How We Met: Carmen Callil and Harriet Spicer

Carmen Callil, 54, came from Australia in 1960. She worked for Granada television and as a freelance book publicist before founding Virago, the feminist publishers, in 1973. She is still chairwoman, but her main job is managing director of Chatto & Windus. She lives in Notting Hill Gate.

Harriet Spicer, 43, was born in London and educated at Benenden and St Anne's, Oxford. Her first job was promoting ice-cream, but in 1972 she was made a secretary at Carmen Callil Ltd. She became managing director of Virago in 1982. She has two children and lives in Highgate, north London.

CARMEN CALLIL: Harriet has always paid me the greatest compliment of not being frightened of me. I've worked with her longer than I've ever worked with anybody in my life, but she's always treated me as a human being and not as some sort of strange creature from outer space.

We have different versions of how we met and mine is wrong. Harriet put me right. I thought my previous secretary at Granada introduced us, but in fact it was Graham, a New Zealander editor at Quartet Books. I ran a book publicity company in those days and was looking for an assistant or secretary or whatever. I've no idea if I interviewed Harriet. But I do remember this sensation of wonderful calm entering my life. She struck me as absolutely formidable and cool, with this remarkable stately manner which meant I trusted her immediately.

It was the end of Sixties, beginning of the Seventies then, an absolutely wonderful period, parties every night - I'm afraid it really was like that, gruesome. I was party girl, and everybody used to whizz in and out of the office - in Smith Street, Chelsea, above the synagogue - and I've got photographs of Harriet there which is how I know how long we go back. I always say to her, 'I've got photographs your children are going to kill me for'. I wore minis - though I always had terrible legs - but Harriet actually was always very simple and elegant. She got on terribly well with the people who floated in and out, but she kept her cool and did her work. She must have been terribly young.

Virago was financed by the book publicity company, so while I was starting that I just left things in her hands. She never let me down - and never has done ever since. We used to work opposite each other on my dining-room table in Smith Street and later at Cheyne Place. We'd be having these meetings and she would sit there typing and listening. Later, when Virago had started, she said she wanted to do all the production and she learnt it from scratch, just taught herself. I never asked her how; she just did it. She's not really someone you teach. She's her own self.

I think if I had to make a division between what I've done and what she's done since then, she's been less to do with writers and more to do with turning Virago into an absolutely solid thing, the established feeling it has. I was always much more frenetic than Harriet. She's calm and very, very thorough and a good businesswoman - no one could pretend I was any of those things.

I left Virago full-time 11 years ago, but I continue to be chairwoman and some weeks I speak to her every day. We discuss business, the figures - just like we've always done, and she explains things to me that I've forgotten. Now I don't ever have to worry about Virago because she's looking after it. I don't know how we got to be so lucky.

She's also very funny - which is unexpected in Harriet because she has a somewhat severe presentation. Do you know what she really reminds me of? She reminds me of everything that was best to do with those old British movies - she slightly sends herself up. She's just like Alec Guinness. She's marvellously self-deprecating which, funnily enough, is quite Australian. The other day I said to her, 'Doesn't anybody ever tell you you're daunting, Harriet?' and she said 'No, nobody ever does. But that's probably because they're too daunted to say so.' That's a typical Harriet remark.

We never see each other at weekends, absolutely not. So in that way we're not friends at all. She's got her life and I've got mine. I said to her when I heard we were going to do this: 'By the way, Harriet, you know you never talk to me about your love life and I never talk to you about mine?' and we screamed with laughter at that. In the Seventies when we first met, everybody was in love all the time. There were things we both observed, but we never discussed it. I just think it's a sense of privacy you have. After all, you see more of the people you work with than anybody you ever live with.

But Harriet has known me longer than anybody, really. I remember when my cat Mary died, I could have rung several people but I rang Harriet because I bought Mary from a pet shop the day we moved from my first flat to the second flat where Virago started. I've got photographs of Harriet's long English leg with Mary climbing up it. I rang her and said 'Mary's dead,' and she said 'Oh' - but I could tell she understood.

