school year, and a new group of children were chosen at the start of each Autumn term. But with Rafi, things were different.

The headteacher decided he should continue with the reading help until the end of primary school. So by March 2020, I’d known the now 11 year-old Rafi very well. He’d talk to me about his weekend excursions, his prowess at computer games, and try out new jokes on me.

On his 10th birthday he told me he’d been given money. “What did you spend it on?”, I enquired. “Fortnite and crisps”, he replied with a mischievous grin.

But one Wednesday afternoon that March, suddenly it all came to a juddering halt. Schools closed abruptly due to Covid, and cheeky Rafi was gone.

I hadn’t said goodbye to him at our last session. He’d carried on reading a David Walliams book, and we finished by playing a few minutes of scrabble (I’d have to help him choose his words, but he still loved it). I’d said my usual “Bye then Rafi, see you next week, be good!” And that was that.

Of course by early March, everyone knew school closures were a possibility. But on that day, as I sat next to Rafi in an empty classroom on our tiny chairs, neither of us knew that would be the end of our happy routine for a very long time.

The only hint of impending doom was the moment he showed me how good he was at washing his hands for 20 seconds. When you’re sitting very close to a child for half an hour, touching the same book and turning the same pages, that was a blessed relief to see.

Rafi was in Year 6, the final year of Primary school, a critical year which prepares the children for the big, bad world of inner-city secondary schools. Like almost every other school, lockdown lessons had moved online, but not every child had a device, or parents with the time and inclination to help them.

I doubted very much whether Rafi had his own ipad or laptop, and the thought of him settling down at home to concentrate on school work without any teachers present, day after day, was laughable. I imagined him playing Fortnite non stop for 12 hours each day, eating Monster Munch and barely leaving his bedroom.

As lockdown continued, it became increasingly clear that we might not be able to return to school before the Autumn term, if then. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Rafi: what was he doing? Was he ok?

‘Summer learning loss’ is a well known phenomenon - children, especially disadvantaged ones, can often forget what they have learned after the long summer break and take a while to catch up. A full 6 months without formal education would undoubtedly do even more harm. When government ministers talk about the urgency of getting schools fully open again next month, it’s children like Rafi who I think about.

Boys like Rafi sit on a knife edge. Young men from his ethnic group notoriously control the drug trade in his London borough. Literacy might ultimately mean good qualifications and a ‘regular’ life - but illiteracy and poor qualifications would surely put him in danger of taking another path, one that I truly fear.

Rafi is due to start his new secondary school in one week’s time. I wrote an email to him a few weeks back, sent via the school secretary, asking him how his lockdown was going. I never received a reply - but then 11 year old boys aren’t that keen on writing letters, in my experience. I finally admitted to myself that I was missing him, I was missing our sessions, and I was worried about his future.

A weekly volunteer reading scheme might not seem very significant on the surface, but it is one of the simple threads that bind our society together and make the world a better place. The children benefit immeasurably, particularly from the one-to-one attention they too often don’t get at home.

Covid not only destroyed lives, but it also destroyed the education of so many vulnerable children who might never recover from the harm it wrought. I can only hope that Rafi - wherever he is and whatever he is up to - doesn’t number among them.

That same punch-in-the-stomach feeling has returned to me several times over the last few years: there have just been too many instances of people I once greatly admired, turning out to be less than saintly in real life.

There is anger combined with a large dollop of humiliation: how could I have been so damn stupid, so trusting, not to see that this apparently fantastic, talented person was in fact not quite as they appeared to be?

Of course, nobody is perfect. We all have flaws and prejudices to varying degrees, and complicated, multi-faceted personalities. None of us, even the most Mother Theresa-like, can be nice all the time. I am, for instance, completely intolerant of raisins, exhibitionists, and men who pose with cars on dating apps. They bring out the worst in me.

But there are, unfortunately, too many examples of celebrities who excel in their field but behind closed doors, turn out to have worse than average personality flaws - whether it’s racism, or abuse, or bad behaviour of one form or another. There are simply too many examples. But I am sorry to say that I need to add the venerable Dame Jenni Murray to that list.

