FICTION AND POETRY

‘Oh, yea, sometimes,’ said Mr Thorne, looking rather sheepish, and making salutations a little too much in the style of the last century.

‘You deceive none but your consti-stit-stit; what do you call the people that carry you about in chairs and pelt you with eggs and apples when they make you a member of parliament?’

‘One another also, sometimes, signora,’ said Mr Slope, with a deanish sort of smirk on his face. ‘Country gentlemen do deceive one another sometimes, don’t they, Mr Thorne?’

Mr Thorne gave him a look which undressed him completely for the moment; but he soon remembered his high hopes, and recovering himself quickly, sustained his probable coming dignity by a laugh at Mr Thorne’s expense.

‘I never deceive a lady, at any rate,’ said Mr Thorne; ‘especially when the gratification of my own wishes is so strong an inducement to keep me true, as it now is.’

ROBERT BULWAR-LYTTON, 1ST EARL OF LYTTON (OWEN MEREDITH)

Writing as Owen Meredith, Lord Lytton (The Park 1846²) was a poet who was also in diplomatic service as Minster at Lisbon, Governor-General of India and Ambassador in Paris.

FROM DISAPPOINTMENT IN LOVE ‘THE PORTRAIT’

MIDNIGHT past! Not a sound of aught Through the silent house, but the wind at his prayers. I sat by the dying fire, and thought Of the dear dead woman upstairs. A night of tears! for the gusty rain Had ceased, but the eaves were dripping yet; And the moon looked forth, as though in pain, With her face all white and wet: Nobody with me, my watch to keep, But the friend of my bosom, the man I love: And grief had sent him fast to sleep In the chamber up above. Nobody else, in the country place All round, that knew of my loss beside, But the good young Priest with the Raphael-face, Who confessed her when she died. That good young Priest is of gentle nerve, And my grief had moved him beyond control; For his lips grew white, as I could observe, When he speeded her parting soul. I sat by the dreary hearth alone: I thought of the pleasant days of yore: I said, “The staff of my life is gone: The woman I loved is no more. “On her cold dead bosom my portrait lies, Which next to her heart she used to wear –Haunting it o’er with her tender eyes When my own face was not there.

JOHN GALSWORTHY

John Galsworthy (Moretons 1881²) is most famous for his series of novels called The Forsyte Saga. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.

FROM THE FORSYTE SAGA, THE MAN OF PROPERTY PART I CHAPTER I: ‘AT HOME’ AT OLD JOLYON’S

Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight – an upper middle-class family in full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed the gift of psychological analysis (a talent without monetary value and properly ignored by the Forsytes), has witnessed a spectacle, not only delightful in itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In plainer words, he has gleaned from a gathering of this family – no branch of which had a liking for the other, between no three members of whom existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy – evidence of that mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so formidable a unit of society, so clear a reproduction of society in miniature. He has been admitted to a vision of the dim roads of social progress, has understood something of patriarchal life, of the swarmings of savage hordes, of the rise and fall of nations. He is like one who, having watched a tree grow from its planting – a paragon of tenacity, insulation, and success, amidst the deaths of a hundred other plants less fibrous, sappy, and persistent – one day will see it flourishing with bland, full foliage, in an almost repugnant prosperity, at the summit of its efflorescence.

On June 15, eighteen eighty-six, about four of the afternoon, the observer who chanced to be present at the house of old Jolyon Forsyte in Stanhope Gate, might have seen the highest efflorescence of the Forsytes.

This was the occasion of an ‘at home’ to celebrate the engagement of Miss June Forsyte, old Jolyon’s granddaughter, to Mr. Philip Bosinney. In the bravery of light gloves, buff waistcoats, feathers and frocks, the family were present, even Aunt Ann, who now but seldom left the comer of her brother Timothy’s green drawing-room, where, under the aegis of a plume of dyed pampas grass in a light blue vase, she sat all day reading and knitting, surrounded by the effigies of three generations of Forsytes. Even Aunt Ann was there; her inflexible back, and the dignity of her calm old face personifying the rigid possessiveness of the family idea.

When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present; when a Forsyte died – but no Forsyte had as yet died; they did not die; death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against it, the instinctive precautions of highly vitalized persons who resent encroachments on their property.

About the Forsytes mingling that day with the crowd of other guests, there was a more than ordinarily groomed look, an alert, inquisitive assurance, a brilliant respectability, as though they were attired in defiance of something. The habitual sniff on the face of Soames Forsyte had spread through their ranks; they were on their guard.

The subconscious offensiveness of their attitude has constituted old Jolyon’s ‘home’ the psychological moment of the family history, made it the prelude of their drama.

The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family importance, and – the sniff. Danger – so indispensable in bringing out the fundamental quality of any society, group, or individual – was what the Forsytes scented; the premonition of danger put a burnish on their armour. For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an instinct of being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing.

Over against the piano a man of bulk and stature was wearing two waistcoats on his wide chest, two waistcoats and a ruby pin, instead of the single satin waistcoat and diamond pin of more usual occasions, and his shaven, square, old face, the colour of pale leather, with pale eyes, had its most dignified look, above his satin stock. This was Swithin Forsyte. Close to the window, where he could get more than his fair share of fresh air, the other twin, James – the fat and the lean of it, old Jolyon called these brothers – like the bulky Swithin, over six feet in height, but very lean, as though destined from his birth to strike a balance and maintain an average, brooded over the scene with his permanent stoop; his grey eyes had an air of fixed absorption in some secret worry, broken at intervals by a rapid, shifting scrutiny of surrounding facts; his cheeks, thinned by two parallel folds, and a long, clean-shaven upper lip, were framed within Dundreary whiskers. In his hands he turned and turned a piece of china. Not far off, listening to a lady in brown, his only son Soames, pale and well-shaved, dark-haired, rather bald, had poked his chin up sideways, carrying his nose with that aforesaid appearance of ‘sniff,’ as though despising an egg which he knew he could not digest. Behind him his cousin, the tall George, son of the fifth Forsyte, Roger, had a Quilpish look on his fleshy face, pondering one of his sardonic jests. Something inherent to the occasion had affected them all.

CECIL WILLIAM MERCER (DORNFORD YATES)

Dornford Yates, the pseudonym for Cecil William Mercer (Home Boarder 1889²), was a barrister and a novelist. His comedy Berry novels and Chandos thrillers were bestsellers between the two World Wars.

FROM BERRY AND CO. CHAPTER 1

HOW WILL NOGGIN WAS FOOLED, AND BERRY RODE FORTH AGAINST HIS WILL.

“Who’s going to church?” said Daphne, consulting her wrist-watch.

There was a profound silence.

My sister turned to Jill.

“Are you coming?” she said. “Berry and I are.”

“I beg your pardon,” said her husband.

“Of course you’re coming,” said Daphne.

“Not in these trousers. This is the first time I’ve worn them, and I’m not going to kneel in them for any one.”

“Then you’ll change,” said his wife. “You’ve plenty of time.”

Berry groaned.

“This is sheer Bolshevism,” he said. “Is not my soul my own?”

“We shall start,” said Daphne, “in twenty minutes.”

It was nearly half-past ten in the morning of a beautiful summer day, and we were all taking our ease in the sunshine upon the terrace. It was the first Sunday which we had spent all together at White Ladies for nearly five years.

So far as the eye could see, nothing had changed.

At the foot of the steps the great smooth lawn stretched like a fine green carpet, its shadowed patches yet bright with dew. There were the tall elms and the copper beech and all the proud company of spreading giant – what were five years to them? There was the clump of rhododendrons, a ragged blotch of crimson, seemingly spilled upon the green turf, and there the close box hedge that walled away the rose-garden. Beyond the sunk fence a gap showed an acre or so of Bull’s Mead – a great deep meadow, and in it two horses beneath a chestnut tree, their long tails a-swish, sleepily nosing each other to rout the flies; while in the distance the haze of heat hung like a film over the rolling hills. Close at hand echoed the soft impertinence of a cuckoo, and two fat wood-pigeons waddled about the lawn, picking and stealing as they went. The sky was cloudless, and there was not a breath of wind.

The stable clock chimed the half-hour.

My sister returned to the attack.

“Are you coming, Boy?”

“Yes,” said I. “I am.”

Berry sat up and stared at me.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “There’s a service this morning. Besides, they’ve changed the lock of the poor-box.”

“I want to watch the Vicar’s face when he sees you,” said I.

“It will be a bit of a shock,” said Jonah, looking up from the paper. “Is his heart all right?”

“Rotten,” said Daphne. “But that doesn’t matter. I sent him a note to warn him yesterday.”

“What did you say?” demanded her husband. “I said, ‘We’re back at last, and – don’t faint – we’re all coming to Church to-morrow, and you’ve got to come back to lunch.’ And now, for goodness’ sake, go and change.”

