Patricia Utechin in conversation with Humphrey Carpenter

Carpenter How did it all begin?

Utechin Well, I was in Oxford. I’d been working for a couple of other senior people in the University, and then my future husband, Sergei, came over direct to Oxford from displaced persons camp in Germany. He was Russian, so obviously Isaiah was one of the first people he was taken to see. I was looking for a new job, Isaiah was looking for a secretary. He knew of me on the grapevine and via my future husband, and there it was.

Carpenter What sort of date was this?

Utechin I worked for him for two or three years in the early 1960s. Then Sergei got a job in Glasgow University and we went off to Glasgow. I came back to Oxford in 1972 after separating from Sergei, and worked for Isaiah for twenty-five years, until he died. carpenter So you’d worked for academics before. Did you have any idea what you were in for?

Utechin Absolutely not.

Carpenter I asked Henry Hardy if Isaiah was actually quite organised – you’re starting to giggle already …

Utechin He knew very, very clearly what he wanted to do, just on the level of the work he and I used to do. He’d buzz me on the telephone in my office on the top floor of Headington House: ‘Can you come down?’ When I arrived he’d say, ‘Now, we’ve got a lot of work to do this morning’ , and he’d produce a pile of letters or, in the old days, when he was still in the full vigour of writing, he’d want to dictate a review or some other piece. But the detail was extremely chaotic. Everything would get changed: we can't catch that flight after all, we want to go on that flight; I can't manage the concert this night, could you switch the tickets? Could you move paragraph C from page 6 to page 5, and paragraph B from page 1 … And what used to amuse me a lot, endlessly shuffling language around.