The Oldie magazine - April issue (398)

32-PAGE GUIDE TO GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY NEW

MATT

CARTOON

April 2021 | £4.95 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 398

Mr Men turn 50!

Roger Hargreaves by Kath Garner

Tortured genius – AN Wilson on Elizabeth Bowen Barry Humphries on the Australian invasion Spicy Chips – Simon Heffer on Chips Channon

Give The Oldie for 67p an issue See p11

Mr Men turn 50 page 14

Features 10 Elizabeth Bowen’s tragic genius A N Wilson 11 Hurricane Higgins hits Liverpool Gary Smith 13 Why are the British so beastly to the Yanks? Donna Freed 14 Roger Hargreaves and 50 years of Mr Men Kath Garner 16 1960s Australian invasion Barry Humphries 18 Chips Channon, uncensored Simon Heffer 21 Philip Roth’s Jekyll and Hyde sides Tristram Powell 25 Best Easter sermons Reverend Peter Mullen 26 Pilgrimage to 84 Charing Cross Road Valerie Grove 28 My trip to mad world Horatio Clare 30 Gainsborough in London Susan Sloman 75 The good life – drinking and gardening Hugh Johnson

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 12 Olden Life: What were Universal Aunts?

Jackie Winter

Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA www.theoldie.co.uk

S u bs queries Email h ? elp@ s u bsc r ib theoldiee. . co.uk

ABC circulation figure July-December 2020: 47,382

Ozzie invader – Barry Humphries page 16 12 Modern Life: Who is Allan Shaich? John Lloyd 32 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 34 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 35 Country Mouse Giles Wood 37 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 38 Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu 41 School Days Sophia Waugh 41 Quite Interesting Things about ... April John Lloyd 42 God Sister Teresa 42 Funeral Service: Howard Morgan James Hughes- Onslow 43 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 44 Readers’ Letters 47 I Once Met… George Sanders Nicholas Hordern 47 Memory Lane 59 Media Matters Stephen Glover 60 History David Horspool 62 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 62 Rant: Nosy chemists Jill Stitson 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor John Bowling Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

Lucinda Lambton on Pevsner page 84

91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

50/1 The Oldie’s 32-page Guide t0 Growing Old Disgracefully

84 Overlooked Britain: The Pevsner guide to my Durham childhood Lucinda Lambton 87 Taking a Walk: Hidden charms of an ancient Dorset giant Patrick Barkham

Books

Arts

Supplement

49 The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss,

by Reverend Richard Coles Frances Wilson 50 Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries: 1918-38 edited by Simon Heffer Jane Ridley 50 The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons from Monastic Life, by Sarah Sands Nicola Shulman 51 The Buildings of Green Park,

by Andrew Jones Lucinda Lambton 53 Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir,

by Marina Warner Ysenda Maxtone Graham 55 The End of the Road, by Jack Cooke William Joll 57 Double Blind, by Edward St Aubyn Paul Bailey

Travel 82 Home from home: British holiday cottages Liz Hodgkinson Oldie subscriptions ● To place a new order, please visit our website subscribe.theoldie.co.uk ● To renew a subscription, please visit myaccount.theoldie.co.uk ● If you have any queries, please email help@ subscribe.theoldie.co.uk, or write to: Oldie Subscriptions, Rockwood House, 9-16 Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH Oldie book orders ● Please email bookorders@theoldie.co.uk

63 Netflix: Pelé Harry Mount 64 Radio Valerie Grove 64 Television Roger Lewis 65 Music Richard Osborne 66 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 67 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 69 Gardening David Wheeler 69 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 70 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 70 Restaurants James Pembroke 71 Drink Bill Knott 72 Sport Jim White 72 Motoring Alan Judd 76 Digital Life Matthew Webster 76 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 78 Getting Dressed: the Ravenmaster Brigid Keenan 80 Bird of the Month: Willow Warbler John McEwen Advertising For display, contact: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Melissa Arancio on 07305 010659 For classified, contact: Kami Jogee on 07983 097477 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover Greg Balfour Evans /Alamy

The Oldie April 2021 3

The Old Un’s Notes

NEIL SPENCE

Blistering barnacles!

It’s hard to believe the wonderful Captain Pugwash cartoonist, John Ryan (1921-2009), would have celebrated his 100th birthday on 4th March this year.

Ryan came from an intriguing family. His father was the diplomat Sir Andrew Ryan, his mother was a granddaughter of one of Byron’s physicians and his aunt Mary was the first female university professor in Britain.

Captain Pugwash – fond of crying, ‘Dolloping doubloons!’, ‘Coddling catfish!’ and ‘Kipper me capstans!’ – first appeared in the launch issue of the Eagle on 14th April 1950 and was later adapted for television.

A pompous, portly figure with a goatee beard, Pugwash wore a skull-and-crossbones hat and a blue frockcoat over a red-and-black horizontally striped shirt, inspired by the colours of Ampleforth College’s rugby team. Ryan was at the school.

Ryan once said, ‘Pugwash has two qualities which I

believe are present in all of us to some degree: cowardice and greed. It is the conflict between these opposing emotions that makes the stories work.

‘It may be that the Captain is popular because we all have something in common with him.’

The Old Un couldn’t agree more with the sentiment of Oldie contributor Quentin Letts’s new book, Stop Bloody Bossing Me About: How We Need to Stop Being Told What to Do. In one sublime paragraph, he lists things that have been

banned by busybodies over the years: ‘Carveries, TikTok, blowing a trombone or trumpet, bedding your neighbour, cotton buds, drinks parties in Bolton…’

Steven Berkoff has called on London’s authorities to pull down the temporary ice-cream and cherry sculpture on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square and replace it with a statue of acting legend Laurence Olivier.

‘Olivier was one of Britain’s greatest actors and played a big part in making London’s Theatreland what it is today – the pride of the world,’ says

Among this month’s contributors Simon Heffer (p18) is editor of Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38. A Sunday Telegraph columnist, he is author of Staring at God: Britain in the Great War and The Age of Decadence.

Matt Pritchett (p42) is Matt, Britain’s greatest pocket cartoonist. The Telegraph’s pocket cartoonist since 1988, he has won Cartoonist of the Year at the British Press Awards on numerous occasions.

A N Wilson (p10) has written over 50 novels, biographies and works of history.

His books include The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her and The Victorians. He is writing his memoirs.

Hugh Johnson (p75) is the best-selling wine writer in the world. Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book comes out every year.

His latest book is Sitting in the Shade: A decade of my garden diary.

Isabel Rawsthorne by Francis Bacon. From Carol Jacobi’s new book, Out of the Cage: The Art of Isabel Rawsthorne

the 83-year-old actor. ‘And he’s all but ignored – it’s shocking! Acting and the theatre are so fundamental a part of British culture but they [the authorities] would rather put an ice-cream cone with a cherry on the fourth plinth.

Are they dumb? They need to wake up.’

Oldie contributor Jonathan Meades is bringing out a collection of articles from 1988 t0 2020, Pedro and Ricky Come Again.

The Old Un particularly enjoyed Meades’s tribute to the great Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83), the peerless author of the Buildings of England guides to the counties.

Meades calls the guides ‘the most magnificent work of British popular scholarship of the past half-century’. He adds that ‘Pevsner changed this country’s attitude to The Oldie April 2021 5

Important stories you may have missed Van with broken glass window stopped on M5 Worcester Observer Public toilets set to reopen at the weekend Bournemouth Daily Echo

Stoat trap sabotaged Times £15 for published contributions

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6 The Oldie April 2021

Easter escape: Cappadocia caves, rumoured refuge of Jesus’s followers after the Crucifixion. By Elisabeth Luard

architecture more than any man since Ruskin, whose inspired earnestness he shared’. Sadly, though, Leipzig-born Pevsner ‘loved his adopted country more than it loved him’.

Three cheers for Pevsner!

Three cheers for the new edition of his guide to County Durham (see page 84)! Three cheers for inspired earnestness!

By chance, the Old Un booked into the Prebendal Farm B&B in Bishopstone over 30 years ago and was befriended by Rob and Jo Selbourne.

In 1904, Rob’s great grandfather took on the tenancy of Prebendal Farm: a mixed 1,000 acres of sheep, dairy and wheat.

Four generations later, come Lady Day (25th March), rent won’t be paid to the Church Commissioners as usual. Rob and Jo are retiring.

One hundred years of farming and family memorabilia must be cleared out, including silver teapots and antique ‘brown furniture’.

Down in the cellar, forgotten butter churns, meat-mincers and a cast-iron marmaladeshredder have surprising price tags.

Outbuildings contain an abundance of agricultural history: a binder for making sheaves of corn, spares for tractors long since discarded and galvanised buckets.

Rob admits to a momentary pang of grief as a precious reminder of the past is hauled into one of the numerous gigantic skips.

Then it’s gone – and on to the next load. The end of an era indeed.

On 15th March 1961, Jaguar unveiled a car that mesmerised all visitors to the Geneva Motor Show.

The E-Type was a sublime combination of the famed 3,781cc engine and coachwork.

And perhaps its most astounding aspect was the performance. Jaguar loaned a prototype coupé to the chaps at Autocar magazine – they achieved 150.4 mph and 0-60 mph in 6.9 seconds.

At a time when a Hillman Minx’s top speed was 82 mph, and a police Wolseley 6/99 could barely manage 98 mph, such figures were virtually science fiction. British Pathé’s archive contains 1961 footage of a Roadster on the speedlimit-free M1, with other traffic looking antediluvian by comparison.

Some journalists grumbled about the brakes, transmission and seating but such cavils could never detract from the E-Type’s impact on British motoring.

As William Boddy of Motor Sport wrote in 1962, ‘No car could be safer, more docile, instil greater confidence, than this stupendously clever 150-mph Jaguar.’

While we’re talking about Jaguars… Calling all owners of Jaguar SS cars, especially the SS100.

These cars were popular after the war with British servicemen. right up until the mid-1960s. A lot of them can still be found near military bases such as Aldershot, Andover, Middle Wallop, Burtonwood and Oakham.

Grahame Bull, a classic-car fan and Oldie reader, is keen to find out the survival rate of the SS100s, SS90s, SS1 tourers and coupés.

Contact grahamebull@ tiscali.co.uk if you’re a proud owner or former owner of one of these glorious Jags.

RIP cartoonist Haro Hodson (1923-2021). Haro drew Jessica Berens’s ‘What is Heavy Metal?’ in the first Oldie issue, 1992

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

‘Sorry – wrong planet’

27th March marks the 90th anniversary of the death of writer and journalist Arnold Bennett (1867-1931).

Bennett was best known for his Potteries novels. They began with Anna of the Five Towns (1902), later a TV series, written while he was editor of Woman magazine.

‘When all at once – I failed to see’

He then lived for ten years in France, where he wrote The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) and Clayhanger (1910), both of which became TV series, and The Card (1911), later a film (1952) starring Alec Guinness.

Despite his success as a writer – or perhaps because of it – he was not well liked by the literary establishment.

In her diary, Virginia Woolf said he was ‘an old bore; an egotist’ and accused him of having ‘a shopkeeper’s view of literature’. Clive Bell, in Old Friends, said he was ‘an insignificant little man and ridiculous to boot’.

Somerset Maugham called him ‘cocksure and bumptious and … rather common’.

Bennett had an omelette named after him, created by the chef at the Savoy Grill.

According to the Oxford

English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the adjective ‘sexy’ was in a letter he wrote in 1896.

Bennett died of typhoid on 27th March 1931 after drinking tap water in a French hotel.

Anthony Powell enthusiasts will lap up The Ordeals of Captain Jenkins by Giles Jenkins – aka Uncle Giles in Powell’s sequence A Dance to the Music of Time.

Uncle Giles was, in theory, a fictional character – the unreliable uncle of Nick Jenkins, the sequence’s narrator. Who knows what hand Robin Bynoe, the editor of the new book, had in actually writing it?

But then Powell (19052000) was a master of the grey area that lies at the intersection of fiction and non-fiction, given that Dance mirrored but didn’t slavishly copy his own life.

As novelist and keen Powellite D J Taylor writes, ‘It’s as if Sebastian Flyte had written a commentary on Brideshead Revisited.’

The Old Un was much buoyed by the enthusiasm of Viscount Gage, 86, in his new memoir, My Life So Far. Landowner Nicolas Gage, who lives at Firle Place, East Sussex, impressively fathered a son at 75.

He writes, ‘The late Alan Moorehead, author of Gallipoli, suffered a

Warm roast lamb with gremolata (chopped garlic, parsley, lemon zest and olive oil) on fried ciabatta

horrendous stroke in later life. As a result, he could only say four words: “Bloody awful” and “Bloody marvellous”. This seems to be an accurate account of life

but, so far, my life has been more of the latter.’

The Old Un wishes all Oldie readers a bloody marvellous April and a very happy Easter.

Naim Attallah (1931-2021) Naim Attallah, who has died aged 89, was the last of the postwar buccaneer publishers: a Palestinian Puck, in the wake of dynamic grandees such as André Deutsch and George Weidenfeld.

Naim loved the mischievous world of the polemicist Auberon Waugh and Oldie founder, Richard Ingrams. As far as Naim was concerned, it was his code of loyalty to them that compelled him, in late 1991, to invest £120,000 in the launch of The Oldie, a sum that steadily grew to £500,000 in the magazine’s first few years.

Naim became the magazine’s star interviewer. Jennie Erdal may have done the research, but it was Naim who persuaded his subjects to reveal more than they normally would. Bill Deedes dubbed him ‘the smartest burglar in the business, a dab hand with the skeleton keys’.

I joined The Oldie as its marketing manager in June 1992, four months after its hasty launch. Naim was always supportive and encouraging but, two years later, he could no longer underwrite the monthly £20,000 losses. With the board’s consent, the magazine was closed in July 1994.

Two days after the decision was announced in the press, Naim agreed to a plan to resurrect the magazine as a monthly. Thanks to a huge rise in advertising revenue and reduced costs, The Oldie survived. Yet only Naim could and would have taken the risk. He never recouped his investment.

It is a definitive case of ‘without whom…’.

James Pembroke

The Oldie April 2021 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Appointment with death

IAN BOTTLE/ALAMY

After 30 years of double vision and headaches, I finally visited a neurologist and learnt the truth...

Are you having headaches, too?

Mine started last July, in the first break between lockdowns. I had had them before, in the 1990s when I was an MP, but those were simply mild migraines – a bit of double vision and a light throbbing on the right side of the head. And they were quick to cure: 20 minutes with my eyes shut in one of the leather armchairs in the Quiet Room of the House of Commons Library and I’d be as right as rain again. These new headaches wouldn’t go away.

And they got worse. As summer turned to autumn, the occasional thumping head turned into a daily horror story. I would wake with pulsing pains in my temples.

Every time I coughed or sneezed or strained, there were sharp, lancing pains on either side of my skull. They had me yelping out loud. Standing up wasn’t too bad, but bending over, even slightly, brought on a dull, foggy pain all over my head. At night, I lay in bed as still as I could, willing the throbbing to go away. It didn’t.

I saw the GP three times. Was it my posture? It’s never been good. Was it my diet? I do overdo the chocolates and cheese. Was it the way I sit at the computer screen, head pushed forward, eyes straining at the print? I have been writing a book and sitting at the desk eight hours a day.

I varied my diet, got my eyes tested and took more exercise. Still the headaches persisted: bad in the morning, worse in the evening and worst of all, off and on, in the night.

Eventually, the GP sent me to see a consultant neurologist and the great man – a world

authority on dementia, Parkinson’s disease and strokes – questioned, prodded and poked me for an hour before sending me off for an MRI scan.

Have you had an MRI scan? They are not for the faint-hearted or the claustrophobic: 40 minutes strapped inside a cylindrical coffin with hideous banging, buzzing and clanking sounds as the magnetic resonance imaging machine does its stuff.

I did not like it, but I knew it had to be done because, frankly, the headaches had become unendurable and I needed to know the worst.

Just 24 hours later, I was back at the hospital, sitting face to face with the consultant. He lit up his screen and showed me the image of my skull and spine. He took me on a guided tour of the workings of my cranium and said, quite simply, ‘I’m liking what I’m seeing. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.’

That was three weeks ago. I haven’t had a headache since. After six months in hell, I’m in heaven. It turns out that Hamlet was right: ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’

I am so glad it seems I am going to live, because I have been invited to be a judge at the finals of the International Talk Like a Pirate Contest later in the year and it’s an event I don’t want to miss.

The contest is part of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, an annual celebration started in 1995, which encourages likeminded people around the world to greet one another every 19th September with a suitably piratical ‘Oo-arr!’ and ‘Ahoy me hearties!’

Gold dust: Robert Newton in Treasure Island (1950)

Pirate speak was pioneered in the 1934 film Treasure Island, starring Lionel Barrymore as Long John Silver.

It was consolidated and made truly universal by the great Robert Newton, official patron saint of Talk Like a Pirate Day, who portrayed pirates in several films, notably the 1950 Disney version of Treasure Island and Blackbeard the Pirate in 1952.

It is because of Newton, born in Dorset, educated in Cornwall, that across the world a West Country burr is the go-to accent when anyone wants to sound like a pirate.

Because of his prowess in pirate parts and his reputation as a heavy drinker, Newton is severely underrated.

He is a beautiful actor. Catch him in David Lean’s directorial debut, This Happy Breed (1944), to see him at his subtle best.

His fee for the film was £9,000, with a penalty of £500 to be deducted every time filming had to be delayed because of his drinking. By the time the film was completed, Newton wasn’t due a penny – but his performance was so compelling (and he was so charming) that the film company paid him anyway. He died of drink and a heart attack aged 50, 65 years ago, on 25th March 1956. He is my kind of hero.

Mothering Sunday falls on 14th March this year.

My friend Dave went into a shop and asked for flowers. The woman behind the counter said, ‘I’m sorry – we don’t sell flowers.’ ‘But you’re open,’ protested Dave. ‘We are allowed to be open,’ explained the woman, ‘because we are a circumcision clinic.’ Said Dave, ‘But you’ve got flowers in the window.’ Said the woman, ‘What do you expect us to put in the window?’

Gyles’s latest book is The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes (OUP) The Oldie April 2021 9

Suffering for her art Tortured by love, longing for children, Elizabeth Bowen poured her pain into her exceptional novels, says her friend A N Wilson

T

he Heat of the Day, The Death of the Heart and the late masterpiece Eva Trout are among the finest English novels written in the mid- to late-twentieth century.

In her brittle, mannered prose, Elizabeth Bowen caught the painfulness of love and its all-consuming pain. In Eva Trout (SPOILER ALERT!), there aches, throughout the comedy, the yearning for a child by a galumphing, tall, emotionally deprived woman.

It was no surprise to discover, when Elizabeth Bowen’s biography came to be written, how often she fell in love.

Notably tall, and with a stammer, she communicated awkwardly with others.

She lived in the days of class distinction, and to be upper class – her manner was notably grande dame – cut her off from the many. She was the only child of the Irish country house – Bowen’s Court, County Cork, demolished by a propertydeveloper after she sold it in 1959. Her history of it is a grief-stricken threnody for the enlightened Ireland of Lady Gregory.

Julia Parry’s very moving new book talks about the love affair between her grandfather, Humphry House, and Elizabeth Bowen. This took place when House was a don at Oxford, in his early twenties, in the process both of getting married and of establishing himself as one of the foremost scholars of Victorian literature – editor of Hopkins, author of a superb study of Dickens.

The most chilling letter in the volume tries, falteringly, to explain why he had not told her that his wife was expecting a baby.

It was too painful a subject. And then, the sentence I almost wish I had not read: ‘Why Elizabeth, did you not tell me when we first slept together that you were a virgin?’

She would have been in her early thirties when the twentysomething cad wrote this letter. She had been married for a decade.

Two memories came back when I read this – one a friend’s memory, one my own.

Elizabeth Bowen liked secrets. Her novels are full of them – the teenage

10 The Oldie April 2021

Irish eyes aren’t smiling: Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)

diaries, cruelly read by adults in The Death of the Heart; the missing love letters in A World of Love.

She kept her emotional life in separate compartments. A friend of mine went to one of her dinner parties in the 1950s, where Cyril Connolly, Rose Macaulay and others were exchanging literary quips. He excused himself from the table and went in search of the loo. He opened one door, which turned out to be a cupboard under the stairs, where he found Bowen’s husband, Alan Cameron, a mournfullooking man with a military, white moustache, sitting with his supper on a tray. Whether Mr Cameron had excused himself, or been excluded from, the brilliant company my friend never knew.

I was awestruck when, aged 21, I came across her, aged 70. The Warden of my Oxford college, William Hayter, asked us to dine with her. My wife and I brought our baby in a basket, and I remember Elizabeth Bowen’s powdery face leaning over it, as she said, ‘I n-n-never had a b-baby.’

She lit a fag – she was a chain-smoker – and looked as if she was about to weep.

She was easier in the company of men than in that of women. One close friend was David Cecil, one of whose protégées at Oxford was a young don-novelist, Rachel Trickett. Lord David hit on the disastrous idea of bringing the aspirant writer together with the famous novelist, and asked John Bayley, Iris Murdoch’s husband, to make up the foursome.

Rachel, a brilliantly funny talker with a Lancashire accent, launched into descriptions of college life, and anecdotes about her legendarily severe Principal, Miss Proctor.

John could see – what was invisible to Lord David and to Miss Trickett – Elizabeth hating the younger woman.

While Rachel prattled amusingly about Miss Proctor, Elizabeth leaned forward with her fork and rapped Rachel, really hard, on her knuckles. ‘DON’T talk about your … P-p-principal in that way,’ she blurted.

The rest of the meal descended into silence.

My wife and I saw her on and off for about a year. The septuagenarian had developed a crush on an American graduate student in the college, who was the boyfriend of one of my female contemporaries.

Bowen’s pursuit of this man was relentless, though I think she wanted only his company, rather than an affair.

He was flattered, but scared by her. She moved to the Bear Hotel in Woodstock for the whole winter, to be near him.

I also saw her with John Bayley and Iris Murdoch. She came to John’s classes – chaotically brilliant – on Jane Austen in New College.

It was Bowen who told me of John’s superb novel of army life, In Another Country. She thought he was a better novelist than Iris.

Reading of her affair with the caddish House has reawakened my gratitude for my having met her, and my sense that almost all good art – and, by God, her novels are good – comes out of suffering.

Julia Parry’s The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters, and Elizabeth Bowen (Duckworth) is out now

Alex Higgins smoked, boozed and gambled as he met a delighted Gary Smith

M

y dad, George, worked in Liverpool, manufacturing paints. As a youth determined to misspend it, I went to see Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins play some exhibition matches at his factory social club.

Higgins (1949-2010) had won the World Championship a couple of years earlier, in 1972. But the £400 prize money was a far cry from today’s six-figure pay-outs – so the daily grind of working men’s clubs was a professional snooker player’s bread and butter.

There was a real buzz about the place.

Even though John Spencer (World Champion in 1969, 1971 and 1977) had played here recently, this was different. The

MIRRORPIX/ALAMY

‘He was on the fruit machine, vodka in one hand, cigarette in the other’ atmosphere was more akin to a visceral boxing match than to the gentle probing of the green baize.

Crammed into the hastily erected, raked seating, the audience welcomed the main attraction with applause that quickly evolved into a kind of roar, a warlike mix of reverence and love.

However, my intense anticipation and excitement were a blissful counterpoint to Higgins’s Genius in a fedora: Higgins

boredom and lack of motivation as he sleepwalked through four frames against players from the works team, winning but without the expected magic.

During the interval, I decided to get the great man’s autograph for my collection. Something told me he would be at the bar; in fact, everything told me that was where he’d be.

I found him engaged with a fruit machine, glass of vodka in one hand, a cigarette and a handful of coins in the other. Just as he was at the table, he was all ticks and sniffs and birdlike movements of his head, on the lookout for danger. Finding another hand from somewhere, the Hurricane quickly signed an autograph before returning to the spinning bright lights of those cherries and bells.

As a starstruck 13-year-old, I was a little disappointed by the evening, with Higgins being off his game and only fleetingly lighting up the smoky, darkened hall with his play.

Yet, on reflection, what could have been better, more apt, than getting up close and personal with your idol as he smoked, boozed and gambled his way through a mid-session break?

Somebody once said you shouldn’t meet your heroes. I disagree – there are precious few of them around.

Higgins was definitely one of mine.

His wild unpredictability was the very essence of his genius. I for one still miss the ‘People’s Champion’, a flashy fedora in a world of shapeless beanies.

The World Snooker Championship 2021 will be held at the Crucible, Sheffield, from 17th April to 3rd May

N W !

O D CK CK BA LO IS R R U E O FF O

When the Hurricane hit Liverpool

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The Oldie April 2021 11

what were Universal Aunts?

Universal Aunts, a personal service bureau, was founded 100 years ago by Gertrude Eliza Maclean.

In 1921, Gertie came up with a bright idea. With her many nieces and nephews, she decided to put her aunt-like qualities to good use. Universal Aunts was born.

Every morning, Gertie and her business partner, Emily Faulder, worked in a room behind a bootmaker’s in Chelsea. In the afternoon, they withdrew to the ladies’ rest room at Harrods to interview women answering their advertisement: ‘Ladies of Irreproachable Background Required for the Care of Children.’

Applicants included: Miss Phyllis Beckett: ‘Sporty. Knows all about footer and white mice. Guaranteed not to nag. Can slide down banisters at a push.’

Mrs Charlotte Hedgecombe: ‘Hefty.

Stern. Stand no nonsense. On Borstal Board of Governors. Can cope with any number of older boys.’

Mrs Kitty Pendlebury: ‘Young and jolly.

A recognised authority on tuck shops and chocolate eclairs.’

The Aunts’ major function was caring for children whose parents were posted overseas. Primarily, this meant escorting children across London on their way to or from private schools.

who is...

Allan Shiach?

Allan Shiach, 80, is a successful Hollywood screenwriter and producer, whose day job for many years was running a whisky distillery.

He was chairman and chief executive of Macallan-Glenlivet from 1979 to 1997.

In the 18 years he ran the company, its share price increased 200-fold.

As a former chairman of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, Shiach is perhaps the only person to have run a trade union and a Stock Exchange company at the same time.

12 The Oldie April 2021

Emergency call: Universal Aunts, founded a century ago

you! I thought they’d send an old bag.’

There were memorable assignments: the goat that had to be met at Waterloo and escorted to King’s Cross. A resourceful Aunt asked the taxi driver to stop in Hyde Park so the goat could enjoy a walk.

Universal Aunts became sought after in fashionable circles. They sent wellspoken Aunts to read aloud to Winston Churchill’s widow, Clementine, when her eyesight was failing. Monica Dickens, great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens and a former debutante, worked for Universal Aunts as a cook in the 1930s.

Her book, One Pair of Hands, was based on her experiences. The most highprofile Aunt was Lady Diana Spencer, a part-time nanny in the late 1970s.

In its centenary year, Universal Aunts remains fundamentally the same. The fur-collared coats and cloche hats are long gone, but the attributes that make a good Aunt haven’t changed: tact, oodles of common sense and an unfailing sense of humour. As well as child-escort services, it provides cooks, residential companions, housekeepers, carers, party staff, house- and pet-sitters, travelling companions and drivers.

The owner and director today is Angela Montfort Bebb, daughter of Kate Herbert-Hunting, a previous director, who wrote Universal Aunts (1986) – the basis for the TV series Ladies in Charge.

The Aunts also find things for clients.

The most bizarre request is a bear trap.

Jackie Winter

Under his stage name Allan Scott, he wrote Don’t Look Now, Castaway, The Witches, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and the Netflix smash The Queen’s Gambit.

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is the most successful Australian stage musical of all time. Just before it opened in London, a sign appeared in the corridor of the theatre’s male dressing rooms, reading: ‘Sexual harassment in this area will not be reported. It will, however, be rated.’

The Queen’s Gambit is Netflix’s most successful mini-series ever and has sent world sales of chess sets off the charts.

Shiach bought the film rights to the

original novel and spent 30 years coaxing it from conception to production, working on eight different scripts with eight different directors.

The first of these was Bernardo Bertolucci. They had a series of pleasant lunches to discuss the script, at which the director talked about anything but. ‘He then went off to make The Sheltering Sky and I never saw him again,’ said Shiach.

Another potential director was Heath Ledger, who’d played chess when young.

Shiach sent him some ’50s and ’60s music suggestions for the soundtrack. Ledger called from New York to say how much he liked them and died that same night.

Shiach spent decades trying to think

The children never knew quite what to expect. One small boy had bragged to envious friends about the glamour puss who’d be meeting him at Paddington.

When he clapped eyes on the mature, sensibly-clad woman allotted to him, he said, ‘You are not the Aunt I ordered.’

An American lad had a better experience. ‘Gee,’ he said, grinning happily at his Aunt. ‘I’m glad it’s

how to engage an audience who didn’t know chess. When Garry Kasparov was

Winning move: Anya Taylor-Joy in Allan Shiach’s The Queen’s Gambit

hired as an adviser, he read all seven episodes of The Queen’s Gambit overnight. He enjoyed them but told Shiach, ‘I have to tell you one thing: at this level of chess, nobody ever, ever says “Check” or “Checkmate”. They just don’t say it.’

Anya Taylor-Joy, the heroine of The Queen’s Gambit, an ex-dancer, used her training to remember the choreography of the chess moves, often played at great speed.

Allan Shiach’s father died in a car accident when he was eight. On an icy night, his car was in collision with a lorry.

The day after the funeral, the lorry driver, uncomfortably dressed in a suit and tie, came to offer his condolences to Allan’s mother. Shiach thought then, and still does, that he was the bravest man he ever saw.

John Lloyd

Why are the British so beastly to Yanks?

I’m from Noo Yawk, Noo Yawk – so nice I have to say it twice.

Despite arriving in London over 15 years ago, I’ve retained my honking New York accent. And so I’ve come across some irksome preconceptions about Americans.

The first is the assumption of ignorance – delivered with a touch of condescension. On my first visit to the Oval, I was asked, ‘Do you know where you are?’ and ‘What are you doing here?’ whenever I spoke with my nasal twang.

I wouldn’t have known what was happening without Aggers’s ball-to-ball commentary. I had no idea you could rent an earpiece with Radio 5 Live pouring discreetly into your ear. Instead, I took along a food-spattered Roberts radio from my kitchen. I cradled it in my arms and had to hoist it each time someone pushed past to the bar.

I did redeem myself by packing an enviable four-course picnic – a meal Americans excel at.

Another point of irritation is my pronunciation. I generally have to introduce myself twice.

‘Donna,’ I say.

‘Dana? D-a-n-a?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘Donna, D-o-n-n-a.’

‘Oh you mean Daaaana!’

I have snapped only once. ‘No, I mean Donna. It’s been my name for over 50 years – I really ought to know!’ My friend Tess still says, ‘Hi, Daaaaaaana!’ whenever we meet.

Then there’s the misconception about New York rudeness, encapsulated by the

joke ‘Excuse me, could you point me in the direction of Broadway, or should I just go f*ck myself?’

In fact, if I saw you poring over a map, I would barge up and ask where you wanted to go.

I am still regularly asked, ‘Are you from Canada or America?’

While dispiriting and bewildering, the question doesn’t upset me as much it would if you asked a British person, ‘Are you Scottish or English?’

In any case, I’m insulted by being thought either American or Canadian.

‘I’m from New York,’ I reply. Native New Yorkers think we’re just a little bit special and a country apart.

Still, most people are friendlier to me and less judgemental than they would be if I were from the other side of

this country rather than of the Atlantic.

And I’ve done my best to pick up the local customs. In my written English, I have added ‘u’s for extra flavour. I have swapped zees – or zeds – for esses to acclimatise. I shop for coriander instead of cilantro and I can pronounce Leicester, Worcester and Edinburgh flawlessly. But I still occasionally slip on the sidewalk.

In my years here, I have developed a certain reserve. I’ve learnt the local art of avoiding eye contact and have developed a sense of embarrassment.

I can do false modesty and selfeffacement but, deep down, I still consider myself New York special. That’s nowhere near as special as the English in New York, though. They are convinced that they are really rather the ratherest thing!

Donna Freed The Oldie April 2021 13

Fifty years after they began, Mr Men books have sold 85 million copies.

Teacher Kath Garner pays tribute to the brilliant adman behind them

How Mr Tickle tickled the world I

t began 50 years ago with an orange blob – which became a tickle – that became one of the characters in the phenomenon that became the Mr Men series of books. These iconic little books remain as popular as ever and seal Roger Hargreaves’s position as one of the bestselling children’s authors in Britain.

The idea for Mr Tickle, the Mr Man with the orange body and extraordinarily long arms (Roger himself was six foot five), is thought to have come out of a conversation with his then-six-year-old son, Adam. Adam apparently asked, ‘What does a tickle look like?’

Or was Mr Tickle purely a character who evolved from Roger’s vivid imagination? No one knows. But the character led to a series of over 85 books that captured the hearts of the nation’s children and quickly became a bedtime favourite read. The latest, out this year, is Little Miss Kind.

Following National Service in the RAF, Yorkshire-born Roger Hargreaves (1935-88) began in advertising, working his way from junior copyrighter to creative director. But an early talent for drawing, a keen sense of humour and a desire to spend more time at home with his young family led him to try fulfilling a childhood ambition of becoming a cartoonist.

Turning his thoughts to children’s books, Roger, led by his experience in advertising, was very clear on what he was trying to achieve. He wanted to create a short read (one that could be enjoyed in five minutes); something bright and colourful with engaging pictures that even the youngest child would find appealing; and something presented in a small format so that it was easy for little hands to hold.

Mr Tickle emerged from that original orange blob doodle in August 1971. With

14 The Oldie April 2021

its colourful pictures and simple storyline, recounting the mischief caused

by Mr Tickle, tickling upstanding members of the community and ending with the possibility of the reader themselves being tickled, it proved an immediate publishing hit and led to the launch of the first six books in the series.

Mr Tickle was joined by Mr Bump, Mr Greedy, Mr Happy, Mr Nosy and Mr Sneeze. They were heralded at the launch as ‘simple entertainment for children aged three to eight, whether readers or listeners’, costing a very affordable 20p each.

Aged eight myself when they were launched, I was considered too old to buy these books. But I delighted in visiting younger friends, whose bookshelves I could raid and have a sneaky read.

Mr Bump, with his bright blue body, bandaged head and tummy, became a favourite, as did the bright yellow Mr Happy with his permanent smile and desire to make everybody else happy.

Later, when I became a mum, the

nervous and quaking Mr Jelly became the firm favourite: my children loved seeing him transform into someone much braver. The characters all have normal human traits that children and adults alike can relate to and identify with, making them favourites across the globe.

The initial books were an immediate success and quickly led to six more titles.

In 1974, the books were rebranded Mr Men. The name became internationally known, with the books translated into 15 languages across 22 countries.

Thanks to his advertising background, Roger realised there was enormous potential for his characters. He sold the rights to third-party clients with a variety of products, including bedding, food, toys, stationery and clothing. So the characters gained widespread recognition independently of the books – and also fuelled demand for further titles.

In 1975, the stories and characters were transformed into a BBC cartoon series with actor Arthur Lowe as narrator.

Left: Mr Happy on the anniversary £5 coin. Below: Hargreaves and Mr Silly

His voice rapidly became synonymous with the stories. By 1977, Roger was devoting all his time to the books and merchandising opportunities. He was happy to fulfil a request from an American publisher to launch a new series, aimed at appealing to young girls in 1981, called Little Miss.

Following the same format as the

Mr Men books, the first three were entitled Little Miss Tiny, Bossy and Sunshine. More books swiftly followed and were again snapped up for television, this time narrated by the married actors Pauline Collins and John Alderton.

Children throughout the world could relate to the characters Roger created.

The simple storylines described childhood situations they could identify with and captured emotions that they too were experiencing. Hargreaves himself said a lack of formal art training meant he couldn’t draw properly – he therefore had to keep his pictures simple.

Because he was too lazy to write a novel, he said, the short stories of his infamous characters were ideal. They were helped by his advertising background: short, to the point and with a specific target audience.

Sadly, Roger died suddenly from a stroke in 1988 at only 53. Building on his father’s success, eldest son Adam continued the legacy of the Mr Men and Little Miss series, creating a raft of new

characters and exciting adventures for another generation of children, crediting them to Roger on the front cover.

Fifty years on, it is incredible to think that a simple doodle instigated such a beloved and eternally popular series of books. There is a character or situation for everyone – whether it’s snooty Mr Uppity, confused Mr Muddle or Roger’s favourite, Mr Silly, said to capture his own humour. It isn’t hard to understand how over 85 million copies have been sold.

Their simplicity in structure delights each generation as they are passed down from parent to child.

Roger once said he loved the idea that when his characters were 100 years old, their readers would still be five. As I read the books once more to children I work with as a forest-school leader – and remember the children I taught in nursery and primary school, who loved the books – I can relate to that.

Slipping back easily into the persona of a five-year-old, I still laugh belly laughs at the antics of those mischievous Mr Men! The Oldie April 2021 15

Wizards from Oz A wave of brilliant Australians came to Britain sixty years ago. They included Clive James, Germaine Greer – and Barry Humphries

‘W

e’re going overseas,’ announced Ada Scott, my mother’s friend.

‘After that, we might pop over to some of the clean countries.’

By ‘overseas’, Ada meant what we all meant: England. My grandparents called it ‘going home’ and, in the Melbourne of that epoch, it was an inevitable destination, to which we swam like spawning salmon.

The ‘clean countries’ were nowhere near the Mediterranean, of course, and were probably places like Denmark, Holland and Switzerland. Dorothy Wilmot, my mother’s dressmaker, said that she had found Sweden ‘spotless’, and the Swedes – just like the Wilmots – ‘very particular’.

Before I boarded an Italian ship in Melbourne bound for the Old Country, in 1959, I had a romantic view of my destination. In my early years, my picture of England was inspired by all those books from Odhams Press with titles like Lovely Britain and Wonderful Britain.