“But we shall perspire,” said Berry. “Profusely. To walk half a mile in this sun is simply asking for it. Besides –”

“What’s the car done?” said Jonah. “I’m going, and I can’t hurry with this.” He tapped his short leg affectionately. “We needn’t take Fitch. Boy or I can drive.”

“Right oh,” said my sister, rising. “Is ten-minutes-to early enough?”

Jonah nodded.

“This,” said Berry, “is a conspiracy for which you will all pay. Literally. I shall take the plate round, and from you four I shall accept nothing but paper. Possibly I shall –”

Here the girls fell upon him and bore him protesting into the house and out of earshot.

“Who’s going to look after the car while we’re in church?” said I.

“There’s sure to be somebody ready to earn a couple of bob,” said Jonah. “Besides, we can always disconnect the north-east trunnion, or jack her up and put the wheels in the vestry or something.”

“All right. Only we don’t want her pinched.” With a yawn I rose to my feet. “And now I suppose I’d better go and turn her out.”

“Right oh,” said Jonah, picking up his paper again.

I strolled into the house.

We were proud of the car. She was a 1914 Rolls, and we had bought her at a long price less than a week ago. Fresh from the coach-builder’s, her touring body was painted silver-grey, while her bonnet was of polished aluminium. Fitted with every conceivable accessory, she was very good-looking, charming alike to ride or drive, and she went like the wind. In a word, she did as handsome as she was.

It was eight minutes to eleven as we slid past the lodge and on to the Bilberry road.

Before we had covered two furlongs, we swung round a corner to see a smart two-seater at rest by the dusty hedgerow, and a slight dark girl in fresh blue and white standing with one foot on the step, wiping her dainty fingers on a handful of cotton-waste.

L P HARTLEY

L P Hartley (West Acre 1910³) read Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, before working as a book reviewer, editor and writer. The Go-Between was published in 1953 and tells the story of a schoolboy, Leo Colston, who becomes embroiled in an affair between a man and woman from different social classes. The novel is a bildungsroman, exploring the challenges of growing up and learning about love and relationships. A television adaptation was broadcast on BBC One in 2015, starring Old Harrovian Jack Hollington (Rendalls 2014–2019) as Leo. This extract is from the start of the novel, with its very famous opening line.

FROM THE GO-BETWEEN PROLOGUE

THE PAST is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

When I came upon the diary, it was lying at the bottom of a rather battered red cardboard collarbox, in which as a small boy I kept my Eton collars. Someone, probably my mother, had filled it with treasures dating from those days. There were two dry, empty sea-urchins; two rusty magnets, a large one and a small one, which had almost lost their magnetism; some negatives rolled up in a tight coil; some stumps of sealing-wax; a small combination lock with three rows of letters; a twist of very fine whipcord; and one or two ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use was not at once apparent: I could not even tell what they had belonged to. The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they quite clean, they had the patina of age; and as I handled them, for the first time for over fifty years, a recollection of what each had meant to me came back, faint as the magnets’ power to draw, but as perceptible. Something came and went between us: the intimate pleasure of recognition, the almost mystical thrill of early ownership – feelings of which, at sixty-odd, I felt ashamed.

It was a roll-call in reverse; the children of the past announced their names, and I said “Here.” Only the diary refused to disclose its identity. My first impression was that it was a present someone had brought me from abroad. The shape, the lettering, the purple limp leather curling upwards at the corners, gave it a foreign look; and it had, I could see, gold edges. Of all the exhibits it was the only one that might have been expensive. I must have treasured it; why, then, could I not give it a context?

I did not want to touch it and told myself that this was because it challenged my memory; I was

proud of my memory and disliked having it prompted. So I sat staring at the diary, as at a blank space in a crossword puzzle. Still no light came, and suddenly I took the combination lock and began to finger it, for I remembered how, at school, I could always open it by the sense of touch when someone else had set the combination. It was one of my showpieces and, when I first mastered it, drew some applause, for I declared that to do it I had to put myself into a trance; and this was not quite a lie, for I did deliberately empty my mind and let my fingers work without direction. To heighten the effect, however, I would close my eyes and sway gently to and fro, until the effort of keeping my consciousness at a low ebb almost exhausted me; and this I found myself instinctively doing now, as to an audience. After a timeless interval I heard the tiny click and felt the sides of the lock relax and draw apart; and at the same moment, as if by some sympathetic loosening in my mind, the secret of the diary flashed upon me.

Yet even then I did not want to touch it; indeed my unwillingness increased, for now I knew why I distrusted it. I looked away and it seemed to me that every object in the room exhaled the diary’s enervating power and spoke its message of disappointment and defeat. And as if that was not enough, the voices reproached me with not having had the grit to overcome them. Under this twofold assault I sat staring at the bulging envelopes around me, the stacks of papers tied up with red tape – the task of sorting which I had set myself for winter evenings, and of which the red collar-box had been almost the first item; and I felt, with a bitter blend of self-pity and self-reproach, that had it not been for the diary, or what the diary stood for, everything would be different. I should not be sitting in this drab, flowerless room, where the curtains were not even drawn to hide the cold rain beating on the windows, or contemplating the accumulation of the past and the duty it imposed on me to sort it out. I should be sitting in another room, rainbow-hued, looking not into the past but into the future; and I should not be sitting alone.

So I told myself, and with a gesture born of will, as most of my acts were, not inclination, I took the diary out of the box and opened it.

DIARY FOR THE YEAR 1900

it said in a copperplate script unlike the lettering of today; and round the year thus confidently

heralded, the first year of the century, winged with hope, clustered the signs of the zodiac, each

somehow contriving to suggest a plenitude of life and power, each glorious, though differing from the others in glory. How well I remembered them, their shapes and attitudes! And I remembered too, though it was no longer potent for me, the magic with which they were then invested, and the tingling sense of coming fruition they conveyed – the lowly creatures no less than the exalted ones.

The Fishes sported deliciously, as though there were no such things as nets and hooks; the Crab had a twinkle in its eye, as though it was well aware of its odd appearance and thoroughly enjoyed the joke; and even the Scorpion carried its terrible pincers with a gay, heraldic air, as though its deadly intentions existed only in legend. The Ram, the Bull, and the Lion epitomized imperious manhood; they were what we all thought we had it in us to be; careless, noble, self-sufficient, they ruled their months with sovereign sway. As for the Virgin, the one distinctively female figure in the galaxy, I can scarcely say what she meant to me. She was dressed adequately, but only in the coils and sweeps of her long hair; and I doubt whether the school authorities, had they known about her, would have approved the hours of dalliance my thoughts spent with her, though these, I think, were innocent enough. She was, to me, the key to the whole pattern, the climax, the coping-stone, the goddess – for my imagination was then, though it is no longer, passionately hierarchical; it envisaged things in an ascending scale, circle on circle, tier on tier, and the annual, mechanical revolution of the months did not disturb this notion. I knew that the year must return to winter and begin again; but to my apprehensions the zodiacal company were subject to no such limitations: they soared in an ascending spiral towards infinity.

And the expansion and ascension, as of some divine gas, which I believed to be the ruling principle of my own life, I attributed to the coming century. The year 1900 had an almost mystical appeal for me; I could hardly wait for it: “Nineteen hundred, nineteen hundred,” I would chant to myself in rapture; and as the old century drew to its close, I began to wonder whether I should live to see its successor. I had an excuse for this: I had been ill and was acquainted with the idea of death; but much more it was the fear of missing something infinitely precious – the dawn of a Golden Age. For that was what I believed the coming century would be: a realization, on the part of the whole world, of the hopes that I was entertaining for myself.

The diary was a Christmas present from my mother, to whom I had confided some, though by no means all, of my aspirations for the future, and she wanted its dates to be worthily enshrined.

In my zodiacal fantasies there was one jarring note, to which, when I indulged them, I tried not to listen, for it flawed the experience. This was my own role in it.

My birthday fell in late July and I had an additional reason, an excellent one, though I should have been loath to mention it at school, for claiming the Lion as my symbol. But much as I admired him and what he stood for, I could not identify myself with him, because of late I had lost the faculty, which, like other children, I had once revelled in, of pretending that I was an animal. A term and a half at school had helped to bring about this disability in my imagination; but it was also a natural change.

I was between twelve and thirteen, and I wanted to think of myself as a man.

JOHN MORTIMER

Sir John Mortimer (The Grove 1937²) was a barrister and a playwright, as well as writing his famous collection of stories about a barrister named Horace Rumpole.

