At some point in the mid-1960s, the actress Phyllida Law’s Scottish mother-in-law came to live with her in north London. Sweetly traditional and as neat as a pin, “Gran” occupied a room upstairs for 17 years, until her death, tended by Law, her husband and their two daughters — the actresses Emma and Sophie Thompson, then still in pigtails. Since Gran was increasingly deaf, after a while Law started leaving little notes by her bed, to remind her of doctor’s appointments, or simply to entertain. This little gem of a book is those notes collected.

It is clearly the work of a great natural talker, conjuring for her increasingly ailing relative whole sheaves of hilarious anecdotes concerning anything from egg sandwiches trapped in the glove compartment to long-dead aunts using the vacuum cleaner as a hairdryer. Quickly, they build into a classic of that under-recorded subject: everyday life.

So, on Tuesday, Law might hurry in the rain to pay a fine on library books, then pop into ­Woolworths on the way back for a “treaty” box of Richmond Assorted biscuits. On Thursday, Gran might polish the brass — but only if it was “looking red” at her. Quietly, effortlessly, a whole history of near-extinct British idioms and expressions is delivered. Over the years there are small dramas (“the ferry was off last week because a jellyfish got stuck in the works”); fiascos (“one holiday in Skye, mother put a queen of puddings on the window ledge and the sheep ate the lot”); and the ­occasional flat-out disaster, such as the day Mrs Wilson next door overfills her cigarette lighter and sets her spectacles on fire.

The chief preoccupations are food and health: rhubarb dipped in an eggcup of sugar; hearing aids enthusiastically licked to render them more effective. The wider world is rarely mentioned (no talk of current prime ministers, strikes or wars) and there is nothing about Law’s own continuing career as a successful actress, yet the book never feels narrow.

It is clear that Law was profoundly fond of Gran — the tap of her “wide wedding ring on the ­banister rail” was a daily cue for preparing lunch — and that love illuminates every page. But more crucially, these seemingly casual, sometimes throwaway notes add up to the collected prose of a truly great comedian. (“Beethoven was deaf. Deaf and German. What a disaster.”) It’s too good as a ­stocking filler for your mother-in-law. It’s too good for the loo. There is as much compressed, instinctive humour in these pages as in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van.

Notes to My Mother-in-Law by Phyllida Law
Fourth Estate £12.99 pp200

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