There was a whole shelf-ful of these illustrated volumes published during the Second World War to encourage patriotism, especially in the far reaches of the Empire where we lived.

We were totally deprived of the thing that England had in such abundance and which Hitler threatened: quaintness. The only thatched cottage we could cherish was our magnificent Staffordshire thatched-cottage teapot, and matching cup and saucer, which, after becoming slightly chipped, ended up in the gardener’s shed.

We could remotely assert our allegiance to Albion with a Winston Churchill calendar behind the kitchen door, and an Edward VIII souvenir

16 The Oldie April 2021

Coronation mug – brought back on the boat by my grandparents who were due to attend that ill-starred event – but we were quaintness-starved.

To this day, you’d be wasting your time visiting Australia on a quaintness quest.

In my early twenties, when I was assiduously acquiring habits of intemperance, I anticipated the delights of London pubs. How charming they must be, I thought, compared with the licensed urinals of Melbourne and Sydney, tiled and reeking of disinfectant.

Reading the ‘smart’ fiction of authors like Michael Arlen and Beverly Nichols, I imagined the pubs and cocktail bars of Mayfair – and when I finally got there, they did not disappoint. It took at least ten years for me to see beyond the quaintness and its sister virtue, charm, to the execrably filthy carpet.

I had to live in the cheapest area of central London, to audition for acting jobs, and do the night shift in Wall’s ice-cream factory, Acton, Raspberry Ripple department, so obviously I was obliged to live in inexpensive Notting Hill Gate.

My lodgings were cheap, for I had found a seedy basement flat next to the underground station, and I felt like a character in a book by Patrick Hamilton.

We had a lodger whom my then wife and I rarely saw. Alan Beale was a dancer in the Royal Ballet we’d met in Melbourne. He owned a small rustbucket of a car. We never saw his car because he’d lent it to an Australian art critic called Robert Hughes, who had newly arrived in pursuit of a pretty young ballet dancer.

Hughes would go on to write that brilliant account of Australia’s convict past The Fatal Shore, and become the

most famous art critic in the world, whose rare plagiarisms were encrypted in a racy prose.

As art critic on Time magazine, he invented a unique language to describe contemporary art: he had the ability to be eloquent about nothing. Hughes was a ‘card’; he borrowed Alan’s car permanently and married a recovering nymphomaniac.

In London back then, most people seemed to have an Australian dentist.

They had come over in the fifties to fill the carious gnashers of the poor old Poms and rip off the National Health.

When the Arabs started to arrive in the sixties, the dentists invented the ‘Australian trench’. They merely ran the drill round the teeth of the sedated sheikh in a neat horseshoe top and bottom. Then they filled them with gold and capped the lot. They would last until the patient got back to Jordan – not before he had paid for his dazzling smile in cash. Craig, the dentist, then billed the health system.

All the Australian dentists belonged to a flying club and had villas in Spain, so the Arab loot would wing its way to safety in Majorca most weekends.

In January 1961, Robert Hughes and Bryan Robertson mounted a major exhibition of Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery, which introduced its visitors to the work of Arthur Boyd and Brett Whiteley. Later, Francis Bacon gave a dinner for the artists at the Café Royal – and Sidney Nolan, already a celebrated and successful expatriate painter, was also present.

When Nolan left early to get to his house in fogbound Putney, another Aussie artist and a Stranger to Fame

NEIL SPENCE

leant towards me and said, ‘There goes Bootsie Nolan.’

‘Why “Bootsie”?’ I naturally enquired.

‘Because, mate,’ my neighbour snarled, ‘he’s so far up Kenneth Clarke’s arse, all you can see is his boots!’

It was not a notably gracious observation, but it was unfortunately typical of my countrymen’s response to a successful colleague.

The next arrivals had all been students at Sydney University: Bruce Beresford, Clive James and Germaine Greer.

Germaine was the only one I knew, having been impressed by her in 1958 when she came down to Melbourne and helped me display one of my Dada exhibitions.

These were exercises in outrage intended to affront the respectable citizens of Melbourne, and they did.

Even then, Germaine was a striking

The Australians are coming! Barry Humphries, Robert Hughes, Clive James and Germaine Greer. By Bill Leak

and attractive girl in a short, blue shift and black stockings. She was the first woman in Australia to wear them, and Germaine was already far too bright for the hayseed Bohemians who fawned on her in that far-off time. Little more than a decade later, Germaine was world famous.

Bruce Beresford, now my closest friend, became the director of three Oscar-winning films and has made over 30 pictures, many of which he wrote.

Applauded in Europe and America, he has, as might be expected, earned less acclaim in Australia. He directed two magnificent movies in the early seventies based on the scabrous comic strip Barry Left: Bruce Beresford directs.

Below: the original Barry McKenzie, drawn by Nicholas Garland

McKenzie, which first appeared in Private Eye in 1964. These set a benchmark in subtle humour as yet unrivalled.

Bruce’s friend Clive James, who died in 2019, became a prolific critic, author and poet. When I first met him at Cambridge in the sixties, I marvelled at his library which contained, among other treasures, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up in its original serial form in Esquire magazine, 1936.

He went on to become a television star, and a fine poet. He saw himself as a multilingual Lothario, though no one I know ever heard him converse in anything other than a cultivated Strine.

Yet, in spite of his prolific literary output, Clive always found time to encourage and nurture attractive young poetesses, who would all vouch for his tenacity.

I have not mentioned the myriad actors, sportsmen, sopranos, directors, racehorses and authors who have come to the UK and revitalised your decadent and flaccid culture.

Our greatest novelist, Patrick White, having spent much of his life in Europe, came back to Sydney in 1956 and became an avid nationalist.

One day, in my presence, Patrick, un homme très difficile, was fulminating (he often fulminated) against a gifted actress who had gone to Canada.

‘Why couldn’t she stay in Australia?’ the great writer fumed.

‘But, Patrick,’ his Greek companion Manoly protested, ‘you know you hate Orsraylia!’

The Oldie April 2021 17

Chips Channon was the ideal political diarist – truthful, vulnerable and gossipy. By Simon Heffer, editor of his uncensored diaries

Chips with extra sauce H

aving just spent three years editing Chips Channon’s diaries, I had to form a rigorous view of what makes a good political journal.

Where does one start? The diarist needs a proclivity for outrage, and it helps to be an outsider looking in: so we shouldn’t have high hopes for diaries from David Cameron.

The diarist needs energy and a passionate interest in others – so we might get Boris Johnson’s only if someone else writes them, but even then they would probably be late.

Above all, the best diaries need to have an author who knows, or thinks he or she knows, everybody; historical interest; candour; disclosure; wit; and above all revelation of the diarist’s character.

As an example, here’s Channon from 23rd November 1935, days after his first election to the House of Commons: Brendan Bracken lunched with us alone; he drank four brandies and told us all the latest gossip, sexual and political… Everyone is enchanted about Duff. He is Secretary for War at the age of 45.

The secret has been well kept, and Diana [Cooper] denied even the chance … poor Charlie Londonderry has been given the sack … I know him intimately and have always liked and trusted him: we have even been to brothels together in Paris.

Happily, he drops names with which most readers of his diaries will be pleasantly familiar – Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s henchman; Duff Cooper, whom he detests, and Lady Diana, whom he adores; and 18 The Oldie April 2021

Chips Channon (1897-1958) – diaries now published in full for the first time

then gives us something we probably didn’t know about Lord Londonderry.

Then, a month later: Anthony Eden was appointed Foreign Secretary by Mr Baldwin.

His appointment is a victory for ‘The Left’, and the pro-Leaguers.

He has had a meteoric rise, young Anthony. I knew him well at Oxford, when he was mild, aesthetic, handsome, extremely cultivated and interested in the East – now at 38 Foreign Secretary. There is hardly a parallel in our history. I wish him luck; I like him; but I have never had an exaggerated opinion of his brilliance. His appearance is magnificent.

It helps if those of whom the diarist writes can command the reader’s interest. One way to do this is to have been famous. But Channon shared a trait

with Alan Clark, the only political diarist of the last century to rival him, which was that, when he wrote about people of little significance, he did so in a way that made them at least memorable.

Indeed, this is another reason that the diaries of Sasha Swire, recently published, are a cut above many others – she writes largely about nonentities, and makes them riveting. Channon does something similar on 4th May 1936: Sir Patrick Hannon, member for Moseley, got up and declared that a recent article of L M Weir, Lab member for Clackmannan, had made a gross abuse of privilege in a published article. The Speaker suspended Weir, who looks like a semistarring actor, a sort of tu’penny hack, whilst the anxious House deliberated. It looked like trouble until that old crocodile Austen Chamberlain rose and suggested that Weir’s lame and feeble explanation be accepted, and Hannon then withdrew his motion.

Channon, like Clark after him, had a knack of reporting a routine day in parliament and dropping in a soupçon of dirt to give it an extra piquancy. And it helps when history’s subsequent vicissitudes make the anecdote one of added significance, as in this entry from 8th July 1936: It was a long day today at the H of C, and I didn’t get away until 12.45. Six divisions. The subject was malnutrition, a vote of censure on the govt… Harold Macmillan, the quiet, bookish, eccentric member for Stockton-on-

Chips and Honor Channon, right. Lady Brownlow (left); Lady Cunard (2nd left); Norah Lindsay standing. Lord Iveagh’s house

Tees (and incidentally the Duke of Devonshire’s son-in-law), having voted against the govt on the Foreign Office vote of censure, has now repudiated the govt whip, and Mr Baldwin wrote back a frigid note of acknowledgement.

Macmillan is unprepossessing, and no wonder that [his wife] Dorothy, the Devonshires’ dullest daughter which is saying much, prefers the company and love of dark Bob Boothby.

Channon had the good fortune to be writing at a tumultuous time in British history, and to have a front-row seat at the main events.

In this first of three volumes (the second covers October 1938 to July 1943, the third 1943 to 1957) Channon not only has the ‘gathering storm’ of the 1930s as a backdrop; he starts in Proust’s Paris in 1918, roars through the Twenties and is virtually on the stage at the abdication, thanks to his friendship with the King and Mrs Simpson.

It is also good for political diaries not to be all about politics; but, this being the 1930s, the politics inevitably dominates them. On 19th July 1937, Channon writes: Then Winston spoke dramatically and made the startling announcement that there were 12-inch howitzers trained on Gibraltar. The effect was electrifying, and the House was stirred and rather less pro-France, but Winston’s authority was his weak point; it was no other than Master Randolph, and the House was amused.

Then followed a secret cttee

meeting about recruiting, which Belisha addressed. He was simple, straightforward and impressive and made a good impression.

We had hardly rushed back to the Chamber when Lloyd George got up and made a terrific, but stupid, tirade against Franco and the govt’s foreign policy. It was the worst speech I had ever heard him make and the House was not impressed.

Channon would have been a brilliant journalist. He could spot a story at several miles, he knew never to bury the headline, and he instinctively knew who and what made the news.

He thought he knew in 1937 that Churchill, with a long and consistent record of failure and misjudgement behind him, was finished. But people would want to read about this extinct volcano in years to come (and by this time Channon had decided he was writing for public consumption later – much later, as he specified his unexpurgated manuscript should not be available for 60 years after his death).

And, sometimes, history simply fell into his lap, such as at the Anschluss in March 1938, days after the diarist has become parliamentary private secretary to Rab Butler, the deputy Foreign Secretary: An unbelievable day in which two things occurred: I fell in love with the Prime Minister, and Hitler took Vienna.

The morning was calm, the PM was enchanting. I am in and out of his room constantly now … there were messages on the tape announcing the mysterious

movements of troops in Bavaria; there were denials from Berlin and ominous reports. I had heard some of them at the FO before lunch.

There was a grand luncheon party at 10 Downing Street, the Chamberlains entertained the Ribbentrops, Halifaxes, Winston Churchills (and to balance them the Londonderrys), Hoares, Inskips etc. By then the news had reached the FO that the Germans had invaded Austria. From 5 to 7pm more messages poured in. I was in Halifax’s room at 7.30 when the telephone rang.

‘The Germans are in Vienna’ – and, five minutes later, ‘The skies are black with Nazi planes.’ We stood breathless in the Secretary of State’s room wondering what would happen next. It was like 1914; perhaps more dramatic and less dangerous.

Channon is distinguished by comparison with, say, his contemporary Harold Nicolson thanks to his lack of inhibition.

He is not afraid to tell the truth – and, for all the fears about libel writs when the heavily redacted edition of these diaries appeared in 1967, much of the salacious gossip he peddles is entirely true.

And he tells the truth about himself – for all the bragging and showing-off and name-dropping, there are moments of deep vulnerability.

He proves that a good diary must include all of human life, and his unquestionably does.

Simon Heffer is editor of Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 (Hutchinson) The Oldie April 2021 19

The Jekyll and Hyde of New England: Philip Roth (1933-2018) at his home in Connecticut, 2005

The gripes of Roth As a new biography appears, director Tristram Powell remembers working with a writer who could be kind – and scarily cruel

©SARA KRULWICH/NYT/EYEVINE

I

got to know Philip Roth in 1983, when I made a TV film for the BBC based on his novel The Ghost Writer.

I had written to him out of the blue.

He wrote back, saying, ‘Come to Connecticut and we can discuss a possible film.’

This was Philip 1 – sane, enthusiastic, generous, erudite, good Philip.

A couple of months later, the chosen, highly experienced scriptwriter presented his first draft for Philip, now in London, to approve. It was a disaster.

‘This script exemplifies everything my work is opposed to. It contains every known Jewish family cliché,’ Philip said, holding it over the wastepaper basket.

The scriptwriter humbly said he’d like to try another draft. I knew what the result of that would be. We left.

I rang Philip later and told him I’d fired the writer. This small, unhappy drama pleased – even excited – him. His own life was ordered, often solitary.

His clapboard house, bought on the profits of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), was hidden away up a dirt road, an escape from his unwanted fame in New York. Inside, there were wooden floors, demure curtains and oriental rugs – the deep quiet of a writer’s house, very familiar to me.

At the same time, he loved provocation and disorder as a source of drama. This was Philip 2, the subversive,

hilarious voice in Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theatre, who could also be filled with paranoid rage and selfobsession. As he said himself, ‘When God wants to say f**k, he says it through me.’

Philip described how he had escaped from writing well-mannered, ‘good’ books.

‘I was living in New York for the first time. I made new friends. Among the people I met were a group of Jewish fellows, all highly educated, who were very funny – and when we all had dinner together it would get raucously funny. I realised I was one of the funny ones. I could make people laugh, not by cracking jokes but by telling stories.

‘It dawned on me that I could do The Oldie April 2021 21

Tristram Powell directed The Ghost Writer (1979) and, with Roth, co-wrote the screenplay

this stuff in writing. I began to write some stories about a guy in analysis.

These stories eventually became Portnoy’s Complaint … nothing in my education had prepared me to be a scandalous writer, but the moment I became comical and freewheeling, I became a scandalous writer.’

He put it more succinctly: ‘I had to squeeze the nice Jewish boy out of me drop by drop.’

We worked on a new script of The Ghost Writer together. I blocked out scene summaries; Philip wrote in fresh dialogue. He went at it with terrific inventive enjoyment.

‘This is BAFTA-winning material,’ he would say. It wasn’t, of course, though it did later win a heavy, iron trophy, which I never saw, at the Banff Television Festival in the Canadian Rockies.

Writing the script, a form of rewriting the novel, was altogether more fun than toiling over his new novel. Later he summarised, in operatic style, 50 years of hard labour at the fiction coalface.

22 The Oldie April 2021

‘Exhilarating and groaning. Inspiration and uncertainty. Abundance and emptiness. Blazing forth and muddling through … and tremendous solitude.’

Philip kept away from the location shoot in Vermont. The only time he visited and was shown the schedule, his reaction was to ask whether the crew’s bowel movements were included.

He continued to avoid signing his contract. This was his way of keeping an element of control over the production. I pleaded with his legendary agent, the then famous Robbie Lantz.

The ancient Mr Lantz was full of steely, irresistible, old-world charm. His list of star clients – from Bette Davis to Elizabeth Taylor, from Carson McCullers to James Baldwin – must have been the most glittering in the world. He was full of sympathy, as we looked out onto Central Park South from his luxurious office: ‘Mr Powell, why do we carry on in this business? Find me another career.’

The film crew was part-BBC and part-American. After an initial froideur, each side slightly in awe of the other, everyone suddenly relaxed. The BBC were not used to – and were rightly impressed by – the American lighting guys’ can-do approach: ‘You want it, you got it.’

We had an unwelcome visit from the slightly sinister Teamsters Union, who represented the truck drivers. Money changed hands.

In the evening, after a drive through heavy snow, which was needed for the story, we were back at the hotel. Much whiskey was drunk. Jack Daniel’s deserved an on-screen credit.

Sam Wanamaker played the distinguished old Jewish writer, perhaps slightly based on Isaac Bashevis Singer, whom the aspiring young writer – as it were an imagined Philip himself – is visiting. Sam was on his phone a lot of the time, in pursuit of funding for his dream project – a rebuilt Globe Theatre on the original Thames-side site.

Claire Bloom, living with Philip at the time, played his wife. As always, she gave an excellent performance but she seemed unhappy at having landed up in this cultural backwater. Costume and make-up bore the brunt of her disdain.

Typically, I was unaware of it.

I finished editing the film and we had

‘I am a thief – and a thief is not to be trusted. Disclose it; tell it’

a viewing for Philip. It seemed to go well.

At any rate, he laughed a lot at the end credits. I’d put the Lower East Side gravel-voiced Jimmy ‘Schnozzle’ Durante singing (I’ll Never Forget) The Day I Read a Book on the soundtrack.

Time passed. He then screened the film for Claire and her brother, the experienced feature-film editor John Bloom. I’m not sure how they reacted.

But I soon got a letter from Philip 2, bad Philip, telling me how wrong the casting of the lead man was: too anxious to please … no fire in his belly … why had I not followed his advice?

He seemed to have forgotten that he had been involved in every stage of the production, including the casting and meeting the actor in question. And approving him. Whatever was wrong with the film, I must understand it was clearly not his fault. We broke off contact.

More time passed – years, in fact. I wrote, saying that I now, with more experience, felt I could have handled the casting better. He wrote back, telling me he had shown the film to a friend and ‘It’s better than you think.’ Whatever that meant. Perhaps it compared well with the feature films adapted from his novels, all of which he hated.

‘There’s nothing too private for Philip not to use in his work. He’s ruthless,’ Claire said to me one evening.

Philip would have agreed: ‘I am a thief and a thief is not to be trusted. There are no easy answers; there’s great pain – but disclosure is what it is all about. It’s why we live. Disclose it; tell it.’

It was a lesson that Claire took to heart in her memoir of their life together and how it ended, Leaving a Doll’s House (1996). A lot of disclosure and a lot of pain.

In spite of two serious breakdowns, major heart problems and chronic back pain – he had to write standing up – Philip completed three great novels, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Plot Against America. These historical reimaginings were an escape from the novels of ‘personal disclosure’.

His last short novel, Nemesis (2010), set in Newark during the polio outbreak of summer 1944, is particularly resonant for these times.

He had worked ceaselessly. He died in 2018, aged 85, finally asking for medication to be withdrawn, sending away his closest friends with a farewell ‘I have work to do.’

Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography is published on 6th April. The Ghost Writer can be viewed on YouTube

The best sermons ever This Easter, vicars shouldn’t be obscure or arrogant in the pulpit.

Like Jesus, they should be funny, says Reverend Peter Mullen

CLASSIC IMAGE/ALAMY

‘L

ove God and do as you like,’ said St Augustine of Hippo.

That’s the way to write a sermon: get your punchline in at the start.

Understand that the art of preaching is not to sound as if you’re preaching.

Nothing is more off-putting than the bellowing revivalist with his banana-split smile and ego bigger than the gospel.

John Bunyan knew all too well the seductiveness of clerical self-esteem.

One morning, a parishioner praised him: ‘Fine sermon, Pastor John!’

Bunyan said, ‘Aye, Satan told me that before I got down from the pulpit!’

The task of the preacher is not self-expression but self-effacement. The message is the thing, not the medium.

The prototypes for all sermons are the spoken parables of Jesus. These witty utterances, nearly always preached on the Galilean hillside, are full of ironical humour. They were meant to be funny.

Take the one about the man who went to a wedding without his wedding suit.

His host, the king, asked, ‘ “How camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment?”

‘And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, “Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” ’ That’s not very funny, is it? Until you get the joke: that it was the host’s job to provide his guests with proper togs.

There are more than 30 such parables in the Gospels and – because truth is best expressed in riddles – they are packed with irony. If I were writing a book about them, I would call it Jesus’s Jewish Jokes.

The form of the sermon has changed down the centuries. Medieval sermons were originally written in Latin by scholarly monks and handed out to the less well-educated parochial clergy. They would read, mark and inwardly digest them, and then preach them in the local tongue to their parishioners.

Jesus gives the Sermon on the Mount

The local priest would extemporise matters of local interest – so there was nothing po-faced and moralising about them. The image of the insufferable, pompous priggish parson was the creation of Jane Austen’s exquisite satires.

In the Middle Ages, the sermon was an occasion for a good night out when the village got together to hear the latest news. In fact, sermons were the mass media of the age – sometimes they were distinctly tabloid, even ribald.

In England, the great age of the preachers was the 17th and 18th centuries. The sermon developed into a literary form in the hands of men of such voluminous scholarship that most moderns are pygmies beside them: Swift, Jeremy Taylor, Bishop Berkeley and Lancelot Andrewes. There was vivacity in their speech, and people went to hear them in order to be ravished.

John Wesley modestly boasted, ‘I design plain truth for plain people.’ After Wesley came the madding crowd of hellfire-anddamnation preachers. Their sermons were often like music-hall performances, with the congregation answering back.

The late Ian Paisley repeated an example of this sort of sermon, in jesting self-deprecation: ‘Ye are all bound for damnation. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth!’

From near the back, an old woman piped up, ‘And what about us what has no teeth?’

The preacher answered, ‘Teeth will be provided!’

It was not always the parson who preached; there were lay sermons.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced a volume of them. One day, he boasted to his friend Charles Lamb, ‘You’ve heard me preach, haven’t you Charles?’

‘Why, I never heard you do anything else!’

The Church is a comprehensive collection of sinners, and preachers might be gathered from the four winds.

When I was at St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, we heard Ann Widdecombe (twice), the tenor Robert Tear and Roger Scruton, who fixed his bike to the church railings like a Wild West gunslinger tying up his faithful steed.

Archbishop Cormac Murphy-O’Connor came, and the next day it was announced that the Pope had made him a cardinal.

‘There,’ I said, ‘See what happens when you come and preach at St Michael’s!’

Great preachers do not waste time explaining, and academic theology is left where it belongs, under the dust sheet.

Instead they offer images of the spiritual realities and they incarnate thoughts in things. Their words are made flesh.

In their sermons, God speaks English.

Bunyan translates the vices and virtues into living characters such as Obstinate, Pliable and the Shining Ones. And so they achieve real presences.

No one does this better than Lancelot Andrewes. On Easter morning, when Mary Magdalene meets the risen Jesus in the resurrection garden, there is none of that wafty talk of the discursive theologian telling us Mary ‘experienced new life’.

Instead, at Eastertide, Andrewes places his hearers there in the garden with Mary and Christ the Gardener: ‘He touched her, and she greened all of a sudden.’

The Rev Dr Peter Mullen was Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill The Oldie April 2021 25

A New Yorker’s letters to a London bookshop were a big hit 50 years ago. Valerie Grove accompanied her on her first visit to Marks & Co

Pilgrimage to 84 Charing Cross Road

F

ifty years ago, in 1971, I was the ‘bouncy girl reporter’ – as she described me – who accompanied Helene Hanff on her first visit to the antiquarian bookshop Marks & Co, at the address she was about to immortalise: 84 Charing Cross Road.

In her book of that title, published in America in 1970, she simply reproduced her exchange of letters with the shop, starting in1949. The anglophile Miss Hanff would pester Marks & Co for English classics, preferably slightly foxed.

She wrote as she spoke, in Jewish wise-cracking style. ‘Frankie,’ she would address the shop’s manager, Frank Doel, ‘it’s going to be a long cold winter AND I NEED READING MATTER – so GO FIND ME BOOKS!’ The reply from Doel, a family man from suburban Finchley, was formal.

‘Dear Madam: In reply to yours of the 5th October…’

‘I hope “madam” doesn’t mean over there what it does here,’ she retorted.

In her brownstone studio apartment in Brooklyn, she kept few books. As an autodidact she scorned people who never threw or gave away their collections.

‘People furnish their homes with shelves full of unread books,’ she said.

‘Otherwise how wouldja know they were educated, right? I can’t think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book, or even a mediocre book.’

She preferred her books scribbled in – ‘comradely’ style – with notes in margins and inscriptions on flyleaves.

When her copy of Pepys’s diary arrived from Marks & Co, she found the previous owner was ‘a slob who never even cut the pages’.

She did the job with a pearl-handled fruit knife, one of a dozen she’d inherited.

26 The Oldie April 2021

‘Maybe I go with the wrong kind of people,’ she told Marks & Co, ‘but I’m just not likely to have 12 guests all sitting around simultaneously eating fruit.’

Her book has never been out of print.

It became a TV play, a West End play and a 1987 film, in which Anthony Hopkins played Frank Doel and Anne Bancroft was Helene – looking nothing like the thin and spiky Ms Hanff, who usually wore a chic black trouser suit from Saks and a foulard tied in the Parisian style.

The day before the book’s British publication, in June 1971, I went by cab with Ms Hanff to Charing Cross Road.

Number 84 was, as we had been warned, padlocked. Frank Doel had died from peritonitis in 1968, and the owners, Messrs Marks and Cohen, had sold the shop for redevelopment. It had closed six months before.

It was a poignant moment. Ms Hanff had so often promised Frank Doel she would come to London as soon as she could afford the trip. Peering through the letter box, we saw only dusty floorboards and piled-up mail. In the film, Bancroft arrives at the shop alone, sans bouncy companion, and steps inside, to wander misty-eyed through the stacks.

The real Helene was too busy blowing clouds of smoke from her Du Mauriers to be misty-eyed.

Ten years later, we were both back at the shop (a McDonald’s branch today) for the unveiling of a blue plaque.

For a dollar or two, Marks & Co supplied her with Catullus, Plato and Hazlitt

‘Imagine it,’ she said. ‘That a plaque should go up on a London building, just because I wrote letters to it. And I never even went to college!’

Born in 1916 in Philadelphia, at 20 she landed in New York, to scrape a living by her typewriter: Ellery Queen TV scripts, New Yorker features and a book called Underfoot in Show Business.

She said she learned everything about English literature from Q – Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his volumes of Cambridge lectures.

‘I start reading Q. Who assumes I’ve read The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. So I read Paradise Lost and find I need to have read the New Testament. So I read the New Testament and find I need to have read the Latin Vulgate. And my Latin reader says the rules governing the ablative are the same as in English. Aha! Thanks a LOT.’ For a dollar or two (her maximum was $5), Marks & Co supplied her with Catullus, Plato’s Socratic dialogues, William Blake, Tristram Shandy, Hazlitt, John Henry Newman, 19th-century essayists and 18th-century thinkers.

‘You dizzy me,’ she wrote in 1951, ‘rushing Leigh Hunt over here whiz-bang like that. It’s hardly more than two years since I ordered them.’

To the staff of Marks & Co, still under rationing, Helene would send food packages – tinned meat, eggs, candy and nylons. Any friend of hers travelling in Europe would have to say hello to the shop at 84 Charing Cross Road and report back. ‘Dickensian,’ they told her.

The writer Leo Marks, son of the proprietor, said his father never read any of the books he sold ‘but he knew their value’.

On another of her London visits, she

EVENING STANDARD/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY

told me over lunch about the pilgrimages she’d made: to St Paul’s, where John Donne preached, and to Keats House in Hampstead.

I had a thought. She’d just watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in America.

‘Would you like to see where John le Carré lives?’ I asked.

‘Oh boy, would I,’ said Helene.

So I drove her to the circular enclave of Gainsborough Gardens in Hampstead.

Outside number 9, I slowed down.

As we sat there, the front door opened and out stepped a tall, distinguishedlooking man wrapping a scarf round his neck, with his dog on a lead. Startled, I accelerated away.

‘That was HIM!’ I cried. ‘That was John le Carré!’

‘Weell,’ said Helene, impressed. ‘That was somethin’. I mean, they showed me Keats’s house, but they never showed me Keats!’

Each time her book was revived on radio or on stage, another avalanche of letters would arrive. ‘Everybahdy who

reads the paperback writes me a letter,’ she told me. ‘So then I have to write back.

The stamp costs me 30 cents. My royalty on the book is 11 cents. So I’m losing 19 cents every time!’

A farmer in Ohio proposed marriage.

‘Can you see me a farmer’s wife in Cowpats, Ohio?’

For six years in the 1980s, she produced a monthly Letter from New York for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

There were essays about her neighbours, their dogs that had to be walked in Central Park, the rooftop gardens of Manhattan, the street parties organised on the slightest pretext, Christmas shopping at Lord & Taylor, cosmopolitan delis and off-Broadway theatres.

When André Deutsch threw a party for her at the Garrick, she was appalled to learn that the club favoured actors but barred all women. ‘Like any two-bit actor can get in, but not Judi Dench?’

Once she visited me at my northLondon home and wrote about it in her next book, vastly impressed by

Helene Hanff at Marks & Co, June 1971.

The shop had closed six months before

unexceptional Victorian features such as tiled floors, fireplaces, stained-glass windows and the stumps where gaslights had been.

Then in 1995, when I was in New York, I called at her East 72nd Street brownstone garret. It was exactly as I had imagined.

Hardly had we sat down to chat than a knock came on her door. In breezed a chirpy young schoolteacher named Lynne M Brusco, from Florida, accompanying a gaggle of children on a school trip/pilgrimage to meet the author of their set book.

Sadly Helene died in 1997, aged 80.

Much later, Miss Brusco sent me some photographs, writing, ‘Please know that you always have a home in Naples, Florida.’

We still correspond. Lynne’s last email tells me, ‘I’m introducing a new generation of teenagers to dear Helene!

The Oldie April 2021 27

My trip to mad world When Horatio Clare went psychotic, he was prescribed pills. In fact, he needed therapy – and to give up smoking dope

I

relish English terms for madness.

We’re loopy, bonkers, potty, bananas, crackers and cuckoo. The merry imagery suggests that being batty is part of us.

The acute personal version of madness, which I experienced two years ago, is terrifyingly dramatic. It is also rooted in language.

In medical parlance, I experienced ‘hypomania’, ‘mania’ and a ‘psychotic episode’. For weeks, I felt high, brimming with energy. Publishing two books, lecturing and supporting my family, I criss-crossed the country until my feet bled, my voice failed and my thoughts raced.

Scarcely sleeping, I came to believe that the radio could hear me, and aliens and security services were on my side. I made a hole in the ceiling of my flat, aiming to convert the whole block into a university of peace and international understanding. Convinced that world peace required me to appear to end my life, I set my car to roll down a hill and walked away from it, naked but for my boots. So attired, I informed an alarmed farmer I thought I needed help.

A thoughtful and sympathetic social worker ‘detained’ me, as she preferred to call it, under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act. I became one of about 50,000 people who are ‘sectioned’ annually.

In an acute care ward in a psychiatric hospital in Wakefield, two anti-psychotic pills, none of the booze and cannabis I had been guzzling and an enforced break from work and family led me to ‘present as sane’ (in the jargon) in two days.

I was allowed into town after nine days – thank God for the sculpture in the Hepworth Wakefield art gallery, more healing than any pill – and soon afterwards discharged.

Now came a turmoil of contradictory languages and ways of seeing. An NHS psychiatrist believed my ‘longitudinal history’ (I had been up and down before) indicated ‘bipolar disorder’, for which he advised lithium or another ‘mood-stabiliser’.

28 The Oldie April 2021

Although I understood and appreciated that medication helps a great many people, I was wary of side effects, polypharmacy (widespread overprescription, whereby you take pills to counteract pills) and a sense that the pharmaceutical road would be dangerous.

Coming off lithium, for example, can leave you worse than you were.

I turned to psychology instead. My therapist, like many others, does not regard ‘bipolar’ as a useful word and has little truck with ‘disorder’.

Rather than treat symptoms, as medication does, she went for causes. It became clear that my breakdown was no mystery. I had taken from childhood deep self-doubt and a desperation to please, added years of lies, evasions and thrill-seeking to resultant shame and guilt, piled them inside me like a bonfire, thrown booze like fuel and cannabis as a detonator into the mix and gone up in a whoosh of delusions.

We used Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing – you follow your therapist’s moving finger while recalling traumatic memories, entering them on a subconscious level, addressing them afresh. It was astonishingly cathartic.

Effective talking therapies, such as the Open Dialogue approach, treat delusions as language for a crisis that you have no other way of explaining.

It would have taken me years, sane, to account for myself when mad (indeed it has – two). But, mid-breakdown, the idea of omnipotent forces who knew and understood me was a blessed short cut to a comprehensible universe.

Delusions relieved me of responsibility for the chaos I had brought

‘I had thrown booze and cannabis into the mix and gone up in a whoosh of delusions’

on myself and my family. Spooks and aliens are ever popular delusions.

‘Once upon a time, it was probably the King or the Bishop or whoever people felt had power over them,’ a progressive consultant psychiatrist told me. ‘Now it tends to be spies and celebrities.’

Perhaps because he was not legally responsible for me, this consultant judged that my understanding – that cannabis had triggered my highs, which brought lows – sounded ‘a fair shout’.

One striking moment in hospital came when someone said that cannabis had messed him up. An adamant chorus of us agreed. Ironically, I had written a book about the effects of cannabis, 12 years earlier – which makes me an idiot who ignored his own warnings, but also an idiot who documented his own ‘longitudinal history’.

The consultant’s approach helped refute the NHS psychiatrist’s insistence: that, because I was ‘bipolar’, I ‘selfmedicated’ with cannabis; that the highs must therefore precede use; and that I should therefore take pills.

Two years later, I hope my position is not a loony insistence on my being right but a quiet conviction, widely shared, that the individual matters more than the system, and that ours is failing to cope. Bipolar diagnoses have increased 4,000 per cent in a decade, while around a fifth of our adult population are on antidepressants.

I have been undramatically up and down since the breakdown, remaining dope-free, functional and as happy as the times allow.

An epiphany came in conversation with a psychologist. ‘It’s not about cure,’ she said. ‘It’s all about healing.’

And so I see myself as someone who had a breakdown, and remains in recovery. Choosing language is, for me, a way of choosing hope.

Heavy Light: A Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing by Horatio Clare (Chatto & Windus) is out now

The Suffolk painter is best known for his rural scenes – but his last years in the capital were the pinnacle of his career. By Susan Sloman

Gainsborough in London

THE ARTCHIVES/ALAMY

T

he writer Captain Philip Thicknesse said of his friend Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) that, ‘though he is a shy man, he knows he is one of the first geniuses in Europe’.

This remark was made in 1773. It is striking because, at that time, the artist had never travelled abroad and did not even live in the English capital.

Between 1759 and 1774, he worked in Bath, perfecting a distinctive style of painting and establishing a network of influential friends and clients.

His move to London in 1774 earned him the right to be called one of the great figures of the 18th century. Today, our ideas about the English countryside 30 The Oldie April 2021

are informed by his landscapes. Our concept of what men and women of the Georgian period looked like is, to a significant degree, founded on Gainsborough’s portraits.

Having shared his house in Bath with his milliner sister, Mary Gibbon, he was unusually sensitive to changing tastes in fashion and understood better than most artists the properties of fabrics and the way garments were cut and constructed.

Gainsborough in London looks at the last phase of the painter’s life. In London, Gainsborough became increasingly independent-minded. This affected what he painted, and how he painted. He was more inclined than ever to experiment and to leave parts of his canvas roughly

finished or apparently unfinished.

‘Neglect’, a word sometimes used to define sprezzatura, or studied carelessness, was recognised to be a hallmark of Gainsborough’s style.

When he moved permanently to London in 1774 and settled in Schomberg House, in Pall Mall, Gainsborough was no stranger to the capital.

More than three decades earlier, at the age of 13, he had left Sudbury, his birthplace in Suffolk, to study there.

At that time, he attended a drawing academy, founded by William Hogarth in St Martin’s Lane in 1734. The Frenchman Hubert-François Gravelot taught Gainsborough drawing.

The influence of Gravelot’s elegant

GL ARCHIVE/ALAMY

Opposite: The Mall in St James’s Park (c1783). Left: 4th Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, at Greenwich Hospital (c1782).

Top: James Christie, founder of Christie’s auction house (1778). Above: Sarah Siddons (1785), the actress famed for her appearances at Covent Garden and Drury Lane

draughtsmanship remained with him for life, but it was Hogarth’s towering artistic personality that provided the real impetus to his career.

In the spring of 1788, he became seriously ill. Sometime between midFebruary and mid-April, Gainsborough spent a day at the trial of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal, in Westminster Hall. There he sat with his back to an open window and returned home chilled and unwell. It was a turning point that signalled his decline.

The artist died of cancer on 2nd August 1788 at 2am, in the rear second-floor bedroom of 87 Pall Mall. William Pearce, who lived in Pall Mall and had become a close friend of Gainsborough’s in recent

years, is the only person outside the family known to have been present.

He afterwards corrected the myth about Gainsborough’s final words, which William Jackson published as ‘We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyke is of the party.’ Pearce’s pithier version was ‘Van Dyke was right.’ Gainsborough’s daughter Margaret told the landscape painter James Ward that he said simply, ‘Van Dyke.’

A small funeral was held at St Anne’s, Kew, on 9th August. Among the pall-bearers were the artists Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, Samuel Cotes and Paul Sandby. Gainsborough’s grave was outdoors, covered by a plain, dark blue stone slab, laid flat on the ground and inscribed:

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH ESQ.R DIED AUG.ST THE 2.D 1788.