FROM THE COLLECTED STORIES OF RUMPOLE ‘RUMPOLE AND PORTIA’

This is a story of family life, of parents and children, and, like many such stories, it began with a quarrel. There was I, ensconced one evening in a quiet corner of Pommeroy’s Wine Bar consuming a lonely glass of Château Thames Embankment at the end of a day’s labours, when the voices of a couple in dispute came drifting over from the other side of one of Jack Pommeroy’s high-backed pews which give such an ecclesiastical air to his distinguished legal watering-hole. The voices I heard were well known to me, being those of my learned friend, Claude Erskine-Brown, and of his spouse, Mrs Phillida Erskine-Brown, née Trant, the Portia of our Chambers, whom I befriended and advised when she was a white-wig, and who, no doubt taking advantage of that advice, rose to take silk and become a Queen’s Counsel when Claude was denied that honour, and thus had his nose put seriously out of joint. The union of Claude and Phillida has been blessed with a girl and a boy named, because of Claude’s almost masochistic addiction to the lengthier operas of Richard Wagner (and an opera isn’t by Richard Wagner if it’s not lengthy), Tristan and Isolde. It was the subject of young Tristan which was causing dissension between his parents that evening.

‘Tristan was still in bed at quarter to eight this morning,’ Claude was complaining. ‘He won’t be able to do that when he goes away to Bogstead.’

‘Please, Claude’ – Phillida sounded terminally bored – ‘don’t go on about it.’

‘You know when I was at Bogstead’ – no Englishman can possibly resist talking about his boarding school – ‘we used to be woken up at half past six for early class, and we had to break the ice in the dormy washbasins.’

‘You have told me that, Claude, quite often.’

‘We had to run three times round Tug’s Patch before early church on saints’ days.’

‘Did you enjoy that?’

‘Of course not! I absolutely hated it.’ Claude was looking back, apparently on golden memories. ‘Why do you imagine Tristan would enjoy it then?’ ‘You don’t enjoy Bogstead,’ Claude was pointing out patiently. ‘You’re not meant to enjoy it. But if I hadn’t gone there I wouldn’t have got into Winchester and if I hadn’t got into Winchester I’d never have been to New College. And I’ll tell you something, Philly. If I hadn’t been to Bogstead, Winchester and New College, I’d never be what I am.’

‘Which might be just as well.’ Our Portia sounded cynical.

‘Whatever do you mean by that?’ Claude was nettled. I strained my ears to listen; things were obviously getting nasty.

‘It might be just as well if you weren’t the man you are,’ Claude’s wife told him. ‘If you hadn’t been at Bogstead you might not make such a terrible fuss about losing that gross indecency today. I mean, the way you carried on about that, you must still be in the fourth form at Boggers. I notice you don’t talk about sending Isolde to that dump.’

‘Bogstead is not a dump,’ Claude said proudly. ‘And you may not have noticed this, Philly, but Isolde is a girl. They don’t have girls there.’

‘Oh, I see. It’s a boy’s world, is it?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Poor old Isolde. She’s going to miss all the fun of breaking the ice at 6.30 in the morning and running three times round Tug’s Patch on saints’ days. Poor deprived child. She might even grow up to be a Queen’s Counsel.’

‘Come on, Philly. Isn’t that a bit…?’

‘A bit what?’ I had taught Phillida to be dead sharp on her cross-examination. ‘Well, not quite the thing to say. Of course I’m terrifically glad you’ve been made a QC. I think you’ve done jolly well.’

‘For a woman!’ A short, somewhat bitter laugh from Mrs Erskine-Brown emphasized her point.

‘But it’s just not “the thing” to crow about it.’ Erskine-Brown spoke with the full moral authority of his prep school and Winchester.

‘Sorry, Claude! I don’t know what “the thing” is. Such a pity I never went to Boggers. Anyway, I don’t see the point of having children if you’re going to send them away to boarding school.’

At that point, and much to my regret, the somewhat grey and tedious barrister named Hoskins of our Chambers, a man weighed down with the responsibility of four daughters, sat down at my table in order to complain about the extortionate price of coffee in our clerk’s room, and I lost the rest of the Erskine-Brown family dispute. However, I have given you enough of it to show the nature of their disagreement and Phillida’s reluctance to part with her young hopeful. These were matters which were to assume great importance in the defence of Stanley Culp on a charge of illicit arms dealing, for Stanley was a father who would have found our Portia’s views entirely sympathetic.

In most other respects, the home life of the Culps and the Erskine-Browns was as different as chalk and cheese. Stanley Culp was a plump, remorselessly cheerful, disorganized dealer in second-hand furniture – bits of junk and dubious antiques – in a jumbled shop near Notting Hill Gate. Unlike the Erskine-Browns, the Culps were a one-parent family, for Stanley was in sole charge of his son, Matthew, a scholarly, bespectacled little boy of about Tristan’s age. Some three and a half years before, Mrs Culp, so Stanley informed me when we met in Brixton Prison, had told her husband that he had ‘nothing romantic in his nature whatever’. ‘So she took off with the manager of Tesco, twenty years older than me if he was a day. Can you understand that, Mr Rumpole?’

SIMON SEBAG-MONTEFIORE

Simon Sebag-Montefiore (The Knoll 1978³) writes fiction and history. His novels include the Moscow Trilogy of novels: Sashenka, Red Sky at Noon and One Night in Winter. His work has been short-listed for and won numerous prizes, including the Political Novel of the Year Prize. His latest book is Voices of History: Speeches that Changed the World.

FROM SASHENKA PART ONE

St Petersburg, 1916

It was only teatime but the sun had already set when three of the Tsar’s gendarmes took up positions at the gates of the Smolny Institute for Noble Girls. The end of term at the finest girls’ boarding school in St Petersburg was no place for policemen but there they were, unmistakable in their smart navy-blue tunics with white trimming, shiny sabres, and lambskin helmets with sultan-spikes. One clicked his fingers impatiently, another opened and closed the leather holster of his Mauser revolver and the third stood stolidly, legs wide, with his thumbs stuck into his belt. Behind them waited a traffic jam of horse-drawn sleighs, emblazoned gold and crimson with family crests, and a couple of gleaming limousines. The slow, slanting snowfall was visible only in the flickering halo of streetlights and the amber lamps of touring cars.

It was the third winter of the Great War and it seemed the darkest and the longest so far. Through the black gates, down the paved avenue, the white splendour of the pillared Institute rose out of the early twilight like an ocean liner adrift in the mist. Even this boarding school, of which the Empress herself was patron and which was filled with the daughters of aristocrats and war profiteers, could no longer feed its girls or heat its dormitories. Term was ending prematurely. The shortages had reached even the rich. Few could now afford the fuel to run a car, and horsepower was fashionable again.

The winter darkness in wartime St Petersburg had a sticky arctic gloom all of its own. The feathery snow muffled the sounds of horses and engines but the burning cold made the smells sharper: petroleum, horse dung, the alcohol on the breath of the snoring postilions, the acrid cologne and cigarettes of chauffeurs in yellow- and red-trimmed uniforms, and the flowery scents on the throats of the waiting women.

Inside the burgundy leather compartment of a Delaunay-Belleville landaulet, a serious young woman with a heartshaped face sat with an English novel on her lap, lit by a naphtha lamp. Audrey Lewis – Mrs Lewis to her employers and Lala to her beloved charge – was cold. She pulled the bushy lambskin up over her lap; her hands were gloved, and she wore a wolf-fur hat and a thick coat. But still she shivered. She ignored the driver, Pantameilion, when he climbed into his seat, flicking his cigarette into the snow. Her brown eyes never left the door of the school.

‘Hurry up, Sashenka!’ Lala muttered to herself in English. She checked the brass clock set into the glass division that kept the chauffeur at bay. ‘Not long now!’

A maternal glow of anticipation spread across her chest: she imagined Sashenka’s long-limbed figure running towards her across the snow. Few mothers picked up their children from the Smolny Institute, and almost no fathers. But Lala, the governess, always collected Sashenka.

Just a few minutes, my child, she thought; my adorable, clever, solemn child.

The lanterns shining through the delicate tracery of ice on the dim car windows bore her away to her childhood home in Pegsdon, a village in Hertfordshire. She had not seen England for six years and she wondered if she would ever see her family again. But if she had stayed there, she would never have known her darling Sashenka. Six years ago, she had accepted a position in the household of Baron and Baroness Zeitlin and a new life in the Russian capital, St Petersburg. Six years ago, a young girl in a sailor suit had greeted her coolly, examined her searchingly and then offered the Englishwoman her hand, as if presenting a bouquet. The new governess spoke scarcely a word of Russian but she knelt on one knee and enclosed that small hot hand in her own palms. The girl, at first hesitantly then with growing pressure, leaned against her, finally laying her head on Lala’s shoulder. ‘Mne zavout Mrs Lewis,’ said the Englishwoman in bad Russian.

‘Greetings to a bespoke guest, Lala! I am be-named Sashenka,’ replied the child in appalling English. And that had been that: Mrs Lewis was henceforth ‘be-named’ Lala. The need met the moment. They loved each other on sight.