The titan of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour died in March 2026, age 75. Murray had a long and distinguished broadcasting career, most famously at the helm of Woman’s Hour for a phenomenal 33 years.

Murray had reached the very top of a difficult, cut-throat profession, gaining respect from legions of fans - not just women - from all walks of life. She’d quit the BBC in 2020 after a difficult last few years bogged down in the gender debate (on which I happened to agree with her, but that is irrelevant to this particular blog) - and had became a newspaper columnist.

‘For many listeners, she was the programme and the rest of us were mere stand-ins; we could never match up to her’, wrote her Woman’s Hour co-presenter Jane Garvey.

There is no doubting her success, as proven by the outpouring of tributes. As Garvey says, Jenni was Woman’s Hour. Her comforting, velvety, occasionally matronly “radio voice” was legendary. So was her calm, authoritative manner and her fearless interviewing style. She could switch from an item about padded bras to interviewing a prime minister effortlessly. All of these things I hugely admired, and so did the audience.

I was also one of the listeners who, in 2006, vividly remembers Murray announcing live on air that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and the sadness and shock I felt. The fact it made headline news is a mark of how much of a household name she had become.

In 2021, not long after she had left the BBC, Sunday Times writer Rosie Kinchen interviewed Murray. It was quite revealing, in an unexpected way:

‘I had discovered “Dame Jenni”, as she was known to staff on the programme, had a reputation for being tough and occasionally mean. Her response when I raised the accusation surprised me. She seemed almost proud. “No one has ever accused me of bullying,” she said with a glint in her eye. “I might have reduced one or two to tears.”’

It was the first time I have ever read anything about her that offered a glimpse into ‘back-room’ Murray. The Murray that scores of producers had worked with over the decades, and in some cases, had emerged with a less than glowing report. Unfortunately, I was one of them.

—————-

May 2018

“Umm, Sarah, have you met Jenni before?”, the Woman’s Hour duty editor said to me gingerly. It was the evening before the morning when I would meet Jenni Murray for the first time.

A small team of us had been preparing the next morning’s show all day; and I was the “new girl”.

After 15 years as a journalist in the main BBC TV newsroom, I had taken voluntary redundancy. It was exhausting and I was exhausted. I wanted to have more fun, more variety, and less daily intensity. So I had turned freelance, and had been working in various journalism and communications jobs. I had also applied for freelance Radio 4 production roles, hoping to gain experience on programmes that were outside the main news beat. How exciting not to have to read up on interest rates or instantly recall details about every MP.

“No, I haven’t actually. Why, what do I need to know?” I replied with a dry laugh.

“Well….she can be quite tricky…”, she continued. “Everything has to be very particular.”

Over the very long time I had been staff at the BBC, I had worked with all kinds of presenters. Some utterly delightful, some straightforwardly unpleasant. Some would talk to you as an equal, some would barely even look you in the eye unless you were male and/or senior.

Some were brilliant journalists who could write and edit their own scripts to perfection, and ad-lib any type of interview at a moment’s notice - others simply read off the autocue. Some would chat to you off air like a friend, others were colder and made sure producers knew their place in the pecking order.

So I concluded that I could pretty much cope with anything. I had seen it all before. There were also a lot of what some people might call “difficult women” in the newsroom, often from older generations who had known only an abrasive, male-dominated working environment where balls of steel and a dictionary of curse words were required and frequently deployed. In fact things had got so bad in the main BBC newsroom at one stage that an editor was assigned to clamp down on bad newsroom behaviour: he was dubbed the “Polite Police”. The volume of shouting did reduce slightly after that.

However, I was not prepared for what greeted me on that May morning in the Woman’s Hour offices. Well, I say greeted - but there was no greeting.

I walked into Murray’s dimly-lit office on my own for the first time to talk through the item I had spent much of the previous day working on.