AGED 6l YEARS. On 10th December 1788, after the annual prize-giving at the Royal Academy, Reynolds delivered his 14th and penultimate Discourse to students. This, as a tribute to a single artist, was unprecedented in form, and Reynolds was uncharacteristically emotional as he spoke.

‘His praises of Mr Gainsborough,’ we are told, ‘were interrupted by his tears.’

Gainsborough in London by Susan Sloman is published on 23rd March (Yale University Press, £35) The Oldie April 2021 31

Grumpy Oldie Man

Cruel COVID killed my angelic GP

A saintly doctor for 50 years and a hero for tackling my hypochondria matthew norman Many speak of the COVID jab as an oddly emotional experience, and so it was this week for me.

It wasn’t solely the relief, or bemused delight about this country – which for ages has seemed incapable of tying its shoelaces without slapstick disaster – rediscovering a measure of competence.

Incited along with the immune response was a stab of poignancy about those for whom it came too late.

A year earlier, almost to the day, I’d had two conversations at opposing ends of the COVID-aware spectrum.

One was with a sweet, septuagenarian, ultra-Orthodox rabbi at the Turkish baths, who was unconcerned about the virus because ‘Hashem [God] will protect me.’ One week later, Hashem having gone AWOL, it killed him.

The other, over the phone, was with my private doctor. Dr Julian Muir took the threat more seriously, silently mulling for a while when asked if I should extract my nephew from my parents’ house.

‘It’s a tough call,’ he finally said, ‘but well worth considering. We know very little about this virus, but it’s clearly a brute for the old.’

Dr Muir was by no means old. He was 71 and, with his irksomely full head of hair, could have passed for a decade younger. But he too died from COVID in late January.

Presumptuous as it must seem to claim grief about someone with whom I spent a few hours each year, Julian was an enchanting man and an extraordinary doctor. And I, frankly, was an extraordinary patient.

‘Apologies in advance but I’m your worst nightmare,’ I introduced myself some 20 years ago.

‘And why is that?’ he said with the knowing smile of one who’s seen it all down the decades.

‘I may be the worst hypochondriac on the planet.’

32 The Oldie April 2021

He grinned again. ‘I imagine I’ll cope.’

I’d already assumed that he’d be to my medical tastes, from the 49 minutes passed with the antique Spectators in the fusty waiting room round the corner from Harrods.

It wasn’t just that he loved to talk.

Good doctors (albeit this is no option in an urban NHS surgery) take oodles of time.

They bring a faux languor to their work, listening with well-disguised intentness for opaque clues that won’t be picked up in a rigidly timed appointment.

They bring something like artistry to their science.

Once, after he’d binned the latex glove and promised me it wasn’t what I thought, I asked if he was equally reassuring with the less ostentatiously demented.

He leaned forward and placed a firm hand on each knee. ‘I need you to understand this. Whenever I’m with you, right at the forefront of my mind is the boy who cried wolf.’

Along with his uncanny diagnostic gifts, he had the quality you wish for but do not find in every physician. He radiated humanity.

The eclectic range of topics covered during our consultations, and over several lunches, included politics, food, troublesome builders encountered in his alternative career as a property developer, and holidays in Chile with his golden, fast-growing family.

And, occasionally, he’d talk about patients with more serious conditions than any he lived to unearth in me.

‘ Whenever I’m with you, at the forefront of my mind is the boy who cried wolf ’

When I asked after his 84-year-old with lung cancer, he grimaced and his eyes clouded with pain when he reported that it had done for her.

He had mentioned a middle-aged guy with a huge oesophageal tumour, saved by the surgery he fought tigerishly to persuade a reluctant surgeon to perform.

The eyes misted with distress again when he said the cancer had fatally resurfaced elsewhere.

‘He had seven good years he wouldn’t have had but for you,’ I consoled.

‘Mm,’ he said, ‘of course that is something. But…’ The youngest medic known ever to have qualified in Britain, at an outlandish 21 years and 305 days, he’d been a doctor for a full half-century without becoming hardened to the agonies the job entailed.

The only two slips he ever made were not activating the ‘number withheld’ function when he rang from his mobile, and buying a house in west London a seven-minute walk from mine.

‘I hereby swear a solemn oath that I will never pitch up at your door in a panic,’ I told him, ‘after 11pm.’

‘You’re welcome at any time,’ he graciously replied, ‘so long as it’s a time when I’m at our place in Hampshire.’

I must have irritated the hell out of him, but he never showed it. Whether the medical issue raised was very grave on another’s behalf, or straddled the borderline with the certifiable on mine, his gentle concern was as tangible as his talent and expertise.

‘I’ll have a look when you’re next in, but I’m not worried,’ he said during a typically demented call about the emergence of a new bone in my mouth.

‘I suspect you’re having one of your wobbles.’

I’m having another one now as I imagine a future without Dr Julian Muir.

He will be endlessly missed, and never replaced.

Town Mouse

Town mice think they’re brighter than country mice tom hodgkinson

One morning recently, I broke the silence at breakfast by reading out a snippet from the Times to Mrs Mouse.

‘I see that living in the city may make urban mice cleverer than their rural counterparts,’ I said.

‘What rubbish.’

‘It’s true. According to this story, researchers found the townies performed considerably better than the country mice in problem-solving tasks. They solved 77 per cent of their tasks compared with just 52 per cent solved by the rural mice.’

The research was carried out by some German academics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön. Fifteen field mice were pitted against 15 Berlin-born mice in a KryptonFactor-style competition. The tasks given to the mice included opening the windowpanes of Lego houses and the lids of Petri dishes, and retrieving a wad of paper wedged inside a plastic tube.

The Berlin mice did slightly better than their dozy rural cousins. The prof leading the research declared, ‘Our results are consistent with the idea that living in human-altered environments might favour increased problem-solving performance.’

I’m afraid this isn’t the case with me.

Since we moved back to the radically human-altered environment of Shepherd’s Bush from the wilds of Exmoor five years ago, my problem-solving performance has, if anything, diminished.

In the country, while I was never particularly successful at jobs round the house, growing vegetables or looking after animals, I did at least make an effort to wield a hammer, saw and mattock.

Now I’ve become one of those enfeebled modern men – the sort of fop who pays other, more accomplished men to carry out simple tasks like putting up a 34 The Oldie April 2021

picture, while I spend all day on a computer screen, withering away.

I feel like one of the citizens in E M Forster’s The Machine Stops, his brilliant 1909 dystopian story, in which everyone lives alone in underground cells and communicates via a form of Zoom.

If you take intelligence to mean something like ‘book learning’, then this town mouse cannot report much improvement on that score, either. When living in the sticks, I read three or four books a week. I devoured medieval history and modern sociology. Now I spend my evenings numbing my brain by watching episodes of The Crown.

In the seventies, they used to say, ‘TV kills your brain cells, man!’ I think this may be true. When reading books, I could talk to my family about the economic effects of the Protestant Reformation. Now I just discuss how far the patterns on Anya Taylor-Joy’s frocks

in The Queen’s Gambit were influenced by the chessboard.

What is true is that urban living can lead you to believe you are more intelligent than slow-talking country mice. I went to a London school for fops and dandies called Westminster. It left me with a terrible intellectual snobbery, because it was then and still is, I think, the best school in the country. It is regularly number one in the league tables. We looked down on Etonians, whose school is located in suburban Windsor, as being a bit dim, boring and conventional, as well as totally uncool.

The great autodidact William Cobbett loathed the products of both Westminster and Eton, and called Oxford and Cambridge, the next stage in the fops’ journey, ‘dens of dunces’.

Real wit and intelligence, he reckoned, were to be found in the sturdy folk who could both grow cabbages and read political magazines.

I suppose what the noble scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology are saying is that life is tougher for town mice, and that they therefore reach a higher level of aptitude.

The country mice, by contrast, have had an easier time of it, and so have been able to survive quite happily with a lower level of ingenuity.

Well, it’s the other way round with humans. The city mice are pampered and given easy, high-paying jobs in corporations. Feeling slightly guilty about their good fortune and comfortable lives, they become liberals and read the Guardian.

I was worrying about becoming a useless, urban Mekon – an overinflated ego hovering on a flimsy disc of nothingness.

So I’ve resolved to bring a bit of country living to our terraced house in west London. The first step was to order large loads of logs. These logs are deposited on a pallet out in the street.

They then have to be carried through the house and stacked in the yard, an activity that makes me feel I am not entirely without purpose.

The pallet then has to be broken into individual planks, each of which needs to be sawn up into useful bits of kindling.

Unloading and reloading the logs took my son and me a good hour of sweating and puffing. It felt good.

As for the marmalade – well, it was a triumph. Since returning to London, I’ve been slightly guiltily buying it from Waitrose. So making ten jars of it at home and finding it to be the best marmalade ever made me feel, erm, quite clever.

Country Mouse

He’s a celebrity – get him out of my Welsh quarry giles wood

ITV has cancelled Britain’s Got Talent 2021 owing to the difficulty of filming COVID-compliant auditions.

The news caused absurd hopes to curl round my heart which, all too soon, were dashed. The puerile I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, also featuring Ant and Dec, is scheduled still to go ahead.

No, it’s not harmless. It wastes precious time in which we could be reading John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent, learning how to play a woodwind instrument or studying the larval food plants of British macro-moths.

As part-time television reviewers on Gogglebox, Mary and I are puzzled by the enthusiasm, sometimes verging on hysteria, that is clearly experienced by many viewers of these formulaic elimination shows.

In the days of live audiences, we even wondered if some members had been spiked with amphetamines, so inexplicable were their excitement and lack of critical faculties when the evidence of mediocrity was not even hiding in plain sight.

More puzzling still was why so many of the acts in Britain’s Got Talent featured acrobats from places like Anatolia, who were no more British than Vladimir Putin.

We are not against ‘shiny floor’ programmes per se. On the contrary, we have been worn down by some shows – notably Strictly Come Dancing – in which various parables of the human condition can be observed playing out.

The parable of progress, for example.

Initially unpromising contestants such as Bill Bailey can be seen to grow in stature, simply by virtue of putting in arduous weeks of practice, which in Bailey’s case coaxed out and refined his innate rhythmic ability and, hence, confidence.

And yet those we would have expected to be fluid movers – like vintage partygoer Susannah Constantine – are

pushed across the dance floor like upright fridge freezers before their ritual humiliation by the judges. Social justice, you might call it.

Meanwhile, an academic friend points out that the shocking Naked Attraction has its roots in the folk memory of the massively popular freak shows that were a feature of taverns and fairgrounds between the 1840s and 1940s.

Even worse shocks are meted out in The Yorkshire Vet, a vehicle for gory and visceral veterinary procedures to teach a lesson to smarmy southerners, who don’t know where their meat comes from.

I see myself as something of a human shock absorber – most of it doesn’t stick.

I am, in that respect, like Tony Blair, Teflon Man. But when ITV saw fit to air graphic footage of I’m a Celebrity ‘star’ Jordan North vomiting in a Welsh limestone quarry before taking part in some stomach-churning abseiling trial, I knew my shock absorber needed upgrading.

Decades of happy memories had been defiled. This quarry, on the Isle of Anglesey, had been one of my personal haunts of ancient peace, as well as the

‘I love coming here for dinner parties – their cheese board is out of this world!’

haunt of peregrine falcons, fulmars and choughs. I know every inch of that location in as forensic detail as I know the back of my hand.

Some 50 years ago, my family sailed to this exact spot from our holiday cottage in Conwy on the Welsh mainland. A day of days, under a cloudless sky, when we caught a bucket of mackerel and barbecued them on the shore. Fast-forward 30 years and my mother and I botanised for bee orchids on the same quarry floor.

Surprisingly, the internet contained only a handful of complaints from emetophobes (those who are revolted by vomiting), declaring they didn’t feel in a safe space as there had been no warnings about the vomiting to come – even though there was a link to a showbiz story in the Mirror where, in a report by Nika Shakhnazarova, it was revealed that ‘I’m a Celebrity star Jordan North’s mum Wendy predicts he’ll vomit on live TV.’ For the rest of the viewers, the vomiting was obviously considered par for the course. Perhaps they have been desensitised.

And what about the torture trials, wherein contestants were shut into glass-lidded boxes while thousands of insects such as maggots, spiders and earwigs were introduced by pipe?

I wonder if Carrie Symonds, like me, Chris Packham and the RSPCA, noted this unethical treatment of insects. After all, she had only to whisper ‘badger’ in Boris’s ear for the culling to be culled itself. Perhaps it will be Carrie, in the end, who pulls the plug on I’m a Celebrity.

It occurs to me that, as boomers (people born between 1946 and 1964), Mary and I are not only becoming living fossils, but also the second-last generation to retain the memories of the days when Britain was a reasonably decent place to live.

Those born after 1964 have little hands-on experience of this country being a place where the traditional British values of reserve, decorum, stiff upper lips, courtesy and fair play could be seen everywhere to prevail.

We boomers knocked down all the established institutions and customs, failed to replace them and now have only ourselves to blame, as Helen Andrews writes in her new book, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.

After Brexit, when we should be selling our global brand, shows like this are sending the wrong message. The rest of the world likes the concept of the English Gentleman. It is, or was, our USP. We would do well to revive the brand.

The Oldie April 2021 35

Postcards from the Edge

The nasty smell of Coco Chanel’s Nazi sympathies

TOBY MORISON

She was utterly horrible – but her perfume’s divine, says Mary Kenny The world’s most famous perfume – the jasmine-based Chanel No 5 – marks its centenary this year.

When the only scent I had previously heard of was Evening in Paris (available from Woolworths), I still knew about Chanel No 5. Everyone did. Marilyn Monroe, when asked what she wore in bed, simply said, ‘Chanel No 5.’

Coco Chanel, who launched the fragrance in 1921, was a brilliant businesswoman. Consigned to a convent orphanage in Saumur, aged 12, when her overburdened mother died, she took from those nuns much of her design sense: the simple black dress, the black-and-white patterns and the mystical significance of the number five. That came from the pathways she had seen at Aubazine Abbey, laid out in patterns of five.

Chanel is a world brand today – according to French sources, it’s worth £9.6 billion in annual revenues. And yet, considering Coco’s opinions, it’s a wonder that Chanel survives in our ‘woke’ world.

Coco was anti-Semitic and homophobic, deploring the existence of ‘queers’ – in the fashion business! She was anti-republican and anti-trade union.

She spent the Second World War holed up in the Paris Ritz with her lover, a German officer with Gestapo connections.

It later transpired that she had probably passed intelligence to Nazi Germany.

She used the anti-Semitic laws to reclaim her Parfums Chanel – notably No 5 – from her Jewish business partners, the Wertheimer brothers, stating she alone was an ‘Aryan’. The Wertheimers escaped to America and generously forgave her this perfidy – partly from decency, but partly because nobody wanted to damage the No 5 brand.

How did Coco get away with it? She had always cultivated numerous lovers, and she retained them as useful connections. She was never charged with Nazi collaboration, it’s claimed, because Churchill recommended flexibility; or

perhaps she knew too much about old boyfriends such as the Duke of Westminster, who held not altogether salubrious political views.

After the war, Coco disappeared to Switzerland, returning to Paris in the mid-1950s with a sensational new Chanel collection. She had a glorious funeral in 1971 in Paris’s lovely Madeleine church.

From her convent days, Coco had retained a devotion to St Thérèse of Lisieux.

In an era when statues fall for longago colonialist sins, when Marie Stopes is disowned by her own birth-control clinics for her racist and homophobic opinions, and when one dodgy Tweet can get you ‘cancelled’, Coco Chanel is still an untouchable world legend, a French institution, seemingly untainted by some of the reprehensible views she held.

Would I indulge in a bottle of Chanel No 5 to mark its anniversary? Bien sûr!

Loneliness has been a persistent theme of our lockdown year: walled up in dutiful isolation, whole population swaths have been afflicted by a sense of the solitary.

Still, according to Noreena Hertz, author of The Lonely Century, in developed societies that tendency to isolation was already present.

Prof Hertz claims that one in five millennials has no friends, and young people are losing face-to-face

communication skills because of their addiction to screens.

For oldies, there are warnings that loneliness can lead to, or accelerate, Alzheimer’s. There are claims that people join daft right-wing cult groups because of loneliness.

Human beings did not evolve as atomised units. Until relatively recently, we lived our lives in connected groups.

Children grew up sharing not just bedrooms, but beds. Old movies like the Googie Withers 1947 classic It Always Rains on Sunday (catch it on Talking Pictures sometime) show grown-up sisters still sharing a bed as a normal practice. Privacy and individual space emerged only with rising living standards.

Lockdown loneliness, especially for singletons, prompts us to contemplate our existential aloneness in the universe. Or it prompts us to wallow in Elvis Presley’s immortal Are You Lonesome Tonight?

How sad that the traditional Irish turf fire will be no more. How warming and aromatic was a sod of turf burning in the hearth.

But the bogs and peatlands that produce turf are being closed: harvesting turf emits greenhouse gases. The Dublin government has decreed that while the few stocks of turf that remain, milled into briquettes, may be used up, no further supplies will be permitted.

The bogland was part of the Irish landscape – as was the donkey that stood patiently in the bog for the turf-cutters. Lord Snowdon told me that when he visited Ireland in the 1950s – his stepfather was the Earl of Rosse – the most endearing sight he beheld was the ass, as the Irish called it, carrying panniers of turf.

Bogland people were sometimes called ‘bogtrotters’, a little derisively; but the bogs preserved ancient treasures too.

Many a bogman broke open a sod of turf to find beads of amber therein, preserved from pre-Christian times.

Goodbye to all that!

The Oldie April 2021 37

Profitable Wonders

The frog’s great leap forward

DORLING KINDERSLEY LTD/ALAMY

james le fanu

What a purposeful transformation the fertilised egg makes into a fully formed organism.

That great Victorian naturalist Thomas Huxley compared it to a master potter moulding the contours of a formless lump of clay: ‘pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, fashioning flanks and limbs in due proportion’.

He judged the impression of ‘a hidden artist seeking to perfect his work’ to be ‘the most admirable of all nature’s miracles’.

Almost more admirable still is the transformation of one form of life into another: the humble, earthbound caterpillar metamorphosing into the ethereal butterfly borne aloft on its iridescent wings.

We can have little direct knowledge of such ‘natural miracles’ as they unfold at microscopic level – with one astonishing, if familiar, exception signalled in early spring by the unmistakable sound of frogs croaking in a pond.

Their breeding season has begun. The male, with much splashing and kicking, seizes his partner from behind in the tightest of embraces, pressing down on the eggs within her belly, fertilising them with his sperm as they are ejected.

The female swims off to a quiet part of the pond to recuperate, leaving behind her jelly-like spawn, swollen with water, floating freely.

The spawn’s subsequent development over the next three months is probably the most intensely scrutinised of all complex biological phenomena.

It provides a unique opportunity to observe in real time what is required in becoming first aquatic, herbivorous and fish-like – and then four-legged, carnivorous, air-breathing and terrestrial.

That transformation gives us a sense of what was entailed in that momentous evolutionary event 300 million years ago, when the earliest amphibious forms of 38 The Oldie April 2021

At 12 weeks, the final phase of a tadpole’s transfomation comes all in a rush

life emerged from the primordial seas to colonise dry land.

The curtain rises on this drama when, a couple of weeks after fertilisation, a minute, comma-sized tadpole liberates itself from the jelly-like spawn. Soon it acquires the three features necessary for its transient fish-like existence – external gills with which to breathe; a muscular tail to propel it through the water; and a mouth for feeding, connected to a long, tubular intestine curled within its body like a watchspring.

For the next two months, the tadpole is in essence a feeding machine, growing in size and strength as it absorbs the nutrients from the plants and algae on which it grazes. The only physical change during this time is the emergence of a pair of limb buds on either side of its tail.

The wondrous metamorphic transformation, when it happens, comes all in a rush. No aspect of the tadpole’s being is untouched as, over a few short days, its organs and parts are broken down, refashioned and replaced with entirely new ones.

Externally, the tail shrinks rapidly, its skin, muscle, cartilage and nerves dissolving away. The cellular material is swept into the bloodstream. It becomes the building blocks of a much-enlarged skull, a widely articulated jaw and that powerful muscular tongue for capturing the insects, worms and beetles to satisfy its now carnivorous diet.

The tadpole’s small, sideways-directed eyes grow large and bulging. They are

kept moist by newly formed tear glands and swivelled by a set of muscles that confer a 360-degree field of vision.

Meanwhile, the limb buds elongate to form those characteristic, long, spindly yet powerful legs – the frog’s most striking and glorious attribute. They endow a jumping prowess unparalleled in the animal kingdom.

Internally, the long tubular gut degenerates, reassembling itself into the several specialised structures identical to our own: an acid-secreting stomach, duodenum, small intestine and an ascending and descending colon.

And, most significant of all, the circulatory system is remodelled with a three-chambered heart and maturing lungs, in anticipation of the frog’s imminent air-breathing existence.

And so it is that the pond – at one moment brimming with tadpoles flitting here and there – is, a week later, almost deserted as, reincarnated as frogs, they leap to dry land.

Despite the many insights offered by the frog’s life cycle into the complexities of embryology, the fundamental question it poses remains as irresoluble as ever.

How does the same set of genes give rise to two such profoundly different beings? How does it orchestrate their transformation, one into the other, while recapitulating, in a few days, the profound anatomical and physiological changes that took their earliest amphibian ancestors several million years to accomplish?

Sophia Waugh: School Days

All work and no play makes for sad boys Mental health. Now there’s a pair of words that seems to encapsulate the Zeitgeist.

People babble on about it, often nonsensically and without any thought about what they are saying.

‘Oh, he’s got mental health,’ they’ll say, shaking their heads. Well, of course ‘he’ has. We all have – what is concerning is when ‘his’ mental health is poor.

Schools are, at the moment, very concerned about the mental health of both their students and their staff. Caring messages are regularly emailed to us, assuring us that our mental health is a top priority and ‘signposting’ us to websites where we can receive help.

I must have filled in some quiz (or is that too light-hearted a word?) about how I was feeling before Christmas, as I received an email from the Head showing concern at my state of mind. It was probably just after I’d kicked my recycling bin round the classroom and cried in front of the Assistant Head, but I’d forgotten all about it by the time the email came.

Most days I don’t feel low any more – just fed up. I’ve worked out how to teach a computer and faceless children, I walk the dog a lot and I sit by the fire and read.

I, along with most of us, am surviving.

But, as an adult, I have the resources to survive. We oldies know that ‘time and the hour run through the roughest day’, but even the students to whom we’ve taught

Macbeth find it hard to believe this. When you live as much in the moment as many teenagers do, it is very hard to be able to look forward. All they’ve worked out is that they wish they were back in school, which surprises and even unnerves them.

Boys are finding it harder than girls.

Girls would rather hang out in the shopping centre, but will accept a walk in the park as a way of meeting and talking to friends.

Girls use social media to converse much more than boys do. Boys do not see the point of going for a walk. They want to play football but they are not allowed to.

Boys are (alas) less likely than girls to give in to the joys of a good novel. I was reading John Boyne while walking my dog this morning, and felt a physical shock when I left Tsarist Russia and found myself back on a muddy hillside.

But I revelled in the shock, loved the fact that for a while I’d left the rain, lockdown and endless gloom and had totally given myself up to someone else’s story.

But those who don’t read, who can’t escape their increasingly stifling reality, are finding life increasingly hard. Many of my students say they’re not even bothering to leave the house for exercise much; I fear we will be dealing with a generation of agoraphobics.

Our Prime Minister has come up with a spiffing plan to help with the problems that are going to be the next National Health

crisis. He has created a Mental Health Youth Ambassador to advise the government on better mental-health provision.

On many levels, this is obviously a step in the right direction, but I can’t help but be a little cynical. Dr Alex George, who has been appointed to the role, has been a campaigner in this field for a while – particularly since his brother killed himself last year. He is also well known as a TV ‘celebrity’ since he appeared on Love Island, a downmarket ‘reality’ programme.

His appointment certainly makes Johnson look as though he is taking the problem seriously and as though he cares – and a Love Island celebrity is going to provide many more column inches than any other doc. Dr George will also sit on the new Mental Health in Education Action Group, which Number 10 says will look at how the Government provides well-being support for young people as they return to school and university. And they will need it.

The question, as ever, will be where the money will come from. Help with suffering children has already been cut to the bone.

Johnson has to do more than appoint an (unpaid, natch) celebrity advisor. He has to do something he does not always seem very good at: he has to listen to advice – and take it. It is not just young people’s GCSEs and A levels that are going to suffer. If we aren’t careful, many more lives will be lost to COVID without even the smallest cough.

Quite Interesting Things about … April In England, April is usually the month with the lowest rainfall.

In April 2016, the Large Hadron Collider was shut down after a weasel fell into it.

The world’s first weather map, published in the Times on 1st April 1875, gave the weather for the previous day.

Slavery first became a statutory offence in the UK on 6th April 2010.

On 17th April 2011, Emmanuel Mutai won the London Marathon. The next day, Geoffrey Mutai won the Boston Marathon. The two men are not related.

On 18th April 1930, the BBC

announced that there was no news that day – so listeners could enjoy some piano music.

Notes from the BBC

powered for 24 hours without the use of a single shovelful of coal.

JOHN LLOYD For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia

On 21st April 2017, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the UK was The Oldie April 2021 41

sister teresa

A reading from the book of Matt Normally I get up at 5.30am and, once dressed, have an invigorating cup of tea before Lauds begins at 6am.

At that hour of the morning, few of us feel inspired or particularly holy, but I think we are all conscious of the support that praying in a community provides.

One can feel slightly smug about being up and about at that early hour, but on the whole we’re on automatic pilot. Lauds is a routine that sets us up for work and prayer.

Recently I had a few days’ holiday staying with friends. On waking one morning, I reached for my breviary to begin Lauds as usual. Praying the Divine Office on one’s own is far more difficult than praying it in a community: the impetus is so much easier to sustain when you’re singing in a monastic choir.

By mistake, I picked up an album of the cartoonist Matt. I find his cartoons irresistibly funny, and see them all too rarely. The temptation was to swallow the

book whole, but I confined myself to laughing aloud at just a couple of his jokes, before going on dutifully to the psalmody.

I was fortunate in that the Psalm of the day was 104. It is a marvel in its own right, and was notably enhanced by those few seconds of mirth. Solemnity in liturgy is totally suitable most of the time, but even liturgy needs the occasional light interval.

God is playful as well as transcendent.

‘How many are your works, O Lord! In wisdom, you have made them all.

The earth is full of your riches. There is the sea, vast and wide, with its moving swarms past counting, living things great and small. The ships are moving there and the monsters you made to play with’ (Psalms 104:24-26).

The monster the psalmist had in mind was Leviathan, a dragon-like creature in the complicated mythology of the Old Testament and the Near East.

Our great blue whale, over 100 feet long and weighing up to 200 tons, is just as appropriate. It is most emphatically not a plaything for any human being – but for God, why should it not be as much fun as a floating toy in a child’s bath?

It is such moments as these that give the lie to the idea that churchgoing should be a stuffy duty.

A somewhat belated Lenten resolution for both clergy and laity could be the effort to make our prayer life – whether private or public – more sprightly and therefore much more enjoyable and more likely to take place.

Funeral Service

Howard Morgan (1949-2020) As a royal portraitist, Howard Morgan painted three Queens: Elizabeth II, the Queen Mother and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. His approach was sometimes unorthodox and seldom deferential.

While painting the Queen Mother at Clarence House, he accidentally kicked one of her Corgis. ‘It was like seeing a furry rugby ball cartwheeling between us,’ Morgan, always a good storyteller, said afterwards. ‘I was struck dumb. I didn’t know what to say.’

He worried his flamboyant style might land him in the Tower, but his relaxed manner seemed to go down well with the Queen: ‘She talks like an Italian,’ he once said. ‘She waves her hands around. She was always gesticulating.’

In his Battersea studio, he painted with foot-long brushes and paced the room singing hymns and sea shanties.

Morgan travelled to his funeral in a 42 The Oldie April 2021

horse-drawn hearse.

Howard’s musician son Alexander led the tributes to his father with a virtual eulogy from California.

‘Howard came from humble beginnings and a very austere religious family. His father, Tom, when not teaching at school, taught and preached his beliefs everywhere, from the beaches of Wales to the hundreds of letters he wrote to Howard.’

After growing up in the Midlands and being informed by his first art teacher that his doodles would never amount to much, Howard studied fine art at Newcastle.

Alexander told how his father started his career while living in a defunct convent in south London. The turning point came when Tory MP Peter Lilley commissioned a portrait. Other commissions followed.

‘It did not matter if they were royals or rock stars; he treated them all the same.

Everyone was a fellow human being – except for traffic wardens when they tried to put a ticket on his 1938 Citroën parked on a kerb outside a bank.

‘Howard’s studio was like an encyclopedia or a jungle: a world of antique phones, toy cars, Star Wars models, muskets, fake moustaches, banjos and ballet shoes, the smell of turps and the heat of studio lights.

You never had a clue whom you might encounter: a Middle Eastern billionaire or his brush-cleaner, a politician or an African art-collector, a giant or a dwarf, a magician or a musician.

‘He was so very proud of his six children and amazed by their talents. He was so very inspired by his first wife, Susie, and second wife, Sarah. He painted them so many times. True muses both.’

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Beware of doctors who cry wolf

We usually overestimate medical dangers – but not with COVID theodore dalrymple Last night, unable to sleep, I thought back to my patients.

The first who came into my mind was a taxi driver in his sixties. I took his history as usual, and asked him where he had lived as a child. He gave his address, and then said something that has remained with me ever since: ‘We lived there until Adolf Hitler moved us on.’

How admirable the understatement.

How genuinely self-deprecatory the irony! To be bombed out in childhood and make light of it many years later! Not for him the siren call of self-pity! What a moral example!

He understood something more important even than social distancing in a time of COVID-19, namely psychological distancing. That is to say, an imaginative ability to experience and observe one’s experience at the same time.

He was fortunate, perhaps, to have grown up in a time before the study of psychology undermined the sophisticated, instinctive understanding of life’s exigencies that was once a population’s.

The second patient who came to my mind was a man who would surely have delighted Charles Dickens. Once, as he was leaving the consulting room, he turned to me and said, ‘It’s not that I’m ungrateful, doctor. I’m very grateful. It’s just that no one’s doing anything for me.’

How I looked forward to his periodic visits, though it must be admitted that he was inclined to smell of voluntary incontinence – or perhaps inaccuracy of aim. He always said something much more interesting or arresting than the things you’ll find in the pages of our allegedly serious newspapers or literary novels. Once he said to me, ‘Sometimes, doctor, I feel like the little boy with his finger in the dyke, crying wolf.’

What a perfect summary of our existence – that of us intellectuals. All my life, like so many others, I have been like

a little boy with his finger in the dyke, crying wolf. The only difference is, of course, that this time, with the pandemic, the cries of alarm – at least in my own opinion – have been justified.

A third came to mind. I met him in prison (I was the doctor there). He was a middle-aged alcoholic who, drinking too much, had become depressed. His doctor had prescribed for him antidepressants that, sometimes, especially in conjunction with alcohol, gave rise to hallucinations. While suffering from such hallucinations, he had attacked a person seemingly at random, and had been sent to prison.

Of course he shouldn’t have drunk too much, but neither should his doctor have prescribed him the antidepressants. With a colleague, I wrote to the court to ask that this mitigating circumstance be taken into account, and his sentence was reduced by half.

He was a highly intelligent – though not highly educated – man who realised

his prison sentence was the best thing that could have happened to him. We used to have long, quasi-philosophical discussions.

I continued to see him when he left prison, where he had formulated an idea for creating an internet business in the days when such businesses were in their infancy. Within three months of his release, he had made £75,000 – perhaps £150,000 today – all perfectly legally.

But then he decided to stop; he thought that fulminating success would lead him to personal disaster.

How many people would have the strength of character – or perhaps self-knowledge – to take such a step?

Very few, I suspect. We were talking one day of art, he having a refined aesthetic appreciation. I asked him whether he had ever been to the National Gallery.

He replied with something I have never forgotten, and which seemed to me infinitely tragic: ‘It’s not for the likes of us.’

The Oldie April 2021 43

The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk

Last National Serviceman

The last National Service salute

SIR: Charles Pasternak (January issue) did his National Service in 1955/6 at the same time as me.

Enclosed [above] is a photograph of Private Fred Turner, the last National Service private soldier (squaddie), who departed Fallingbostel, Germany, on 7th May 1963. Serving in the Catering Corps, he is saluting me – then Captain Richard Stancomb, Assistant Adjutant of 13/18 Hussars. He might have departed earlier, had he not spent some few months at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

Yours, Richard Stancomb, Malmesbury, Wiltshire

Doddy’s religious side

classes of boys, many of whom were ‘Fen tigers’. From his desk at the front of the class, ‘Nung’ would play a few bars on his bassoon; then suggest we draw him a bassoon fantasy. He would then retire to his store room to continue his latest cartoon for the Evening Standard.

Later he was best known for his cartoons of animated musical instruments and their players.

He was also a very funny raconteur.

You may remember his recording of the saga of the unfortunate builder and his pulley and his estate agent’s blurb ‘French widows in every bedroom giving fantastic views’.

Ben Oglesby, Beccles, Suffolk

F***ing unnecessary SIR: I have enjoyed The Oldie for nearly 30 years but I am wondering whether I should continue much longer. I have a problem with your increasing use of the word f***ing.

It appeared three times in your January piece about Joan Baez (delighted to hear that she is still with us), but please – we are mature enough to accept without too much embarrassment words like fizzing, flowing and foaming without out all these asterisks.

Bob Pawsey, Hungerford, Berkshire

Deborah Kerr goes missing SIR: On page 72 (March issue) you printed a photo mis-captioned Deborah Kerr; it is in fact her co-star in the film Black Narcissus, Kathleen Byron.

Thank you for a brilliant magazine.

Only came this morning and already half read.

Much love for all, Mrs N S Henderson, address supplied

Pupils aren’t students SIR: Thank you, James Pembroke, for pointing out that pupils are not yet students.

When I was a university lecturer (1988-2012), I believed that I was involved in two profound transitions – pupil to student, and student to graduate.

Put simply, pupils still need to be taught, students study under guidance and graduates carry on learning when no teacher or explicit guidance is available.

When I went to university in 1966, it was arguably true that many new university undergraduates were already students; that’s simply not true today.

An important corollary is that universities should not be measured on teaching quality: a primary objective is to wean pupils off teaching!

SIR: So ‘chucklesome’ to read of Ken Dodd in the February issue. Charismatic?

Yes indeed – and always ready to say hello to all and sundry. We used to meet him frequently in Liverpool Cathedral at the morning service, where my wife was a member of the ‘at the front’ team. He always referred to her as ‘Mrs Vicar’ when they met. A dear man indeed.

Canon Dr Ian Lovett, Great Torrington, Devon

ASSOCIATED NEWSPAPERS

Hoffnung was my teacher SIR: Reading Mary Kenny’s husband’s recollections, those of us who were at school in the ’40s and ’50s may well remember such teachers, some more memorable than others.

For a short while, a young Gerard Hoffnung had the unenviable task of trying to instill some knowledge of art to 44 The Oldie April 2021

‘Have you been dismissed from class again?’

I used to say, with deliberate ambiguity, ‘The more I teach, the less they learn,’ because when you teach, the pupil simply becomes increasingly dependent on teachers and the teaching process, instead of learning to learn.

Yours etc, Dr John J Wilson, Farington, Lancashire

works better without that intrusive ‘go’.

Yours faithfully, Hilary King, Bletchley, Buckinghamshire

Gyles, know thyself!

Trelford keeps his shoes on SIR: Mary Kenny writes (February issue), ‘America is a great country – for oldies!’

My favourite oldie moment there was reading this sign, a few years ago, in the security area of Kennedy Airport in New York: ‘Anyone over the age of 75 is not required to take off their shoes or outer clothes.’ I hope the sign is still there and that other countries might do the same.

Yours, Donald Trelford, Pollença, Majorca

Sir Les, the wise diplomat SIR: I very much enjoyed the piece in the March issue by Sir Les Patterson, the Australian Cultural Attaché to the Court of St James.

It reminded me so much of ‘The Adventures of Barry McKenzie’ in Private Eye in the 1960s.

Please commission Mr Humphries to contribute more; a breath of fresh air in these suffocating times.

Tony Pearson, Prickwillow, Cambridgeshire

Wolterton by moonlight SIR: Peter Sheppard, in his interesting article on Wolterton Hall (March issue), refers to the ‘fabulously carved marble fireplaces attributed to Richard Fisher of York’.

Unfortunately, poor Richard Fisher was only briefly employed at Wolterton.

He was sacked by September 1738 for moonlighting, much to his chagrin.

It was ‘yndeed verey much unexpected and a great surprise to me, to be turned of in Such a dishonble mannor as I was’.

‘The granny annexe was the wife’s idea!’

The Wolterton account books record work by his successors, William Roberts and Charles Trubshaw, and include payments specifically for the chimney pieces in the saloon and the ‘south-west corner room’ or blue drawing room in 1739 and 1740.

Dr John Stabler, North Creake, Norfolk

Docherty always on the ball SIR: John McEwen’s piece (I Once Met, March issue) beautifully encapsulated Tommy Docherty’s sharp humour, which served the Doc so well in his after-dinner speaking career.

The Doc definitely admired Tom Finney, as referenced by McEwen, but ‘Sir Tom’ was also the catalyst for a famous meeting he had with Cliff Britton, the manager.

In 1957, the maximum wage was increased from £15 to £17. Out of season, the maximum was £15. Docherty had heard that Preston were paying Finney £17 throughout the year – so he demanded an interview with his manager.

He complained to Britton that Finney was being paid more than him in the off season, and insisted on being told why.