‘It’s two minutes to five,’ said the chauffeur tinnily through the speaking tube.

The governess sat forward, unhooked her own speaking tube and spoke into the brass cup in excellent Russian (though with an English intonation). ‘Thank you, Pantameilion.’

‘What are the pharaohs doing here?’ said the driver. Everyone used the slang term for the political police, the Gendarmerie. He chuckled. ‘Maybe the schoolgirls are hiding German codes in their petticoats?’

Lala was not going to discuss such matters with a chauffeur. ‘Pantameilion, I’ll need you to come in and get her trunk,’ she said sternly. But why were the gendarmes there? she wondered.

The girls always came out on time. Madame Buxhoeven, the headmistress, known to the girls as Grand-maman, ran the Institute like a Prussian barracks – but in French. Lala knew that Grand-maman was a favourite of the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna and the reigning Empress Alexandra.

A cavalry officer and a gaggle of schoolboys and students in gold-buttoned uniforms and caps walked through the gates to meet their sweethearts. In Russia, even schoolboys had uniforms. When they saw the three gendarmes, they started, then walked on, glancing back: what were the political police doing at a boarding school for noble girls?

Waiting to convey their masters’ daughters home, the coachmen, in ankle-length padded robes lined with thick white lamb’s fur, red sashes and bowler hats, stamped their feet and attended to their horses. They too observed the gendarmes.

Five o’clock. The double doors of the Smolny swung open, casting a ribbon of canary light down the steps towards the gates.

‘Ah, here they come!’ Lala tossed her book aside.

At the top of the steps, Madame Buxhoeven, severe in her black cape, serge dress and high white collar, appeared in the tent of light – as if on wheels like a sentry on a Swiss clock, thought Lala. Grand-maman’s mottled bosom, as broad as an escarpment, was visible even at this distance – and her ringing soprano could crack ice at a hundred paces. Even though it was freezing, Lala pulled down her window and peered out, excitement rising. She thought of Sashenka’s favourite tea awaiting her in the little salon, and the biscuits she had bought specially from the English Shop on the Embankment. The tin of Huntley & Palmers was perched beside her on the burgundy leather seat.

The coachmen clambered up on to their creaking conveyances and settled themselves, whips in hand. Pantameilion pulled on a beribboned cap and jacket trimmed in scarlet and gold and, stroking a well-waxed moustache, winked at Lala. Why do men expect us to fall in love with them just because they can start a motor car? Lala wondered, as the engine chugged, spluttered and burst into life.

Pantameilion smiled, revealing a mouthful of rotten fangs. His voice came breathily through the speaking tube. ‘So where’s our little fox then! Soon I’ll have two beauties in the car.’

Lala shook her head. ‘Hurry now, Pantameilion. A trunk and a valise, both marked Aspreys of London. Bistro! Quick!’

RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Harrow 1762) was an Irish playwright and Whig politician. He is best known for his plays The Rivals, The School for Scandal and The Duenna. The Harrow English Literature Society is named after Sheridan.

FROM THE RIVALS: ACT 1, SCENE 2

[Enter MRS MALAPROP and SIR ANTHONY ABSOLUTE.]

MRS MALAPROP There, Sir Anthony, there sits the deliberate simpleton who wants to disgrace her family, and lavish herself on a fellow not worth a shilling.

LYDIA Madam, I thought you once…

MRS MALAPROP You thought, miss! I don’t know any business you have to think at all – thought does not become a young woman. But the point we would request of you is, that you will promise to forget this fellow – to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

LYDIA Ah, madam! our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget.

MRS MALAPROP But I say it is, miss; there is nothing on earth so easy as to forget, if a person chooses to set about it. I’m sure I have as much forgot your poor dear uncle as if he had never existed – and I thought it my duty so to do; and let me tell you, Lydia, these violent memories don’t become a young woman.

SIR ANTHONY Why sure she won’t pretend to remember what she’s ordered not! – ay, this comes of her reading!

LYDIA What crime, madam, have I committed, to be treated thus?

MRS MALAPROP Now don’t attempt to extirpate yourself from the matter; you know I have proof controvertible of it. – But tell me, will you promise to do as you’re bid? Will you take a husband of your friends’ choosing?

LYDIA Madam, I must tell you plainly, that had I no preferment for any one else, the choice you have made would be my aversion.

MRS MALAPROP What business have you, miss, with preference and aversion? They don’t become a young woman; and you ought to know, that as both always wear off, ‘tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion. I am sure I hated your poor dear uncle before marriage as if he’d been a blackamoor – and yet, miss, you are sensible what a wife I made! – and when it pleased Heaven to release me from him, ‘tis unknown what tears I shed! – But suppose we were going to give you another choice, will you promise us to give up this Beverley?

LYDIA Could I belie my thoughts so far as to give that promise, my actions would certainly as far belie my words.

MRS MALAPROP Take yourself to your room. – You are fit company for nothing but your own ill-humours.

LYDIA Willingly, ma’am – I cannot change for the worse.

MRS MALAPROP There’s a little intricate hussy for you! [Exit.]

SIR ANTHONY It is not to be wondered at, ma’am, – all this is the natural consequence of teaching girls to read. Had I a thousand daughters, by Heaven! I’d as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet!

MRS MALAPROP Nay, nay, Sir Anthony, you are an absolute misanthropy.

SIR ANTHONY In my way hither, Mrs Malaprop, I observed your niece’s maid coming forth from a circulating library! – She had a book in each hand – they were half-bound volumes, with marble covers! – From that moment I guessed how full of duty I should see her mistress!

MRS MALAPROP Those are vile places, indeed!

SIR ANTHONY Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical! It blossoms through the year! – And depend on it, Mrs Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last.

MRS MALAPROP Fy, fy, Sir Anthony! you surely speak laconically.

SIR ANTHONY Why, Mrs Malaprop, in moderation now, what would you have a woman know?

MRS MALAPROP Observe me, Sir Anthony. I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny of learning; I don’t think so much learning becomes a young woman; for instance, I would never let her meddle with Greek, or Hebrew, or algebra, or simony, or fluxions, or paradoxes, or such inflammatory branches of learning – neither would it be necessary for her to handle any of your mathematical, astronomical, diabolical instruments. – But, Sir Anthony, I would send her, at nine years old, to a boarding-school, in order to learn a little ingenuity and artifice. Then, sir, she should have a supercilious knowledge in accounts; – and as she grew up, I would have her instructed in geometry, that she might know something of the contagious countries; – but above all, Sir Anthony, she should be mistress of orthodoxy, that she might not mis-spell, and mis-pronounce words so shamefully as girls usually do; and likewise that she might reprehend the true meaning of what she is saying. This, Sir Anthony, is what I would have a woman know; – and I don’t think there is a superstitious article in it.

SIR ANTHONY Well, well, Mrs Malaprop, I will dispute the point no further with you; though I must confess, that you are a truly moderate and polite arguer, for almost every third word you say is on my side of the question. But, Mrs. Malaprop, to the more important point in debate – you say you have no objection to my proposal?

CECIL BEATON

Sir Cecil Beaton (High Street 1918¹) was a writer, artist and photographer, well known for his photographs of celebrities including Winston Churchill, Vivien Leigh, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, the Queen and Elizabeth Taylor. He was also an award-winning costume designer for stage and film. This extract is from one of his diaries: a series of five diaries have been published, with The Wandering Years as the first in the series.

FROM THE WANDERING YEARS: 1922–39

PART I: CAMBRIDGE, 1922

After three escapist years at Harrow School, where my fledgling interests were ex-curriculum, and any signs of intelligence were seen only out of class, my father was faced with the problem of what to do with me. Most of my contemporaries now knew what they wanted to be in life; but at the age of eighteen I showed no particular aptitude for any known career. I had acquired somewhat of a reputation, and a certain amount of scandalous disapproval, for being able to make people laugh, and was considered sophisticated for my age. Yet I was, in many ways, remarkably undeveloped. It is true that I had been the art master’s prize pupil, with a knack for water-colour sketches, and a derivative flair for caricature and theatre design; but I, myself, had little confidence in these talents. In fact, secretly I was as anxious about my future as my father must have been.

It was therefore a welcome reprieve when my parents decided that my education should be continued at a university. Most parents already knew to what university, and to which college their offspring were to go. But my father was delightfully casual about such things, and one Saturday afternoon, at the thirteenth hour, set off at the wheel of the family Renault for Cambridge. Here he interviewed a Mr Armitage of St John’s college. It is only now, so many years later, that I understand what a remarkably generous and loving parent I was fortunate enough to have. Perhaps too close a proximity prevented his children from seeing him as the wistful and rather whimsical person he was; and with the years he wore a sad expression that may have been the result of feeling unappreciated. When, however, he came across some stranger who reacted to his charm or his wit, his whole being changed, and he shone brilliantly. My father had been all his life an enthusiastic cricketer and was, in fact, renowned as a wicket-keeper.