She did not even look up as I walked in.

When she did eventually start speaking, it was not, as one might expect on first meeting, “Nice to meet you Sarah, I’m Jenni”, or even a simple “Hello”. Instead, she lifted up the printed and stapled brief I had left on her desk as instructed the night before, and she began yanking at the staples in frustration to separate the pages. With loud sighs of frustration.

“My briefs need to be on single-sided sheets please”, she sighed, like a frustrated headmistress, peering through her famous half-moon glasses. I suddenly felt like a school pupil presenting homework to the teacher, who then admonishes you for its tardiness and for just being an appalling pupil. I had to remind myself that I was not a 23 year-old intern, but a forty-something woman with two decades experience in national newsrooms.

One of the rules I had been given was that, during these morning meetings, you should not speak to Jenni unless she asked a question. Rather like the late Queen.

The dynamic therefore becomes one of master and servant; not how a good production team ever operates in my experience. You cannot discuss editorial issues openly and creatively with someone if they do not respect you enough to let you talk when there is something that needs saying. This is pretty basic, I thought.

I was also told off by Murray for not writing the questions down in the precise order in which she wanted to ask them. “Please could you go away and re-write these questions in order”, she demanded. This was, I have to say, a request I had never come across before.

Most journalists conduct interviews with pre-prepared questions in front of them, in a sensible order. But the actual interview is an organic, live situation which demands flexibility: your next question often depends on the interviewee’s previous answer. Or maybe you’ll need to go off on a tangent. Or maybe you’ll run out of time. Only the most inexperienced - or the most anxious - would need a very precise order, I assumed.

On another occasion during a morning briefing, where again I was sitting in a nervous silence, waiting for Murray to ask a question (Dear god, what would it be this time? Staples the wrong size? Font too small? Her tea not warm enough? The sky too cloudy?), she took umbrage that I had - helpfully, I thought - included the main news story on which the discussion would be based.

“I don’t need all this, please go away and remove it, and print the brief out again”, she asked in her usual unforgiving, tetchy manner.

Actually, let’s just call it rude and condescending. Because that is what it was.

Rosalind*, a former Woman’s Hour producer who spent several years on the programme, says Murray “bullied through intimidation, and silent treatment. I wish I’d called it out at the time. “What the f*** is this?”, I should have said. It was abusive, and I was getting stress headaches. I would come off air and have to lie down in an empty room for an hour until I was fit to drive home.”

She also believes Murray behaved differently with male staff. “She was a pussycat with them”, she told me.

I remember going home on the evening after meeting her for the first time, in a mild state of shock. The woman who was so admired and so legendary, was in fact a bully. I was crestfallen. I had wanted to like Murray, to learn from her and have engaging discussions with this feminist icon: what I got instead was a deeply unpleasant ice queen who seemed to enjoy a feeling of superiority.

Colette*, another former colleague of Murray’s who worked on her team in the late 1980s told me: “It was a horrible experience that made me ill with stress. [Jenni] was a rude, arrogant bully. She made a point of reducing every new and inexperienced producer to tears in the daily debriefs, including me. She never let the mask slip on air and she undoubtedly was a fearless journalist, but behind the scenes she was frequently mean and sometimes downright cruel, especially to those beneath her in the pecking order.”

I have often wondered if women of Murray’s generation - who had to fight hard to get where they were, often in male-dominated, misogynistic environments - are ultimately harder on their female colleagues than their male ones. I wonder if they somehow feel that women should go through what they went through - a sort of, “sorry but I’m not making life easy for you just because I am a woman” test.

But Murray, who I suspect did not have the slightest bit of interest in who I was or what my experience was - would have been unaware that I had already fought my own path in broadcasting - over 20 years in BBC TV News, producing daily news broadcasts seen by millions every day. A relentless, intense, often exhausting job.

I too had worked in some male-dominated teams, or with the aforementioned “difficult women” whose first line of attack was to shout. I had dealt with all this - jumped over the hurdles - and arrived in her office as a seasoned producer who didn’t need to be “tested”, if that is what she thought she was doing.