‘Because he is a better player than you, Tommy,’ was the response, to which the Doc swiftly retorted, ‘Not in the summer he isn’t.’

Bob Reeves, Bristol

Learn your lines, Tom!

‘Now I understand’

SIR: My late husband, an ex-Navy chap, to whom I was married for 50 years, used to wax extremely eloquent on the misquoting of Sea Fever. The constant insertion of the word ‘go’ into the first line, and other subsequent lines, drove him to distraction. He was right!

Tom Hodgkinson says he tries to keep a percussive beat when reciting the poem. He would find that it

SIR: I read with some interest Gyles Brandreth’s Diary in the March issue.

Mr Brandreth goes into great detail about his lack of culinary skills after his wife’s accident. Might I suggest a little-known book published in the late 1970s, The Complete Husband? Chapter 8, ‘Husband as Cook’, I am sure he will find both interesting and helpful. The author? Gyles Brandreth!

Keith Gilbert, Northallerton, North Yorks

Second sign of age SIR: Seeing the crossing signs in the Old Un’s Notes (March issue), I thought you’d be amused by the attached sign, which is in the lobby of our retirement flats.

Respectfully, Peter Osborne, Woodbridge, Suffolk

Bernstein’s good grammar SIR: Among Richard Osborne’s comments on Charlie Harmon’s book on Leonard Bernstein (January issue), I was interested to read of Bernstein’s interest in grammar and his aversion to the misplacing of the word ‘only’ in a sentence. Even writers of note sometimes fall foul of this.

The simple rule, once explained in an article by Marghanita Laski, I think in the Observer, is that ‘only’ should precede the word to which it applies. She demonstrated how its placing changes the meaning in a sentence, using as an example ‘The cat sat on the mat’: Only the cat sat on the mat.

The only cat sat on the mat.

The cat only sat on the mat.

The cat sat only on the mat.

The cat sat on the only mat.

As the mistake is common, it seems worth bearing this in mind.

With all good wishes, Merle Cartwright, Taunton, Somerset The Oldie April 2021 45

I Once Met

George Sanders In 1961, I was 27. Newly arrived in Lausanne, I had opened a British advertising agency’s Swiss branch.

I knew no one, but had an introduction to George Sanders via a jazz-piano coach.

Chemin de Montolivet 27 overlooked Lake Geneva and the snow-clad Alps. I took the lift that the actor had built to the penthouse. He was at the grand piano in a ‘smoking’, playing Till There Was You. His wife, Benita, Ronald Colman’s widow, and her daughter, Juliet Colman, plied me with stiff whiskies.

St Petersburg-born George was on vodka.

‘Give us a tune, old boy,’ he said in his suave, world-weary, cut-glass drawl.

Numbed from the booze, I played and even sang in front of the star of Broadway’s version of South Pacific. The faux pas mercifully indulged, I was invited to dinner. I was a frequent guest until I left for Paris.

I saw him in England, too. Adept at mechanical engineering, George spent hours in his workshop in Benita’s Kent rural retreat. In the garden, he erected a jousting device consisting of pulleys, electric motors and bucket seats, where two ‘knights’ faced off, declaring, ‘Cry

God for Harry, England and St George!’

Lances aloft, they closed the gap: the first to scoop the quoit was the victor.

From Paris’s Left Bank with a view of ill-fated Notre-Dame, I handled the Colgate account. In London, with Juliet, I was at a Claridge’s suite where George played on a white concert grand. In New York, as a BBDO Madison Avenue ‘Mad Man’, I was invited to Park Avenue drinks. George played a guitar behind his head and sang songs in Spanish.

Exasperated, Noël Coward cried, ‘Dammit, George, you’ve got more natural talent than any of us!’

In 1967, I was in LA for another ad agency when the Sanderses invited me to their Beverly Hills home. Hostess Benita kept the guests’ spirits up despite crippling cancer.

The actor Charles Boyer entertained us with conjuring tricks.

‘My audition for the ComédieFrançaise,’ he Sweet music man: Sanders

quipped, in the low, seductive voice that had invited Hedy Lamarr to the Casbah.

George and I played jazz standards on the Bechstein.

Among the three couples, hosts George and Benita Sanders, Charles and Pat Boyer and Joseph and Patricia Cotten, two of the husbands – Sanders and Boyer – later died by suicide after their wives’ deaths.

Boyer and Sanders were the reverse of their ‘Latin lover’ and ‘cad’ onscreen personas. Boyer was so distraught at Pat’s death that he could not live without her. Sanders’s love for Benita was immense. After taking an axe to his beloved grand, he died on Spain’s Costa Brava, overdosing on Nembutal in 1972, aged 65.

The former adman was always more admiring of business titans than of actor colleagues. He never took himself or his movie triumphs seriously.

Did his huge talent achieve success too easily? Did he undervalue himself?

Sometimes I think so.

It is nearly 60 years since I first met George. I still miss him.

Nicholas Hordern

MARK LONGLEY/ALAMY

A lot of bottle in a sixties off-licence

It was 1960 and we were managers of an off-licence in West Ewell, Surrey, with living accommodation above the shop and a small garden.

Licensing laws were strict.

Application to the local magistrate was made annually and, when permission to sell alcohol was granted, trading hours were stringent: in our case, 10am to 2pm and 5pm to 9pm, six days a week. Sunday trading was not allowed.

Beer came in bottles, and bottles came in wooden crates. Six quarts to a crate

or 12 pints to a crate – storage space was at a premium. Stacking them up required strength. Crates and bottles carried a deposit.

Beer cans were supplied with a special can-opener – ring pulls came later. At party time, we sold barrels of beer – another storage problem, along with the need to know how to tap the barrel!

Most of our customers were from the local estate, their purchases predictable.

Cratelifting wasn’t for softies

When there was a special occasion to celebrate, there would be a large mixed order for us to deliver.

Another service we provided was hiring out beer glasses. Sometimes these would be returned dirty – they were supposed to be washed, ready for the next occasion.

A few ex-colonials lived in our locality. These customers were considered quite special: their requirements were very different and their custom valued.

Château-bottled and vintage wines were not on our shelves; wine was not a popular drink in the 1960s.

Still, it was possible for us to obtain rare and expensive wines and elusive bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label

whisky or a Haig Dimple from the bonded warehouse.

Christmas 1962 was the worst winter for years; it was also our busiest time. Stock was sitting all over the property. Crates of beer and lemonade sat under four inches of snow in the garden.

All the doors had to be open to allow easy access.

No central heating. No calculators – instead we added up columns of figures.

The sounds of clattering bottles and the ringing of the cash register were relentless.

By June Jenkins, Ewell, Surrey, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie April 2021 47

Books Mourning service FRANCES WILSON The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss

By Reverend Richard Coles

GARY WING

Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99 Richard Coles, the Vicar of Finedon, Northamptonshire, is sewn into the fabric of our lives, like family.

Every time we turn on the radio or TV, there he is: the presenter of Radio 4’s Saturday Live, the model for Alan Smallbone in the sitcom Rev, a contestant on Masterchef, Strictly and Have I Got News for You. Last century, he was half of the pop duo the Communards, whose cover version of Don’t Leave Me This Way was number one for four weeks in 1986.

Remember Bridget Jones’s gay friend Tom, who had a one-hit wonder in the 1980s and loves it when people still recognise him? He’s based on Richard Coles, apparently.

The Madness of Grief, Cole’s third volume of memoirs, is an account of the death just over a year ago of his civil partner, David Oldham. David, aged 43, died from internal bleeding.

We do not find out the cause of the bleeding until page 77, at which point the narrative changes gear. David was an alcoholic and he had chronic, decompensated alcoholic liver disease.

Along with Richard’s grief comes the inevitable guilt: ‘I should have been kinder, loved him more strongly, made him happier, I could have done but I did not, because I was too self-absorbed, and there is nothing I can do about it now.’

As David drifts into and out of consciousness, Richard sings him A Case of You and then realises that his stomach is overspilling his belt: he must, he tells himself, go on the 5:2 diet. It is when he

nips back home to feed the five dogs that David dies, on 17th December 2019.

Boris Johnson has been voted Prime Minister, the presents are under the Christmas tree and a lethal virus is about to be unleashed in Wuhan.

To call his grief ‘madness’ makes it sound more exciting than it is. Grief, Coles discovers, is grindingly, numbingly, colourless. Life without the person you love is colourless; your own company is colourless. The days are too long; the house is suddenly filled with junk; being awake is an effort and so you go to bed, dosed with sleeping pills, at 6.30pm. You feel as if you’re stoned, ‘standing in a motorway service station dressed as a velociraptor surrounded by broken crockery and everyone’s gone quiet’.

After death comes what Coles calls ‘sadmin’: filing the death certificate, selecting a coffin, planning the eulogy and ordering a headstone. When he chooses David’s grave-clothes, the funeral director insists that he remember

the underpants, lest the departed soul ‘goes commando into that good night’.

Because everyone feels that they know Richard Coles, he is stopped in the street, in the pharmacy, at the burger van and in the supermarket. Other widowers give him advice: one instructs him to ignore what the lifestyle magazines say about coping with mourning because it is ‘shit and bollocks’.

Letters arrive by the truckload. Most people are kind, but some are vile. ‘I cannot begin to tell you how glad I am to hear the news that David has died,’ writes one man. Another tells him that David is roasting on a spit in hell.

He visits friends – Richard has dozens and dozens of friends. Some are army officers; some are left over from his pop-star days. He met one at West Hampstead tube station in his twenties.

He spends Christmas with Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, at Althorp House, where one of the Earl’s children tells him that he is like one

The Oldie April 2021 49

of the family – but then we all feel that Richard Coles is like one of the family.

As a vicar, Coles is used to death, but that doesn’t make his own loss any easier to bear. Nor does his Christianity. David, he says, is rotting in the earth and not flying up to heaven.

There is more love of dog than love of God in these pages: it is the five dachshunds that keep Richard in one piece, especially at night when they all pile into the bed together.

This is not a particularly good book, in the literary sense. It is repetitive, directionless and lost inside itself.

But that is what grief is like, which makes this an honest book, and a brave one. Grief, we realise, is the ultimate form of bravery. He should have called his lament The Courage of Grief.

Chicago’s wittiest MP JANE RIDLEY Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries: 1918-38 Edited by Simon Heffer Hutchinson £35 Chips Channon (1897-1958) was a socialite, a Tory MP and a prolific diarist.

Until now, his diaries were available only in a heavily redacted, single volume, edited by Robert Rhodes James in 1967.

Simon Heffer has edited the unexpurgated version of the diaries, and it is a revelation.

The book runs to a thousand pages, but do not let the length deter you. At £35, it is very good value. Channon penned an estimated two million words of diary between 1918 and his death in 1958. The present volume covers only the years 1918-38, and there are two more volumes to come.

The diaries give a compelling account of the extraordinary times of interwar Britain. But they are written by a man whose views on the great questions of his day often seem to us now to be either morally distasteful or just wrong.

Like other great diarists such as Pepys, Chips was an outsider on the make. He was born in Chicago in 1897, and his father, whom he described as a ‘dull nonentity’, owned a small shipping fleet which tootled round the Great Lakes.

Chips loathed America and was desperate to escape. In 1933, he married Lady Honor Guinness, daughter of the fabulously rich Earl of Iveagh, and became an MP two years later.

In one bound, this American social climber and snob reached the dizzy heights of smart society, provided by his father-in-law with a generous income and a house in Belgrave Square.

50 The Oldie April 2021

Chips adored royals, jewels, bibelots and Fabergé, all of which he collected. He was best friends with Diana Cooper and Emerald Cunard. He admired his fellow American Wallis Simpson, whom he thought a clever woman with her ‘high-pitched voice, chic clothes, moles and sense of humour’.

How he enjoyed entertaining Edward VIII at dinner in his grand house with its Amalienburg dining room, where the tiaras nodded, the diamonds sparkled and the room swayed with jewels.

Over the Abdication, Chips backed the losing side, but he found himself in a ringside seat. He was slow to realise that Edward couldn’t marry Wallis while remaining King, but the crisis has never been better described than it is here.

From talking to his many friends in the know, ranging from the Duke of Kent to Lord Beaverbrook, Chips composed an extraordinarily detailed and vivid narrative – an account that is in another league from the daily paragraphs of gossip he was accustomed to writing in his diary.

He was fiercely pro-German. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Chips lapped up the fabulous bling and hospitality. He thought Goering was a master of the art of party-giving – and as for Hitler, he was a ‘semi-divine creature’.

Taken to see a boys’ labour camp, he was full of praise. ‘I cannot understand the English dislike and suspicion of the Nazi regime,’ he wrote. Little did he know – or care – that the boys, whom he thought healthy specimens of German youth, were SS men substituted for the usual prisoners.

His political career was undistinguished – he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rab Butler, who was Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office.

Over Appeasement, Chips was badly wrong. He hero-worshipped Neville Chamberlain, of whom he writes (as Heffer tells us) ‘like a gushing schoolgirl’.

He totally misread Hitler. ‘He is always right, always the greatest diplomatist of modern times,’ said Chips.

Over Munich, he was dangerously

‘NASA’s first photo of the landing to find life on Mars’

naïve, and he considered that Chamberlain really had succeeded in bringing peace in our time. He thought that ‘Winston as PM would be worse than a war; the two together would mean the destruction of civilisation’. The reader is left wondering how on earth he managed to salvage his political career, but for this we will have to wait for the next instalment.

Chips’s pro-Nazi opinions were redacted by Rhodes James in the 1960s edition of the diaries. Simon Heffer has made the editorial decision to publish the complete text.

That is surely the right thing to do.

These events took place almost a century ago, and Appeasement can no longer be hidden like a guilty secret. It is a historical fact that Chips and others in the Conservative party expressed pro-Hitler views in the 1930s, and the evidence needs to be laid out to enable a proper assessment.

Reading Chips is like eating rich cream. The diary is full of plums. He has an insatiable appetite for gossip and a vast acquaintance. In spite of his appalling political opinions, his diary of the 1930s is almost impossible to put down.

Simon Heffer has edited this vast text with great skill, never intruding with excessive footnotes, always letting Chips speak for himself, and providing an exemplary index.

He has produced a superb edition of an indispensable chronicle.

Jane Ridley is author of Bertie: A Life of Edward VII

Holy hack

NICOLA SHULMAN The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons from Monastic Life

By Sarah Sands Short Books £12.99 Here is a book of ten chapters, each describing time spent in a different monastic institution.

It’s not one to read at a single sitting because its art is in making small differences in atmosphere, pace, light, sound and, indeed, silence, settle and grow in the mind.

And anyway – a whole book, in one go? Who has time for that? What with the breaking news, the Zoom meeting and the constant checking to see if the COVID-19 stats have been updated as, obviously, it is of the highest importance that I be informed at once.

Few people have led more urgent

and frantic lives than Sarah Sands. At the time of writing this book, she was the editor of the BBC’s Today programme, which kick-starts the daily onslaught of information.

For her, there was a genuine imperative, not only to stand right in the middle of the particle storm of news but to channel it through Today’s main line of enquiry: ‘How worried should we be?’

None of this conduces to serenity.

Hence, perhaps, the contrary impulse was beginning to brew in 2019, when she carved a couple of days out of a G20 economic summit to visit the Koyasan monastery in Japan. After this, she set herself the task of ‘enfolding monastic moments into my life’.

She read deeply into the lives of saints and mystics, visited monasteries, attended a gathering of Coptic monks in the Egyptian desert and joined a Buddhist retreat in Thimphu, Bhutan.

Before she was halfway through the project, she decided to quit her job.

The short chapters pack in a lot of thought and history, but they always feel rich, not dense. It’s a surprise when you remember she doesn’t spend more than two nights, and sometimes just a few hours, in one place.

She can give us only first impressions.

While this has obvious disadvantages with regard to the realities of a monastic vocation, it makes her account a good tourist guide. You get a fair idea of what it might be like to go there yourself: the unaccustomed pillow, the difficulty of sitting still and the perpetual impingement of one’s phone.

Sands’s phone is a kind of devilish spirit companion on these trips, constantly drawing attention to itself and all it represents, with its pings and buzzes, sulking conspicuously when it has no signal.

At the Cistercian abbey of NotreDame de Sénanque, she opens her bag to discover her phone’s got company, in the form of her husband’s – her highly scheduled and elsewhere and now phoneless husband’s – phone. At Kyosan, it leads her into the temptation to steal the charger the kind monks have lent.

The brevity of these visits makes her stretch her eyes and ears. Monks build in beautiful places and Sands writes beautifully about them, with the startled senses of one opening a window on the first morning.

And what about the interior vision?

There are small gains: a quieting of the mind; a new intentness in her capacity to notice things, such as birdsong, of which we are the beneficiaries. At the Scottish Dark Sky Observatory in East Ayrshire,

‘Whoa, volcanic glass? VERY high-tech’

she goes to look at the darkness, in order to see the light.

Inevitably, the writing gets metaphorical. Platitudes muster – but she is equal to the threat.

She also talks to the monks and nuns, to try and learn from them. These are conversations, yet it’s hard not to see them as just a different kind of interview: how worried should we be?

The answer she gets is the same in Egypt as in Norfolk or Catalonia; the same in the 21st century as in the ninth. We are worrying about the wrong things. We look for pleasure in all the wrong places.

What we should be thinking about is death. ‘Life is best led as an antechamber to death,’ she writes. ‘This existence of ours is as transient as the clouds.’

By the time you get to St Bernard of Clairvaux, who lived by the precept ‘Why not cease to love what will soon cease to exist?’, you begin to wonder whether monastics have always been drawn from a subset of humanity with an unusually acute suspicion of change, and fear of death. Not unlike journalists on Today.

But what if, as Winston Churchill wrote to his wife, ‘Death is just a moment in life’? What if transient things are all there is, and this is why we love them?

Sands has decided to silence her inner critic. ‘Do not judge,’ she reminds herself. ‘Accept.’ A bit more pushback against that acceptance might have been welcome.

Queen’s neighbours LUCINDA LAMBTON The Buildings of Green Park

By Andrew Jones ACC Art Books £25 This book is as beguiling as a book can be.

From the first glimpse of its most agreeable small format – so satisfying to hold and with a cover that positively sings of the delights to be found within – you are charmed out of your wits.

I am not alone in being thus entranced: the brilliant foreword by Alain de Botton does not exaggerate when he declares that Andrew Jones has ‘a prodigiously well-stocked mind and heart … and is sensitive and knowledgeable about pretty much all the arts of all major cultures’.

‘With his edifying ability’ of looking ‘properly’ around him during a lifetime of distant travel, we read that Jones is ‘particularly alive to modernism in African architecture’.

He was pretty well stymied by the onset of pandemic restrictions. So it was that this superbly elegant and sympathetically old-fashioned book was created within 21st-century lockdown rules.

Trapped in central London, the author circumnavigated the boundaries of his home in Piccadilly, daily marching forth, creating Instagram posts, with one building a day as his quota. What glorious details he did glean; what endearing facts he did find.

Early on, we see the mid-18th-century beauties of the ‘joyously flamboyant’ Spencer House. ‘All I can say whenever I see Spencer House is “Hurrah”,’ writes Jones about its façade, dominated by a huge pediment bedecked with palm fronds, statues of Bacchus, Ceres and Flora and a quantity of urns.

Standing next door, we see, in too-harsh-for-me contrast, the mid20th-century concrete of Denys Lasdun’s ‘modernist’s dream’ at 26 St James’s Place; in reality ‘a veritable millefeuille of complexity!’ writes our guide.

He admires the building’s setting – marching along Queen’s Walk, overlooking the park – and the ‘constant aesthetic banter’ with Spencer House and its neighbours.

Another of his excellent pickings is James ‘Athenian’ Stuart’s neo-classical rooms at Spencer House – some of the first of their kind in 18th-century Europe.

Such historic details abound – sometimes with little relevance to the buildings, but included for their sheer delight. Number 119 Piccadilly was once the Royal Aero Club, ‘whose members included many of the fathers of mechanised aviation in Britain’.

Charles Rolls was a regular, a man so mean that he would always bring his own sandwiches and then order a glass of water before leaving, without having spent a farthing!

This was also the gentlemen’s club that sponsored a competition to design the first aircraft seat belt in the world.

In 1801, Wellington Arch – with its beautiful gates by Decimus Burton – displayed a lock with the promise of 200 guineas to anyone able to pick it.

The Oldie April 2021 51

In 1851, the challenge was successfully taken up by Alfred Charles Hobbs, an American locksmith, who took 51 hours over 16 days to do the deed, while visiting London for the Great Exhibition.

In 1912, the arch was crowned by Adrian Jones’s Peace Descending on the Quadriga of War – the largest bronze statue in Europe. Some 50 years earlier, an immense equestrian statue of Wellington – a man would have stood as high as the horse’s knees – by Matthew Cotes Wyatt, had been hauled aloft to stand proud over London.

It was mocked by the populace for its great size. Queen Victoria wanted to have it removed but, on the Duke’s threatening to resign all his public posts if it were, the Queen backed down. It was so enormous that when it was waiting to be dispatched from the sculptor’s studio, 12 men sat down to a celebratory dinner in the animal’s stomach.

Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks was to be played for the first time in Green Park, amid the fizzling splendour of George II’s colossal party planned to mark the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. The pyrotechnicians Ruggieri and Sarti of Bologna, under the direction of Captain Thomas Desaguliers, Chief Firemaster of His Majesty’s Laboratory – what gratifying details! – were put in charge.

A vast structure, the Temple of Peace – 400 feet long by 114 feet high – was built, from where some 30,000 fireworks were to shoot forth. A 100-strong orchestra, including 40 trumpets, was ready to add to the majesty of the occasion and 100 cannons were also on hand.

It was not to be: as thousands waited, the Temple of Peace took fire and was followed by an exploding conflagration that destroyed the lot.

Handel’s music alone is the legacy of these grand plans; a rich addition to, as Jones puts it, ‘this wonderful pocket of London’.

Egyptian Marina YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir

By Marina Warner William Collins £16.99 Esmond Warner was a young British staff officer stationed in Bari in 1944.

One day, he was helping the local Terzulli family with translations. With his customary bluff ebullience, he introduced the prettiest daughter of the family to a fellow officer of his, saying to her, ‘Here’s just the thing for you.’

‘It’s so wonderful you’re buying me an engagement ring. But why do we need a getaway driver?’

The girl turned to Esmond and said to him, simply, ‘But why not you?’

‘And the possibility struck him to the heart, the words flying true from the bow of her lips,’ writes Marina Warner, in this charming and compelling memoir of her parents’ marriage.

She focuses mainly on her own earliest years in Egypt, where her father Esmond ran the Cairo branch of W H Smith from 1947 until it was burnt down in the riots of 1952.

Esmond fell madly in love and was terribly excited at the prospect of marrying the stunningly pretty Ilia Terzulli. Warner captures her balding father’s rather unsexy British ardour: he was forever loudly sniffing a Vicks inhaler while holding the other nostril, and forever roaring with laughter.

Writing to his parents in London (his father was the retired England cricketer Plum Warner), he gushed, ‘She’s like a two-year-old filly … a lovely, open character … although very possessive and jealous!’ He added, ‘Her life will be mine, not her circle’s’.

The two of them had spent only two minutes alone together. Esmond was 37, 15 years older than Ilia.

And Ilia … well, Warner’s prose takes flight while describing the darting southern-Italian beauty that was her mother. There was ‘nothing to her but light and air, and the rainbow dazzle in her black hair and bright face’.

They were married in Bari. Esmond was posted to Sri Lanka. And there Ilia suddenly was, ‘the young daughter of a widow of no means from a stricken region of a defeated nation’, on a London bus to South Kensington going to lodge with her parents-in-law in their mansion flat.

You can imagine the clash of the two worlds. Warner takes us there, sublimely.

The flat smelled of the peelings from the kitchen’s rubbish chute, ‘the building’s ample digestive tract’ with its ‘dark

gullet’. In the stuffy drawing-room, Plum Warner handed Ilia a wooden sporting implement and said, ‘There are only two rules in life. Keep a straight bat. And your eye on the ball.’

Almost the first thing Esmond did on his return to London in 1945 was to take Ilia to Peal’s in Oxford Street to fit her out with a pair of brogues, his way of signalling that she was now an Englishwoman.

Here I need to remind you what it’s like to read a Marina Warner book. She comes to a halt on certain items or words and writes a short academic paper on them. It’s no good flicking forward. That would be disrespectful, and you might miss the crux of the book. You must just sit back and imagine you’re in quite a good Monday-morning lecture.

So now, in this chapter called Brogues (all the chapters are named after items in her parents’ belongings), we have an essay on the etymology and mythology of brogues. ‘Brogue also means a way of speaking your own tongue … Oddly, shoes have a tongue … A brogue is a mark of identity, a sign of tribal belonging and origin.’ Later on, we have a seven-page essay on the word rastaquouère (‘dashing with a tendency towards sexual unscrupulousness’).

I was far more interested in the dynamic of Esmond and Ilia’s marriage after they moved to Cairo. Were they happy? Ilia kept a notebook of favourite quotes, one of which was Proust’s ‘One’s ideal is always unattainable and one’s happiness mediocre.’

All too soon, Esmond had stopped calling her mia piccina and gone over to ‘How was your day, old thing?’ before heading to the drinks tray. And he had a terrible temper.

The ‘difficulty at the core of his whole being’, Warner writes, was that, because of his father’s fame, he had hung out with the Bullingdon crowd, where he didn’t belong and hadn’t the money.

He and Ilia lived in style in Cairo, but money worries gnawed away. Ilia made all her own clothes – and her children’s – happily and capably. One day, though, she dared to stop off at Cicurel (the Cairo Harrods) to buy her husband a silver photograph frame. He was furious and hurled it out of the window, narrowly missing her face and a passer-by. He wept with remorse, his glasses steaming up, and begged for forgiveness. But from now on, Ilia was terrified of him. Having witnessed the scene, Marina Warner writes, ‘I resolved never ever to depend on a husband.’

The world of early-1950s Cairo that she evokes is dazzling and seductive. The The Oldie April 2021 53

portrayal of a W H Smith office picnic outing to the tree under which Mary and Joseph rested on the flight to Egypt is one of the book’s many delicious and pivotal sections. Warner uses her novelist’s skills to imagine conversations convincingly. It’s dreadful when the bookshop is burned down. That night of riots signalled ‘the end of a world and an era’. It had a brutal effect on Esmond’s mind, embittering him.

Also, it leads to a seven-page essay on the history, geography and mythology of book-burning.

Down Cemetery Road WILLIAM JOLL The End of the Road

By Jack Cooke

LEE MILLER ARCHIVES

Mudlark £14.99 At 33, Jack Cooke, resident in coastal Suffolk, found himself thinking about death, the monuments associated with it and his mortality.

‘I’m already in decline,’ he writes. ‘My physical peak has come and gone, and I failed to notice. In another decade, my brain cells will start to die in droves.

After a certain age, we are all in the process of dying… It was high time that I took the process seriously.’

Jack Cooke’s approach to this Hamlet moment in his life takes the unusual form of his buying an 18-foot Daimler hearse from an undertaker in Bristol, carrying out essential repairs – it has no floor and he is intending to sleep in it – and visiting burial locations around the UK that have attracted his attention.

And quite a journey it turns out to be: some 2,000 miles, starting at Dunwich in Suffolk (with its eight churches), ending only when the hearse expires in north Scotland, fortunately for us after Cooke has visited Orkney.

The hearse takes him and Enfield, an uncomplaining spider who is his only companion, from Suffolk through Essex and Herts to London. Use of the M25 sounds stressful.

In London, despite his cumbersome and presumably non-eco vehicle, he visits several cemeteries and churchyards, including Highgate where he has to break in by night, outwitting the cameras. He moves down to Lewes, on to Portsmouth, into the South West, up to the Cotswolds, on to Tewkesbury and into Wales, criss-crossing the Midlands, up into Derbyshire, and then north to the Lakes, Carlisle and Scotland.

Cooke skilfully transmits the associations surrounding his chosen

The cover of Lee Miller: Fashion in Wartime Britain by Robin Muir, Amber Butchart and Ami Bouhassane, Lee Miller Archives Publishing, £35

sites, along with the instinct that led him to those places in the first place.

At Golders Green crematorium, he is greeted enthusiastically by the custodian, Eric Willis. He takes him on a tour which encompasses Marc Bolan’s memorabilia.

The items are brought out once a year for a service of remembrance on the anniversary of Bolan’s death at the hands of a tree near Barnes Common in September 1977. There are also urns containing the ashes of Bram Stoker and Freud, and a hall dedicated to RAF pilots who died in the Battle of Britain.

At Theberton in Suffolk, Cooke encounters the remains of the Zeppelin shot down in June 1917, with only two of the 18-strong crew surviving.

‘The Zeppelin’s commander, Franz Eichler, threw himself from the front of the burning gondola with four others,

and their bodies were found in a neat line stretched out across a cornfield, like toy soldiers discarded by a child,’ he writes.

At Peak Cavern near Castleton, Derbyshire, Cooke visits the cave system.

There, Neil Moss, an Oxford undergraduate aged 20, became trapped during a descent in March 1959 and suffocated, despite massive attempts to save him, after 35 hours had passed. His father requested that his body be left in situ, not wishing to risk further loss of life.

My favourite was the Bullough Mausoleum on the Island of Rum, in the Hebrides, bought in 1888 by John Bullough, a very rich Lancashire industrialist. His son George really went to town, planting 80,000 trees and importing 250,000 tons of topsoil from Lancashire in puffers.

The Mausoleum is a considerable The Oldie April 2021 55

distance from Kinloch Castle where the Bulloughs led a life of extraordinary opulence. Cooke’s account of his visit to it, together with the following journey to Orkney, is utterly compelling. When we can go nowhere, this book lets us travel freely.

A little less conversation PAUL BAILEY Double Blind

By Edward St Aubyn Harvill Secker £20 Edward St Aubyn’s latest novel is a very curious affair indeed.

Double Blind covers a year in the lives of the kind of people who, unlike the rest of humanity, are never lost for words.

Apart from a young man named Sebastian, who is receiving treatment for chronic schizophrenia, and the kindly Father Guido, a Franciscan priest, the characters tend to talk in neatly phrased paragraphs, which often take on the quality of lectures in miniature.

If the epigeneticist Olivia asks her psychoanalyst father a question, Martin will not have a problem answering it at length. Olivia’s new boyfriend, Francis, is similarly capable of sharing his knowledge of the natural world with anyone who has the time and patience to listen.

As for Hunter Sterling, the American entrepreneur who became a billionaire ‘after selling his legendary hedge fund, Midas, only a few months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers’, and has now founded Digitas, a ‘digital, technological and scientific venture capital firm’ – well, let’s just say that the sound of his own voice seldom fails to afford him pleasure. He stops holding forth only when Saul Prokosh, the wily fellow Princetonian and director of Brainwaves, a division of Digitas, cuts him a line of coke or interrupts his flow with a business proposition.

Olivia’s closest friend is Lucy, who returns to England from New York at the beginning of Double Blind. She has just abandoned her wealthy fiancé, Nathan, and has recently been employed by Hunter Sterling, in whose apartment in St James’s Place she is staying.

On her first night in London, she suffers a severe panic attack and phones Ash, a doctor she has known and trusted for years.

He comes over, examines her and tells her he will call a neurologist and make arrangements for an MRI. He gives her a Zopiclone and she sleeps soundly.

Lucy is lunching with Olivia and

‘Got any red tape?’

Francis when she receives a message from Dr Hammond to say he has the results of the scan. Olivia accompanies her to the hospital, where Lucy learns that she has a brain tumour.

The doctor passes her on to a surgeon, who explains the procedure he will undertake with her permission.

She hears him out, though she is numb with shock. She decides, for the immediate future, that she will go through with the engagements she has planned for her boss, who will be arriving shortly.

She does so, and then becomes another fixture in the plot until a scene with an expert in immunotherapy, in the closing pages, shows her in a more impressive light.

In the brilliant novels involving Patrick Melrose and his singularly awful parents, Edward St Aubyn confronts the unspeakable with a lightness of touch that is often reminiscent of Ronald Firbank.

The manner in which he employs a contained skittishness as a means of encompassing both cruelty and despair is masterly. The effortless dialogue is replete with the stops and starts and revelations of everyday communication, and to such an extent that its very truthfulness is the cause of the reader’s astonished laughter.

But that’s literary history. What is unsettling about Double Blind is that it displays only intermittently those qualities of subtle perceptiveness that mark the best of St Aubyn’s earlier works.

The people in Bad News and Some Hope, for example, speak like real men and women. The brainboxes in his latest book are almost robotic when they give voice to their dissertations on ecology, genetics and neuroscience and other subjects with which the Svengali who controls them seems very well informed.

The novel is crammed with information, some of it fascinating but little of it useful to the narrative, which becomes ever more diffuse.

There were times when I had to stop and wonder if I was reading a satire on the state of the technology-driven culture that predominates right now, especially in the scenes set in Hunter Sterling’s lavish properties in the south of France and California.

Among the guests is the vile Cardinal Lagerfeld, a Nazi in crimson and a wheeler-dealer. He wants a share of the profits to be made from the sale of Happy Helmets, purveyors of an item of headgear inspired by the scanning of the saintly Fra Domenico’s cranium before his death after a long life of serenely happy solitude.

It was the obliging Father Guido who allowed Saul Prokosh access to the dying monk, and the kind soul from Assisi is the recipient not only of the cardinal’s abuse but of some leaden humour as well – as when he drinks margaritas under the impression that the tall glasses contain lemonade.

The French home is called Plein Soleil and the American one Apocalypse Now. Hunter Sterling (give that name some thought) certainly likes to live dangerously – if only in the imagination.

Olivia is the adopted daughter of the loquacious Martin Carr and his wife Lizzie. She discovers from her birth mother that she had a twin. Olivia and Sebastian are characters in Twelfth Night. Not long before the end of this cluttered novel, the shrink starts to wonder whether Sebastian is Olivia’s missing brother.

The fact that she wasn’t named Viola is about the only thing here that isn’t explained. At length.

Paul Bailey wrote At the Jerusalem The Oldie April 2021 57

Media Matters

Rupert Murdoch, going strong at 90

PA IMAGES/ALAMY

As he enters his tenth decade, the tycoon is still thrilled by papers stephen glover About a year ago, I was told by a friend of his that Rupert Murdoch had vascular dementia. I mention this now because it is clear that he doesn’t – or, if he does, it is to such a small degree as to make not the slightest bit of difference.

The crinkly-skinned media mogul so hated by the Left, who turns 90 on 11th March, is as energetic and engaged in his business as ever.

One of Murdoch’s executives recently told me how excited he had been by the hiring of a senior journalist at the Sunday Times, which he owns.

Here is a man about to enter his tenth decade, the proprietor of a vast if somewhat depleted media empire in Britain, America and Australia, who is still fascinated by the appointment of a single hack.

Friends and employees stream down to his mansion near Henley for lunch or dinner with Murdoch and his fourth wife, the former model Jerry Hall. There may be even more guests than usual since, for obvious reasons, Murdoch is shielding (though he had his first COVID jab before Christmas) and doesn’t go to the swanky new offices by London Bridge, which house the Sun, Times and Sunday Times and his other British-based media businesses.

Just how sharp he remains is clear from his assessment of Robert Maxwell in Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell, John Preston’s recently published biography of his old rival, whom he has far surpassed.

Murdoch rightly told Preston that Maxwell was a ‘buffoon’ and that, as far back as the early 1960s, he realised he was ‘obviously a crook’. Murdoch says, ‘I The Sun king: Murdoch just after he bought the paper, 1969

could see the way he was running the Mirror was a joke. Always putting himself on the front page. My pictures never appear in my papers, and preferably no quotes either.’ That’s true.

Many people aged 90 are preparing to meet their maker. Not Rupert Murdoch, whose mother clocked out aged 103. Last year, he reportedly bought a manor house in the ‘Chipping Norton triangle’ in north Oxfordshire which requires considerable and lengthy renovation, with a final bill estimated at £30 million.

One close neighbour will be flamehaired Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of his British media operations. Another will be her friend David Cameron, who in 2008 flew to the tycoon’s yacht in the Mediterranean to seek his blessing.

What, I wonder, does Murdoch think of his tumultuous career, in which he turned an Adelaide newspaper inherited from his father into a sprawling media empire? Perhaps he seldom looks back.

Maybe he will go on looking forward to the next excitement until his dying day. A friend describes how, at the end of a long dinner party, he left to fly to China for a meeting with President Xi Jinping.

Let me attempt a fleeting audit, starting with the plus side. He saved the Times from extinction. Since acquiring it in 1981, he has ploughed possibly as much as £300 million into the paper which, 40 years later, is at last modestly profitable. Ironically, Murdoch, who became famous as the tabloid king, may be most

remembered as the saviour of the Establishment’s favourite newspaper.

He also built Sky television from scratch – coming close to bankruptcy at the outset – before selling his company’s controlling share for £12 billion in 2018.

Sky Sports has enriched several sports, both at the elite level and at the grass roots.

Sky Arts provides more arts coverage than the terrestrial channels put together. Sky News pioneered 24-hour news in the UK. Of course, the Left hated him for his ownership of the once powerful Sun and the now defunct News of the World, which Murdoch closed down in 2011 after the phone-hacking scandal – for which he seems not to have been directly cuplable.

The Sun is now a shadow of what it once was, as is the Daily Mirror. The heyday of red-tops is long gone, and so is their power. Whether the Left will loathe him any the less is debatable.

There is a debit side. High on my list is the price war he launched against the Independent in 1993, when it was selling roughly as many copies as the Times. By slashing the cover price of his paper, he initiated the slow decline of its young rival (of which I was a co-founder). Fair, if ruthless, competition, some will say.

But the Times was loss-making, and Murdoch’s cross-subsidy of his title to destroy the Independent would in some countries have been illegal.