Mr Armitage immediately recognised my father’s charm, straightforwardness of manner, and simplicity of character, and he enjoyed the cricket talk. After the interview, it was arranged that, although the college was full, I should have rooms in Bridge Street and could ‘go up’ at the beginning of the next term and remain on, provided I could pass a special examination to be taken on arrival. Neither of my parents was particularly interested in the arts or in their manifestations. My mother certainly had an innate taste and sense of design and proportion, which I have consulted all through my life. My father, as a young man, was an amateur actor in the days when the amateur theatre had a certain status; and he often delighted, and at the same time embarrassed, us by his imitations of the actors of his day. But it must have been baffling for this straight-sailing couple to discover that the eldest of their four children was turning out to be so different from all that was expected.

Even as a child, I preferred to sit silent and self-conscious among the grown-ups while other children played rounders or rolled in the mud. I displayed not the slightest interest in cricket, or how to throw a ball with a twist on it, and now I was showing dissatisfaction with home life, as well as signs of outrageous snobbishness. I was full of inner yearnings, growing my hair ‘like a piano-tuner’, and developing other ridiculous aspects of aestheticism.

My ambition to break out of the anonymity of a nice, ordinary, middle-class family certainly manifested itself in other tiresome outward forms; one of which was the pleasure I took in surprising, or even shocking people by the inimitable way in which I adorned myself. Thus, it is not at all unexpected that, on the first occasion here recorded, I should purposely have allowed myself to be caught wearing a peculiar assortment of garments, before changing into a conventional suit, by the Victorian Mrs Perry, the only bona fide actress, albeit retired, my parents knew. Mrs Perry was the extremely respectable widow of a Folkestone doctor, with whom my family had made friends when holidaying one summer. Although Mrs Perry was an aggressive personality, and enjoyed every opportunity to take the centre of the stage, she had never been celebrated in the professional theatre. Yet to our somewhat conventional family house in Hyde Park Street she brought a distant exciting flicker of the footlights.

JOHN SUMMERSON

John Summerson (Rendalls 1918³) was a renowned English architectural historian. He was Curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum from 1945 until his retirement in 1984, and was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University 1958–59. He also lectured on the history of architecture at Birkbeck College London. Of his many books, the best known are probably Georgian London and Architecture in Britain 1530–1830, both standard works. He was at Harrow School from 1918–22 and the School’s History of Art society is named after him.

FROM THE CLASSICAL LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE CHAPTER 1: THE ESSENTIALS OF CLASSICISM

One thing at a time. First, what are the orders? On [illustration 1] you will find a very clear diagram of the Doric order. It consists, you see, of a temple column standing on a pedestal and carrying on its head the architrave, frieze and cornice, those elements which are collectively called the entablature. Then, in [illustrations 2–5] you see the Doric order again, with its four companions; it is the second from the left, with the Tuscan to the left, the Ionic, Corinthian and Composite to the right. An ‘order’ is the ‘column-and-superstructure’ unit of a temple colonnade. It does not have to have a pedestal and often does not. It does have to have an entablature (columns are meaningless unless they support something), and the cornice represents the eaves.

Now, why are there five orders? This is a little more difficult when it is necessary to glance back to some origins. The earliest written description of any of the orders is in Vitruvius. The name of this Roman author will crop up frequently in this book and this is the moment to introduce him. He was an architect of some consequence in the reign of Augustus and wrote a treatise in ten books, De Architectura, which he dedicated to the Emperor. This is the only treatise of its kind to have survived from antiquity and for that reason has been accorded enormous veneration. Vitruvius was not himself a man of any great genius or literary talent or indeed – for all we know – of architectural talent. The thing about his treatise is that it rounds up and preserves for us an immense quantity of traditional building lore: it is the code of practice of a Roman architect of the first century AD, enriched with instances and historical notes.

In the course of Vitruvius’s third and fourth books he describes three of the orders – Ionic, Doric and Corinthian – and gives a few notes on another, the Tuscan. He tells us in which part of the world each was invented. He relates them to his descriptions of temples and tells us to which gods and goddesses each order is appropriate. His descriptions are by no means exhaustive, he gives no fifth order, he does not present them in what we think of as the ‘proper’ sequence (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) and – most important – he does not present them as a canonical formulae embodying all architectural virtue. That was left for the theorists of the Renaissance.

In the middle of the fifteenth century, fourteen hundred years after Vitruvius, the Florentine architect and humanist, Leon Battista Alberti, described the orders, partly with reference to Vitruvius and partly from his own observations of Roman remains. It was he who added, from observation, a fifth order – the Composite – which combines features of the Corinthian with those of the Ionic. But Alberti was still perfectly objective and Vitruvian in his attitude. It was Sebastiano Serlio, nearly a century later, who really started the orders – the five orders now – on their long career that Serlio quite meant to do this but that is what he did.

Serlio was a man of the High Renaissance, an exact contemporary of Michelangelo, a near contemporary of Raphael and an associate of the architect-painter Baldassare Peruzzi whose designs he inherited. He built a few quite important buildings but his greatest service to architecture was to compile the first full-scale fully illustrated architectural grammar of the Renaissance. It came out as a series of books. The first two appeared in Venice, the later books in France under the patronage of Francois I. The books became the architectural bible for the civilised world. The Italians used them, the French owed nearly everything to Serlio and his books, the Germans and Flemings based their own books on his, the Elizabethans cribbed from him and Sir Christopher Wren was still finding Serlio invaluable when he built the Sheldonian at Oxford in 1663. Serlio’s book on the orders starts with an engraving – the very first of its kind – in which all five orders are shown standing side by side like ill-assorted ninepins ranged according to their relative slimness, that is to say, according to the ratio of lower diameter to height. All are on pedestals. The stubby Tuscan is on the left; then the similar but slightly taller Doric; the elegant Ionic; the lofty, elaborate Corinthian’ and finally the still more elongated and further enriched Composite. In the text accompanying this plate Serlio explains himself. He says that just as the ancient dramatists used to preface their plays with a prologue telling audiences what it was all going to be about, so he is putting before the principal characters in his treatise on architecture. He does it in a way which makes the orders seem as categorical in the grammar of architecture as, say, the four conjugations of verbs in the grammar of the Latin language.

Illustration 2–5: 2. Sebastiano Serlio, woodcut, 1540 (plate 1) 3. Giacoma Barozzi da Vignola, copper engraving, 1563 (plate 2) 4. Vicenzo Scamozzi, wood-engraving, 1615 (plate 3) 5. Claude Perrault, copper engraving, 1676 (plate 4)

JAMES BLUNT

James Blunt (Elmfield 1987³) is a singer and songwriter, and was in the army in the Life Guards, serving under NATO during the 1999 Kosovo War. He rose to fame with his debut album Back to Bedlam, the album selling over 11 million copies worldwide. His most recent album is called Once Upon a Mind (released in 2019).

MONSTERS

Oh, before they turn off all the lights. I won’t read you your wrongs or your rights, The time has gone. I’ll tell you goodnight, close the door, Tell you I love you once more. The time has gone. So here it is.

I’m not your son, You’re not my father, We’re just two grown men saying goodbye. No need to forgive. No need to forget. I know your mistakes and you know mine. And while you’re sleeping, I’ll try to make you proud, So daddy, won’t you just close your eyes, don’t be afraid. It’s my turn to chase the monsters away.

Oh, well I’ll read a story to you, Only difference is this one is true. Time has gone. I’ve folded your clothes on the chair. I hope you sleep well, don’t be scared. Time has gone. So here it is.

CHORUS

Sleep a lifetime. Yes, and breath a last word You can feel my hand on your arm. I will be the last one, So, I’ll leave a light on. Let there be no darkness in your heart.

FROM MOON LANDING (2013), ‘SMOKE SIGNALS’

One by one they pass me by. And I’ve used up my supplies. Out of water. Out of hope. Can’t make fire. Only smoke.

Here I am alone in silence Castaway on a desert island. A traveller in an ocean lost at sea.

Smoke signals in the night sky Hope you see them as you pass by. I’m screaming from the cliff top You’re the only one I’ve got To rescue me to rescue me. Why can’t you see, why can’t you see? I don’t think that I’ll survive. I’ll die here without you. Oh, I can’t live without you.

The sun comes up. The sun goes down. Wonder if I’ll ever be found?

Here I am alone in silence Castaway on a desert island. A traveller in an ocean lost at sea.

Smoke signals in the night sky Hope you see them as you pass by. I’m screaming from the cliff top You’re the only one I’ve got To rescue me to rescue me. Why can’t you see, why can’t you see? I don’t think that I’ll survive. I’ll die here without you. Oh, I can’t live without you.