It became clear that Murray’s behaviour was well known. In whispered conversations with other producers, I would express my shock at her behaviour. “Oh yes that’s normal” would be the reply. Why had nobody ever complained, I asked. Some brave ones had, but nothing had changed, I was told.

I contacted a former senior BBC News editor, who didn’t work directly with Murray but knew a lot about her. “A brilliant broadcaster but a ghastly bully”, she wrote.

“I think the negatives of working with such people should not be glossed over. Some buy into an argument that they are simply demanding high standards and this behaviour is part of what makes them good. But I have no truck with that. I think it is mostly an abuse of power and a failure of those above to address it. You could argue she belonged to a different era when this behaviour was the norm. But I think workplace bullying is a scourge, which has a significant impact on people’s sense of wellbeing.”

Being “demanding” is exactly how Murray once described herself. In 2020, Times Radio’s Luke Jones, a former BBC Radio 4 producer, interviewed Murray and put to her allegations that she was hard to work with.

“Your reputation as a fierce and sometimes tricky customer does precede you”, he commented.

“I’ve never been a frightening or tricky customer. I’m demanding, and I have wonderful producers who always did their very best to make sure that I went into the studio extremely well prepared. Difficult? No, not really. But what’s wrong with being a difficult woman anyway? And you know, if a woman is demanding, she does tend to be called horrible names, which would never apply to a man, so no, I won’t have that”, was Murray’s response.

I do agree that women are often labelled as bitches/harridans/difficult etc more often than men, but it is usually by men. In Murray’s case, it was usually women calling her out. And recalling my days in the TV newsroom, there was ‘equal opportunities’ shouting: the worst culprits were both male and female.

By the time she died, Murray had become known as a feminist champion, a fearless defender of sex-based rights - and she had suffered for it. In 2017, she claimed the BBC had banned her from hosting discussions on transgender issues. She had faced a backlash for saying that men who undergo sex-change operations cannot be “real women”.

This had galvanised support for her from gender critical voices, and so, naturally, the tributes at the time of her death frequently alluded to her bravery and steadfastness over the trans debate. On that, I stand with them and salute Murray’s stance. My criticism has nothing to do with those issues.

Someone could do a doctorate on workplace bullying, and over the years I have personally witnessed and heard about dozens of cases of terrible behaviour inside the BBC. Some were dealt with, others not. I do not know if there is a specific problem with the BBC, or whether it simply mirrors other intense media environments, but it’s clear the problem has been widespread.

No matter how much you hear about it though, nothing really prepares you for that quiet, crushing sense of disillusionment when you realise that someone you once held in such high regard is, in fact, deeply flawed.

“Never meet your heroes”, they say. I think I agree.

He had found an old photo of my grandfather’s family soon after World War I. It is taken outside their house, we presume, in the small town of Ustrzyki Dolne, in what is now far south-east Poland close to the Ukrainian and Slovakian borders.

I was completely mesmerised.

In some ways it is typical of the black and white photos to be found in Jewish homes the world over: a family grouping from the early 20th century, in eastern European clothing, some looking classically Jewish, others more secular.

These photos haunt me. None of them know what is to come.

It is also a glimpse into a world I never knew, family I never met, relatives about whom I had heard stories my whole life, and a beloved grandfather in his youth.

There is a universality about it in other ways, too. This is one of millions of families whose lives would all eventually be destroyed by the Holocaust - whether by murder at the hands of the Nazis, or by escape to all corners of the globe.

When this photo was taken - early 1920s we think - it was a town where about half the residents were Jewish, the rest Polish and Ukrainian. And almost all the stories of 20th century Ashkenazi Jewish life can be found in this single photo.

One was rounded up by the Nazis as they invaded the village in 1942, and was sent to be murdered in a concentration camp, with her two young children. She was my great-aunt.

Another was taken by the Russian army and killed. His surviving family eventually settled in Israel.