Murdoch, whatever one thinks of him, is the most successful media tycoon who has ever lived. But will his empire, based as it largely is on the old technology of print, long survive his death? I doubt it.

There is no one available to succeed him with even one-tenth of his talent. His empire is too far-flung to hold together without its maverick creator in charge.

But that is all in the future. On the happy occasion of his 90th birthday, I think we can say with confidence that the irrepressible Rupert Murdoch will be with us for a while longer.

The Oldie April 2021 59

History

The Red Prince of the Savoy

A son and father of kings, John of Gaunt was an ambitious moneybags david horspool ‘Old John of Gaunt’ are the first words of Shakespeare’s Richard II. They fix the King’s uncle for ever in our minds as the venerable sage and royal adviser. In 1398, when Richard’s words are meant to have been spoken, John, 2nd Duke of Lancaster (1340-99), father of the future Henry IV and progenitor of a line that would fold itself back into English royalty in two different ways, was six months away from death.

But he wasn’t particularly old, a mere 58. Only three years before, the Duke had been the main negotiator with the French at Leulinghem in the Pas de Calais, settling a truce which closed the latest chapter in the Hundred Years’ War. It was not age that withered John of Gaunt, but life. As a new book, The Red Prince by Helen Carr, shows, a career of duty, wealth accumulation and relentless ambition – not to mention a tangled and energetic sex life – took its toll.

The Shakespeare problem is one historians of medieval England routinely have to face. It’s usually a waste of time to point out where the playwright got his facts wrong – complaints about artists messing about with royal history are nothing new (look at The Crown) and the response is always the same. Poetic licence, and genius, amount to a free pass.

But if quibbling over the details is pointless, what about the big picture? In the case of John of Gaunt, is the portrait in Richard II an approximation of the truth, or a travesty of it?

What emerges from Carr’s book is that, by the end of his life, John of Gaunt was almost the only thing between Richard II and full-blown tyranny. Carr’s Richard has all the petulance, unpredictability John of Gaunt: Edward III’s son and Henry IV’s father 60 The Oldie April 2021

and wounded narcissism of Shakespeare’s, without the poetry.

She draws attention to Richard’s peculiar fixation with his greatgrandfather Edward II, whom he tried to have canonised. Considering Edward had been deposed and brutally murdered by a vengeful aristocracy who resented the king’s reliance on favourites, a pattern Richard was busy reproducing, this was a provocative pastime, to put it mildly.

Because John of Gaunt is not the main focus of the play, Shakespeare gives us only a small detail of the portrait. Carr shows how much effort went into achieving his position, and how it was a result as much of personal striving as of high birth.

Born in Ghent (hence Gaunt) in 1340, John was the third son of Edward III, brother to Edward the Black Prince and Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence.

Despite this stellar pedigree, it was marriage that made John of Gaunt.

First, his union with Blanche of Lancaster brought him the largest inheritance in England when Blanche’s father Henry, 1st Duke of Lancaster, died without male issue.

Then, following Blanche’s death, Gaunt set his sights even higher, marrying Constance of Castile, daughter of Pedro, King of Castile, known as the Cruel. Pedro had been restored to his throne with the help of John and the Black Prince, but was deposed and murdered in 1369.

Thus the Castilian throne was nominally in the hands of a usurper when John and Constance married.

The Duke claimed the crown and spent much of the rest of his life trying to make good on that claim.

In 1387, he led a

disastrous expedition to Castile. Though a military failure and a personal blow, the campaign had two beneficial outcomes for John and his dynasty. His daughter married into the new Castilian royal family, and Enrique of Castile, the King, paid John a large bribe to go away.

It was as a moneybags with ideas above his station that John of Gaunt’s popular reputation was fixed. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, rebels declared they would ‘have no king called John’.

Fortunately for him, the Duke was away from London when the mob descended on his splendid Savoy Palace by the Thames – where the hotel is today.

Carr vividly describes the rebels systematically destroying the riches on display there and cracking open barrels of fine wine. Many were killed, unable to get out of their boozy confinement in the palace cellars when their comrades set the building alight.

The other stain on the Duke’s reputation was his carrying on with a mistress, Katherine Swynford. Though John seems to have been as promiscuous as any of his peers, Katherine was different. Only after the Revolt, when his reputation was at its lowest ebb, was he persuaded to ‘put her away’.

On his second wife’s death, John made the unprecedented decision to marry his lover, and successfully petitioned Richard to legitimise his offspring by her, born before they married. This sort of devotion did not go down well.

For all the difficulties of writing medieval biography, it’s worth it to remind us that people in the Middle Ages were no less complex than they are today.

‘Old John of Gaunt’ was rich, ambitious, ruthless John of Gaunt and protective, dutiful, chivalrous John of Gaunt.

The Red Prince: The Life of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster by Helen Carr is published on 15th April

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

Metaphorically speaking

TOM PLANT

England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer has ten sets of initials after his name.

Almost all relate to his medical knowledge, which is wide and deep.

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam’s fame, however, rests not just on his epidemiological expertise, but on his ability to explain what’s going on. It rests on, in particular, his use of metaphor. Dr Van-Tam uses metaphors much more effectively than most politicians.

Take the Prime Minister. He enjoys language and sometimes uses it well. But shown a long ordeal and asked how to cheer us up, he reaches for ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’, which is perhaps the most hackneyed metaphor since Brexit’s elusive ‘level playing field’.

Thus, on 30th December, Mr Johnson orated, ‘We are still in the tunnel of this pandemic. The light, however, is not merely visible: thanks to an extraordinary feat of British engineering, if you like, the tunnel has been shortened and we are moving faster through it.’ Hmph.

Now take Dr Van-Tam’s railway analogy, earlier last year. He was on a platform waiting to board a crowded train: ‘It’s wet, it’s windy, it’s horrible. And two miles down the tracks, two lights appear and it’s the train and it’s a long way off and we’re at that point at the moment. That’s the efficacy result.

‘Then we hope the train slows down safely to get into the station; that’s the safety data. And then the train stops.

Nosy chemists I have just survived interrogation by a 12-year-old Saturday girl at my local pharmacy.

My husband and I made the mistake of arriving at the checkout together, each clutching a packet of 32 paracetamol.

‘Who are they for?’ said the 12-year-old, eyeing us both suspiciously.

62 The Oldie April 2021

‘And, at that point, the doors don’t open; the guard has to make sure it’s safe to open the doors. That’s the [Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency], that’s the regulator.

‘And when the doors open, I hope there’s not an unholy scramble for the seats. The [Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation] has very clearly said which people need the seats most and they are the ones who should get on the train first.’

The doctor had us gripped.

Politicians can sometimes produce a memorable metaphor: Mao Zedong said atom bombs were paper tigers; Churchill identified the iron curtain; Geoffrey Howe explained how Mrs Thatcher’s opening batsmen had been sent out to the crease with bats broken by their captain.

All these metaphors helped to arouse in the mind of the listener a consciousness of the ideas or events being described. By their very difference from the words expected, metaphors – which in Greek ‘transfer to one word the sense of another’ – can help to make the telling more vivid.

They can also make it more boring.

Orwell counselled against using a metaphor we are used to seeing in print: these are clichés. But he did recognise that some metaphors are ‘dead’ and have in effect reverted to being ordinary words.

Dead metaphors would nowadays include ‘landmark rulings’, ‘grinding to a

‘Us,’ we said in unison.

‘Do you live together?’

I was very tempted to say, ‘Yes, we’re living in sin and the sex is wonderful,’ which she probably wouldn’t have believed; we’ve been married for over 50 years and it shows. We both just said, ‘Yes,’ and gritted our teeth.

‘In that case, you can have only 32 tablets,’ she said, very po-faced.

Our joint blood pressure was now at stroke level, but we didn’t give in. We demanded to see the supervisor, much to the chagrin of those in the queue building up behind us.

After much huffing and puffing, we were allowed our drug haul of 64 paracetamol.

halt’ and perhaps ‘going viral’. I would draw the line – there’s another corpse – at ‘perfect storms’, ‘windows of opportunity’, ‘rollercoasters’ and almost anything ‘toxic’ or ‘iconic’. As for ‘roll out the vaccine’, that is more daft than dead.

Mixed metaphors also attract criticism. I rather enjoy them. It’s best to avoid ‘igniting’, ‘sparking’ or ‘triggering’ tensions, but when the cat is out of the bag and everyone is in the soup, not clover, I think it’s reasonable to smile.

The sin in mixing metaphors is not, after all, in making the mixture but in failing to realise that that’s what you’ve done. The writer to the Times last year who complained, ‘It’s throwing the baby out with the bath water… It’s dumbing down via the back door,’ saw nothing amiss.

Roger Angell, however, knew exactly what he was doing when he described a book as ‘a mélange, a grab bag, a plate of hors d’oeuvres, a teenager’s closet, a bit of everything’. But he wasn’t mixing metaphors, he was simply offering one after another, much as Macbeth was when told of his wife’s death: ‘And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle/Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.’

Without metaphors, we’d have no Shakespeare. Indeed, we’d have no poetry.

It doesn’t end there. When your headache/backache is at its worst, then you have to extract the pills, each individually encased in unopenable ‘childproof’ foil.

My pills usually emerge in tiny fragments – except when my six-year-old grandson does it for me.

SMALL DELIGHTS Putting your hand into the bag of Scrabble tiles and coming up with exactly 7.

ELEANOR ALDRED, SHREWSBURY Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

God forbid that you ask for anything stronger. You are then looked up and down and asked three questions. ‘Are they for you?’ ‘Have you taken them before?’ ‘Are you on any other medication?’

You look them straight in the eye and say, ‘No,’ ignoring the five lots of medication on your repeat prescription form. Finally, there’s question four: ‘You do know they are not for long-term use, don’t you?’

Yes, I am aware of all ‘health and safety’ issues, but I have had my rock ’n’ roll years and survived.

For God’s sake, allow me to be the judge of what I think is best for me now.

JILL STITSON

Arts NETFLIX HARRY MOUNT PELÉ The most shocking moment in this engaging documentary is Pelé’s first appearance on screen.

His unlined face is still great at 80 – he looks 50. But in that first appearance, the great man has to use a stroller after hip surgery. Later on, he’s in a wheelchair.

It’s a sad transformation from that coiled, five-foot-eight spring of energy who dominated football from 1958 to 1970. Only England’s World Cup win in 1966 prevented Brazil from winning four World Cups in a row.

There’s a danger that such constant success – and a contented life, apart from a few affairs and the hip surgery – would make a Pelé documentary a bit dull.

Recent documentaries on Diego Maradona, Paul Gascoigne, George Best and Ayrton Senna were all heightened, I’m afraid, by the footballers’ flaws and, in Senna’s case, his death at 34. Pelé has already outlived poor Best and Maradona by 20 years.

But the documentary is given an enthralling arc by concentrating on the 1970 World Cup and the build-up to it.

The 1966 World Cup was a disaster for Pelé and Brazil. In 1970, some thought that, at 29, he’d had it. Even the old

Gold standard: Pelé wins the World Cup in Mexico, June 1970

Brazil coach said – wrongly – that Pelé was losing his eyesight.

So when he explodes back to life in the 1970 World Cup, it’s a thrill – even, I’d say, for non-football fans.

As the team gets better and better, he visibly relaxes. By the time Brazil meets Italy in the Final, the team is an amalgam of supreme skill and cool confidence.

They smash Italy 4-1, finishing off with the World Cup’s most famous goal – Carlos Alberto’s 86th-minute strike, the culmination of a wondrous series of passes, the last of them from a superchilled Pelé.

He seems so calm, charming and unspoilt throughout his life. But he admits he felt under intense pressure in 1970.

‘The greatest gift you get from victory isn’t the trophy – it’s the relief,’ he says about the 1970 win. In the dressing room afterwards, Pelé shouted three times, ‘I’m not dead!’

He had added pressure from the vicious military dictatorship that ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985. The swaggering

President, Emílio Garrastazu Médici, muscles in on the 1970 victory at every opportunity. Some have attacked Pelé for not criticising the regime – but would you speak out against a regime that liked torturing critics?

This lovely documentary goes wrong only in the translated voiceovers of the players: Pelé sounds like Swiss Tony, the smooth car-dealer in The Fast Show; his teammate Pepe sounds like an old Cockney; another teammate, Zagallo, sounds like Christopher Hitchens. That apart, it’s a joy.

Pelé straddles the footballing ages: from the black-and-white era of heavy, sodden balls and slow-moving players to the Technicolor samba of 1970, with those heavenly, gold-and-green Brazil shirts.

Brazil are the only team to have won the World Cup five times. Pelé is the only player to have won it three times. He scored 1,283 goals in 1,367 games. Unbeatable.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE In the closing moments of Today, there came several enthusiastic voices urging everyone to get onto Radio Garden online at once and have endless – and educational – fun. Naturally I obeyed and I didn’t regret it.

Radio Garden is an online radio station which allows you to click on radio stations across the world – and during COVID it has been booming. You follow a little green light on a global map, click and, in a trice, you’re there: in Vancouver or St Malo (a lovely talk station on which French books are read clearly, comprehensibly) or an unlimited number of small towns anywhere you like. I flitted around Teruel, Marsala, Tucumán…

What larks! A life of promiscuity now beckons – and I was already fooling around on my trusty Azatom portable. Times Radio has become a fixture (Giles The Oldie April 2021 63

‘Motormouth’ Coren on Fridays, Hugo Rifkind on Saturdays, Tom NewtonDunn on politics, and weekday afternoons with the lovely Mariella Frostrup.)

I’d been dabbling in Scala Radio, too, with its ‘soothing’ playlist: typically a random concoction of Albinoni followed

by John Rutter, Puccini, Karl Jenkins, O Sole Mio, Scott Joplin, the Triumphal March from Aida and an Icelandic duo called Hugar playing Waves…

Mmmmmm. And sometimes Zzzzzz.

Then suddenly up creeps Boom Radio, ‘tailor-made for Baby Boomers’, of which I had no warning until the Daily Telegraph reviewed it warmly. Radio 2 has ‘lost its way’, they said. I tuned in and caught its jingle – ‘Bee-Double-Oh-Em’, followed by the ultimate vintage rock disc, Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock (1956). All their callers have to state the first record they ever bought. Mine was Buddy Holly’s That’ll Be the Day in 1958, when singles cost 6s 8d – so I am their target audience.

But, just as I can’t read fiction in the morning, I really can’t switch on pop music before sundown (except for aerobic purposes). So although I appreciate its existence – and its revival of old DJs such as David Hamilton – I find daytime Boom a bit milquetoast, especially compared with the more raucous Gold, where I already get my late-night fix of Sixties hits.

Back to Radio 4, then, and Keats. It seems only yesterday – it was a mere 25 years ago – that I was celebrating in these pages the 200th anniversary of Keats’s birth, and the beautiful readings on Radios 4 and 3. The bicentenary of his death has just given us a rich, well-made (by Beaty Rubens) two-parter, John Keats: Life and After-Life, by the poet Sasha Dugdale.

She began by asking, ‘What use are poets when we need virologists, nurses and ICU doctors?’ She linked Keats’s medical studies with his illness, poems and death from TB, the COVID of its day.

There were excellent contributions from academics, plus the unmistakable Bob 64 The Oldie April 2021

Geldof, the bicentenary spokesman for the Keats-Shelley Memorial in Rome.

‘Where are the songs of spring?’ asked Bob. Ode to Autumn, recited by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, made a fitting close, with its elegiac last line: ‘And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.’

Tim Harford tapped into the Zeitgeist when he scrutinised statistics in More or Less.

Just in time to make sense of government claims of the ‘Ninety per cent of over-75s will be two-thirds safer from infection’ variety. His appearance on Private Passions on Radio 3 revealed his gratifying preference for electronic, mathematical sounds – most memorably Knee Play 5 (Einstein on the Beach) from Philip Glass, with its refrain of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.

Which reminds me: Shostakovich deliberately created his String Quartet No 15 to drive audiences to leave the auditorium in tedium. I heard that in Something Understood, from John McCarthy, the famous hostage. He was discussing boredom with Dr Tiffany Watt-Smith from the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University. Didn’t know that existed!

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS A panorama of decay at the best of times, Hastings, during the prolonged months of lockdown, is like an end-of-the-world zombie apocalypse movie.

The shops, cafés, pubs and restaurants are shuttered and abandoned, the doorways unswept, windows broken and unwashed. The pier has been locked for months. The pavements are strewn with rubbish and dog mess. Nothing gleams.

Everything is weed-choked. It is hard to picture it ever coming back to life. What a bore the brown winter sea is, anyway.

Bridgerton’s Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) and the Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page)

The telly, consequently, is my window on a nicer world – and what do I watch?

Only Foyle’s War, which is set in Hastings. I also liked Mighty Trains, which is about a mighty train traversing Australia, except there was a derailment and they had to reverse – not that the passengers missed much. Australia is nothing but a lot of red earth and a kangaroo, which hopped over a fence.

A similar programme was Mighty Cruise Ships, in which a mighty cruise ship veered around the Canary Islands.

There’s no ship’s wheel today – only a computer mouse. Indeed, ships don’t even look like ships. They are floating metal boxes, with no curving lines, no elegance, nothing to link them with the old Cunarders. On board, there are circus performances, dozens of bars and a German crew. Why do German men when speaking English always sound as gay as geese?

Joanna Lumley, in defiance of lockdown, has been on the move. She’s already been to Russia and India, but she can’t go to Africa as the ivory-poachers would bag her for those splendid lateral incisors.

Instead of ending up as a piano, she ‘makes her most personal journey yet’ and, in Home Sweet Home, finds herself with a camera crew in a plague village in Derbyshire. Then she is in the Rovers talking to Ken Barlow; on a Scottish island looking almost with interest at a tweed loom; and, keeping an impressively tight lid on satire, in Ulster, showing a blind man a mural on the side of a house.

In every scene, Joanna wears a different coat. She goes to Whitby and dresses up as a Goth. She goes to Bradford and starts talking in a dialect of Hindi. She looks at a waterfall and puts on a sympathetic face when a do-gooder explains how the very landscape of England is racist, and everyone must do more ‘to promote access to the countryside for people from diverse backgrounds’. Why? What a breathy voice she has, like a human hairdryer. Joanna sighs, gasps, pants. She swoops about, gesticulating in slow motion. Surely they can find room for her in the preposterous Bridgerton, with its broughams and bustles, fans and balls, powdered wigs and plates piled high with multicoloured macaroons?

The series is a fantasy of social reversal, an alternative Regency England where the monarchy and aristocracy are black people, white men are bullying weaklings and all the girls are wily protofeminists, their opinions and attitudes formed as if by Germaine Greer.

Ed McLachlan

‘He says you’ll like his friend – he says he’s a well-known film actor and you’ll recognise him when you see him’

Panto season prevails, with Ugly Sisters, Broker’s Men, matchmaking wars and crazy courtship protocols.

I was amazed I managed as many as two episodes, before switching to a Jack Warner film on Talking Pictures TV. Were I a younger man, however, I’d quite fall in love with Phoebe Dynevor – who turns out to be the actual daughter of Coronation Street’s Sally Dynevor – Sally Whittaker as was, Kevin’s wife, also called Sally, a sexy pixie. Forty years ago, I fell in love with her, too.

Longing for sunshiny oases and desert islands – or at least geraniums in urns – I watch all those shows from the Lost World, when crowds existed, before people went about wearing face nappies.

The appeal of Antiques Road Trip, which is frequently on in the middle of the night, is no longer the buffoons poking about in junk shops, robbing the owners and dealers – it is the miracle of travelling freely; the open road.

What makes me laugh about Celebrity Antiques Road Trip is that I’ve seldom heard of the celebrities, many of whom have by now also dropped off the twig,

eg somebody named William Simons from something called Heartbeat.

Then there is Coach Trip, where contestants are usually called on to ride camels in Marbella. I’ve never followed the programme’s rules – all this bickering about tactical voting. Yet the big question remains: is Brendan a celebrity yet? Or is he stuck in the doldrums, like Jeremy Spake from Airport and Maureen from Driving School? Welsh beauty Maureen, who ran over her husband’s foot, went to Calais ‘to practise her French’.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE HANDEL’S BROCKES PASSION Easter approaches; let us keep the feast.

Not that it was kept last year, when churches were closed for the first time since 1208. A man purporting to be the Archbishop of Canterbury addressed the nation from his kitchen. And no Passion music was heard live in the land.

A year on, the Bach Choir is advertising tickets for Elgar’s Gerontius

in June, but the annual Eastertide performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion has gone by the board for a second successive year, and may do for a third if state-sponsored risk aversion remains the order of the day.

There is always the gramophone, of course. The great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter would invite friends to his Moscow apartment on Good Friday to hear Bach’s St Matthew Passion.

He favoured the Klemperer recording – a fine choice, though I’ve occasionally opted for a wonderful 1958 Leith Hill Festival performance conducted by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Sung in English, it has about it something of that sense of devotion and spiritual calm the Leipzig Lutherans must have experienced at the time of the work’s creation.

This year, however, I shall be turning to a revelatory recording from Richard Egarr and the Academy of Ancient Music of Handel’s Brockes Passion.

Composed six years after Handel took up permanent residence in England, this astonishing piece has been little noticed by his adopted countrymen for nigh on 300 years.

The commission came from an old university friend, the well-heeled Hamburg merchant, international man of letters and amateur poet Barthold Brockes, whose oratorio text Jesus, martyred and dying for the sins of the world was already winning a powerful following among anti-Pietist Lutherans.

Unlike a traditional Passion text, in which a verbatim Gospel narrative is filled out with brief crowd scenes, chorales and contemplative arias, that of the Brockes Passion is a freewheeling, theatrical paraphrase, designed, like some latter-day news channel, to terrify the punters and lure them in.

Bach uses verses by Brockes in his St John Passion, but his Leipzig congregations would have been appalled

by Brockes’s commissioning competitive settings (four, including Handel’s) for the 1719 Easter season. ‘Ah, Hamburg!’ they would have murmured; Hamburg being a city where crowds flocked to hear celebrated composers locking horns, much as they do nowadays to witness the jousting of top-flight footballers.

Bach admired Handel’s setting, stole bits from it and performed it in Leipzig in 1746. Others, however, can never forgive the text. ‘Explicit, garish, saccharine’ are some of the words used by John Eliot Gardiner in his exuberant Bach volume, Music in the Castle of Heaven (Allen Lane, 2013).

Still, it’s difficult to see how one avoids matters bloody, garish and explicit – The Oldie April 2021 65

Jennens, another well-heeled man of faith and literary ambition, produced some preliminary translations.

It was an odd exercise, given that there was no chance of the piece’s being performed in England, even in translation. Was this the cue Jennens needed to make his own ‘scripture text’, an anthology entitled Messiah, which he then invited his friend to set, causing the world’s best-loved oratorio to be sung in English?

Perhaps God is an Englishman after all.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON GREEN SHOOTS FROM OLD ROOTS

MATTHEW HORWOOD/ALAMY

Easter rising: The Cross in the Mountains

by Caspar David Friedrich (1808)

even occasionally sado-masochistic – when unfolding so dreadful a tale, not least in the scenes of scourging and crucifixion, which people of an age long before our own would have known at first hand.

Consider George Herbert: he may be a better poet than Brockes, but meditations such as The Agonie and The Crosse make for no less easy reading.

Brockes provides a swift-moving text: 105 numbers in 150 minutes in Handel’s setting. We need to adjust to his decision to give so much of the story-telling and spiritual reflection to the anonymoussounding Daughter of Zion, one of the most astonishing roles in baroque oratorio, superbly realised on the AAM recording by soprano Elizabeth Watts.

Yet there are things here – her aria after Judas’s suicide, ‘You squander God’s grace’ – that do in two minutes what some in Messiah do in six.

Brockes’s humanising of the story sits well with Handel’s operatic genius. The scenes of Peter’s denial and remorse are as strong as any in Passion music. And the portrayal of Jesus is more than usually naturalistic. The setting even includes a duet with his mother before the crucifixion. Very Netflix, but touchingly done.

Handel scores the piece for strings, continuo and a mob of oboes and bassoons – superb in the AAM performance – which both terrify and console.

The beautifully designed and endlessly informative 220-page hardback book includes a bonus CD on which we hear sections of the Brockes Passion for which the creator of the text of Messiah, Charles 66 The Oldie April 2021

I know impatient readers of this column will be pining to return to the raw pleasures of muddy music festivals, stadium rock concerts and ‘intimate’ gigs where suave crooners like Johnny Standing and Nicky Haslam sing the silvery songbooks of the greats.

Sadly, everything is off.

I can’t bring you ‘live’ reports this month, next month, or maybe ever. All there is left on this plague island in perma-lockdown (where is the promised ‘golden age’ of ‘global Britain’? I want my money back!) is this: live-streamed or pre-recorded events and albums. Artists are pumping out albums as if the industry were going out of fashion, which of course it is.

When I cast my eye over new releases for the year – I’ll be honest – I haven’t heard of 90 per cent of the artists. So I will not be reviewing here the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, Product of Hate or even The Weeknd (sic) – and the only reason I’ve heard of him is that he was the half-time act at the Superbowl.

Eighty-year-old Sex Bomb: Sir Tom Jones

Green shoots, anyway. March sees the bruised, sultry vocals of Lana Del Rey’s new offering, Chemtrails Over the Country Club. And later in the spring, there is ‘new’ work from three Brits everyone – without advanced cognitive decline, anyway – should have heard of: Sting, Ringo Starr and Tom Jones, and there’s space for only the last one here.

Tom Jones is, in theory, touring Europe this year, no doubt with his all-time hits – such as Sex Bomb and It’s Not Unusual – for the loyal knicker-throwers, plus his new album, Surrounded By Time.

At the time of writing, only a couple of tracks by Sir Tom have been released.

One is a tub-thumper called No Hole in My Head; I prefer Talking Reality Television Blues, a nine-minute cover of a 2019 anti-Trump song by Todd Snider.

It rumbles down the tracks in Sir Tom’s chocolatey tom-tom to the killer payoff: ‘Then a show called The Apprentice came on and pretty soon/ An old man with a comb-over sold us the moon/ We stayed tuned in, now here we are/ Reality killed by a reality star.’

It’s a cover, though, folks, and these are not his lines. This is not – to coin a phrase – unusual.

Ringo and Sir Tom are both 80 and I’m afraid we may have reached the point in the life cycle of the Golden Oldie where we might be better off marking the anniversary of some classic LP released in the 1970s (we have just all come together in blessed, 50-year-old memory of Carole King’s Tapestry) than reviewing new work.

Still, this column will continue to look forwards, however unpleasant that prospect may be, towards the sunlit uplands, while noting that the only gathering that hasn’t been cancelled so far is the Festival of Brexit.

Spring arrives in Normandy, March 2020. Hockney iPad painting

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU DAVID HOCKNEY’S ARRIVAL OF SPRING

©DAVID HOCKNEY

Royal Academy of Arts 27th March to 22nd August David Hockney must be one of the – perhaps the – most shown artists of his time.

Since 1963, when the newly opened Kasmin Gallery in Bond Street gave him his first exhibition, he has had more than 400 one-man and 500 group shows. This is the third within a decade at the RA. Could that perhaps have got up the collective nose of Gilbert & George, who resigned as Royal Academicians when they were refused a show?

Hockney is bedecked with honours and has been cited as the most influential British artist ever, and his paintings can sell for even more than the idiocies of Jeff Koons. So when he says that he has ‘never been mainstream’, it is tempting to respond ‘Ah, bless!’

Artists like to be perceived as outsiders and rebels. Hockney’s selfperception has more justification than many in one way. Throughout his long career – he is now 83 – he has been an

innovator, keen to experiment with whatever new – and indeed old – technology has offered.

He was one of the first to use acrylic.

Since then, he has employed photography, collage, fax, liquid paper, computers, iPads and iPhones, many print-making techniques, watercolour, the camera lucida, multi-canvas paintings and multi-camera films. All have fired his enthusiasm.

Some experiments and investigations have been less successful than others: when he discovered watercolour, comparatively late in his career, he showed his first efforts before he

‘We’re in the wrong cartoon, aren’t we?’

had fully absorbed the medium’s particular demands.

On the other hand, while I generally consider artists’ videos of the sort that get onto Turner Prize lists to be dreary time-wasters, the two that Hockney made for his 2012 RA show were both moving and beautiful, especially the one following the seasons in Yorkshire.

For the present show, the season is spring 2019 – specifically in Normandy, where he currently lives. The chosen medium is another new print technique deriving from iPad drawings. These are much more impressive works than those he produced when he first tried iPads a few years back. That’s because of recent advances in the ‘brushes’ app, designed partly by him, and also because he is now both painting and drawing fluently on it, allowing him to work at speed.

The printing process permits largescale reproduction, and every mark is readable. As usual, his colours are very strong, and they are not jarring as sometimes in the past.

There are over 100 works, closely hung in the chronological order of production, thus following the course of his spring. I am touched that a man in his 80s can take me back to the Normandy I discovered at 11.

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Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER AUTUMNAL CHELSEA Unlike the horticultural faithful and, indeed, Her Majesty, I have never been a regular attendee of the Chelsea Flower Show.

Once every three or four years has been enough – not least because, for the past 40 years, I have lived some 200 miles from London. And why, anyway, would anyone want to leave their own garden in the glorious month of May? And apart from the designer show gardens, there’s the recurring risk of sameness in the marquee, where growers and nurserymen profile their delights in – sometimes – similarly repetitive displays. True, there are always new plant varieties to discover, but these soon find their way into television programmes, gardening columns and, thankfully, commercial outlets.

I first went to the Show 50 years ago and most recently in 2017. The coronavirus pandemic caused its cancellation last year, but in the hope that the disease will be well under control by later this year, the Show’s oh-soregular (since 1912) third-week-of-May slot has been shunted on to the third week of September.

Leaving aside visitors’ thoughts on a four-month postponement, I have instead been talking to some of the movers and shakers closely involved with this annual spectacle.

‘The Royal Horticultural Society is our premier gardening charity, running five stunning gardens, to say nothing of its horticultural advisory service. Much of the money for these activities comes from the Chelsea Flower Show,’ says Christine Skelmersdale, proprietor of Broadleigh Gardens in Somerset, one of our foremost specialist bulb growers, who served on the RHS Council for 11 years.

She adds, ‘2020 saw a devastating reduction in [the Society’s] income across the board – so it is totally understandable that it will wish to attempt to have its premier show in 2021. While it is disappointing that it cannot be at its normal time, and very hard for the exhibitors of spring-flowering plants such as tulips, what a great opportunity it offers exhibitors who would not normally be able to exhibit or have a chance to show another range other than the stale Chelsea standard fare.

‘Just imagine the pavilions filled with spectacular displays of dahlias, gladioli, asters, tender perennials like salvias – all of which will be at their peak as well as the more normal traditional herbaceous plants and trees and shrubs.’

‘How will Old Roses be made to defy nature and bloom in September?’ asks Michael Charlesworth, chair of the Heritage Rose Group. ‘Their absence may be missed this year, but the wondrous colours of late summer and autumn will be welcomed.’

Woody-plant expert and RHS insider Maurice Foster agrees. September ‘creates an opportunity for plants to be exhibited that never get a look in at the spring event and, though it is a little late, we might see a good show of colourful late-summer

Autumn leaves: Magnolia grandiflora

performers such as hydrangeas. Magnolia grandiflora might come into play alongside the more lowly ericas, callunas and daboecias [heathers]. There are some very good buddleias worth showing, along with loads of fuchsias, hebes, hibiscus, abelias and, perhaps, some hypericums.’

While possibly ‘a little early for autumn colour, plants like oxydendrum and some maples might be showing a leg’.

Echoing Christine Skelmersdale’s concern about the RHS’s vital cash flow, Maurice charitably concludes that the move ‘is an interesting social and horticultural experiment, as well as a kind of vaccine for the Society to help it combat the financial pandemic’.

A Chelsea September seems to be winning favour all round. I won’t book my train ticket just yet, but the week of 21st to 26th September is heavily inked in my diary.

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD PEARS I remember, years ago, my then motherin-law saying that, of all the varieties of pear, Doyenne du Comice was the best.

From planting, all pear trees need up to four years before producing a good crop of fruit. Having just entered my ninth decade, I am aware that if I am going to grow Doyenne du Comice, or any other pear, I had better get on with it.

Pear trees used to be grown on pear stock; this produced huge, slow-growing trees unsuitable for most gardens.

Nowadays they are usually grafted on to quince rootstock; they will fruit more quickly and their size is more manageable.

Pears probably grow best on trees trained against a south-facing wall or fence. In Edwardian gardens they were often grown as espaliers, forming a screen between the flowers and vegetables, or flanking a path.

Paths can now be edged with The Oldie April 2021 69

low-growing pear trees, like one-tier espaliers, known as stepovers. Since pear trees are shallow-rooted, good soil and drainage are important. So is summer pruning of cordons and espaliers.

Bare-root trees can be planted now and until mid-April, if possible on a site protected from spring frosts, as pear trees will produce their blossom about two weeks earlier than apple trees.

Pomona Fruits offer 14 varieties (the young trees cost about £22), including Comice and one called Onward, which is said to be more reliable than Comice and similar in flavour.

Pollinating pears is slightly tricky.

Though a few varieties, such as Conference, are self-fertile, most are divided into flowering groups and should be grown with another variety in the same or an adjacent group. The best thing is to ask a fruit nursery or consult a catalogue. A few cultivars will need two pollinators.

The pears should be picked – lifted and twisted lightly – before they are fully ripe, and then carefully stored until they begin to colour. The Comice that I bought recently were labelled ‘soft, buttery and aromatic’, which does not do justice to their flavour. I prefer Homer’s description of pears as a gift of the gods.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD FRENCH LESSONS

ELISABETH LUARD

A fine tradition of honest, down-to-earth home cooking is good reason to be grateful to nos amis across the Channel.

Of all the cities in France, the cooking of Lyon is considered the cat’s miaow: from the workers’ bouchons serving a couple of dishes at midday to go with the wine; to the Mères Lyonnaises, brawny begetters of today’s female chefs; to the sainted, late lamented Paul Bocuse.

Celebrate the restoration of our precious entente cordiale – let’s have no more rosbif jokes or laughter at serving roast gigot with mint sauce – and take the Autoroute du Soleil with a pitstop in Lyon for silk-weavers’ brains and Easter bunny with mustard. You know it makes sense.

Cervelles des canuts Cream cheese beaten to a soft green fluff with olive oil, vinegar and fresh herbs is known (for reasons best unexplored) as silk-weavers’ brains. Canuts, silk-weavers, were purveyors of silk ribbons until the nylon industry put the silkworms out of business in the 1920s. Serves 4 250g cream cheese 6 tablespoons double cream 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar 70 The Oldie April 2021

it’s drying out. Bubble up the sauce at the end if necessary to thicken and reduce.

Taste and adjust the seasoning. (A little more mustard? A dash more cream?)

Serve with pommes lyonnaises – chunked potatoes cooked very gently in goose fat with finely sliced onion, diced bacon and just enough water, till the potatoes are soft and golden and have started to fry.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE JOHN BULL’S MENU 1 garlic clove, peeled and finely chopped 1 shallot, peeled and finely chopped Salt and pepper Fresh herbs to finish (some or all) Finely-chopped chervil, chives, parsley, tarragon Beat the cheese with the cream until smooth, then beat or whisk in the oil, vinegar, garlic and shallot. Season with salt and pepper, then stir in the finely chopped herbs. Refrigerate for at least two hours before serving.

Serve with a bunch of radishes on ice and hot Melba toast. To Melba your own white-bread toast, slice horizontally and dry in a medium oven till curled and crisp.

Lapin à la moutarde Whether wild or hutch-reared, there’s never been a better way to cook a rabbit than with cream and mustard. Serves 3-4 1 hutch rabbit or 2 wild bunnies, jointed 1 large onion, finely sliced Generous nugget butter 2 tablespoons plain flour Salt and pepper 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped 2 teaspoons whole-grain mustard Large glass white wine About 300ml double cream Preheat the oven to 160°C/325°F/Gas 3.

Wipe the rabbit joints. If the rabbit is wild and of uncertain age, use a sharp knife to slip the translucent membrane off the saddle and legs. In a frying pan, soften the onions in a little of the butter.

Transfer to a roomy casserole into which you judge the rabbit pieces will fit snugly.

Dust the rabbit joints through seasoned flour and fry them gently in more butter till well browned. Transfer to the casserole with the onions. Add the wine to the frying pan and bubble it up, scraping in the brown bits. Stir in the mustard and cream and pour the contents of the pan over the rabbit joints.

Lid the casserole tightly and transfer to the oven for about an hour at 180°C/350°F, till the rabbit is tender. Check occasionally and add a splash of water if it looks as if

Gastronomic historians will for ever remember this February as the nadir of the pandemic.

It was the month that the French abandoned the 1910 Code du Travail. It meant they legalised having lunch at one’s desk.

Have they gone mad? What will they legalise next? Crack cocaine on Sundays?

Those once proud gourmands have been reduced to a Pot Noodle au bureau.

Antoine Beauvilliers, the great pre-Revolutionary restaurateur, will be turning in his grave (if there’s any room among all the treats with which he was buried). The former chef of the future Louis XVIII, he launched La Grande Taverne de Londres in 1782 in the Palais-Royal. He may have wanted to replicate the mixing of high and low clientele that he saw in London, but he certainly had no intention of imitating our brutal cookery.

After the highs of the Restoration, London gastronomy, symbolic of ‘the effeminate and tyrannical French’, was eradicated. Beer-bellied John Bull was launched in 1712, after Marlborough’s victories, bellowing, ‘God sends meat, but the Devil sends cooks.’ Hogarth ridiculed the fricasées of the ‘half-starv’d Frenchmen’ who had supported the Jacobites.

How our attitudes changed after Waterloo. Brits, Russians and Prussians laid siege to the restaurants of Paris until the end of the allied occupation in November 2019. The word ‘bistro’ may be derived from the Russian for ‘quick’ – the command of the triumphant Cossack cavalry officers.

