Diana's father was a clerk on British Rail, her mother the caretaker of a block of flats, and she grew up in what would now be called a dysfunctional family.
She spent the war years away from home, and her parents split up when she was in her early teens; as an adult, she deliberately kept both her philandering father and her melancholic mother at arm's length, only resuming contact with her mother when, working as a minicab driver, she picked her up purely by chance, and drove her to hospital. After leaving school at the earliest opportunity -"I hear we have something in common. We both started work at fourteen", Princess Margaret once told her -Diana married for the first time at sixteen, and worked as a model and a night club hostess: by the time she met Melly, in 1961, she had two children by two former husbands, and was already suffering from near-suicidal fits of depression.
Life with George Melly cannot have helped. Pills are popped, cocaine is snorted, the alcohol flows, and although Diana dutifully subscribes to the tenets of an open marriage, she seems to get less out of it than her more boisterous spouse ("Isn't he a bit middle management for you?" a friend asks of a particularly unappealing lover, a Welsh mining engineer first encountered on holiday in Sierra Leone). Her son Patrick dies of an overdose of heroin and whisky in his early twenties: comfort of a kind is provided by their house in the Brecon Beacons an increasingly deaf George enjoys the fishing, and she takes in paying guests to cover the costs -but, overall, it's a pretty bleak tale.
Diana Melly tells her sad story without a trace of self-pity, but her prose, though readable enough, is so functional and so lacking in vitality that one is never as touched or engrossed as one feels one should be. Much the same applies to the subsidiary characters who flit through her pages: some of them famous (Bruce Chatwin, Jean Rhys, Jonathan Miller, Sonia Orwell), others half-forgotten but redolent of the period (Molly Parkin, Michael Alexander, Dee Wells, Maureen Cleave, and the lovely Henrietta Moraes, encountered climbing up an ill- attached drainpipe in search of funds with which to buy a supply of heroin).
Little effort is made to build up their personalities, and nothing is revealed that isn't already familiar: after reading, yet again, that Sonia Orwell was given to speaking French when inflamed by drink, it comes as a relief to discover that Mick Mulligan, George Melly's affable fellow jazz man, worked as a greengrocer when not on stage at Ronnie Scott's.
Melly himself comes across in his wife's memoir as a self-conscious eccentric and tireless ladies' man. Ever the exhibitionist, he seems, in his younger days, to have torn off his clothes at the slightest provocation (one of the photographs shows a furtive-looking Pan lurking in the garden in Wales); he tells us in Slowing Down that his marriage to Diana "began passionately and is finishing in compassion", and towards the end of Take a Girl Like Me he spends a fair amount of energy trying -unsuccessfully -to shake off his shrewish-sounding mistress, the Greckel. He survives cancer with admirable resilience, and swallows a small pharmacy of pills every morning. His vagueness is endearing: after giving a lecture in Bristol, he gets on the train to Penzance by mistake, returning to London in time for a very late supper.
Such goings-on, however entertaining at the time, don't always survive the transition into print. Like Henrietta Moraes's memoirs, Henrietta (1994), Take a Girl Like Me proves that, unless the writer is up to the job, bohemian life seems, in retrospect, as tedious as any other, and rather more self-regarding.