TERENCE RATTIGAN

Sir Terence Rattigan (The Park 1925²) was a playwright who is most famous for The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy and French Without Tears. The School’s drama and theatre society is named after him.

FROM THE BROWNING VERSION

ANDREW CROKER HARRIS…sits at the table and makes a sign for TAPLOW to sit beside him. He picks up a text of the Agamemnon and TAPLOW does the same.

ANDREW. Line thirteen hundred and ninety-nine. Begin.

TAPLOW. Chorus. We – are surprised at –

ANDREW. (Automatically.) We marvel at.

TAPLOW. We marvel at – thy tongue – how bold thou art – that you –

ANDREW. Thou. (ANDREW’S interruptions are automatic. His thoughts are evidently far distant.)

TAPLOW. Thou – can –

ANDREW. Canst –

TAPLOW. Canst – boastfully speak –

ANDREW. Utter such a boastful speech –

TAPLOW. Utter such a boastful speech – over – (In a sudden rush of inspiration.) – the bloody corpse of the husband you have slain –

ANDREW looks down at his text for the first time. TAPLOW looks apprehensive.

ANDREW. Taplow – I presume you are using a different text from mine –

TAPLOW. No, sir.

ANDREW. That is strange for the line as I have it reads: ἥτις τοιόνδʼ ἐπʼ ἀνδρὶ κομπάζεις λόγον. However diligently I search I can discover no ‘bloody’ – no ‘corpse’ – no ‘you have slain’. Simply ‘husband’ –

TAPLOW. Yes, sir. That’s right.

ANDREW. Then why do you invent words that simply are not there?

TAPLOW. I thought they sounded better, sir. More exciting. After all she did kill her husband, sir. (With relish.) She’s just been revealed with his dead body and Cassandra’s weltering in gore –

ANDREW. I am delighted at this evidence, Taplow, of your interest in the rather more lurid aspects of dramaturgy, but I feel I must remind you that you are supposed to be construing Greek, not collaborating with Aeschylus.

TAPLOW. (Greatly daring.) Yes, but still, sir, translator’s licence, sir – I didn’t get anything wrong – and after all it is a play and not just a bit of Greek construe.

ANDREW. (Momentarily at a loss.) I seem to detect a note of end of term in your remarks. I am not denying that the Agamemnon is a play. It is perhaps the greatest play ever written –

TAPLOW. (Quickly.) I wonder how many people in the form think that?

Pause. TAPLOW is instantly frightened of what he has said. Sorry, sir. Shall I go on?

ANDREW does not answer. He sits motionless staring at his book.

Shall I go on, sir?

There is another pause. ANDREW raises his head slowly from his book. ANDREW. (Murmuring gently, not looking at TAPLOW.) When I was a very young man, only two years older than you are now, Taplow, I wrote, for my own pleasure, a translation of the Agamemnon – a very free translation – I remember – in rhyming couplets.

TAPLOW. The whole Agamemnon – in verse? That must have been hard work, sir.

ANDREW. It was hard work; but I derived great joy from it. The play had so excited and moved me that I wished to communicate, however imperfectly, some of that emotion to others. When I had finished it, I remember, I thought it very beautiful – almost more beautiful than the original.

TAPLOW. Was it ever published, sir?

ANDREW. No. Yesterday I looked for the manuscript while I was packing my papers. I was unable to find it. I fear it is lost – like so many other things. Lost for good.

TAPLOW. Hard luck, sir.

ANDREW is silent again. TAPLOW steals a timid glance at him. Shall I go on, sir?

ANDREW, with a slight effort, lowers his eyes again to his text.

ANDREW. (Raising his voice slightly.) No. Go back and get that last line right.

TAPLOW, out of Andrew’s vision, as he thinks, makes a disgusted grimace in his direction.

TAPLOW. That – thou canst utter such a boastful speech over thy husband –

ANDREW. Yes, And, now, if you would be so kind, you will do the line again, without the facial contortion which you just found necessary to accompany it –

ALEXANDER GALBRAITH WILSON

‘Sandy’ Wilson (The Head Master’s 1937³) is most famous as a lyric writer and composer, known in particular for the musical The Boy Friend (1953). During the Second War World, he served in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps.

FROM THE BOYFRIEND

Any girl who’s reached the age Of seventeen or thereabouts Has but one desire in view She knows she has reached the stage Of needing one to care about Nothing else will really do

Childhood games are left behind And her heart takes wing Hoping that it soon will find Just one thing

We’ve got to have, We plot to have, For it’s a dreary not to have That certain thing called “The Boy Friend” We scheme about And dream about And we’ve been known to scream about That certain thing called “The Boy Friend”

He is really a necessity If you want to get on And we might as well confess it He is a sine qua non

We sigh for him And cry for him, And we would gladly die for him That certain thing called “The Boy Friend”

We plead to have, We need to have, In fact our poor hearts bleed to have That certain thing called “The Boy Friend” We’d save for him And slave for him We’d even misbehave for him That certain thing called “The Boy Friend” Life without us is impossible And devoid of all charms No amount of idle gossip’ll Keep them out of our arms We’re blue without Can’t do without Our dreams just won’t come true without That certain thing called “The Boy Friend”

We’re blue without Can’t do without Our dreams just won’t come true without That certain thing called “The Boy Friend”

MIKE D’ABO

Mike D’Abo (Bradbys 1957³) is a singer and songwriter. His musical career started at Harrow and he went on to form A Band of Angels with a group of Old Harrovians. He left the group and joined Manfred Mann in 1966. He wrote Build Me Up Buttercup with Tony Macaulay and it was released by the Foundations in 1968, with Colin Young singing lead vocals. He wrote Handbags and Gladrags in 1967 when he was lead singer of Manfred Mann. Rod Stewart recorded the song in 1969 with Mike d’Abo playing the piano.

BUILD ME UP BUTTERCUP

Why do you build me up (build me up) buttercup, baby Just to let me down (let me down) and mess me around? And then worst of all (worst of all) you never call, baby When you say you will (say you will) but I love you still I need you (I need you) more than anyone, darlin’ You know that I have from the start So build me up (build me up) buttercup, don’t break my heart

“I’ll be over at ten,” you told me time and again But you’re late, I wait around and then (bah dah dah) I went to the door, I can’t take any more It’s not you, you let me down again

(Hey, hey, hey) baby, baby, try to find (Hey, hey, hey) a little time and I’ll make you mine (Hey, hey, hey) I’ll be home I’ll be beside the phone waiting for you Ooh ooh ooh, ooh ooh ooh

Why do you build me up (build me up) buttercup, baby Just to let me down (let me down) and mess me around? And then worst of all (worst of all) you never call, baby When you say you will (say you will) but I love you still I need you (I need you) more than anyone, darlin’ You know that I have from the start So build me up (build me up) buttercup, don’t break my heart

You were my toy but I could be the boy you adore If you’d just let me know (bah dah dah) Although you’re untrue, I’m attracted to you all the more Why do I need you so?

(Hey, hey, hey) baby, baby, try to find (Hey, hey, hey) a little time and I’ll make you mine (Hey, hey, hey) I’ll be home I’ll be beside the phone waiting for you Ooh ooh ooh, ooh ooh ooh Why do you build me up (build me up) buttercup, baby Just to let me down (let me down) and mess me around? And then worst of all (worst of all) you never call, baby When you say you will (say you will) but I love you still I need you (I need you) more than anyone, darlin’ You know that I have from the start So build me up (build me up) buttercup, don’t break my heart

I, I, I need you more than anyone, baby You know that I have from the start So build me up (build me up) buttercup

HANDBAGS AND GLADRAGS

Ever seen a blind man cross the road Trying to make the other side Ever seen a young girl growing old Trying to make herself a bride So what becomes of you my love When they have finally stripped you of The handbags and the gladrags That your Grandad had to sweat so you could buy Baby Once I was a young man And all I thought I had to do was smile You are still a young girl And you bought everything in style Listen But once you think you’re in you’re out ‘Cause you don’t mean a single thing without The handbags and the gladrags That your Grandad had to sweat so you could buy Sing a song of six-pence for your sake And take a bottle full of rye Four and twenty blackbirds in a cake And bake them all in a pie They told me you missed school today So what I suggest you just throw them all away The handbags and the gladrags That your poor old Granddad had to sweat to buy They told me you missed school today So I suggest you just throw them all away The handbags and the gladrags That your poor old Granddad had to sweat to buy ya

PAUL BINSKI

Paul Binski (The Park 1970³) is Professor of History of Medieval Art at the University of Cambridge and author of numerous books and essays, including Gothic Wonder, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation and Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England.