Wellington requisitioned the palatial Hôtel Grimod de la Reynière – the grand townhouse belonging to the author of the Almanach des Gourmands – and the allied monarchs ordered their meals from Les Frères Provençaux, at a cost of three thousand francs a day, during the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris.

It wasn’t just the military. There was a proliferation of cartoons of English couples crossing the channel. A fortnight later, they were barely able to fit through

the gates of Calais, having behaved like touring football hooligans who had just beaten both France and Germany 5-0.

In 55 BC, Caesar denounced us as barbarians, not least because we didn’t cut our wine with water. Fast forward two millennia, and the diluting French felt the same. Brillat-Savarin, author of Physiologie du Goût, wrote of the English invaders, ‘They stuff themselves with double portions of meat, order the most expensive dishes, drink the most heady wines and require assistance to leave the table.’

We were Neanderthals in the presence of nymphs. It wasn’t just the food; it never is. We had never seen such finery: the whole of Paris seemed to eat out, and they dressed up, flirting with one another in those mirrored walls, which you can still see in Brasserie Balzac. There was a show at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris called Les Anglaises pour Rire, a one-joke play about our backward dress sense, made worse by 25 years of exclusion from the Paris boutiques.

Used to the fixed fare of the ordinaries, we were overwhelmed by the menus. La Grande Taverne offered 13 sorts of soup, 22 hors-d’oeuvres, beef in 11 different ways, poultry and game in around 30 ways. And, to our great surprise, the prices were listed next to each dish.

Needless to say, those prices steadily rose, owing to our tradition of loudly toasting their cheapness, a gracious gesture which, down the ages, we have taken with us as far as the tiniest stall in remotest Polynesia.

Brillat-Savarin attributed France’s ability to repay its war debt of 50 million francs to the lure of Parisian restaurants.

‘Who is the divinity that effected this miracle? Gourmandise.’ Open ye the gates of the city, Macron!

DRINK BILL KNOTT GROW YOUR OWN WINE ‘The only surefire way to make a small fortune from a vineyard,’ says David Gleave MW, ‘is to start with a large one.’

As founder and MD of Liberty Wines, he has seen many try, but few succeed. ‘If you buy an existing vineyard, you’ve got a chance. Plant your own vines, though, and you’ve got to dig a hole in the ground and wait at least four years before you can make any wine. With reds, if they need cellaring, it’s another two years after that. The phrase “sunk capital” describes it very well.’

Sobering words for those of us who dream of gazing over our own vines.

Philip Addis and Graham Hazell, the two main proprietors of Domaine du

Grand Mayne, about 20 miles south-west of Bergerac, took the sensible option.

The spadework at the Domaine had been done nearly 30 years earlier by another Englishman, Andrew Gordon, who had taken the rundown estate and transformed it into a successful business.

His wheeze was called WineShare: selling leases on rows of vines to British wine-lovers in exchange for a guaranteed supply of well-priced, well-made wine.

He sold the business in 2008. The estate stagnated for a few years until Addis and Hazell took over in 2013, launching a successful crowdfunding campaign the following year and again in 2018.

‘Actually,’ admits Hazell, ‘I heard the vineyard was for sale, and – in a moment of weakness after a couple of glasses – I bought it. Then I realised I didn’t know anything about wine; so I persuaded Philip to come in as my partner.’

Addis’s background was as a wine merchant: he owned and ran Great Western Wine for 27 years, selling it in 2010. ‘I had too much time on my hands,’ he recalls.

‘Looking out over the vineyard from the terrace at the back of the house, after the second or third bottle, I got suckered in.’

Besides the estate, they had two other major assets: an Excel spreadsheet with details of the old WineShare clients – Addis discovered that many of them still had ‘a strong emotional attachment’ to Domaine du Grand Mayne, and were keen to become shareholders – and the talents of winemaker Mathieu Crosnier, who had carried on making high-quality wines despite the estate’s decline.

Crosnier, together with South African winemaker Martin Meinert, makes wines from classic Bordeaux varietals – Sauvignon Blanc and a splash of Sémillon for the whites, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon for the reds – and jolly good they are, too: generously fruity in an almost New World style, yet with the complexity of good Bordeaux.

And, when circumstances allow, you can visit the estate itself: guests can even rent accommodation. There are barbecues every Friday evening, attracting a mix of tourists and locals. ‘The butcher is local, the cheeses are local and so is the band,’ says Hazell. ‘We wanted to get away from being perceived as an English-owned vineyard.’

He has a few pieces of advice for aspiring vineyard-owners. ‘Don’t do it unless you’ve thoroughly researched the business, and you know where the buyers for your wine will be. Find a partner with complementary skills to yours. And understand that it’s not always plain sailing: after the first hailstorm, the romance disappears, and you realise that you’re actually a farmer.’

Wine This month’s mixed case from DBM Wines comprises four bottles each of three wines: a gently floral white from France’s deep South; a cool-climate Chilean Pinot Noir; and a red-blooded Spanish Malbec, built to go with a barbecue.

However, if you wish, you can buy 12 bottles of the individual wines.

Viognier/Grenache ‘Les Lauriers’, Coteaux de Béziers, France 2019, offer price £9.65, case price £115.80 Characteristically peachscented Viognier with 30 per cent Grenache Blanc.

Pinot Noir Reserva ‘Pionero’, Morandé, Casablanca Valley, Chile 2018, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Light, sunny – but not jammy – Pinot Noir with raspberry and redcurrant fruit.

Malbec A Punto, Spain 2018, offer price £10.49, case price £125.88 A Punto means medium-rare: with rich autumnal fruit and a dusting of spice, this Malbec is perfect with steak.

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The Oldie April 2021 71

KGPA LTD/ALAMY

SPORT JIM WHITE OLDIE MAN OF THE SEA 2021 For those of us who haven’t learnt a foreign language, read the complete King James Bible or finished the 1,000-piece jigsaw from Christmas, there’s a new lockdown role model.

Step forward Frank Rothwell, a 70-year-old from Oldham. While I failed to do anything more than watch the box set of Call My Agent, Frank decided he was going mark the lockdown by stretching himself a bit. And how.

After a conversation with someone in the pub (remember those?) last summer, he decided he was going to row the Atlantic single-handed. He’d never so much as lifted an oar before. But the requirement to take up a new sport wasn’t going to stop him. Nor was the idea of going it alone. After all, he had spent a couple of weeks on an uninhabited island as a contestant in Bear Grylls’s TV series the year before.

Thus, after learning the ropes by paddling as much as 50 miles a day off the North Wales coast throughout the autumn, in December, just as the rest of us were failing to master Mandarin, he set out from the Canary Islands. Six weeks, 3,000 miles and 1.6 million strokes later, he arrived in Antigua on Valentine’s Day, to be greeted by Judith, his wife of 50 years.

‘My dad said to me, “Never let anybody tell you you’re too old,”’ he said, as he pulled and heaved himself into the record books as the oldest person ever to row unassisted across the pond (Graham Walters, 72, managed to get within six miles of Antigua last summer, but needed to be towed into harbour after being blown off course). And, with his magnificent feat, Frank became the oldie sporting role model of this and many a year.

Sport has a limited understanding of longevity. James Milner, the Liverpool footballer, is invariably described as a grizzled veteran. He is 35. When he won his seventh Superbowl in January, the American quarterback Tom Brady was considered by many to be an athletic Methuselah. He is 43. Even the apparently eternal Nick Skelton, when he won the gold medal in the showjumping at the Rio Olympics and needed a step ladder to mount his horse, was a mere 59. Now, though, embarking on his eighth decade, here is Frank Rothwell, a proper oldie. And, as such, a genuine age-defying hero.

What’s more, as he rowed, he was raising astonishing sums for Alzheimer’s 72 The Oldie April 2021

Research UK. In honour of his brotherin-law Roger, who died from the condition even as he was in the mid-Atlantic, Frank raised more than £1 million. He is the Captain Tom of the high seas.

Those of us wheezing as we mount the stairs can only wonder at how he did it.

The fact is, living on a diet of freezedried, powdered stews, obliged to sleep curled up in the most cramped of quarters, apparently spurred on by brass-band music blasting out across the waves, he just got on with it. One thing age brought him, he reckoned, was perspective. Every minute out in the mid-Atlantic was there to be not suffered but relished.

After all, he could have been stuck back in Blighty, under lockdown, when the most exciting thing on offer is the possibility the postman might deliver that jigsaw you ordered from Amazon. Hang on a minute – where’s my life jacket?

MOTORING ALAN JUDD POST-LOCKDOWN BREAKDOWNS Here we go again, I thought: AA renewal time – therefore time to haggle. And, once again, it was worth it.

The initial quote was £373.01 for three (family membership), including home start, roadside breakdown and relay recovery.

Last year, it was £268.89. I picked up the phone and explained politely to the nice lady who answered that, on balance, all things being equal, at this moment in time and considering my future membership going forward, I’d rather pay less.

The lady tapped her keyboard and, after amicable negotiation, we agreed £260.00. Sadly, whatever it is these days, it seems to pay to query it.

This annual AA ritual began some years ago when I noticed that I would pay more to renew my membership than if I left and rejoined. When I rang to say I was considering this, or perhaps moving to a rival organisation, I was asked if I would like to pay less. I liked, was given a reduction and advised to challenge every future renewal quote. It’s worked ever since.

En-route salute: an AA patrolman at Garston, near Watford, 1920s

This ridiculous, not to say iniquitous, state of affairs came about following the AA’s demutualisation in 1999 to become what it is now the profit-making AA plc.

I’ve no objection to profit in principle but don’t think the loyalty of members (or are we now customers?) should be thus exploited.

Having been a member for 54 years – nearly half the organisation’s existence (it was founded in 1905) – I’m offered various free benefits I never use, such as 20 per cent off in Moto Burger King, when I’d prefer my loyalty to be better rewarded with a little more financial candour.

That said, the breakdown services generally function efficiently. I’ve rarely needed them in recent years – but when you do, you really do. The last time I did was when the water pump on my Discovery 3 sheared off one dark night and they took me and the car home.

Lockdowns mean less traffic and presumably fewer breakdowns, but if last year’s lockdowns are anything to go by, they’ll be deluged with calls as things ease and people start their cars after a long break.

Or try to. More than half the distress calls will be battery-related. Cars are designed to be driven and, like us, deteriorate when idle, especially in colder weather. The AA advise that a healthy battery should be OK, provided you charge it by running the engine for a least 15 minutes once a fortnight.

Ideally, you should move it, too, even if only backwards and forwards in your parking place. Check that your tyres are fully inflated – they become ‘flat-spotted’ if left unmoved for too long – and use the brakes so that surface rust on the discs is rubbed off. I’m afraid I go for overkill, aiming to drive an unused car for 30 minutes weekly, but that’s partly because I like any excuse to drive.

Older, less robust batteries need recharging more often – again, like us – and if you can’t drive them, you could top them up weekly with a batterycharger, or even connect permanently to an appropriate trickle charger.

Electric vehicles and hybrids, however, are charged differently.

The advice is to keep them charged by pressing the start button weekly so that the ready light comes on for about ten minutes, but don’t – really don’t – connect them to a battery-charger without reading the handbook. Some may take a conventional charger, but many require a specialised charger. If in doubt, ring the AA – or RAC or whatever – and ask. That’s what they’re there for.

And, while you’re at it, tell them you’re a little worried about your membership fee.

Stay in touch with

phone

Easy-to-use mobiles that will help you stay close to family and friends We have teamed up with specialist phone company emporia to bring you these two great offers on easyto-use mobile phones.

If last year taught us anything at all, it taught us that, when the chips are down, it really, really helps if you can speak to someone, or, even better, see and hear them and not just when you need them.

For us oldies, whether we like it or not, mobile phones have become an important lifeline, so we might as well arm ourselves with the best that we can get, and which are geared to the needs of

a generation with failing eyesight, less than perfect hearing and fingers that don’t work so well as they used to.

These two Oldiephones will appeal to different ends of the market. Those of us who want to embrace the modern technological world – but in a simple, straightforward way – or those who just want to text or call.

The emporiaSMART.4 State of the art smartphone, with front facing camera for selfies and video calls, a great rear camera that works with the magnifying app for when you forget your glasses, secure contactless payments instead of using

your bank cards, and a QR scanner ideal for track and trace. The S4 also comes with an illustrated 135 page training book to help you learn all the tricks at your own pace, plus a 16 page guide to setting up and using contactless payments securely. You can buy this phone, PLUS three months of discounted IQ Mobile credit* for just £195 including a FREE protective cover worth up to £25.

The emporiaONE This is an elegantly designed flip phone, with a large screen, big, well-spaced keys and good volume. This is the ideal phone for someone who needs to be connected, but doesn’t want to learn about videos or surf the internet. You can buy this phone, PLUS three months of discounted IQ Mobile credit* for just £65.

To order an Oldiephone, please visit: https://shop.emporiatelecom.co.uk/theoldie or call 01782 568342 *The Oldie and emporia have teamed up with specialist provider IQ Mobile, powered by the UK’s EE network, to provide great value mobile services. Existing phone numbers can be transferred, and ongoing monthly top ups will be required after the initial offer period. The service includes ‘roam like at home’ across EU countries, so when we can all get back to normal your service is ready for those trips to start again.

The Oldie April 2021 73

A toast to the good life Writing, drinking and gardening... That’s how Hugh Johnson has made a living for 60 years – and he’s had a ball

M

uch of the blame must go to P G Wodehouse, but perhaps the clincher was Oliver Edwards.

On 17th April 1778, he told Samuel Johnson that he ‘too, had tried to be a philosopher, but I don’t know how, somehow, cheerfulness was always breaking in’.

It has always been so when I sit down to write, whatever the subject. I used to bone up on, say, the local undertakers for a searching piece in the local paper, and, by paragraph two, I was telling the one about the two Irishmen who… No, there I go again. That’s not what the editor ordered.

But it is how I got here. Why write, I asked myself, if readers are not going to read? And why should they read if it isn’t fun? Besides, I pictured them shuffling, looking at their watches, sneaking a look to see how long it was before the end. I was always nervous that they’d give up on me.

Suppose they weren’t interested in undertaking, or indeed clarets, which was what I proposed! Then hoodwink them. Start off by writing about something likelier to grab them, and then ease over to the matter in hand. Marriage prospects, I recall, handily introduced the subject of laying down First Growths (girls who do it have a string of suitors – or did in my day).

Wine, of course, has inherent cheerfulness. It’s what it’s for. By the time I’d developed a healthy thirst for it, at Cambridge and after (it didn’t take long), my curiosity was also hooked.

I found plenty of worthy, literate, enthusiastic books to read, but few I found absorbing, let alone amusing. I remembered that approved cliché: ‘If you want to learn a subject, write a book on it.’

But who would pay me? The editor and cartoonist Mark Boxer gave me a steer: ‘Try Jocelyn Baines at Nelson.

They’re coining it in with Robert Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World. Say you want to do the wine version.’

Which is why my first book, called by

Master of revels – P G Wodehouse

my favourite four-letter word, Wine, is a swanky number with full-colour plates (which I had to take), and why I pocketed the £1,000 advance which took me and Judy, newly wed, on a pan-European tour in the wettest and most miserable vintage ever, 1965.

Wine sold well. It sold in America (where I had the thrill of sharing a publisher with P G Wodehouse, Peter Schwed of Simon & Schuster). Then Harry Evans asked me to take over from the retiring Elizabeth Nicholas as Travel Editor of the Sunday Times.

Only months later, Jocelyn Stevens asked me to edit Queen – and Harry said, ‘Grab it – off you go.’ Celeste, our astrologer at Queen, summed up my career when she said, ‘You’re a lucky devil.’

Two years later, James Mitchell, leaving Nelson to start Mitchell Beazley, asked me to do a wine atlas. ‘If I can have serious maps, Ordnance Survey-style,’ I said. His backer agreed – what a splendid job they did. The sales of the atlas exceeded even my dreams. After 500,000, James presented me with a gold disc on the cover of a leather-bound copy.

When he asked what came next and I answered, ‘Trees,’ he thought (and perhaps hoped) I’d said, ‘Cheese.’

‘No – trees,’ I said.

‘Trees aren’t a consumer subject,’ he answered.

I have always loved trees, and still can’t understand how most people feel indifferent to the magnificent vegetables that give us shade, not to mention wood.

It wasn’t going to happen without sponsorship from the International Paper Company.

James and I went to New York – and this mammoth producer of newsprint bought into the idea, bankrolled it, helped my research and I’m happy to say made a decent profit when we eventually sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. Co-editions in translation were the secret of Mitchell Beazley’s groundbreaking success.

Trees, and a new house in north Essex, drew me into gardening. In 1974, war in the Middle East quadrupled the price of oil and everyone felt poor – including the Royal Horticultural Society. I was asked if I could help with its 100-year-old Journal and ended up, with James’s help, turning it into The Garden and starting Tradescant’s (or Trad’s) Diary as its editorial. I’m still writing it, 45 years later.

I’m surprised when people ask what wine and trees (and gardening) have in common. They are all intimate, personal, sensual pleasures that reward observation, study and patience.

They are all grist to the mill of a writer who tries to entertain by explaining quite complex themes.

The rest follows. Tony Laithwaite asked me to help with the Sunday Times Wine Club. I rashly undertook an ambitious book called The Principles of Gardening. I started my Pocket Wine Book and kept it up for 45 editions. I wrote The Story of Wine. Since then, enjoying both subjects has kept me happy and busy. There is no exhausting them – nor, so far, me.

Hugh Johnson’s Sitting in the Shade: A decade of my garden diary is published on 1st April (Mitchell Beazley) The Oldie April 2021 75

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

How to avoid e-humiliation It’s easy to forget that Facebook is 17 years old and Twitter is 15.

That may not seem much to us but, in the fevered world of social media, it makes them close to fossilised. Most schoolchildren have never known a world without them.

However, those social-media sites operate in a way that is increasingly unpopular, especially with the young.

They are public-facing: what you post on the sites is visible to everyone. This has become, dare I say it, a rather oldfashioned way of using social media.

I’m convinced that we are seeing a gentle shift in attitudes that will lead to a

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

British Library Events www.bl.uk/events Many online events are here – some free; some not – but they are usually high-quality.

Open Culture www.openculture.com A site that collates excellent cultural and educational media – free online courses, films, audiobooks and more.

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems.

Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

significant move away from these public forums, and into more private and moderated ones.

I would welcome it. I’ve never found the soapbox platforms very attractive. I much prefer a private conversation to a megaphone at Speakers’ Corner.

I was discussing this with a group of 14-15-year-olds recently, as part of a careers mentoring group (on Zoom, of course), and I was struck by how unattractive they regard these open platforms. They crave privacy, and cited many stories of friends who had been publicly humiliated on Facebook and the like.

This means that they have all migrated to the many private chat rooms and group communication methods such as WhatsApp, or Discord (which grew out of the online game industry). There are plenty more; Signal and Telegram are two of the better known but there are any number of others.

Their key attraction for the young (and for me) is that you don’t use them to tell the world what you think. You use them to communicate with groups of people who are interested in the same thing, and where the members can control who takes part. If you misbehave, you’ll be ejected, as with any club.

It you use WhatsApp, and plenty of people over 65 do, then you are probably already in one or two private groups, even if it’s just for the family, or the book club. Messages posted there are encrypted and private; provided that you can trust the other members, they will stay that way.

The young take a more considered approach to privacy than many of their elders. I know of several young parents who have asked that nobody post pictures of or information about their children anywhere but in private groups.

It is becoming common for graduation ceremonies and other fairly public events to ban the public posting of pictures. I’ve even been to a wedding where this request appeared in the service sheet.

Furthermore, many of all ages are concerned by the muddle over the relationship between open platforms and free speech. This was brought to a head by the more or less wholesale removal of President Trump from them all, but it had already been brewing for a while.

I am uncomfortable with the idea that a company can act as judge and jury, while the libertarian in me says that they should be allowed to do what they like with their own equipment.

The truth is that the platforms have not yet worked out whether or not they are publishers, and neither have we.

Perhaps this is a symptom of their relative youth; perhaps it points to a lack of effective regulation.

In any event, it’s fair to say that some sort of wind of change, or at least a breeze, is blowing. This will be fanned not just by regulation, but by the shifting loyalties of those who use the platforms.

Cheeringly, however, I am confident that many of the youngsters who use them, and who have never known a non-internet world, appreciate the risks.

Maybe older users should take heed.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Neil Woodford – a cautionary tale Financial firms should make sure their vulnerable customers are not disadvantaged, said the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in late February.

It is shocking that the City regulator believes it necessary to give such a warning to the people we pay to look after our money.

The FCA itself is often criticised for not doing enough to protect investors 76 The Oldie April 2021

from scandals, the latest being the Woodford affair, which has rocked the fund-management industry to its core.

Neil Woodford had been a fêted fund manager with a successful long-term track record. When he set up on his own, thousands of his followers invested in his flagship Woodford Equity Income fund.

This started by living up to its name, investing mostly in solid, blue-chip

companies that paid dependable dividends. At its peak, it was worth over £10 billion. But Woodford was quietly changing his strategy, which made the fund more risky.

He started buying stakes in unquoted start-up companies, many of which did not yet make profits, let alone pay dividends. Some institutional investors noticed and began withdrawing their

Icarus of the City: Neil Woodford, the dream stock-picker who fell to earth

money. As the fund’s performance became unrelentingly worse, more clients bailed out.

By the time small investors wanted their money back, Woodford was unable to pay them. His new-style holdings, comprising two-thirds of the portfolio, were illiquid and difficult to sell.

In 2019, the fund, now worth only £3.7 billion, was first suspended and then wound up. The underlying investments are being sold off, forcing investors to take substantial losses. They are still

waiting for a final payout, which might come later this year. Woodford was sacked, his reputation in shreds, though he wants to set up a new fund targeting the professional market.

Small investors thought they had invested wisely, on the basis of advice from independent financial advisers and Woodford’s reputation as a star stock-picker.

If the people you trust to take care of your money let you down, what can you do to keep your money safe?

Above all, you should take an active interest in your money, whether you use a financial adviser or not. Look for a fund manager with a steady, long-standing record. Do not simply pick a fund from a best-buy list. Before you choose a fund, check where your money will be invested.

Search online for its name and you will find fact sheets and detailed information about it.

Every six months, check how well the fund is performing compared with others in the same sector that match themselves to the same index, such as the FT All Share index. Make sure it still meets your requirements in terms of growth and income and still has the same strategy.

Do not monitor performance every day, because all funds go up and down in price in the short term and you must accept that every fund manager can make mistakes. Check whether the fund has shrunk in size: if it has, that could indicate that those in the know are pulling out.

Do not put all your money in one place. Diversify your investments in different shares and stock markets, and among several different fund managers.

Contact them if you have any questions and remember that, as Woodford demonstrated, past performance is no guarantee of future success.

‘ “Found him?” – but I’ve rented out his room’ The Oldie April 2021 77

Getting Dressed

Beefeater’s towering achievements

The Tower of London’s Ravenmaster mourns his missing raven brigid keenan In January, Merlina, ‘queen’ raven at the Tower of London, went missing. She hasn’t been seen since.

Much hangs on the ravens – everyone knows the legend that if the ravens disappear, the Tower and the kingdom will crumble.

There are seven ravens at the Tower now that Merlina has departed. As queen raven, she was the ruler of the roost.

The Ravenmaster, Christopher Skaithe, 55, mourning his favourite raven, was all over the media. This was the stuff of nightmares for him. At the time of her disappearance, he said, ‘I know so many of you lovely folk will be saddened by this news. None more than me. Please excuse my absence for a few days.’

Only in October, he was telling my grandchildren, on a trip to the Tower, how Merlina, when she felt unloved, rolled onto her back, put her feet in the air and pretended she was dead.

Like his ravens, Skaith was a naughty boy – so much so that his mother took him at the age of 15 to the Army Careers Office and enrolled him as a boy soldier.

It was an inspired decision. He became, over time, a warrant officer, a drum major and a specialist machinegunner in what became the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, serving all over the world. Skaithe is a keen nature-lover and Belize with its jungle was his favourite.

Twenty-five years later, in 2008, his wife accompanied him to the interview for the position of Yeoman Warder at the Tower. ‘I’ve only ever done two job interviews in my life and each time I had a good woman beside me.’

There are 30 Yeoman Warders, including two women, who all previously held impeccable records for at least 22 years in the armed forces.

‘Twenty-two years of not being caught,’ laughs Skaithe.

In blue ‘undress’ uniform. The raven was the first born in the Tower for 30 years 78 The Oldie April 2021

They live with their families in their own flats or houses in the Tower – though during lockdowns Skaithe’s wife and daughter have spent time at their home in Kent.

Their famous uniforms are individually made to measure and supplied free. The day-to-day, blue ‘undress’ uniform of Tudor bonnet, trousers and red-trimmed tabard (under which Skaithe wears his own T-shirt printed with ravens) was redesigned in the Victorian era to be more comfortable.

Each uniform is worth £700. To allow for frequent dry-cleaning (done in the Tower), each Yeoman Warder has half a dozen of these: entertaining and guiding hundreds of tourists (167,000 visited the Tower in the 2019 Easter holidays) can be sweaty work.

Skaithe is particularly proud of his arm badge – he is the only person in the world who can legitimately wear it – an oval disc decorated with ravens, a laurel wreath and a crown.

The Beefeaters (incidentally, many of them are vegetarians or vegans these days) wear their famous state dress uniform, the one on the gin bottle, only about ten times a year, for State

Off duty in Hackett tweed &Tyrwhitt shirt

occasions, such as firing the salute on the Queen’s birthday.

The dress uniform dates from Henry VIII’s time. With its rosettetrimmed breeches, tights and ruff, it is extremely uncomfortable – ‘but you feel like a million dollars wearing it’.

Each Beefeater also has a sword and a spear-like halberd, designed to pull knights off horses. The whole ensemble costs as much as a Dior gown – there’s 230 feet of gold braid on the tunic alone.

The Tower has its own gym, but Skaithe says he gets enough exercise chasing his ravens around. Besides, he thinks that a Beefeater looks better with a bit of a belly.

His job is to let the birds out of their enclosure at daybreak and gather them in at dusk. Their wings are partially clipped, but they can still fly out of the Tower grounds – as did Merlina.

Skaithe doesn’t like to pet his ravens.

He thinks it’s important that they remain wild. He feeds them rats, mice, meat from Smithfield and his own concoction: yummy snacks of biscuits soaked in blood.

He has spent the best part of his life in one uniform or another and likes it that way – no decisions to be made each day.

So much so that he has developed his own off-duty uniform, as dashing as any of the others – a tie, waistcoat and tweed jacket.

Christopher Skaithe is author of The Ravenmaster (Fourth Estate)

The Willow Warbler by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd Viscount Grey, birdwatcher and Foreign Secretary (1905-16), wrote, ‘It is song that is the most pleasing feature of bird life, but it is the last to arouse in most people any keen or intelligent attention’ (The Charm of Birds).

It is easy enough to identify the calls of big birds, but the songs of often invisible songbirds are a different matter. Where better to start than with the willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus)?

Henry Douglas-Home, who could identify the sound of every bird in a dawn chorus, was an ardent admirer: ‘Willow warblers sing the same phrase almost every half-minute of daylight from April to June. Some may call it a ditty, but for me the twenty seconds of its lovely cadence is finer than all the stronger voices it contends with’ (The Birdman).

W H Hudson, another admirer (British Birds), quoted the historian and ornithologist William Warde Fowler: ‘Beginning with a high and tolerably full note, he drops it both in force and pitch in a cadence short and sweet, as though he were getting exhausted with the effort.

This cadence is often perfect: by which I mean that it descends gradually, not, of course, on the notes of our musical scale but through fractions of one, or perhaps two, of our tones, and without returning upward at the end.’

Hudson also quoted the naturalist and essayist John Burroughs, who wrote (quoting from Shakespeare – Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 1) that the song ‘touches the heart… The song of the willow-warbler has a dying fall; no other bird is so touching in this respect.’

Lord Grey called its song ‘soft as summer rain’.

The willow warbler and its fellow Phylloscopus (leaf explorer) the chiffchaff are two of the leaf-warbler family – so called because of colour and habitat.

Both were once described as willow wrens, to which the willow warbler can add – because of its haunts, appearance 80 The Oldie April 2021

and usually grounded nest – a variety of names including Sally (willow) Picker (Ireland), Tom Thumb (Roxburghshire), Willie Muftie (Scotland), Fell Peggy (Lancashire), Nettle Bird (Herefordshire), Grass Mumruffin (Worcestershire) and Ground Oven (Norfolk) – see Francesca Greenoak’s British Birds: Their Folklore, Names and Literature.

Until the turn of the century, one could readily hear its song in south-east England, not least in London. Chiffchaffs, chiefly distinguishable from willow warblers by their song, remain, but the willow warblers have gone.

The last I heard was in copse-lined

Caledonian Park, north London – formerly Caledonian Market, originally for livestock, later diversified. In the 1980s, there were still local residents who remembered cattle barging into shops.

Despite having declined in England, and especially the south-east, by 70 per cent in the last 25 years, willow warblers remain Britain’s most abundant and widespread warbler (2,300,000).

England’s loss is the more rural West Country, Wales, Scotland and Ireland’s gain. The same goes for such similarly declining summer migrants from sub-Saharan Africa – house martins and cuckoos.

Travel Home from home

Once lockdown is over, Liz Hodgkinson will still be wary of planes and hotels. She’ll stick to cottages in Dorset, Scotland and Sussex

E

ven when – more likely, if – travel restrictions are lifted this year, many people including me will probably think it is not worth the faff to go abroad.

There’ll be COVID tests and quarantine, perhaps, on arrival or return. There’ll be worry about catching something off someone on the aircraft or at the hotel.

At 77, I have had the vaccine but is that going to make any difference to these worries? Not much, I think.

With all this in mind, I predict that holidaying in a quirky little cottage in Britain will become the vacation of choice for the foreseeable future. It will give us the chance to explore a country we may not know very well: our own.

A few years ago, I started to make good my own deficiency by booking cottages in unknown parts of Britain.

These staycations have provided just as much adventure and variety as trips abroad, without the accompanying hassle. For those who remain wary of British hotels, cottages are a brilliant alternative.

82 The Oldie April 2021

Generally speaking, they are excellent value for money and they are also incredibly clean, well equipped and comfortable. As they are all individually owned, each reflects its owner’s taste; this may vary from minimalist white cube to the decidedly eccentric.

Unlike at a hotel, there is no corporate feel about them and until you arrive you never know quite what you are going to get. As most of the owners go to a lot of trouble to please, you will rarely – judging by my experience – be disappointed. Usually, they will be on the end of the phone to answer any questions you might have.

The cottages are all self-catering. So you can eat what you like when you like, and there is the additional fun and

‘When cooped up in a strange home, you need to know you can get away from one another’

challenge of cooking in somebody else’s kitchen. I have now stayed in five cottages. But for their existence, I would never have come across carpets of wild orchids, or discovered the Enid Blyton Trail in Dorset.

Already, I am looking at locations for a 2021 holiday and feeling excited about which new region I shall choose to conquer this time. Yes, I’m hooked.

The first rule of cottage-choosing is to make sure there is plenty for you to do, whether your interests lie in walking, sightseeing, birdwatching or hunting down fungi.

The second rule is: never, ever depend on the weather, as you may well have to cope with relentless rain. Your holiday has to work, whatever the climate.

The third rule is to ensure the cottage you pick has plenty of room for everybody staying there. This means reading websites carefully: a cottage that is advertised as sleeping eight may have only two bedrooms. When cooped up in a strange home, you need to know you can get away from one another. A certain

PICTORIAL PRESS/URBANBUZZ/ALAMY

Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan in Lyme Regis, in Ammonite. Below: Enid Blyton, Noddy, Big Ears and Dorset’s PC Plod

amount of privacy is essential if you are not going to drive one another mad.

My first experience of this type of holiday was on the Isle of Eigg, in the Inner Hebrides. Getting there had to be planned with military precision: it involved the Caledonian Sleeper, taxis and a ferry which sailed only once a day.

I wondered whether, as a highmaintenance person needing my hairdryer and hot shower, I might find the cottage a bit primitive. I needn’t have worried: it had every mod con.

I was travelling with my ex-husband – yes, we can stand each other’s company for a few days – and the first thing we did, after settling in, was to plan out each day, once again, like a military campaign.

This involved exploring every inch of the three-mile by five-mile island, cooking, reading, resting and, in the evenings, watching a film. We went in June and I can’t tell you how richly

rewarded I was by coming across moors covered with white, purple and pink orchids. The orchids alone made the whole trip a thrill.

On another occasion, we took the whole family – including The Oldie’s Town Mouse, Tom Hodgkinson, and five grandchildren – to Eigg. This time, we stayed in the island’s one hostel, which was huge and equipped with an industrial kitchen.

With kids, it was even more vital to plan every day’s activities – and food.

That’s another golden rule: work out all the menus before you get there. Also decide who will cook: whether one person is appointed or you take it in turns.

And then make sure you lay in plenty of wine and beer. With our Eigg trips, we ordered the booze in advance from the island’s shop. Whatever happened, we didn’t want to run out.

You may also find yourself doing things you once sneered at. When I was on a cottage holiday with a friend in Rye, Sussex, we booked a guided tour. We

were very glad we had: we got a potted history of this intriguing town.

The cottage a friend and I booked in Swanage was idiosyncratic, full of knick-knacks, and it had a wood-burning stove. Some people like these. I don’t. So, if the cottage advertises one, I make sure there are also other forms of heating.

Check, too, that towels are provided, as it is a bore to have to pack them.

Although it poured every single day of our Dorset holiday, we were able to explore the Jurassic Coast, something I had never done before. Fossils are not exactly my thing, but it was still exciting to come across them along the coast and to view them in the extremely wellcurated Etches Collection in Kimmeridge.

Dorset fossils will soon be all the rage, with the release of Ammonite, starring Kate Winslet as Mary Anning (17991847), the Lyme Regis palaeontologist.

This whole Dorset area was the inspiration for Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, and the Noddy books’ Mr Plod.

Plod was based on a real Studland village policeman, PC Christopher Rone.

Britain has produced so many surprises. Eastbourne may not sound a particularly intrepid choice, but my ex and I had another successful cottage holiday there; this time, in the winter.

We were staying in a converted fisherman’s cottage, possibly the most twee yet, and we were able to get out every day for long walks along the seafront. We swapped notes on various projects we were working on and, in the evenings, cosied up to a Netflix film.

Now for an essential tip. If you’re going on a walking holiday, make sure there is somewhere to put – and to clean – muddy boots.

Any downsides? I would find a cottage holiday too lonely by myself. So a congenial companion is a must.

Ideally, it must be somebody I can laugh with, as there may be unexpected pitfalls: not being able to work the washing machine, or even not being able to find the cottage – some are remarkably hidden away. And a major plus for dog-owners is that the majority are dog-friendly, which most hotels are not.

A certain amount of resilience and forbearance is required but when cottage holidays come off, there is little to beat them.

Ammonite is released on 16th April.

Eastbourne holidays (holidaycottages. co.uk); Dorset holidays (cottages.com) The Oldie April 2021 83

Overlooked Britain

The Pevsner guide to my childhood

lucinda lambton A new book brings memories of County Durham flooding back, from the cathedral’s rib vaults to pitmen’s back-to-backs County Durham is one of the leastknown parts of the British Isles.

I was born and brought up there, surrounded by its buildings. From the ultimate splendours of the cathedral – with its rib vaulting above the choir stalls, ‘the first ever ventured upon in the West’ – to the lonesome outdoor privies over the road from the pitmen’s back-tobacks, there is as rich a variety as can be imagined.

Now it can all be can relished afresh in the new Pevsner guide, County Durham.

It’s the latest in the series created by Nikolaus Pevsner from 1951 and subsequently developed into a series of revised volumes.

This is the third edition of County Durham and what a lush and plush book it is. Half as large again as the previous edition, which dated back to 1983, it is uncommonly handsome and scholarly.

There is an abundance of colour plates, as well as exquisitely refined engravings, such as of the enormous Norman doorway to Le Puiset’s hall at Durham Castle, dwarfing a lurking, frock-coated gentleman carrying his top hat.

Three cheers, too, for the extreme delicacy of the neoclassical cow house at Burn Hall, designed by the young John Soane in 1783. We are given the rare and relatively unknown delight of being shown the first stained-glass windows in the United Kingdom, dating from AD 684 – both of them tiny; one circular, one arched – at the church of St Peter and St Paul, Monkwearmouth, founded in 681: ‘One of the most venerable churches in the kingdom’.

How moving it is to be shown the soulful beauty of the 1st Duke of Cleveland’s marble effigy of 1844, by Richard Westmacott, at St Mary’s, Staindrop. His saintly countenance may be somewhat misleading. His outraged contemporary Lord Belhaven said that he ‘always had his wine glasses made without a foot, so that they would not stand, and you were obliged to drink off the whole glass when you dined with him’!

84 The Oldie April 2021

In this 2021 edition, Martin Roberts describes the remarkable changes that have smothered County Durham. With its coal mines, it ‘suffered from the ugliness of industrial activity, be it bleak workers’ housing or scarred landscapes’.

Now the pits are no more, ‘…this legacy has been almost entirely eradicated. The steel works are silent, coal mines have closed, and even their fierce coal tips have been pacified into quiet fields.

County Durham has never looked better.’

I can vouch for this strangely magical transformation. Where once the heart sadly sank – although it was often stirred – at the sight of slag heaps, it now sings at the sight of Elysian Fields. How well I remember the miners’ baths with long, long queues of white-faced, blackenedby-coal-dust men, lining up at dawn for their morning wash. There were tin baths as well, still hanging outside every miner’s house to be filled with kettlewarmed water in front of the fire.

It was a life that was fast disappearing.