Another fought with the Polish army during WW2 and eventually settled in Cardiff, where he had a family. His son went on to become the founder and director of the Campaign for the Freedom of Information.

Another two escaped to Brussels, where they married and lived for the rest of their lives. As a small child I clearly remember visiting them, practising my French and seeing my grandfather walk side by side with his brother, with their hands behind their backs in an identical manner. They looked like twins.

Another was the elderly Mayor of the town, who owned a small refinery nearby. The factory employed dozens of non-Jews from the local area and so he became a much respected and valued community figure. He was my great-grandfather.

And last but not least, second from left on the back row is my grandfather, Josef Asher Fraenkel.

Born in 1903, he moved to Vienna when still a teenager. Active in Zionist youth organisations at the University of Vienna, he was later barred from his law degree course because he was a Jew.

Eventually, sometime in the late 1930s, when antisemitic hatred was surging, Josef managed to escape. Travelling via Prague and Switzerland, he arrived in Britain on Sept 3rd 1939, in the nick of time.

Like so many other European refugees, it was the United States where he really wanted to go - but the ship docked in Liverpool - and if you were a European Jew in 1939, you were grateful to any nation that would let you in at all, and so there he stayed.

After a time as an “enemy alien” at the Huyton internment camp on Merseyside, he made his way to London where he met my grandmother Dora Rosenfeld, daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants, in a refugee centre. (The perfect place to meet all incoming single Jewish men, as our family joke goes.)

Josef became a writer (best known for Theodor Herzl: A Biography (1946) and The Jews of Austria (1967)) and a journalist, notably covering the Nuremberg Trials. He was also a founder member of the World Jewish Congress, and astonishingly for a new immigrant to the UK, had a seat in Westminster Abbey for the Queen’s coronation in 1953, as a representative of the foreign press.

Josef was gentle and bookish, and always surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke, mounds of newspapers, and strong black coffee. He spoke poor English with a strong German accent; if my grandparents wanted to say things to each other behind my back, it was always in German. To this day, I cannot speak a word of it.

He was already 71 by the time I was born, so I only knew him as an elderly man, doting on me, handing me 50p pieces for pocket money, buying me books. I adored the weekends and school holidays I spent with my grandparents at their home in Clapham as a child, and was devastated when he died in 1987 - I was just 13 years old.

I regret to this day that that was too young for me to ask him many questions about his childhood, too young for me to comprehend the losses and turmoil that had been a huge part of his earlier life, too young to understand why my grandparents never spoke about the war. It’s only when I look at photos like this that I start to piece together their lives and the culture that was lost.

The death of grandparents can often be particularly traumatic for only children: our family unit suddenly shrinks by a much greater proportion than for others. My grandmother Dora died just two years after Josef and I remember being devastated once again.

It is also immensely sad that Josef never got to see his only child become head of an Oxford college and later, a Peer in the House of Lords. Could he ever have imagined it? I look at this photo of lives about to be torn apart and it seems utterly inconceivable. But immigrants often have a steely determination to make the lives of their children better, and to integrate them into society - and that is exactly what happened.

I will stay mesmerised by this photo for the rest of my life.

THE SUNDAY TIMES, 25 AUGUST 2024

When it comes to pregnancies we all love a miracle. Hilary Swank giving birth to twins at 48? Victoria Coren Mitchell having her second daughter at 51? But the cold, hard truth is that these examples are just that: miracles. Anomalies. Because for every happy story there are many more tales of sorrow and despair.

Hundreds of thousands of women in the UK, like me, spend years of their lives trying to become mothers and failing. And it is a bitter, agonising, wretched story to tell. It is also a story you rarely hear about since it lacks the feelgood factor. I’m 49 and it’s now more than a year since I lost the chance to have my own biological child. I am still grieving, and I don’t use that word lightly; when I described my symptoms to a counsellor, she replied: “It is actual grief, you know.”