HARRIET SPICER: The way I ended up getting a job as Carmen's secretary in 1972 was deeply inappropriate. I was recommended by a friend called Graham Wiremu who worked at Quartet. I only knew him because at Oxford I had a date to meet somebody outside the Bodleian who decided they didn't want to meet me again. All these boys were sitting around in a pub and the date said: 'Does anybody want to go and see this girl from St Anne's?' and Graham, who had nothing else to do, said 'all right'. At first he thought I was completely ghastly, but then it turned out I liked a song called 'Patches', by Clarence Carter, which meant that we became soul mates and he introduced me to Carmen. It always struck me as ironic that my career as a feminist publisher should have started with a blind date.

My interview with Carmen was incredibly short and brisk at her flat in Smith Street, which was amazing. It was full of wonderful paintings and the cover they didn't use for The Female Eunuch on the wall, (Germaine Greer was my major heroine at the time and here was someone who knew her]) bright-red tiles and lime-green paint. I was fairly devastated by that. And there were cats galore, which became a feature of working life - you had to be able to type with a cat around your neck or you wouldn't get anywhere.

Carmen was busy having the wondrous boozy meetings with Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe to discuss setting up the feminist publishing company Virago. They'd sorted out the name and registered the company. And I suppose you got to do more because she was doing that. The Joy of Sex was in its first Quartet edition when I arrived, and we were doing the publicity for that, so there was a huge furore to deal with.

I think there was a rather wild life going on. I remember I sat there looking rather prune-faced at times. There were some wonderful characters: John Cox the opera supremo, and John Hayes from the LSE, those were the two I remember being terribly impressive. They always looked ravaged, as if they'd been out drinking creme de menthe until three in the morning. Someone once said: 'Well, Harriet, you're not the kind of person you'd invite to an orgy,' but I did have a wild boyfriend in those days. He used to whistle under the window when he arrived to pick me up after work and I would be mortified. 'Don't do that, she'll hear you,' I'd hiss.

Carmen has always been very demanding. To begin with I had terrible trouble listening to her voice through the earphones because she dictated very fast. And the pace rarely let up. Carmen says I can't have worked that hard because in my files I keep coming across recipes on Carmen Callil Ltd notepaper that I've typed out from her recipe books.

There's one thing that showed me the driven nature of her work-oriented life. I arrived a bit late one Monday and told her I was sorry but that we'd had a burglary at home and one of the things that was stolen was my father's watch chain. My father died when I was young so the chain had sentimental value. And Carmen said 'Oh, I know darling, I had a terrible weekend myself. I couldn't find the Tipp-Ex.' I was pretty gobsmacked by that. Now I know her, I understand what she was saying. She'd had this horrendous task to do at home and was all set up to do it and couldn't get it right. The Tipp-Ex was a symbol of that.

I certainly picked up a style from her - the manic concentrations and driven work patterns. The one thing that's really memorable about those early days at Virago is the pace at which you worked. We moved to these bizarre one-room offices in Wardour Street - above a drinking club and a Turkish hairdressers - and finally to our current place in Camden, and in the 10 years before Carmen moved to Chatto, there were these extraordinary uninterrupted days of work. It was all learning and doing things for the first time and thinking yippee] We were all battered into shape.

My way of dealing with work has always been that you end up having a work life and another life. We've never socialised, Carmen and I, but then she's always been my boss. When two people have been in business together, as we have, for 20 years, you collect enough data to interpret each other's remarks and decisions. The curious thing is, I'm both the long-term person and the new-generation person. It's the sort of dynamic they talk about in books - Carmen taught me to take on the business after her.

Things have changed enormously over the last 10 years while Carmen has been at Chatto, but she still comes to board meetings and provides an objective eye. She thinks I've become hugely obstinate. Her famous phrase is 'I think this, but I know you'll do what you want to do, darling'.-

(Photograph omitted)