In 1970, museum curator Frank Atkinson set out to preserve the disappearing heritage of the north-east. He was in charge of the great French château/hôtel de ville-like Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, designed by Jules Pellechet in 1869. Rather than concentrating on its European objets d’art, he felt there was ‘an urgent and desperate need to save anything and everything that was local’ before it was too late.

So it was that the Beamish Museum was born, with Atkinson responsible for the most marvellous venture of gathering together a vast multitude of northeastern artefacts. From a 250-ton steam navvy to a sea coal-scavenging rake, from a cardboard milk-bottle top to a child’s sampler – what an intoxicatingly interesting jumble it was!

A particular star of the show was a child’s coffin carriage, dating from the late-19th century, fancifully carved with stained and cut glass. The night before it opened in 1970, I was up till five in the morning along with everyone else there, photographing the museum.

Shops, farms, pubs, pits and chapels were all reassembled – institutions that would have vanished had it not been for him. I remember seeing a child cowering with fright at the sight of a coal fire burning in Beamish’s rebuilt pit village.

With its toasty warmth, it was heating an adjoining oven and was part of what used to be every house’s fireside arrangement, in which cooking, especially bread, was done daily. The frightened child had never seen living flames indoors before.

The Elephant Tea Rooms in Sunderland, designed between 1873 and 1877, is, for me, one of the architectural stars of this north-eastern show. It has a wealth of Gothic arches of polychrome red and white brick, terracotta and faience. Most pleasingly described as built in the ‘Hindoo-Gothic style’, it was built for local tea merchant Ronald Grimshaw by architect Frank Caws.

What sprouting, exotic details: ogee-arched windows with fleur-de-lis finials; a projecting trefoil frieze; and crocketed capitals galore. Most wonderful of all, sheltered on Gothicroofed stone platforms, five white, faience elephants march forth, bearing crates of tea on their backs.

This delightful building has, I fear, been most brutally wrecked, by its ground floor having been demolished and replaced by a horror of a modern façade for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Now – hurray, hurray – help is on the way, with the tide of taste at last turning.

The Sunderland City Council have announced that the elephants ‘are getting ready to trumpet the beginning of an exciting new development’. Restoration is already underway.

By way of a violent change, we can admire classicism at its most refined, with the 1769 chapel at Gibside.

It was built for George Bowes, by the architect James Paine, inspired by a Palladio drawing. Terminating a long, straight sweep of a parkland vista, it is glorified by a great double portico of Ionic columns, with four urns on a

WILL ROBERTS/ANDREW FINDLAY/ALAMY

Above: Gibside Chapel, Rowlands Gill, Gateshead.

Far left: 14thcentury Raby Castle. Left: Sunderland’s Elephant Tea Rooms (1873-77)

balustrade and a dome raised on a high swagged drum. ‘The detail,’ writes Pevsner, ‘is of the finest; the tooling of the stone, for instance, most delicate.’

Inside, vast Corinthian columns carry the dome and groin vaults, surrounding a three-decker pulpit with an umbrella-like sounding-board raised on an Ionic column. An assembly of box pews, of finest cherrywood, is perfection, with curved seats for the servants and visitors and those closing off the corners for the owner and agent.

One of a quantity of ancient castles in

the county, Raby has a cavernous chamber of a kitchen. Apart from its windows’ being enlarged in the 18th century, it has remained untouched since 1370. The entrance hall too is remarkable, with its lofty Gothicry of large enough proportions to shelter a coach and horses delivering its passengers to the bottom of a vast sweeping staircase.

Where and how can I stop? Durham has architectural and scenic jewels at every turn. Yet because the county lies between Scotland, the Lake District and

Yorkshire, might-have-been visitors to Durham inevitably streak along the A1, past the county, on their way north or south.

What foolishness, when the tempting tips of Durham Cathedral – the most splendid example of Romanesque domestic architecture in Europe – can be spotted but yards away over the fields.

The Buildings of England: County Durham

by Martin Roberts, Nikolaus Pevsner and Elizabeth Williamson is published on 9th March (Yale University Press) The Oldie April 2021 85

Taking a Walk

Hidden charms of an ancient giant patrick barkham

GARY WING

‘Shall we do the Classic Giant? Or the Archaeological Giant? Or the Alpine Twist Giant?’

My friend Emily ran through our strolling options as we stood in the small car park on the edge of Cerne Abbas.

‘We’ve walked the hell out of this since lockdown.’

Emily is fortunate because, when locked down, she can take her daily exercise around one of the most interesting villages in England. Her walks are further enlivened by the figure cut into the chalk hill whose gigantic appendage matches the fruitiness of her language.

‘No one knows how old he is,’ said Emily of the Giant, as we ascended a steep path around the Giant’s back and into the woods – her Classic Giant round.

The Giant looks like an ancient pagan fertility symbol, but is he a 14th-century practical joke? When archaeologists excavated the trenches filled with chalk that make him, the snails at the bottom were no older than medieval.

Usually we can dig away the earth to identify clear episodes in our history, but the ground around Cerne Abbas has been so well worked that its layers mystify as well as enlighten. Emily is convinced the

Giant is far older than medieval and its trenches must’ve been dug out and refilled. Why would medieval monks draw an old god on the hill?

The path we walked up began on a broad swath cut into the hillside, an ancient champagne terrace created by monks to grow vines on the south-facing slopes. Cerne’s chalk terroir matches the French region, and those old monks knew how to live well.

Further up, the path became a gorgeous green hollow way known as the Priest’s Way – the route from Cerne Abbey to the Wessex Ridgeway, the A303 of its day.

A buzzard’s call broke the stillness as we emerged from straggly hawthorns onto the hilltop. It seemed crazy that these heights were ploughed fields (I pictured the soil cascading into the valley on a wet day) but, for an amateur archaeologist such as Emily, this was paradise.

She came here religiously if it rained just after the farmer had been ploughing.

The rain cleansed and buffed any ancient flint tools unearthed by the plough, revealing them to Emily’s beady eye.

For 10,000 years, people have lived on these high downs – particularly in winter, to escape the gloomy, flooded

valleys – and modern ploughs have been going so deep for only 50 seasons. So there are plenty of finds here still.

We found nothing underfoot on this dry day, but enjoyed the space, peace and fine view of rolling downs and the Minterne estate in the distance.

Back on the perpetually floral, grassy downs for the descent into Cerne, Emily pointed out the Roman camp on the opposite hillside.

Like the monks, the Romans knew how to live well, she said, and the camp’s position would have provided them with the best view of the ancient Giant.

During the war, he was covered up.

Today, aircraft from RNAS Yeovilton still perform admiring flypasts. It is cheering to imagine successive groups of people with vastly different beliefs all taking care of this chalk behemoth.

We finish our walk, following an avenue of limes to Cerne’s sacred well, which predates the ruins of the 1,000-year-old abbey. The only sound is a languid gog-gug-guggle of water emerging from the hillside onto ancient, iron-stained stones.

This steady trickle is why all these layers of history have accumulated here. Pagans drank the clear spring water to become pregnant. Later, Christians arrived and told their own stories about it.

When St Augustine came to Cerne, he saw humble shepherds and asked them if they would like to be refreshed with beer or water. ‘Water,’ the good men replied, and St Augustine rewarded their sobriety by thrusting his staff into the ground, from where sweet water has flowed ever since.

I drink it, cautiously, and drive on: wholly refreshed, as ever, by the simple act of taking a walk.

Small car park – grid ref SY664015; more parking for the Giant on the main road. Take footpath east and then north-east up eastern side of Giant Hill, first left at the top, and back down the western side of Giant Hill. Cerne Abbas has pubs and a fabulous village shop The Oldie April 2021 87

Genius crossword 398 el sereno Most clues are normal. 6 of them have no definition, but the wordplay gives the correct answer. The answers do have one thing about them. A word can be added to give an extended solution. Please write this word under the completed grid.

Across 1 Worker rejected in agricultural locations? (6) 4 Worked out the price on a ton and made an approach (8) 10 Celebrity attendant welcomes royal offspring (9) 11 Father’s personal expression (5) 12 Bloke must have one for a company like this (4) 13 Converting bitcoin? Rash without a condition such as this (10) 15 Group of three attempt to hold onto one record (7) 16 Prisoner with the German finding shade (6) 19 Agreement could see a son transported (6) 21 City company only employing Greeks at first (7) 23 Put drone out, to capture politician, needing no encouragement (10) 25 Doctor working a very long time? (4) 27 Facilities needed in case of believed royal ancestry (5) 28 Moving past those with expedition (4-5) 29 Date seen on monkey tree (8) 30 Run in hose as fireman’s requirement? (6)

Down 1 A town must support limit for role (8) 2 Hooligans see resistance cutting new air links (9) 3 Eagerly expecting golf in part of India on the rise (4) 5 In knockout competition, be inclined to sweep the board (5,2) 6 Unorthodox perhaps like Humpty Dumpty? (3,3,4) 7 Pair of trunks exposed swimmer (5) 8 Attractive girl eating a new 21d (6) 9 Pretty sharp about appearance (6) 14 No remedy - or bouncing cheque perhaps! (5,5) 17 Heartily deny having made money before paying tax (9) 18 Check on grass taken up for such a creature (8) 20 Pinch place, given promotion for such a ball skill (7) 21 Newsmen regularly underpinning revolutionary course (6) 22 Fish needing to dry up (6) 24 Introduction from expert on origins of electric magnet (5) 26 UN agency given a directive to stop (4)

The word is ___________ How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the current coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries.

Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 7th April 2021. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25.

Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 398 Across 1 Look at (3) 3 Flaw; defect (5) 6 Belonging to you and me (3) 8 Ticks over (5) 9 Compete; assert (7) 10 Inflammatory (10) 12 Unhappy (3) 15 Den (4) 17 Long (for) (4) 18 Scoundrel; dog (3) 22 Donor; philanthropist (10) 25 Huge wave (7) 26 Undo (5) 27 Rug (3) 28 Praise (5) 29 Inform (on) (3)

Genius 396 solution Down 1 Suitable (8) 2 Catholic; diverse (8) 3 Melding (6) 4 Ragamuffin (6) 5 Male singers (6) 6 Observe (rules) (4) 7 Impolite (4) 11 High-pitched bark (3) 13 Despot (8) 14 Strangest (8) 16 Massage (3) 19 Discount; refund (6) 20 Withstand (6) 21 Nonchalant (6) 23 Stalk (4) 24 Brusque (4)

Take 13,19,28,29 plus 12,22,24, add 5 and 9 and you’ll get a paella mista. (If we’re allowed abroad anytime soon!)

Winner: John Foad, Ulcombe, Kent Runners-up: Linda Gullidge, Saltdean, East Sussex; Don Tordoff, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Moron 396 solution Across: 1 Fizzy, 4 Shuns (Physicians), 8 Aid, 9 Cooperation, 10 Strides, 12 Expel, 13 Delude, 14 Simply, 17 Armed, 19 Reports, 21 Disseminate, 23 Cue, 24 Loose, 25 Times. Down: 1 Faces, 2 Zoo, 3 Yielded, 4 Sparse, 5 Unite, 6 Sandpiper, 7 Ideally, 11 Role model, 13 Dialect, 15 Imprint, 16 Breeze, 18 Disco, 20 Sheds, 22 Aim. The Oldie April 2021 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO For 30 years I was privileged to be the ‘bridge manager’ at Tessa Wheeler’s villa on the glorious slopes of Tangier. Sadly, Tessa died in 2017, and her husband Stuart died last year.

The only way Tessa (not a bridge player) could lure Stuart (not a sun-worshipper, to say the least) to Tangier for a week was for a group of bridge players to come along, too.

Here is Wheeler at the helm on one such occasion – he was a fine player, as you’ll see.

Dealer South North-South Vulnerable North

♠ A742 ♥94 West ♠9 ♥ Q J 10 2 ♦J963 ♣Q 10 8 2

♦AQ7

♣A 7 4 3 South ♠ Q J 10 6 5 3 ♥AK75 ♦52 ♣5

East ♠ K8 ♥863 ♦ K 10 8 4 ♣K J 9 6

The bidding South West North East 1♠ pass 2NT(1) Pass 4♣ (2) Pass 6♠ (3) end (1) Although the Tangier players are from the Portland Club, where no conventions are allowed, I introduced a few of the best – the Jacoby 2NT and Splinters being two. This Two Notrump bid shows a game-raise in support of spades.

(2) Splinter bid, showing a non-minimum with club shortage. Wheeler was never backward in coming forward – phooey to having opened with only ten points.

(3) Loving the splinter, North does well to blast here (very much Portland-style), rather than make an ace-showing cue bid of Four Diamonds (which East would double for the lead, killing the slam).

Declarer, the late six-foot-five spreadbetting maestro, won West’s queen of hearts lead, then crossed to the ace of clubs and ruffed a club, a necessary precursor to his cunning plan. At trick four, he led the queen of spades, West playing a smooth nine.

Wheeler had not reached the second day of the World Series of Poker at Last Vegas on several occasions for nothing. Reading West to have a singleton (‘If they don’t cover, they don’t have it’), declarer rose with dummy’s ace (East following low), then ruffed a third club. He cashed his remaining top heart, ruffed a third heart, ruffed a fourth club and ruffed a fourth heart.

East was unwilling to overruff as he would then have to lead a diamond. However, this was merely postponing his fate. For, at trick ten, declarer exited with a spade from dummy. East won the king, but his forced diamond return could be run to dummy’s queen and the slam made.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 264, you were invited to write a Spring Song to a (specified) tune. Although I came out of my study whistling, I had found quite a few of your songs impossible to fit to the tune named. I also wondered why Sing a Song of Sixpence should be a favourite melody.

But David Shields got out his mouth organ to sketch the tune of The Times They Are a-Changin’ for his lines: ‘Come gather round, people, leave your cosy room,/ Get out in the fresh air and log out of Zoom.’ Marianne Barton defiantly set to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic the words ‘Glory, glory, this is madness!/ I must worry just a tad less.’

Maggie McLean, to The Ash Grove, wrote, ‘We’ll walk in Kew Gardens and look at the flowers,/ Although we can’t linger to see how they smell, / As that has been banned under government powers.’

Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to the upbeat I White.

Primavera is time to roam.

If we are locked down fast at home Spring can’t inspire us, but that’s the virus.

We can’t blame Brexit.

Basil Ransome-Davies

(In Dulci Jubilo) I heard the news today-ay-ay That spring is on the way-ay-ay: Blackbird, in the garden, Was singing more than usual – In fact, you’d think he starred in The latest roof-top musical.

But all he meant to say Was ‘Spring is on the way.’

Let’s hope there’s no delay-ay-ay When spring is on the way-ay-ay.

It seems a confirmation There’s such a thing as happiness, And we’ve an inclination To believe in promises That we’ll be making hay – ’Cause spring is on the way!

I White

(Danny Boy) O damn it all, the pipes, the pipes are freezing, Weeks end to end lockdown hems us inside; My mojo’s gone, my nose is far from pleasing, ‘Tishoo, tishoo’ is heard both far and wide.

But every evening’s sun is later burning And every day our hopes of freedom grow And my heart soars to feel that spring’s returning – O annual joy, O annual joy, I love you so.

O sanitised is every item wholly, The wipes still sprawl by table, chair and loo; I’m tired of tuna, beans and ravioli And meeting friends for meals is still taboo.

But daffodils will spear our land’s green spaces, Stand side by side in one great gathering And they will burst the masks that hide their faces And, breathing freely, in their glory greet the spring.

Jane Bower

(Makin’ Whoopee) Another spring, another spell Of every day a living hell, Another season, another reason For blaming Brexit.

Who can be happy as a lark When half of Kent’s a lorry park?

The flowers are blooming, but woe is looming All thanks to Brexit.

Spring’s balmy airs should feel delicious, Although the smell of rotting fishes Could kill the pleasure we used to treasure.

It must be Brexit.

(Abide with Me) As Bard commands, blow winter wind again And leave the fickle spring to younger men; With snow and sleet cocoon me in my lair, For I am old with nothing left to spare.

Yet once, when I was young, I loved the spring: I jumped for joy to hear the skylark sing, Bent low to smell a flower, touch a leaf And had no use for misery nor grief.

For then my fancy turned to love divine: I dreamt that I was yours and you were mine, I learnt to flirt and frolic, laugh and sigh, I wondered at a rainbow in the sky.

Go now, blithe spring, your vernal gods confound, Let lonely winter last the whole year round; But stay – I hear a cuckoo’s far refrain, And yes – a primrose glistens in the lane.

Peter Davies

COMPETITION No 266 Some now say that Stonehenge was first set up in Wales.

Please write a poem, on any theme, with the title Stones. Maximum 16 lines. We still cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 266’, by 8th April.

The Oldie April 2021 91

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OLD POSTCARDS WANTED by private collector. Contact Grenville Collins. Tel: 020 7834 1852. Email: grenville@collins.safeserve.com Homeshare

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside WhatsAppropriate

Q

We have a retired neighbour – he used to run a chain of garages – who is constantly on at us all. He’s set up a WhatsApp group, and endlessly tries to get us to sign petitions to change the parking rules, or to stop a bike hub being built on our road; tries to organise a weekly clap for carers etc. If we don’t do these things – like clapping, for instance – he stops us in the street and asks why. He also gets enraged if anyone parks outside his house. The truth is that he’s a nice guy at heart, and we don’t want to drop out of the WhatsApp group because it’s often very useful. But what can we do?

A F, by email I’ve sometimes got out of this sort of thing by invoking the memory of my late father, who advised me never to join any organisation or sign any petitions. You could always pretend to this man that you promised your beloved father never to do any of these things and you can’t break a sacred oath. The fact that this is a complete lie doesn’t matter. It gets you off the hook without hurting this neighbour’s feelings.

And keeps you on the WhatsApp group, with its invaluable trails of lost cats and photographs of sunsets etc.

A

Doctor’s bad diagnosis

Q

I’ve never liked my GP – she arrived after I’d been with a wonderful woman for years, who became almost a friend. This new one is snappy, always questions repeat prescriptions and seems to disapprove of me. It’s particularly dispiriting because I never get hold of her except when I’m feeling ill, and her attitude

always makes things worse. There is only one other doctor in the practice and he’s pretty useless. None of my friends gets on with her either, by the way; so it’s not just me. What can I do?

Name and address supplied Remember you can change your doctor whenever you like. You don’t have to confront the current one, either. Just switch. But it’s obviously best to meet the new one first to make sure you don’t get someone worse. But remember that most GPs earn between £60,000 and £90,00 a year, which is made up of your money. GPs, like teachers, are your servants. Don’t let her bully you. If this GP practice is the only one nearby, then either stand up to her and tell her, very firmly, that you don’t like her attitude – that’s the language that bullies understand and respect. Or cultivate the other broken reed of a doctor and, by using a lot of charm, mould him into being compliant.

You may find he’s not useless but, rather, just unconfident and shy.

A

She knows she’s fat

Q

I have a friend who is grossly fat. I can’t put it another way.

She has been told by her doctor that she is obese and is finding it extremely hard to get around. I have tried hinting that she should lose weight, but she pays no attention or just says she’s starting a diet ‘next week’. When she comes for a meal, I try to give her light but healthy food, but she always insists on toast or rolls to bulk it out.

I am starting to feel I ought to tell her outright how overweight she is – she’s really at risk of dying early – but I fear hurting her.

Sally B, by email

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98 The Oldie April 2021

A

There is no point in telling her.

She is addicted to food. She knows how fat she is – her doctor has told her very directly – and is probably worried herself, but there is nothing she really wants to do about it.

She would rather risk an early death than give up eating. This is her choice.

Telling her might make you feel better, but it would have no effect and just irritate her. Keep quiet. It’s the kindest thing to do.

Dangerous love letters

Q

I’m 65, and I’m wondering when I should start giving my money away to my children to avoid death duties. Do you think I’m too young, also, to start clearing out the house to make it easier for them to deal with when I’m gone? And throwing out old embarrassing love letters I don’t want them to read? My husband says it would be bad luck and I shouldn’t be thinking like this as I’m too young.

Anna Graham, Cornwall It’s honestly up to you, Anna.

You’re certainly not too young to be thinking about this … but if sorting things out would upset your husband, is it really worth it?

As for the love letters, of course throw them out. If you’d prefer to hang on to them but fear your children might be embarrassed, why not give them to a good but much younger friend for safekeeping and ask them to get rid of them when you die?

A

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

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GUIDE TO GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY Sponsored by

My ballroom-dancing diet Diana Melly I’m not grumpy – do believe me! Richard Wilson The best things in life aren’t free Peter York Peter Finch, a mentor and a mate Trader Faulkner April 2021 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Guide to Growing Old Disgracefully April 2021 Sponsored by

10 Cover: Willie Rushton Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editor: Donna Freed Design: Stuart Crowhurst Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Melissa Arancio, Kami Jogee For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 For editorial enquiries, call 0207 436 8801 or email editorial@theoldie.co.uk

Among the contributors Diana Melly is the widow of the musician George Melly. Her current obsessions are opera and cooking; past ones, dancing and dogs. Dancing is the only exercise she enjoys, but she’s now relearning to ride a bike, as well as studying Philosophy at A-level . She’s a patron of Dignity in Dying and an ambassador for Dementia UK. She is the author of Strictly Ballroom: Tales from the Dance Floor.

Rachel Kelly is a former Times journalist. She now writes about mental health, and ways that have helped her stay calm and well after several bouts of depression. She is an official ambassador for Rethink Mental Illness, HeadTalks, SANE and The Counselling Foundation. Her latest book, Singing in the Rain, was published by Short Books.

Peter York is an author/journalist/ broadcaster and a management consultant. He co-authored the best-selling The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook with Ann Barr. He is the author of 12 books. His latest, The War Against the BBC, is co-authored with Prof Patrick Barwise and published by Penguin. He is President of the Media Society.

9

18

04 Pleasant revolt Rebellious pensioners Liz Hodgkinson 06 Mustn’t grumble I’m rarely grumpy Richard Wilson

14

09 Dancing with Callas My ballroom diet Diana Melly

18 Online exhibitions Private view from my sofa Laura Freeman

10 Dream machines Automotive fantasies Alan Judd

20 In memoriam The best memorials James Hughes-Onslow

12 Retirement dating Love never dies Donna Freed

23 Midas touch Making your money count Garry White

13 What I’ve missed Lockdown desires Peter York

24 Sweet memories I thrived on rationing Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall

14 Take the plunge The perfect bath Elisabeth Luard

25 Upmarket takeaways Dining at home Fran Warde

16 Classics club My class of Latin lovers Isabel Raphael

27 Gadgets and diversions Susan Schwarz

17 Heroes at home The perfect carer Rachel Kelly

30 Old friends Peter Finch – mentor, mate and fine actor Trader Faulkner

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 3

Pensioners with attitude

Rebels without a pause

Liz Hodgkinson, 77, says oldies were born to be wild

O

ld people are usually thought of as crusty fuddy-duddies.

They’re supposedly behind the times, old-fashioned and out of it, muttering about the sad decline of standards and the lax morals of modern youth. As Shakespeare wrote, ‘Crabbed aged and youth cannot live together. Youth is full of pleasance; age is full of care.’

Now we’re seeing a reversal of the stereotype. These days, oldies are the carefree ones and the youngsters are stick-in-the-muds. Today’s youth are the most conformist of all time; they hardly seem to have a rebellious bone in their bodies.

We oldies couldn’t wait to leave home and establish our independence. We thought even the grottiest flats were heavenly.

Our young counterparts are happy to stay in their cozy parental nests well into their twenties or thirties, waited on hand and foot.

‘If only mum could see me now!’ was our proud boast. We imagined her horror at the dirt and clutter we unashamedly accumulated around us, including unsuitable boyfriends and girlfriends who stayed the night.

Today’s youngsters don’t smoke, drink or even have boyfriends or girlfriends. When my late teenage and early twenties grandchildren last visited, they were drinking Coke while I, aged 77, got tipsy on wine.

They’re the new puritans.

And they unquestioningly obey the law, sticking rigidly to whatever virus restrictions might be imposed on them. They tell us oldies to do the same while our instinct remains to rebel. We question everything and demand answers before we agree to kowtow. Today’s youngsters are far more timid than we were, and this has got worse in COVID-induced lockdowns. But, for us, pushing boundaries is a habit.

It’s a habit established over decades, and not about to change.

When we were young, we studied all political creeds and established viewpoints, and fought for the right to have our voices heard rather than

to be silenced. It was only through intense campaigning that we got the voting age lowered from 21 to 18.

And we are still in the habit of asking awkward questions.

Why is this? It’s because we were young people in the Sixties, when youth culture was a brand-new phenomenon. We constituted a separate section of society and asserted our individuality by cocking a snook at our elders. Mind, we had a lot to rebel against.

For the first time, we had our own subversive music, scandalous style of clothes and our own vernacular.

The more shocking the older generation found our behaviour and dress, the more we revelled in being outrageous. We took particular delight in overturning everything

‘I always knew you would grow old gracefully, Eric. I was rather hoping there would be one or two disgraceful highlights’

our timid parents stood for, from three-piece suites to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and the prohibition on sex before marriage.

We were the first generation to have actual birth control, in the form of the Pill, separating sex from conception. We were the first to live together without being married. We campaigned for legal abortion, equal pay, equal opportunities, gay rights and decriminalised cannabis.

We were the first cohort, in large numbers at least, to smoke pot, defy the laws of the land and risk being fined or imprisoned for doing so.

Our attitude was: why should these boring oldies tell us what to do? We went on Ban the Bomb

4 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

marches and, once again, risked imprisonment for sitting down in Trafalgar Square.

Our parents were horrified that we were taking the law into our own hands rather than meekly obeying.

But they could not stop us.

Yes, some of the young go on school strikes to protest against climate change – encouraged by 18-year-old activist Greta Thunberg – but from a safe distance. Society smiles on these protests and, again, there is no chance of them getting arrested, let alone imprisoned.

Even when we left youth behind, we carried on fighting injustice. It was now in our blood and we have grown old with that same attitude of defiance. That spirit of pushing boundaries has never left us and the young hippies of yesterday have become old hippies today.

Many of the battles we fought have been won and present-day youths have little to fight against.

Unlike us, they have been cosseted and helicoptered from their earliest days and see no need to defy their parents or the law of the land. They have been too indulged all their lives to have inculcated a revolutionary attitude. They even like and listen to the same music as their elders.

They are chauffeured all over the place and their bedrooms are havens of luxury and opulence, containing all the latest technology, duvets and sofas. Our bedrooms were cold, miserable places that we were sent to as a punishment and, therefore, wanted to flee.

No wonder they have little desire to bestir themselves, to rise up and rail against society. You cannot be an angry protester from a comfortable billet. You have to desire a better world for yourself and be prepared to strike out for it. We struck out and we are still doing so.

And, in much the same way that we made the older generation shudder, today’s teenagers are shuddering at our attitudes.

Crabbed age? It’s more like crabbed youth these days.

Me? Grumpy?

Unlike Victor Meldrew, Richard Wilson is upbeat about everything – except bicyclists, scooters and Donald Trump What do I get grumpiest about?

I walk in Regent’s Park a lot and I hate people cycling in it. They are not supposed to. A couple of years ago, I pointed out to a young fellow on a bicycle that it was against the rules and he shouted, “Shut up, you old c**t.”

It was threatening and I was frightened. I said to myself, ‘I had better not do that any more.’

These days, if they’re cycling towards me, I just stop and let them go past me.

Electric scooters are just as bad. Oh, I hate them. They’re dangerous. I haven’t had any encounters with them but I don’t say anything to people on them either. One bumped into an actress friend I was walking with not so long ago, and she was the one who did the complaining.

ALAMY

I never wanted to be grumpy.

Towards the end of the series of One Foot in the Grave, David Renwick, the writer, and I went out for dinner one night. The series had been running for ten years. He said he was thinking of killing Victor off and wondered how I felt about that.

I said, ‘Yeah, kill him!’

I was fed up of thinking of new ways of being grumpy and was glad to see the back of him.

I’m only grumpy when the weather is extremely cold, as it has been lately, and it gets into my bones. I’m very pleased it has recently turned milder at last.

I suppose I am also very grumpy with people who are right wing. I’ve been a member of the Labour Party for many years and prefer it to the present Government.

There’s not much joy in being grumpy. A lot of people who are, are really just not behaving brilliantly.

One of the reasons I try never to be grumpy is because people might say, ‘There he goes!’ It’s too predictable.

‘Olo offictiusam sant fugitia quam quidit omnim volutet voloribum hillab id’ Keep on smiling: Wilson as Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave (1990-2000)

I’m actually quite upbeat in many ways. I do get quite tired about not being able to walk as I used to and having to use a stick, but that is frustration more than grumpiness.

The same goes for my memory, which has got worse since I had a

6 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

heart attack four years ago in Hampstead, where I live.

I fell off a small balcony while I was waiting to meet a writer for coffee outside Maison Blanc. As I did so, I hit my head, which caused a bleed in the brain. That’s why my

memory has been destroyed a bit. As a result, I am more forgetful – but not more grumpy.

‘I don’t believe it!’ was never meant to be a catchphrase.

But Victor said it so much in One Foot in the Grave that it became one. After it did, David and I deliberately made sure he used it less often.

I never say the catchphrase myself because it would sound as though I was showing off. I’ve said it by mistake from time to time and apologised. I haven’t come up with an alternative.

People still say it to me, a bit less now than they used to when the series was on. But the final episode was over twenty years ago.

Occasionally people shout it at me these days – taxi-drivers mainly. I’ve got so used to it. If I hear it, I just wave and walk on.

I realise and accept that people associate me with Victor. I’d done quite a lot of comedy before, and acting and directing, but he was my first TV part and lead part.

I like sitcom. The filming’s quite quick – so I could direct a new play at the same time. It bestowed a new freedom on me and was very handy.

I quite enjoyed it in a way.

But I am very different from Victor, even though David wrote it with me in mind.

For a start, I wasn’t a pensioner.

I was 55 when the series started.

Victor was older and had a miserable existence whilst I was a bit more active in a sense - not least professionally. And I was very interested in theatre. I don’t think Victor was!

David, who I still speak to from time to time, relied on his own father for the character, but also on himself, to some extent, even though he knew all along he wanted me to play him.

There was one episode in which Victor was all by himself throughout.

He was in the flat and it was raining. He couldn’t go out into the garden and was just blithering all the time. ‘I wish I hadn’t picked that wallpaper; I never liked it’ – that sort of thing.

I performed the episode as a show at the Crucible in Sheffield in 2015 and it was due to go to the Edinburgh Festival.

It had sold out. But then I had the

With Christopher Strauli, Peter Bowles, James Bolam. Only When I Laugh (1979)

heart attack and couldn’t do it. I sometimes think I might still do it again some day after the pandemic, for all the people who bought tickets and were disappointed.

It was very good to do as theatre – easy. A lot of old actors worry about remembering lines. Although my memory is getting worse, I am lucky. I forget the names of actors and films I’ve seen but lines are not a problem.

In that episode, there was an awful lot of moaning!

I don’t moan much, although I

The series writer was thinking of killing Victor off. I said, ‘Yeah, kill him!’ have to say I have not enjoyed lockdown. I’m quite sociable by nature. I like going to restaurants and to the theatre – even though I prefer cinema now because theatres are hopeless on the whole: so many stairs!

I go for a walk with one friend or another in the park a lot but it’s not quite the same. I’ve been cheating slightly and do allow the odd person into the flat for coffee or supper.

At the beginning of lockdown, I do remember thinking I wouldn’t be able to cope with it but then you do manage. Somehow.

I have been doing a bit of work. I

went to Romania to do some TV with David Tennant in Round the World in Eighty Days. I was his butler; just an old butler. And I have done a radio show, Believe It. It helps that I’ve had my vaccine. I was in the first batch. There was no doubt that I wanted it quite badly. It’s very sad for the people who worry about it and don’t take it, because I think they’re wrong.

It’s amazing it’s been rolled out so quickly. They couldn’t have dealt with it better, even if the Government has dealt with everything else badly!

Of course, the main thing to have been grumpy about in recent years was Donald Trump. Well, I think he is a monster who did such abominable things.

It was extraordinary that Americans let him in the first time.

He just didn’t know anything about running a government.

I was of course absolutely thrilled when he lost the election. They should have successfully impeached him second time round. I would have convicted him with pleasure. If he had got in again, I think I might have committed suicide.

I am 84 and can safely say that I have not become grumpier as I have got older.

I’m a bit more mellow in my old age. My memory may not be so good but of that - being mellower - I am certain.

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 7

Ballroom Dancing

Quick steps to happiness Dancing saved my figure – and my brain. By Diana Melly

ALAMY

I

f I got dementia, and coped the way George Melly, my late husband, did, I wouldn’t mind.

On stage, with his memory going, he boasted about having something beginning with D. He remained good-tempered and fortunately had forgotten a great many of those tiresome jokes. But it might not be like that for me. I don’t have his sanguine nature and I wouldn’t have me to look after me.

While he was alive, I read everything I could about dementia and I wanted to do anything I could to avoid getting what can be a cruel disease. After George died, I became a patron of Dementia UK. Their advice was to ‘forget crosswords and take up ballroom dancing.’

I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that I could dance already, as I had studied ballet up to Grade 5. I have a ragged photo of myself on points. Then I did old-time dancing in the church hall every Saturday when I was 12.

I was with George for 46 years, long enough to realise he didn’t think much of dancing. He preferred his audience, including me, just to watch admiringly.

Exceptions were made before the mini-skirt made tights obligatory.

Girls then could spin and twirl, showing bare thigh and stockings.

By 2010, Strictly had become highly popular and it was easy to find a ballroom class. One near me in Baker Street advertised itself as providing professional partners.

At first, I had a fairly miserable time, learning how difficult it was to dance. But it was obvious why it was so beneficial to the brain: all those neural pathways, built on balance and rhythm.

One lucky evening, when a young Italian kept saying, ‘Stop leaning on me,’ Raymond turned up. He was English and older than the other, mostly European partners.

At 65 and a smoker, he wouldn’t do a fast quickstep – or so some of the young women thought.

Maria Callas, my song and dance idol

By the time they realised what a wonderful dancer he was – he’d been a world champion at 20 – I’d monopolised him.

After a few months, we both left the class. Ray found a small practice studio and he became my teacher.

We went to every London town hall that held tea dances and where the wonderful Mr Wonderful organised the music. £5 for tea and biscuits; non-stop music, 1 till 4pm.

We went on a dance holiday to Majorca. I bought twirling skirts and sequin tops that sparkled under the lights at the Blackpool Tower Ballroom. We became best friends.

I would never be a good dancer, but I enjoyed it. Once Ray said, ‘That was nearly good.’ I went down to size 10 and didn’t care when a friend told me I looked ‘gaunt’.

There was a small hiccup when Ray acquired a girlfriend who unfortunately but understandably also wanted to dance with him.

One night, we all watched the dance championships at the Albert Hall. I got chatting to a handsome Greek – Dino, a dance teacher.

No point in being shy. I asked him, ‘Would you like to come with us to a dinner dance in Cambridge?’

I went down to size 10 and didn’t care when a friend told me I looked ‘gaunt’

Raymond and Dino weren’t exactly jealous of each other. But Dino has never been a 20-year-old champion, and Ray will never be a handsome 40-year-old.

And then came the pandemic.

Although on March 5th there had only been one British death, my clever, concerned and far-sighted lodger advised me to isolate.

I thought it was just for a week but, 11 months later, I’m still not dancing. I was determined not to loose any skills I’d acquired. So Ray sent me some ballroom classics and Dino gave me an Argentine DVD. The Argentine is a craze that began in the Nineties. It means higher heels and a tight, short skirt, slit up as far as you dare.

I waltzed mournfully by myself and tried to remember the fan, a rumba step. None of this was much fun. Then, in April, with all the windows open to the sun, the sound of my lodger’s opera music, even four floors up, filled the house and garden. I started dancing to Callas and waving my arms like Simon Rattle having a fit.

Of course it’s not the same. I miss Dino saying, ‘Wonderful, wonderful, darling.’ I even miss Raymond saying, ‘But you learnt the slip pivot last week.’

I miss getting all dressed-up. You can go in jeans, but where else can you turn up looking like a Christmas fairy? I miss dancing at the Albert Hall with the Chelsea Pensioners, who can jive like they did after the war. I miss the dancers who became friends from the crowded monthly dance at the Royal Festival Hall.

I miss watching and admiring the very old woman – said to be 96 – who danced like Isadora Duncan and wore flowers in her hair.

But, for me, there have been compensations. I’ve discovered opera. Callas isn’t just for dancing to. I’ve gone back to size 14. I’m no longer gaunt.

Colette was right. After 40, it’s your face or your figure.

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 9

Dream machines Petrolhead Alan Judd reveals our readers’ driving fantasies: from a Morris Minor to Lawrence of Arabia’s motorbike

ALAMY

W

hat would be your last automotive wish? What would you most like to drive before finally switching off in that great parking lot in the sky?

It’s not an easy question. Most last wishes are for easy fantasies such as world peace, universal happiness, global cooling or a ban on the BBC’s ghoulish relish for interviewing people until they weep.

But this one is realisable.

Sufferers from AOS (Auto Obsession Syndrome) usually go for exotica, the fastest or most luxurious set of wheels they’ve never owned. A McLaren F1, for instance, that ground-breaking, beautiful great insect of a car. Or perhaps the very first E-Type, a Ferrari 430, a 1920s Straight Eight Bentley a D or C Type Le Mans-winning Jaguar, a 1930s Duesenberg or Buick, or the Mercedes 300 SLR in which Stirling Moss won the 1955 Mille Miglia at an average speed (on public roads) of 99 mph.

I’ve been an AOS sufferer from boyhood, albeit an atypical, sadly un-Moss-like one. Offered the choice of two pedal cars in a shop window – a snazzy red racer or the big bumbly blue Austin lookalike – I chose the latter. I appreciate the power and elegance of much automotive exotica but mostly I admire without desire. In equine terms, I’m as happy plodding along on an old Dobbin with feathers around its fetlocks as galloping on a svelte thoroughbred.