It’s true that the crying has stopped, but there remains an anguish inside me that I fear may never disappear. The sight of mothers pushing prams, of cute kids in parks running to delighted parents, or friends discussing the school run — the most mundane thing can trigger an ache in the pit of my stomach. “Oh my God, why isn’t that me?” I think, in a primeval pang of envy that I cannot shake no matter how much I hate myself for it. “We’re so knackered!” parents occasionally tell me. I would kill to be knackered from looking after my own kids, believe me.

In some ways I was lucky. My best friend from school, Nicola, became an IVF doctor. When I was 36, single and panicking about children, she advised me to freeze my eggs because the technology had improved dramatically, owing to a new fast-freezing method called vitrification. Suddenly “social egg freezing” (where a woman’s eggs are frozen for nonmedical reasons) had become viable — not just a desperate measure to preserve fertility for chemotherapy patients.

So, inadvertently, I had become a social egg freezing pioneer. In 2011 mine was one of just 373 treatment cycles in the UK. Ten years later the process was booming, with 4,215 cycles — more than a 1,000 per cent increase. In 2014 Facebook (now Meta) announced it would pay for its employees to have their eggs frozen, and other tech companies, such as Apple, soon followed. Now it is the UK’s fastest-growing fertility treatment.

I took time off work for one cycle at a London clinic, costing about £4,000. Only my parents and close friends knew what I was doing. At times it was agonising — especially for someone not keen on needles — and the drugs turned me into a hormonal wreck, but if you’re motivated it’s incredible how you can push through unpleasant things. I had eight healthy eggs retrieved and was elated. “You should think about doing another cycle,” Nicola said anxiously, because the chances of success in fertility treatment later on would be considerably higher if I had a greater number of eggs to use. But frankly I couldn’t face it.

I thought I’d purchased a “baby insurance” policy — a way of not panicking about finding a boyfriend or having to confront the awkward topic of kids early on in a relationship. Women are conditioned to feel we shouldn’t mention it out of fear that men will run a mile if you seem desperate to procreate. And if I didn’t meet anyone? I’d cross that bridge later. My consultant was pragmatic. “You can always have a child on your own,” he said. “I know, but that really isn’t for me,” I replied. And I meant it sincerely. I always imagined I’d have a child with a partner and settle down in a nuclear family. But life rarely goes as planned.

Fast-forward a decade and my divorced boyfriend with kids of his own told me he simply could not be a father again. He knew about my frozen eggs and my longing to become a mother. I honestly thought I could persuade him but he wouldn’t budge. “I’ll be a brilliant godfather and if it’s a boy I’ll teach him how to pee,” he promised.

Distraught, a hormonally fuelled “fight or flight” response kicked in and I realised the only way I was ever going to have a child was if I did it alone, using a sperm donor. What had once seemed utterly inconceivable was now inescapable. I’m the only child of an only child, and I wanted desperately to extend my tiny family. Worries about single motherhood, and the stress and loneliness associated with it, were secondary.

I confided in my parents and close friends, most of whom were extremely supportive. There was one exception — an old friend, famously blunt, who told me I was “pretty mad”, adding: “But then I am not you.” That is the point: she is not me, with my hopes and dreams. I’d invested so much time on friends’ children over the years: birthday trips, days out and listening to their trials and tribulations — a sort of motherhood dry run. I loved every moment, but who had the right to tell me I was not allowed to do it for real?

Weeks later I was agonising over sperm donor websites — a high-stakes, surreal game of finding the perfect combination of brains, beauty and someone who looked similar to me. I eventually chose “my man”: an American dad with apparently excellent genes, nice eyes and a good degree. His test tube of sperm was flown to my clinic. Procreation had never felt so unromantic.

Then I got the call. The clinic had set a date for fertilisation: I’d finally discover whether the eggs I’d harvested ten years before had survived — and, critically, if they’d take to the blue-eyed American’s sperm.

