→50 The Australian Women’s Weekly | OCTOBER 2019
Exclusive
Left: Diana, Princess of Wales,
and Margaret Thatcher get pride
of place in the Archers' home.
Below: Jeffrey and Mary in 1969.while Mary, 74, a former
Oxford chemistry lecturer
who was made a Dame
in 2012 for her services
to healthcare, chairs the
board of London’s Science
Museum, and both Archers
are prodigious fundraisers
for charity.
Age seems to have done little to slow
Jeffrey down. One minute he is on his
feet (sheathed in gold-crested slippers),
demonstrating the exercises prescribed
by his personal trainer, the next
scrolling frantically on his phone for
the latest cricket scores, then calling
to his assistant for the just-in review
of his new book. “Now, listen to this,”
he declares: “ ‘A thoroughly gripping
read ... Archer reinforces his position
as a master storyteller.’” He snuggles
back into a big armchair. “That’s what
I am,” he says. “A storyteller, but I do
think I’m a better craftsman now. I take
a lot more care to get things right.”
It’s true that literary critics haven’t
always been kind about Jeffrey’s efforts,
but he suspects they are slowly coming
around. “Someone said recently that
there were Nobel Prize winners who
would like to write as well as Jeffrey
Archer,” he says. “The thing is, you
mustn’t let the readers get bored. I tell a
story, I want you to turn the page, keep
turning them, and not to be able to
put the book down. I don’t have room
for pages and pages of description.
His new book, Nothing Ventured,
follows on from his mega-selling Clifton
Chronicles series, and begins the story
of young detective William Warwick’s
rise from the tough beats of south
London to become head of Scotland
Yard. “It is not just a detective story,”
Jeffrey says. “It is a story about a
detective. He’s not your usual copper,
and I really enjoyed writing it.”
Mary, meanwhile, tells me that
she is reading the acclaimed novelist
Kazuo Ishiguro, who actually did win
the Nobel Prize, and also likes Proust
and Anthony Powell, authors of
multi-volume ruminations on the
human soul. “When Jeffrey first
began,” she says, “I didn’t think he
could write a shopping list, never
mind a book, and I remember sitting
at the kitchen table in our basement,
doing the editing and correcting his
spelling mistakes, but now I read his
books at a later stage, which is what
he prefers, and occasionally I make
suggestions that are sometimes
accepted and sometimes not.”
How did this improbable couple
come together – and stay that way?
Jeffrey’s no-holds barred biographer,
Michael Crick, suggests that Mary’s
life would have been worthy but dull
without Jeffrey, and that for all the
embarrassing scrapes he has dragged
them into, she finds him exciting to be
around. Others portray them as a case
of marital Yin and Yang, hopelessly
drawn to their temperamental
opposite. One of Jeffrey’s oldest
friends, writer Gyles Brandreth, noted
despairingly in his diary: “I just can’t
fathom their marriage. Nobody can.”
Mary was born into a comfortable
middle-class home and, after schooling
at the Cheltenham Ladies’ College,
won a place at Oxford. Jeffrey was
already there, taking a diploma in
education, and boasting a reputation as
a sporty, swashbuckling student fixer.
He was set on a career in politics, duly
becoming a Conservative MP at 29,but five years later the first
major crisis in the Archers’
lives arrived. Jeffrey had sunk
all the couple’s money into what
turned out to be a fraudulent
investment scheme, leaving them
penniless, with two small children
and nowhere to live. It was Mary who
stepped into the breach, landing a
teaching fellowship at Cambridge
University, which came with living
quarters. “I suppose I come from that
generation that learned how to cope,”
she says. “I’ve always been a coper, but,
honestly, that experience of being in
debt in the 1970s, working full-time and
trying to bring up the kids, was even
worse than when Jeffrey was in jail.”
It was at this desperate low point that
Jeffrey hit on the idea of writing a novel.
“I’ve always been able to tell a good
story,” he says. “It’s just a gift I have.
I love the theatre, love a good drama,
enjoy gossip, but it had never occurred
to me to write a novel.” He gazes into
the palatial distance. “The two great
ambitions of my life,” he says, ruefully,
“were to captain the England cricket
team and be prime minister, and I
have failed miserably to achieve either.
Writing wasn’t what I set out to do, but
it was all I could think of, and the first
book, Not A Penny More, Not A Penny
Less, did well, but it wasn’t until Kane
and Abel came out [selling more than
one million copies in its first week of
publication in 1979] that I thought,
‘Hmm, perhaps, I can make a success
of this.’ And that was rather a shock.”
A shock of a different kind came in
1986, when a British newspaper alleged
that Jeffrey, then the deputy chairman of
the governing Conservative Party, had
paid a Mayfair prostitute for sex, then
conspired to cover his tracks. He sued
and won a huge damages award, but
was later proved to have lied under
oath and was jailed for four years,
of which he served two.
“There have certainly been difficult
times in our marriage,” says Mary,
“but I never considered divorce.
Murder, perhaps, but not divorce.”