GOTHIC WONDER: ART, ARTIFICE, AND THE DECORATED STYLE, 1290-1350 FINAL CHAPTER

At the heart of one of the most powerful Romantic concepts of Gothic art and architecture is the idea that Gothic is a style of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’; that rather than being a style of perfected, unalterable and unaltering beauty like Classicism, it is a style if not exactly of beauty, then at least of action, of dynamic change like a natural thing urging towards self-realization. This concept is often attributed to the great Swiss formalist art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. But its roots extend even beyond the sublime of the poet Goethe, who when writing on German architecture in 1772 saw in Gothic architecture the urge to ‘build toward heaven ... like a sublimely towering, wide-spreading tree of God which, with its thousand branches, millions of twigs and leaves more numerous than the sands of the sea, proclaims to the surrounding country the glory of its master, the Lord’. The forest had for some time been an image for the inner imperative of Gothic architecture. In thought, the ancient basis of all such notions of becoming lies in the distinction drawn in Plato’s Timaeus between being and becoming, intelligible firm knowledge and shifting opinion; it was God who implanted intelligence into the created world, and who as maker, father and builder coaxed order out of chaos. The Timaeus was the only work of Plato known directly in the Middle Ages.

It was not lost on ancient and medieval conceptions of nature that creation itself was in a constant state of becoming, always at risk of reversion into primordial imbalance, disorder and decay. The whole thing was like some marvellous balancing act, held delicately together in equilibrium, always at risk, its mixtures and components poised in everlasting but perilous suspense. The system’s microcosm, the human body as envisaged by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Galen and medieval physicians, was also a shifting unstable compound, tensive in nature, viscous and humoural, needing balance. The humoural character of medieval aesthetics too allows us to understand what style and ornament are: not superficial things, but ways in which outwards appearances, surfaces, were suffused connectedly from within, their style, elegance, colour and working, all indicative of inner ordering. This is why the surfaces of works of art are eloquent things, and why medieval, and especially Gothic, art could use the natural imagery of growth, secretion and change so persuasively. Vigour, the natural vigour of stuff and of human experience, is a keynote. The medieval imaginary accepted that such things as stones possessed virtus, ‘power’, and that natural things could morph and shape-shift, a truth as apparent in the understanding of the lability of late-medieval Gothic architecture as of the Green Man. This too the crafter had to cope with and put to good use, for materials, as we have said, have (metaphorically speaking) a ‘character’: they urge, tend and fight – and the artisan duly urges, tends and fights back. If they lost, the Wild could easily become the Dead. Natural science, art and ethics all acknowledged that the world urges and pushes, strains toward flourishing, pleasure and death, risking excess and vice: and it was through restraint and discipline that rebalancing was sought and found. These necessary and health-giving constraints entailed effort, willed self-mastery (enkrasia) and inevitably difficulty – an uplifting, even heroic, concept in the verbal and non-verbal arts. For getting life ‘right’ is hard for all of us, and requires work: no pain, no gain.

For Aristotle, as for Thomas Aquinas his medieval follower, the virtue of temperance, temperantia – the regulation of appetite, pleasure – governs the sense of touch, for touch, along with taste and smell, is the sense most near to the pleasures of animals and thus most needing to be regulated: what makes humans human is the tempering of such appetite by reason, a uniquely human faculty. The word temperance had wide practical and ethical purchase. It required getting things back to a balanced state, back into proportion. The notion of a ‘medium’, that which stands mid-way between things in a combination or blend but which is also a thing in itself – is useful here. In the visual arts, we encounter a substance that blends and binds together pigments into a productive and correctly balanced state, namely tempera. We speak of the tempering of steel, and indeed of temperament in the nice tuning of a musical instrument, producing a satisfying concord: the ‘well-tempered clavier’ as Bach called it. That we encounter ill-tempered human beings goes without saying. The purpose of tempering is harmony and therefore an experience, sensory and reasonable, of rightness and well-being; that practical everyday rightness which makes life livable and which is the objective of craft as much as of medicine.

To tend to something is to encourage it through care, even ‘tough love’. It is the proper direction of the will or desire of someone or something (the term ‘tend’ is related to the group of words also including ‘intention’). It carries with it the idea of tempering and controlling the desire or natural inward movement of a thing, as perhaps with the inherent tendencies or ‘character’ of ivory or wood that need cutting or carving. The Romans, so practical, so effective, understood that while we end in a tomb, we pass pleasurable life in gardens real or imaginary: cultivation – itself a powerful metaphor – provided the ancient and medieval world with a useful body of concepts for shaping and directing things, as did the image of building and architecture. Through their skills and methods, the gardener, woodsman or farmer allied utility with beauty. They understood the virtus of the natural world and that things divided, approximately, into the wild and the tamed. In his Historia naturalis Pliny the Elder classified two kinds of trees – wild ones, silvestres, and kindly or civilized ones, urbani. For Cicero, the great rhetorician, the difference between rustic speech, sermo rusticus, and urbane communication, sermo urbanus, was as much a register of differences of speech, of social cultivation. Roughness or asperitas was a quality of style to be smoothed out unless it served a purpose, as it does in the case of some carved imagery. Our term ‘rude’ still signifies both impoliteness and something unworked, and our work ‘polite’ is descended from the Latin and Romance words for ‘polish’. These terms of civility, language or style are relational – that’s how the arts work, through subtle metaphors. They are also to do with the narrative of process, because tending and tempering change this into that. Quintilian, the Roman rhetorician who vividly bridges the art-language divide, writes of the difficulties of writing itself, but in terms of the analogy with cultivation. In composition he says that we can, if we wish, imprudently rush a text out so creating a mass of unformed ‘raw material’ or draft – for this he uses term silva, alluding to abundant thickets of woodland, that which is always becoming but is not fully realized; but a better way is to plan things with due care and to carve them into shape only in a finishing or polishing process. Beauty and good order have utility, the expression of which is the orderly planting of fruit trees in straight lines, as well as their vigorous but judicious cutting back to prevent them running off or bolting. The point is that we discipline, prune, things in order not simply that they may display but that by being leaner and so flourishing they may nourish and so be useful. The Latin verb putare includes the senses of pruning, cleansing, reckoning and thinking. So things should be correct, and that correctness turns frequently on nature’s management and selfmanagement as a model for how art and literature might also work effectively.

PHILIP MARSDEN

Philip Marsden (The Park 1974³) is a writer of numerous travel books. In his wooden sloop Tsambika, he sailed from his home in Cornwall up the west coast of Ireland to the north of Scotland. The Summer Isles: A Voyage of the Imagination is the account of that journey, and an exploration of islands, both real and imagined.

FROM THE SUMMER ISLES: A VOYAGE OF THE IMAGINATION

It was my grandfather who taught me to sail. He showed me how to hank on the jib, sweat the halyards, make off the sheets and hoist the main by hauling the throat and the peak together (he taught me too the pleasure, the necessity, of the language). He passed on the art of helming, of feeling the boat through the tiller as a rider feels the mouth of a horse; he taught me how to trim the sails, to tie the right knots, to row and to scull. These were the practical lessons. But behind them were also unspoken things that settled far deeper in me – the strange elemental appeal of being on the water, the mystique of boats, the way he spoke about his own, the tenderness he showed every piece of tackle, the winter routine of hanging all the blocks on a lanyard and lovingly varnishing each one, the visceral hurt he felt when anything was damaged.

Later in my teens, I jumped at any opportunity to crew. Friends, friends of friends, anyone who had a boat and wanted an extra pair of hands. I sailed up and down the south coast of England, to Cork and Bantry Bay, back and forth across the Channel to Brittany and Normandy. I loved the footloose rhythm of those trips, arriving in unfamiliar harbours, sailing on the next morning. I gazed out to sea, I read a lot. I enjoyed bad weather, reefed down in heavy seas. It seemed then a perfect existence – contemplation mixed with moments of high adventure. But like all teenage dreams, it was big on ideals and light on responsibility: I was utterly ignorant of the weight those skippers bore.

Now years later, I had still not skippered a boat to anywhere I couldn’t reach by lunchtime. But I had decided to explore the west coasts of Ireland of Scotland, in search of real and fictitious islands. Sailing there single-handed, in a boat I didn’t have, using skills I’d never acquired, was not the easiest way to reach them. But if I have learned anything from years of travelling, it is that a journey’s trickiness is what makes it most rewarding. Looking for imaginary places isn’t meant to be easy.

HERE HE LEAVES THE HARBOUR OF KILRONAN, ON IRELAND’S ARAN ISLANDS.

I woke to sun and no wind. The sea was all shine and glitter. Another boat lay a little way off in the harbour and its mooring rope dropped rod-straight from the bow. Beside it, an inverted image of itself stretched out across the water in a scribble of broken spars and rigging. When I motored out of the bay, my bow left a clean v of wash on the surface. A shag swam off at my approach, then took flight, full of indignation, as if it was frankly impertinent for anyone to be moving about on such a morning.