They did. And miraculously two viable embryos were created and immediately frozen. I was ecstatic. What I didn’t yet know about were the brutal weeks ahead of “frozen embryo transfer”. One embryo would be placed into my womb per cycle, and preceding that would be weeks of intense hormone and other drug treatments to make sure I was in an optimal condition to receive — and hopefully grow — my tiny embryos.

Any woman who has had IVF knows the drill: no part of you is left undrugged. Each day is a rigid timetable of injections, pills and blood test appointments. My stomach was pitted with needle marks. I tried to eat healthily and relax, but I could not go out much or see anyone: if I contracted Covid my cycle would be cancelled. After six long, lonely weeks, the actual transfer was a surprisingly quick procedure, clinical but also emotional. I was handed a photo afterwards, which looked identical to the pregnancy scans excited couples use to announce their news. I burst into tears: was I looking at my future child?

It turned out I was not. The pregnancy test a fortnight later was negative. An all-consuming sadness took over — it felt like a miscarriage. I had a brief sunny holiday to recuperate with a close friend, but every time she asked me about it I cried. There was now only one embryo left and that would be my last chance. It had to work this time, it just had to. This time I threw everything at it: one “add-on” fertility drug, military discipline with the medication regime — and steely determination. Six more weeks of the hormonal whirlwind, and then I’m at home alone, in pyjamas, tears pouring down my cheeks, as I ring the clinic to deliver the news: it’s negative. Again.

That was the close of my 11-year journey to try to become a mother: ending ingloriously in my bathroom, staring hopelessly at a pregnancy test stick. My clinic was a successful one, but also large and impersonal: I’d never spoken to the nurse who recorded my results before, and my consultant didn’t call. “It’s negative,” I texted to my friends, with a sad face emoji. They tried calling but I didn’t want to talk. I had nothing to say. I was devastated, empty and angry.

There are multiple reasons why IVF fails, but usually it’s owing to a genetically abnormal embryo. If I’d frozen my eggs in my mid-twenties rather than my mid-thirties the eggs would have had a much greater chance of being genetically sound. Advancements in IVF science are remarkable, but working out what went wrong when it’s all over still seems shrouded in mystery. Factors such as the age of eggs at freezing and medical history are critical, but the overall pregnancy success rate of about 30 per cent using frozen eggs is giving women hope that their fertility can be put on ice until the time is right. The problem is, a 70 per cent failure rate is a lot of failures — and we need to be honest about the reality: egg freezing is not the holy grail. It’s also expensive: typically about £5,000 per cycle, which does not include drugs or annual storage fees.

In some ways I wish I could relive my twenties — and I’d tell myself to just bloody well get on with it and have a child, even if my partner wasn’t “the one”. Relationships can happen at any age, but in my case children cannot. I just hope that one day I’ll look back at this traumatic time and accept that I tried as hard as I could — and be at peace with that.

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Beginnings are hard.

Everyone seems to have a substack.

So I thought I’d see what they’re all going on about.

If you know me well, you probably know I’ve had a hideous three years or so - against a backdrop of buying and then doing up my house in Crouch End, which in a strange way has kept me sane, despite the stress of building work. Everything else has been unspeakably dire, so maybe writing as a form of - wince - therapy, is the way forward?

The term ‘gratitude journaling’ makes me feel queasy. I was once roped into attending a ‘gratitude journaling masterclass’ and I can tell you, it did make me nauseous. (Me to teacher: “But I like writing and if I write something really good, I can’t bear the thought of just throwing it away! I’d want someone to see it! Isn’t it all a terrible waste?” Teacher: “No.”) So, this will not be a gratitude journal. What exactly it will be, I am not yet sure.

In the meantime, here is a photo of the pancake I enjoyed in an unbearably cute Amsterdam cafe two days ago. I didn't finish all the cream, by the way. I do have limits.

And here is a photo inside Rembrandt’s actual former house in central Amsterdam (RembrandtHuis). It was sublime. I have adored Dutch masters for years, so this was a perfect, perfect hour for me.

See you again soon.

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