For an hour or more I followed the treeless coast of Inis Mór. The regularity of the limestone scarp made it look like a flat-pack island just pulled from the box (vegetation not included). On the other side, way off to the north, the skyline of Connemara was more fulsome, bulbous with the granite peaks of the Twelve Bens.

A mile or so in front of me, dead on my course, were Na Sceirdí, the Skerd Rocks. The name comes from the Irish sceird, a ‘bleak, windswept place’. The largest of them rose more than sixty feet from the water, and there was threat in its height and blackness. Even today, it was surrounded by skirts of surf. I’d read of the nine women dropped off on Sceird Mór years ago to collect dulse. The weather came in and they could not be picked up. For nine days and nine nights they were stranded there. But they were tough, those Connemara women, and the only ill effects were swollen jaws from chewing the dulse – although, according to one of their husbands, they ‘weren’t as good as they used to be until a fortnight after coming home’. In October 2000, a large trawler – the Arosa – was driven on to the Skerd Rocks: just one man from a crew of thirteen was rescued.

I adjusted my course. I wanted those rocks well to the north. I didn’t trust them. Sure enough, after going below for a few minutes, I found that they’d sneaked nearer on the tide. Close up, their presence was more animate, with sculpted

brows and haunches. Every now and then, waves rose up their fringe, ghostly arms stretching out to try and get a hold.

The Skerd archipelago is also visible from the north, from the mainland. The rocks lie far enough offshore to have become part of that hazy and suggestive territory, the cartography of the not-quite-real, the wished-for, the possible. Roderic O’Flaherty wrote of them in the 1680s: ‘These rocks sometimes appear to be a city far off, full of houses, castles, towers, chimneys, sometimes full of blasing flames, smoke and people running to and fro.’

From the cockpit, I watched them closely as they passed, shape-shifting with each glance. They slid past my beam, then my quarter. Then they were astern and shrinking.

The hours melted one into the next. Overhead the sun remained half-hidden behind a film of high cloud. It added to the strange suspension of that morning. The sea surface was so colourless and smooth that I felt I was flying – like the skyships of medieval Ireland. Having cleared the end of Inis Mór, I picked up a swell from yesterday’s blow. The waves were long enough not to trouble the boat, but each time I was in a trough, the rise of water was surprising, deep enough to hide the land.

Towards Slyne Head, a breeze came out of the south. I pulled up the sails and cut the engine. The quiet came as a shock. My ears rang with relief; their only stimulus now the gentle slop of water past the gunwale. I looked ahead to where the land tapered to a point, breaking into a dot-dot-dot of islands and rocks. My internal chatter was toying with names. Slyne Head: slyne …skerd; down in Kerry, there’d been Slea Head and Sybil Point. I wondered about the snakey sibilance, whether there was a link to their threat. I couldn’t think of any other examples so I dropped the theory and focused on getting past the headland.

Around such points is often great agitation. Blocks of tide-driven water pour along the coast at different rates, at different levels; where they meet, there’s usually some reckoning to be done. The swells become confused and steep. Overfalls can add to the chaos. The charts mark these places with a couple of discreet wave symbols, while the pilot books advise that they are ‘best given a wide offing’.

But they move around, these tide races. Sometimes they’re close in, sometimes further out; the winds affect them, and the state of tide. Now on the skyline, just a few hundred yards off, I could see upturned wedges of water. I was trying to work out a course to avoid them when the sea became oddly flat. Sooner than expected. I pushed down the helm and headed back towards the head. There was often an inside passage of calmer water close to the land. But now disturbed water lay in all directions.

Suddenly the boat dropped away to port. I stumbled. My shoulder knocked hard against a winch. My arm was in water. As the boat righted, I picked myself up. At once the stern lifted and we were being driven forward, fast, with another train-size flood. I turned on the engine, stowed the genoa. The wind was too light: I needed power for steerage.

I looked around. All was angles, formless slopes and dips, shapes that water couldn’t hold for long, and didn’t, collapsing in violent patches of froth that now dotted the seascape. It made me think of the field of chevaux-de-frise outside Dún Aonghasa. This was a liquid version.

In a large and regular sea, you develop a rhythm at the helm. No two waves are ever the same but they follow a pattern, like a piece of music. This was just noise. Great stands of water would come surging out of the mess. All I could do was grip the tiller against them. Hoisted for a moment on a mound of sea, I took in my surroundings: acres and acres of turbulence, a fluid plain of jut and rupture. It was hard to tell what progress the engine was making through the water – four or five knots on the instruments. But with the shifting of the water itself, that meant little against the land.

In fact, it was working in my favour. I could see the headland and its lighthouse moving south. And now ahead, a hundred yards or so, all was smooth again. One more shove from the sea, one more yank of the helm. The movement began to settle. Soon Tsambika had found her feet again, and we were free, following the line of a different coast, pushing north.

MICHAEL CARROLL

Michael Carroll (Newlands 1949²) is a travel writer whose work includes books on Greece and Iran. His literary guide for travellers explores the cultural gems of Greece, including Lord Byron’s time in the country and many of the Greek myths and legends that have inspired writers such as Durrell, Twain, Flaubert and Fowles.

FROM GREECE: A LITERARY GUIDE FOR TRAVELLERS

On 5 January 1824 Lord Byron, after narrowly escaping Turkish warships, landed in Missolonghi, for years a centre of Greek resistance which the Turks were determined to destroy. G F Abbott’s Songs of Modern Greece (1900) celebrates its defiance in a siege not long before Byron’s arrival when Markos Botsaris was its leader: ‘They all swore by Ahmed Mohammed to enter Mesolonghi and feast there on Christmas day, before sunrise. “Allah! Allah!” they shouted and rushed forward. The Turks planted ladders to climb on the trenches, but the musket-shots and the sabre strokes made them fall as thick as frogs.’

Byron had been appointed by the London Greek Committee as its agent in support of the Greeks; he had waited several months in Kefalonia before making his move to the mainland. The Ionian Islands were under British rule and England refused to take sides in the conflict; Byron chose to stay in Kefalonia, rather than Zante or Corfu, because he had become a friend of the governor Charles Napier (later renowned as the conqueror of Sind), who was sympathetic to the Greek cause.

Lord Byron had felt an affinity with Greece from his first visit in 1809. He loved the beautiful and often dramatic scenery and was drawn to the mountain warriors of Souli, many of whom he took on as his private bodyguard; romantically, they were his kind of people. In Athens, he took the trouble to learn modern Greek. Foreigners at that time had a low opinion of the natives, deriding and looking down on them. Byron, however, found much to admire in the Greeks, and perhaps because he was aware of the contradictions and failings in his own character, liked them despite their faults. In his notes to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage he rebutted the common accusation thrown at Greeks of ingratitude:

‘Now, in the name of Nemesis, for what are they to be grateful? Where is the human being who has ever conferred a benefit on Greece or Greeks? They are to be grateful to the Turks for their fetters, and the Franks for their broken promises and lying counsels. They are to be grateful for the artist who engraves their ruins and to the antiquary who carries them away: to the traveller whose janissary flogs them and to the scribbler whose journal abuses them! This is the amount of their obligations to foreigners.’

Byron had arrived in a Greece at war yet divided by factions who feared each other as much as they hated their common enemy. Today there is a memorial garden on the site of the house where he stayed for the last months of his life, where he was welcomed ashore in triumph to the shouts of the crowd and the salute of cannon. The building was destroyed during World War II, but we know something about it thanks to several contemporary descriptions. It was a large two-storeyed house with wooden balconies on the shore of the lagoon, with rambling outhouses where Byron’s rumbustious Souliotes were quartered. On the first floor was Colonel Stanhope (later Earl of Harrington), charged by the London Committee to educate and generally improve the Greeks by setting up a printing press and distributing a large supply of bibles. Byron called him ‘the typographical colonel’. Byron’s own rooms were on the top floor, furnished with Turkish sofas and decorated with every type of weapon, including ‘carbines, fowling pieces, pistols, swords, sabres, a claymore’, where he lived with Pietro Gamba, younger brother of his ex-mistress the countess Teresa Guiccioli, the page Lukas, some very large dogs and his two main servants, the long-suffering Fletcher, his valet for the last 20 years, and Tita Falcieri, a giant of a man who had been Byron’s gondolier in Venice (and was later employed by Benjamin Disraeli). According to one visitor it was more like a busy inn than a private house.

For northerners accustomed to clouds and rain through much of the year, a wet spring is never a surprise, but in Greece something better is always expected; and yet how often, instead of blue skies and warming sun, day can follow day of drenching rain. It was Byron’s misfortune to spend the last months of his life at Missolonghi during a long bout of such atrocious weather, when wet winds blew coldly from the south and continuous rain turned the marshy flatlands to a sea of mud. He wrote to his banker friend Hancock that ‘if we are not taken off by the sword, we