However, a straw poll of Oldie readers suggests you don’t have to be an enthusiast to have eschatological longings of the automotive kind.

The first I asked has up-to-theminute tastes and

drives a fully electric vehicle. But her desire is for the car she and her late husband owned in the 1950s, a 1937 bright yellow convertible Austin 7 Special called Bridget.

He tinkered with the mechanicals at weekends while she made new seat covers. It may still exist. If she ever remembers the number plate, we can find out. They were the first British car to be bought in numbers by the not-very-rich and were reliable enough (by the standards of the time) to be manufactured under licence in France, America, Japan and Germany. The first BMWs produced were Austin 7s made under licence and called the Dixi.

Another subscriber, a less nostalgic city-dweller with less fond memories of her husband, opted for two wheels, not four. She wants one of the new electric bicycles which range from lightweight mountain bikes to solid cargo-carriers. She chose a mid-range one called a hybrid: a comfortable, upright bike with straight handlebars rather than those back-breaking racing ones.

They cost around £1,900-£3,000.

I tried one in the Shropshire hills: not ideal pedalling country even with the aid of a small electric motor. But its nine gears made for pleasurable cruising. And you sit high enough to enjoy the views, a relaxing and almost effortless ride far removed from the head-down,

10 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

aggressive Lycra swarms infesting our town roads.

Another two-wheel enthusiast, also a city-dweller, preferred an e-scooter, one of those electric jobs that are spreading like an underground sub-culture through city streets.

She finds such simple, easy motion appealing and hopes it might offer relief to arthritic joints - so long as she’s not carrying so much shopping that she overbalance and does her ankle in. Costs range from around £300 to £1,600 but she worries they might be popular with thieves and is unclear about their legal status in the UK. She’s not along in that. The law itself is clear. It is illegal to use e-scooters on roads or pavements but the application of the law is variable and their status ambiguous.

You’re allowed to buy and own them. Throughout the country, there are a number of trial schemes, with dedicated scooter lanes. The Government pledges to make ‘a legislative framework a priority’.

Meanwhile, they whizz about on roads and pavements alike. Given the deeply entrenched passion for regulation in this country, it’s likely that there will be restrictions.

Another regular reader, a retiree from the motor industry, says his choice is the humble Morris Minor.

Now, if there are cars in heaven – and could it be truly heavenly without?

– the Moggie must surely be among them. Once the modest conveyance of rural deans and district nurses, it has an endearing unassertiveness and pleasing simplicity that makes it impossible to ignore.

What’s more, they can be rebuilt to better-than-new. As

Top: Steve McQueen, wife Neilie and a Jaguar XK-SS, the road-going D-Type (1967). Right: TE Lawrence on his Brough Superior. Opposite: Clark Gable bought his Duesenberg Convertible Coupe in 1935

a four-wheeled friend for your last years, it should be reliable and as easy on the hand as on the eye. A good choice.

On the more expansive end, one reader wants two cars: a top-of-therange Range Rover and a Mini.

An experienced horsewoman, she used to tow with Range Rovers and loved them for their stability, comfort, capability and sense of safety. You can’t blame her; driving any Range Rover makes you feel King or Queen of the Road, insulated and regal. It’s something about the height, bonnet view and all-round vision.

The Mini would be for shopping, either gleaming black or multicoloured like the one Wendy Craig drives in Butterflies.

My pensioner brother’s choice is a Belaz 75710, the world’s biggest dumper truck. Made in Belorussia for the Russian mining industry, it weighs 360 tonnes, carries 496 tonnes and is powered by two diesels offering 2,300hp each – top speed 40mph.

He still risks his life on motorbikes, over half a century after starting out on them. If the Gods forbade him his dumper toy, he’d have a Brough Superior, the sort of bike that did for Lawrence of Arabia.

His wife, however, would opt for any of the F1 McLarens driven by Ayrton Senna. Or maybe including Ayrton Senna.

My choice, after lengthy internal pondering, would be a Mack truck, the ultimate Dobbin. Those are the mountainous beasts you see on continent-crossing, American and Australian roads, with gleaming radiators about ten feet high and drive-in-the-sky cabs.

Not just a ride or a drive - I want to own one. Preferably the recovery truck version so I could be called out to rescue broken-down lorries. I watched one pick up a cementmixer recently, with gentle precision, before towing it away without any apparent effort.

Apart from the comfort and sense of impregnability up there in those cabs, you’d always know that drivers in distress will be pleased to see you.

But our automotive fantasies

‘My pensioner brother’s choice is the world’s biggest dumper truck’

needn’t be confined to last wishes.

They can accompany us to the grave.

There is nothing to say you have to use your funeral director’s hearse.

You can use your own car, van, lorry or whatever. And, if you fear you might not fit elegantly into your Morris Minor or Mini – and would have trouble balancing on your bike or scooter – there are various companies that will provide you with a fitting conveyance.

You can be horse-drawn, conveyed in a classic VW campervan, in an enclosed motorbike sidecar, on a 1950s Leyland Beaver lorry, in a pink Daimler or in a Land Rover Defender accompanied by a matching 8-seater for the – by then, you hope - cheerful mourners.

Go to funeralinspirations.co.uk/ funeral-ideas/funeral-transport for heavenly ideas.

But no need to book just yet.

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 11

Retirement romance

Love in an oldie climate

Donna Freed ’s widowed father was catnip to single ladies

W

hen my parents moved to Carol Woods, a North Carolina retirement community, it had a galvanising effect on the grumpy curmudgeons.

‘Your folks have breathed new life into this place!’ I was told at every turn on my first visit. Were these the same people I found cowering under a bare bulb, surrounded by boxes, the night before their move?

My mother was particularly fascinated by the dating scene. Most new arrivals were couples like my parents. By far the majority of single arrivals were women.

My father was deeply suspicious about this imbalance: ‘What did they do with all the husbands?’ he asked when each widow moved in.

Where others saw the statistical probability of women outliving their husbands, my father suspected conspiracy, or worse.

The arrival of a single man on campus was a big deal. ‘Those poor bachelors,’ my mother said. ‘They get eyed up like meat.’

Charming and sporty, Bob, one such bachelor, was snapped up. But he was soon back on the market, due to the sudden death of his girlfriend.

Up until an old football injury flared up, he had been a regular at the Saturday morning ping pong club. I was dragged along if I happened to visit on a Saturday.

It was supposed to be for fun but, like all the sports at Carol Woods, it had the ruthless quality of gladiatorial combat.

‘We’re a pretty determined lot,’ was my mother’s take on the general population or what she like to call ‘the inmates’.

On the phone, my mother was breathless from repressed gossip.

‘So, Bob from ping pong got a motorised scooter and the other night he had a date,’ she paused, as if this was noteworthy in itself. ‘They had a couple of drinks in his apartment and he wanted to give her a ride home. So he put her on his lap. Well, they crashed into a wall!

He’s all banged up!’

When my mother suffered a

Springtime love: Donna’s parents, Ruth and Seymour Freed, c.1956

near-fatal aneurysm, the campus was updated daily on her progress through typed reports my father tacked to a board by the mailboxes.

It allowed him to focus on her care without repeating the same story to all the interested parties. It also advertised that he was a capable advocate and doting carer.

This was also abundantly clear during her final illness and ultimate death from Hodgkin lymphoma, aged 76, in 2009.

A week after her death, I accompanied my father on a road trip my parents had taken their first year at Carol Woods. It retraced their path through the Outer Banks of North Carolina to see the migrating birds heading south and returning from the Arctic Circle.

Aged 80 and having lost his wife of 53 years, my father pondered what he wanted for the rest of his life. ‘I think I have 5 more good years,’ he said.

He wanted to travel, visit

‘Maybe I’ll get a girlfriend. I think it’s what your mother would have wanted’

12 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

museums, dine at nice restaurants and attend classical music concerts.

He also wanted companionship.

‘Life is short,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get married again but maybe I’ll get a girlfriend. I think it’s what your mother would have wanted.’

I wasn’t so sure she’d have agreed but life is indeed fleeting.

‘Do you have anyone in particular in mind?’ I asked.

‘Not really – all the women I know were your mother’s friends,’ he said. ‘Maybe Ursula, but I think she’s too old.’

Ursula was a spry 93. Next he proposed my mother’s closest friend, Nina, a lovely North Carolina native with a soft, lilting drawl. She was rejected on the grounds that she spoke so low my father couldn’t hear her. Finally, he settled on the most unlikely candidate of all, Irmgard, an Auschwitz survivor who had never married.

She only tolerated my father for my mother’s sake and because my mother had appointed him as Irmgard’s chauffeur. He ferried her to and from local errands and doctor’s appointments, for which she wasn’t exactly grateful.

She also didn’t trust his driving.

With hands braced either side of her, she’d say, ‘Should we pull over?’ to wait out anything worse than a light drizzle.

‘But you don’t even like each other,’ I sputtered.

‘I like a challenge,’ he said, with a shrug and a spread of his hands.

Irmgard was mercifully spared my father’s advances. And my father was spared Irmgard’s almost certain rejection, thanks to Sandy, who was first out of the blocks to volunteer for the role of girlfriend.

She waited three weeks after my mother’s passing before writing a forthright letter to my father. She had to act fast because it turned out that he was a very eligible bachelor.

Not only had he proved himself a devoted partner, but he was ambulatory, had all his marbles and – and this was the clincher – he was a night-driver.

Not so simple pleasures

Best things in life aren’t free In lockdown, Peter York missed drinks and master craftsmen

T

he last time I took some cash from an ATM,I had a moment of near panic when the machine asked for my password.

This lovely familiar figure – key to a good night out, a round of drinks and the taxi home – and part of the bi-weekly ritual suddenly seemed elusive. I hadn’t used it for months.

With nothing to spend cash on, my twice-weekly visits had stretched to one every five months.

My horizons had shrunk to the weekly food delivery – scanning the street from my balcony every five minutes for the familiar van – and the Amazon haul.

But, after a year of this, you want something more. According to a recent report, Brits will have £250 billion saved by this June.

In a weird, two-speed economy, with loads of unemployed – and more to come – in the retail, restaurant, travel and leisure sectors; there’s another group, better off precisely because they haven’t been shopping, eating out, drinking out and travelling.

You can see the divide, and its age. There’s a mass of high-spending baby-boomers who went out and away all the time. Mortgages paid up, pensions-funded up, they were seduced by ads, showing insanely fit versions of themselves in the Maldives or the rainforests.

Baby boomers have been huge luxury-spenders over the last thirty years because they’re ‘worth it’.

They’ve taken that crucial bourgeois-individualism-made-easy phrase to heart. But, at the same time, they remember 50s and 60s childhoods, where, by today’s standards, no-one had anything.

However North Oxford uppermiddle, however Swallows and Amazons a childhood, there was nothing to buy and nowhere to go.

People with nice, big houses didn’t all have nice, big central heating. It was a world of thick blankets and hot water bottles.

But, above all, baby-boomers are

the last generation to be raised with parents and grandparents who remembered the War. People who’d actually say, in a totally non-ironic way, ‘It’ll see me out,’ of a coat or carpet. People who believed that too much dry-cleaning would weaken a well-built suit.

This extravagance was created by a generation symbolised by Viv Nicholson (the ‘spend, spend, spend’ 1961 pools winner brought up in poverty). A generation who remembered their parents quoting Macmillan’s ‘You’ve never had it so good’ of 1957 or Frank Norman’s ‘Fings ain’t what they used to be.’

Baby-boomer extravagance came from a low base. It was always weighed down with all that folkloric vocabulary, pushed to a corner called funny stories about oldies that recurred in their golden years in mad LA or Monte Carlo.

So, as a baby-boomer myself, what do I really want now, if and when normality returns?

I want the serendipity of a layered evening in Soho, where you get a taxi because you’re running late.

You start with a drinks-time thing, then you peel off to bars (stay in Soho or slum it in Mayfair), see more people and get five or six off to supper somewhere.

Usually a taxi home, even though I’m a deep Tube-lover. Did I really spend all that money on an evening?

What I want even more is people doing jobs I can’t do. There’s a clever

‘That’s the fire alarm’

architect two streets away, who’s designed brilliant, bespoke storage in his own house.

I want him to do something like that for me: to counteract the idiotic deployment of space in a 90s conversion of my 1850s London house.

There’s the electrician I’ve given a clump of table lamps to rewire, replug and re-switch so they can be put to work again.

My handyman has been doing things for years at my old house and the place I rented while they did up the first – largely wrong– fix here.

There’s a mass of things for him to do when he’s allowed back in.

A few years ago, I met a serious picture restorer at a party, who’d worked on lovely things from galleries or famous dealers. It turned out she lived up the road.

It was my first lockdown luxury: arranging a timed-to-the-second, no human contact transfer. I’ve got them back and up now and it’s been money very well spent.

Now I’m having a furniture restorer take the few things that deserve it – it’s a combination of value and sentiment – from their miles-away storage, glue back the bits that have fallen off, polish off the dog and cat damage on my animal-mad aunts’ things, and finish off with a subtle waxing – no high-gloss dealer’s shine. Can’t wait.

All the smart restaurants I went to have been emailing recently about their posh meals-on-wheels. I’ve started buying them as a weekend break from my relentless weekday diet: supermarket fish-and-two-veg.

I’m dressing better than I need to but also working my way through my clothes and working out what I can give away. And the same with small rugs and small furniture.

I give them to friends; it’s a kind of reverse extravagance. But they pay a hefty price. They have to send me fulsome, inscribed photographs of the jacket or the rug in situ.

They always look great!

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 13

Taking the plunge

Bath-time for old soaks Elisabeth Luard’s recipe for the perfect bath

ALAMY

I

can’t remember the exact moment I discovered that true happiness is to be found in up-to-the-chin immersion.

It has to be in water of precisely the right temperature, enhanced by the combination of Badedas or Epsom salts – if you can’t get hold of distilled essence of Bulgarian roses, gathered at dawn on the Shipka Pass.

It was certainly after my four children grew up and left home. In the bath, I was a captive audience for everything they’d been wanting to say all day. The result is a subliminal taste for Wiberg’s Pine Essence in January, Penhaligon’s Bluebell in March and Floris’s Lily of the Valley in April that’ll never leave them for the rest of their lives.

The same was true for me.

‘Run me a bath, darling!’ my adored grandmother said, over a whirlpool of discarded crepe de Chine and Brussels lace.

This was a licence to experiment with the contents of her bathroom cupboard: an Aladdin’s cave of potions, unguents and essences in glass-stoppered bottles.

A belle from Baltimore, my mother’s mother was rich, spoilt and glamorous to the tips of her manicured fingernails. An orphaned tobacco heiress, educated in a convent, she married at 14 to escape the nuns. She was everything I hoped to be when I grew up. Life didn’t turn out that way, but I cleave to her sybaritic tastes.

In winter, the morning blend might have been mimosa and tuberose. Spring could be violet and primrose. In summer, it was rose and honeysuckle.

Evening baths were never experimental but perfumed to match her scent. In perfume – as with her wardrobe and dining table – her choices weren’t conventional.

Her favourite blend was Guerlain’s Mitsouku, with a measure of L’Heure Bleu added by the drop into a miniature, cut-glass decanter.

Clean Cleo: Liz Taylor, Cleopatra (1963)

When I perfected it, life was all sunshine and nightingales singing in Berkeley Square.

My bath habit is expensive. My bathroom shelf is stacked with luxurious, fragranced oils and perfumed salts. On an extravagancescale of one to ten, I’m a nine.

These are products for pleasure.

Cleanliness, while desirable, requires power-showers, exfoliating mittens and soap-on-a-rope – or (never again) a rub-down in a Moroccan hammam by a female pugilist with a scrubbing brush made out of chainmail.

Misunderstandings arise over age-appropriate bathing-facilities – particularly for those of us of an age to receive our coronavirus jab in the second wave.

We all have our moments of truth. Mine came when I accepted – with deplorably bad grace – my children’s suggestion. They said the time had come for their mother to downsize from a sprawling fivebedroom farmhouse in the wilds of Wales to a one-person open-plan apartment in a converted soapfactory in west London.

There was mention of walk-in baths, non-slip shower trays, panic-buttons and grab-handles. I, accustomed to the full five-foot-six Edwardian bathtub, said, ‘Thanks but no thanks.’

Time’s chariot and all that, but I’m still gathering rosebuds while I may. Metaphorically.

The new apartment had everything – touch-sensitive

14 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

hot-plates, built-in microwave, underfloor heating – except a bath. Millennials, the building’s target tenants, take showers.

I took a tape-measure and made my own plans. What was a grimly utilitarian, walk-in shower has been replaced by a one-person tub, deep rather than long, with built-in seat and arm-rests of the kind installed

by Japanese billionaires on the terrace with a view of Mount Fuji at cherry-blossom time.

A pair of movable wooden steps allows me a Venus-like ascent, while strategically-placed grab-handles (the ones I swore against) prevent an undignified descent.

When it comes to in-bath atmosphere, candlelight doesn’t do.

What’s needed is proper, overhead lighting, with which reading is not only possible but pleasurable.

Optimal snacks are watermelon, papaya and strawberries – but absolutely no biscuits, cake or anything that produces crumbs.

As for liquid refreshment, my current preference is for Campari with orange juice, ice and fizz, or the occasional gin-and-tonic if the cocktail cabinet runs to it. My Baltimore grandmother, a friend of Wallis Simpson, used to mix herself a mean Manhattan.

I’ve painted Moorish tiles on the splashback. I’m planning a trompe l’oeil of Provence lavender-fields or a Greek olive grove. Or somewhere – anywhere – where a person can spend an hour or two, undisturbed in idyllic happiness, while reading the Sunday papers, an un-improving novel or the latest most-brilliantever Oldie.

Or, for that matter, telephoning friends, chatting about work or watching The Crown on the laptop – particularly the bit with Princess Margaret misbehaving on Mustique.

It’s easy when you have the perfect formula.

Just lie back – or sit up – close your eyes and luxuriate.

Grey matters

My class of Latin lovers

Isabel Raphael on 20 years of teaching classics to oldies

L

atin for pleasure?

It takes guts to advertise a course under that name. Yet now I am running two, both full to bursting, and one Greek for Pleasure course as well.

Twenty years ago this April, I launched an adult course for the Highgate Literary & Scientific Institution (HLSI), and called it, hopefully, Latin for Pleasure.

Frankly, I didn’t expect anyone to sign up. At 11 am on the last possible day, nobody had.

‘I told you so,’ I said to the office but, by 4 o’clock, there were five on the list.

They are the delight of my life, and have been a lockdown lifeline.

I’d never taught adults before, and it was a revelation. Two stalwarts have stayed the whole long course undaunted. Since September 2013, I’ve also worked with a second class in Hammersmith. There are twenty now in each group, and we meet for an hour and a half for ten weeks each term.

Almost all are retired, from a wide variety of professions, and range from mid-50s to over-90s.

The class has included a judge, a science professor, a journalist cum philologist, a documentary filmmaker, a teacher, a churchwarden, and a gasmeter-reader.

They all have some Latin. Some took it to degree level, but most said goodbye to the language long ago.

One has written disarmingly, ‘My grasp of Latin is tenuous, but I muddle along, hanging on to everyone else’s coat-tails and manage to enjoy it hugely.’

The great advantage for all is that they belong to a generation that had to learn by heart, and it’s amazing how much comes back. My job is to make accessible the glories of Latin literature.

How does it work? We have no textbooks. I type out and deliver online whatever we are studying. Currently one group is reading excerpts from Livy 1: the rise and fall of the Tarquins, full

of political skullduggery and with two formidable women. The other is linking stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses with the grand Titian exhibition recently on at the National Gallery.

I vary verse and prose, usually with a different author each term, and am always open to suggestions.

Together we have explored Quintilian’s literary criticism as well as the love songs of Catullus, eye-witness accounts of the Battle of Hastings and the letters of Abelard and Heloise. And Virgil, Horace and epitaphs from Westminster Abbey…

Last week, we had a go at translations of Ogden Nash’s poetry.

Try this one: * sacchrum est gratum sed liquor celerior We’ve even performed a medieval Latin Nativity play.

I do the donkey work, adding essential vocabulary to the typed texts and marking long syllables and words that agree but don’t look the same. Grammar and syntax are dealt with as we read - though I recently came up with a two-page ‘essay’ on my beloved Ablative Absolute. Anyone can chip in at any time and ask for further explanation.

I don’t teach: I translate, calling attention as we go along to the real excitement of subtly differing tenses, word order, scansion (they have to know all about that) and the

differing styles of every writer. I see myself as a key-holder, opening doors for all to the classical world through literature, history, art, even music, and its legacy to us today.

There is no pressure – no dreaded moment when it is ‘your turn to translate’. The atmosphere is wonderfully relaxed.

While everyone is serious about what we’re doing, the breadth of their backgrounds makes for wide-ranging discussion and we’re never short of expert opinions!

A recent ‘poll’ has been amazing.

Memories of grim prep-school Latin have vanished to be replaced by ‘intensity, stimulus and huge enjoyment’. Rusty brains feel stretched and exercised.

One student writes of how fascinating it is that ‘one can hear something of the personality or creative fingerprint of the writers through their idiolect, much as one can identify the composer of a certain piece of music.’

A particular triumph was discovering that the dreaded Julius Caesar was in fact a supreme stylist and a first-class reporter whose despatches had us waiting intently for the next instalment from De Bello Gallico.

We used to meet in the HLSI or in a Hammersmith pub. The arrival of lockdown and Zoom seemed threatening at first, but this has even added to the warmth and cheerful atmosphere of our meetings.

One person wrote recently, ‘I have come to realise how much our Latin classes have meant over the past months; seeing all your faces on Zoom, with a glimpse of studies and sitting rooms, adds a new degree of intimacy. I feel privileged to be part of such an interesting group. Long may our gatherings continue.’

It really is Latin for pleasure.

‘Verb at the end of the sentence, Watkins’

16 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

* Candy is dandy, But liquor is quicker

Isabel Raphael was Headmistress of Channing School, 1984-1998

Care at home

Quest for the perfect carer Rachel Kelly’s Holy Grail? Heroes to look after her parents

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he call came when I was 20.

I was in my flat on the Cowley Road, in my final year as an Oxford undergraduate and trying to make sense of the cahiers de doléances, the lists of public grievances compiled in the first months of 1789 ahead of the French Revolution.

It was my mother. My father, then in his mid-50s, had suffered a debilitating stroke. He was in intensive care. I packed my bag immediately. Family life would never be the same again.

He was left partially disabled.

With an awesome effort of will, he made a remarkable recovery, but it took him the best part of the next decade. After nearly six months in hospital, he learned how to walk again, thanks to a rigorous physiotherapy regime and his own immense determination.

But, despite his best efforts, my father – a writer like my mother – was left with limited movement in his left leg and none at all in his left arm. My mother became his carer.

This can happen to anyone, from someone like my mother to Eleanor Roosevelt, a future first lady, who, from the early 1920s, cared for Franklin after he suffered an attack of polio left him paralysed.

From the moment my father woke to the moment he went to bed, my mother was at his side.

In between, she would finish his anecdotes when he forgot the punchline, discreetly remove his glass if he had had one too many of claret and accompany him pretty much wherever he went (apart from the men-only Beefsteak Club, his last redoubt). All of this she did with selfless good humour, tact and love. In short, she was the perfect carer.

Then she fell ill herself with blood cancer. Even so, she remained my father’s primary carer until her last few months. At her hospital appointments, she would

always impress on her own doctors that she needed to be well to look after my father.

Now, two years after her death, my siblings and I have been grappling with how to replace her.

What makes for the ideal carer?

As different carers have come and gone, I realise that, of course, there is no such thing as the perfect carer, other than my mother.

Rather like The Moon Under Water – the fictitious, perfect pub described by George Orwell – the perfect carer needs an impossible range of qualities. Naturally, we have not found anyone that has them all.

Is it realistic to hope for someone who is as comfortable and competent with affairs of digestion as they are with Lermontov, the Georgian poet and object of my father’s academic enthusiasm? Or one who spots UTI symptoms and comments on the Met’s version of La Bohème?

The truth is that each carer brings different gifts. There is Rosie, whose cheese soufflé delights my father, but whose chief cultural delight is YouTube videos of Filipina pop stars.

Then there’s Katie, who loves Handel, but who cannot cook. Then there was Carmelita, who combined her caring work with being a nurse.

While brilliant at diagnosing ailments, she never cracked a smile.

So, there is no perfection, and it is not to be expected or sought for in someone who is routinely paid around £10 an hour. But there is

one characteristic of a carer that is essential. They need to be someone who is responsible, and qualified enough, to administer medication in the correct dosage.

That might sound an easy ask but, in the last few months of my mother’s life, when she needed a carer herself, her drug regime was complicated. There were differentsized and different-coloured drugs to be taken at different times of the day in different combinations, and with or without food.

Tragically, we had one carer who administered the wrong doses of my mother’s chemotherapy drugs. Over several months, she gave my mother too little of one medication from the pillbox organiser.

We will never know if she might have survived longer had she had the correct, stronger dose to start with. We only discovered what had happened in an appointment with her oncologist, to which I accompanied her.

‘So that’s why my side-effects were so mild,’ my mother joked. She never blamed the carer, saying anyone could have got in a muddle, though she agreed she should leave.

There was only one blessing to this otherwise sad story.

The carer in question had come highly recommended as the ‘perfect’ helper. Now I know that such a person does not exist, I can celebrate instead the bits of perfection in all the different carers I have known. The carer who travelled all over London in search of gulls’ eggs, a sudden fancy of my father’s. Or the one who nursed him for 48 hours on the trot, sleeping at his side, like a loyal dog. Carers have given so much to our family ever since my father fell ill all those years ago.

Rachel Kelly is author of Singing in the Rain: 52 Practical Steps to Happiness (Short Books)

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 17

Pixels at an exhibition Confined to her childhood home, art critic Laura Freeman finds online solace in the world’s best pictures

F

or the last three months, caught between house moves and lockdowns, I’ve been living in Oxfordshire with my parents. Every morning, my husband commutes down the garden to a converted pig shed. I set up in a bedroom decorated in the taste of my 17-year-old self.

On Saturdays, for the sake of stimulus and a leg stretch, we walk to the Rollright Stones, our local Neolithic circle. Never gets (5,000 years) old.

I’ve come to look at the all-tooshort interregnum between the art-starved spring and the cultureparched winter as a golden age. I hared about on almost empty trains and wolfed down cathedrals, cast courts, exhibitions and permanent collections. Then the Tiers fell. Soon after that: Lockdown III. Don’t let the lockdowns get you down, I’ve said to myself in more morose moments. I miss museums and pine for Venice, Florence, Paris, Margate, anywhere...

But all is not lost. You just have to (Google) search for it. Whether it’s the wretched virus, illness, disability or simply not being able to face the queues keeping us at home, all art-lovers should take heart from the extraordinary technological leaps of the last few years. Highresolution photography has made it possible to get nose-to-canvas with works otherwise inaccessible or impossibly crowded.

Two years ago, I fought for my fifteen minutes in front of Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. Since then, Closer to Van Eyck has launched online. This project aims to capture every fraction of an inch of every one of his paintings, using macrophotography, infrared macrophotography, infrared reflectography and X-radiography.

Whether or not you understand the theory, what these techniques mean in practice is a jeweller’s eyeglass view of some of the most

exquisite works ever painted in oil.

The image quality is gobsmacking.

You can get within 2mm of the hem of the Virgin in the Virgin of Canon van der Paele at Bruges and count each silken stitch.

Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait was the most viewed picture on the National Gallery’s website last year.

It tied for first place with Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Other top ten hits were Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Turner’s Fighting Temeraire.

Then there’s the V&A’s spectacular scheme to document their celebrated Raphael Cartoons in three ways: in ultra-high resolution colour (the visible paint layer); in 3D (showing intervention, wear and tear and restoration); and in infrared (uncovering the charcoal drawings beneath the paint). This really is revelatory.

Formerly in a dimly lit gallery rendering the scenes murky and dull, the Cartoons are now vivid and brilliantly clear. You can see the pinpricks used to transfer the Cartoon designs from paper to loom before being woven into tapestries.

The artist’s shifting intentions are revealed as he drew and redrew.

You can get near enough to the catch-of-the-day in The Miraculous Draught of the Fishes to see every gill on the wing of a gasping ray.

When it comes to video tours, galleries have upped their game. I’d

18 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

been kicking myself for missing Artemisia Gentileschi at the National Gallery, but the video tour by curator Letizia Treves is superb.

Rather than a static lecture, it really feels like a ‘walk-through’, allowing you to understand how rooms and themes fit together, how pictures ‘speak’ across the space and how Artemisia’s style became ever more daring.

Do, if you haven’t already, invest in an iPad. No Luddite excuses. Last year, I met a lady who had become an iWhiz at 96. Navigation and zooming in for close-ups is a great deal easier with the touch-screen of an iPad or tablet than with a mouse or a desktop trackpad.

Trying to wander the Vatican on my laptop reduced me to sweary fury when what I was after was spiritual uplift. On an iPad, the tour toggles were much more intuitive.

Consider going bigger. There are two types of cable – HDMI and VGA – which can connect a laptop computer to a TV screen, both less than £10. Some newer ‘smart’ televisions such as the Apple TV allow you to do this wirelessly.

My mother-in-law is a dab hand at throwing (the technical term is ‘Screen Mirroring’) films and photographs from her iPad on to the wider screen of the telly.

Nevertheless, there are limits to what screens can offer. One of last year’s new expressions was ‘skin hunger’, to describe the longing for human touch.

A letter to the Telegraph, printed soon after the churches reopened, still troubles me. It was from a widowed parishioner who said that, with the banning of the sign of the peace – handshakes being unhygienic – she had lost her only physical contact with others.

For all the benefits of Zoom, Ocado or online yoga, leading virtual lives makes for a textureless existence. At times, I’ve been struck by a sort of ‘surface hunger’: a

IMAGE: PUBLIC DOMAIN, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The nation’s favourites: Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) and Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (opposite), painted in 1434

desperate craving for rust and patina, marble and bronze, the glossy tooling of a gold-leaf halo and the almost caramelised ridge of thickly laid impasto.

The trouble with screens is that they flatten art and make every picture uniform. A Frank Auerbach painting, grooved, furrowed and scored, becomes the same as a seemingly brushless Vermeer.

Then there’s scale. A Rothko painting ought to impose, shoulder out and take up space. Reduced to an online thumbnail, it might as well be a Dulux paint swatch: ‘Rothko Maroon.’

When Rothko was at work on his series of murals for the Seagram Building in New York – now at Tate Modern – he wanted the total effect to echo that of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence with its blind windows and geometry.

Michelangelo, he said, had ‘achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after – he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room

where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall’. Sounds like lockdown.

Still, it takes some imaginative leap to get that by clicking through the Tate website.

There’s also the question of ‘headspace.’ Forgive a spot of jargon, but headspace isn’t a bad word for the state of mind needed for looking at art.

Architecture prepares us for art.

The awe of approaching Rubens’s four great altarpieces in Antwerp Cathedral and the sense of reverence inspired by the nave and the vault are both specific and special.

All the pomp and paraphernalia of porticoes, temple fronts and flanking lions ready us for what’s

‘At times, I’ve been struck by a craving for the glossy tooling of a gold-leaf halo’

inside. I still feel cheated by the National Gallery’s decision to make the central entrance ‘Exit’ only.

Mounting the steps set you up for a visit. What we have missed this last straitened year isn’t just experience, but ceremony.

If you’re simply sick of screens, there’s much to be said for travels on paper. When we do all get out again, don’t stint on postcards, guidebooks, catalogues and city maps.

My much-travelled aunt – Wandering Miranda, we call her – has kept herself going with slides, photographs and scrapbooks from her many and varied adventures.

Clearing out a drawer in the first lockdown, I found a box of souvenirs from a student trip to Italy. I thought I’d been excessive at the time, buying dozens of postcards covering every scene of the vast mosaic at Santa Maria Assunta.

But, as I smoothed the creased edges, I was transported far from the flat and back to Torcello on a sunny morning in spring.

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 19

Remembrance of memorials past What’s the best way to say goodbye? James Hughes-Onslow, our Memorial Service correspondent, has the answer

In memoriam: our first Memorial Service correspondent, Ned Sherrin; WF Deedes; Paul Scofield, A Man for All Seasons (1966)

ALAMY

W

hat sad times we live in.

No memorial services and funerals restricted to tiny numbers.

It leaves me, Memorial Service correspondent for The Oldie, in a bit of a pickle, resorting to Zoom funerals for my column.

In these dark times, I return to the best memorial services I’ve attended since I inherited the Oldie job from the late, great Ned Sherrin (1931-2007). And I ponder what are their key elements?

One of my first sombre

‘I was midway through her eulogy when her beloved parrot squawked’ commissions was to memorialise Sherrin himself, remembered at St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, known as the Actors’ Church.

His service contained the most vital element of a memorial service: beautiful words, beautifully spoken.

And what could have been better

20 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

than Dame Judi Dench eulogising Ned with the words by Stephen Haggard: ‘For this I hold – friendship is more than life, longer than love and it shall prove warm to the spirit when the body is cold’?

The second crucial element of a memorial service is humour; it allows the immediate grief of a funeral to give way to celebration.

I remember the loud squawking that interrupted the eulogy by Nicholas Coleridge, former Editorial Director of Condé Nast, now Chairman of the V&A, for his late

boss Ann Barr (1929-2015), deputy editor of Harper’s & Queen. Ann coined the expressions foodies and Sloane Rangers and co-wrote The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982) with Peter York. Her brother rushed to the altar to cover the noisy bird with a blanket and silence it.

‘Yes, I was midway through my eulogy about my great mentor, when her beloved parrot, Turkey, began squawking,’ Coleridge said. ‘From the pulpit, it was impossible to hear the exact words. It sounded like “Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight”, like Long John Silver’s parrot, but perhaps it was “Your copy is late, copy is late”. I ploughed on, but I felt the spirit of Ann Barr very vividly at that moment…’

One of the pleasures of memorial services comes from getting an insider’s view on a person’s professional life.

At St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, former BBC Chairman Lord Grade paid tribute to Tim Bell (1941-2019), Margaret Thatcher’s first spin doctor. Lord Bell is said to have won the 1979 election for her with his slogan ‘Labour Isn’t Working’.

Grade said Bell thought this message rather negative but let it go.

‘No one could tell me where the label “spin doctor” originated but my research confirmed he was the very first,’ said Grade. ‘To Tim it was a badge of honour. He was so proud to be the first spin doctor.

Many have followed; none has surpassed.’ Eat your heart out, Alastair Campbell!

I like to give some flavour of the gatherings after services, such as the one for Richard Lindley (1936-2019), the Panorama and ITV journalist. The Rev Dr Sam Wells gave a sermon at St Martin’s-inthe-Fields, saying,‘There used to be a profession called journalism. One person who spoke the truth was Richard Lindley.’ Later, in a speech at Lindley’s wake at the Reform Club, the BBC’s Andrew Marr corrected him. ‘Journalism is not a profession,’ he said. ‘It is a trade.’

Family members give the most moving – and often the funniest – eulogies.

Rupert Carrington, son of the late Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington

Bill Deedes added his own epitaph at his service: ‘There will be refreshments’ (1919-2018), spoke at his father’s service in Westminster Abbey. He told how Harold Macmillan, as Prime Minister, was interrupted by a persistent heckler who kept telling him ‘Your wife is a drunk.’

Macmillan eventually replied, ‘My dear fellow, you should have seen her mother.’ Macmillan’s mother-in-law was the Duchess of Devonshire and his wife was having an affair with Lord Boothby, a good friend of the Kray Twins.

Memorial services also give fine public speakers a chance to shine.

One of the best was Julian Fellowes, the writer of Downton Abbey, at the memorial service for John Julius Norwich (1929-2018) at St James’s, Piccadilly.

He recalled JJ asking him what he knew about Carlo Goldoni, the 18th-century playwright. ‘Absolutely nothing,’ Lord Fellowes told him.

Lord Norwich then said he had been asked to give a lecture on Goldoni for Save Venice but he couldn’t do it. He wanted Fellowes to do it for him.

‘You can read, can’t you?’ said JJ. ‘A few weeks later,’ said Fellowes, ‘I am in Venice, giving two lectures on Goldoni, while Emma and I had a blissful ten days at the Monaco.’

Honesty about death also works at memorial services.

The Rev Tim Ditchfield, Chaplain

‘A good-looking man who achieved success in everything he set out to do… his untimely death was a comfort to us all’

at King’s College Chapel in London, conducted a service for the military historian Sir Michael Howard.

‘Michael booked the chapel 20 years ago “to get in early”,’ said Ditchfield. ‘He told me he wanted a beautiful service and an enjoyable reception. He said, “There is no point in dying otherwise.”’

A memorial service is also a bridge back to a different generation. How lucky I was to attend the service for ‘Dear Bill’ – WF Deedes (1913-2007), war hero, Cabinet Minister and Telegraph editor – at the Guards’ Chapel. Lady Thatcher was there to sing Bill’s praises, as was the then Tory leader, David Cameron.

It is at memorial services like Bill’s that you get the personal details so often forgotten in weighty biographies. Bill’s editor at the Telegraph, Charles Moore, said, ‘He still wore the suits he had owned since the thirties, twice as heavy as modern cloth because they were cut in the days before global warming.’

Only weeks before his death, Bill was telling Telegraph readers his old suits got very hot in modern, heated buildings. Bill added his own epitaph, read out at the memorial service: ‘There will be refreshments.’

Some of the greatest addresses I’ve heard have been at the services for our finest actors – such as Paul Scofield (1922-2008), memorialised at St Margaret’s, Westminster.

Simon Callow said of Scofield, ‘Discovering at an early age that his scholastic gifts were meagre, he fell with inexpressible relief on acting, for which his gift was instantly apparent. Scofield was not a boastful man and not given to hyperbole – so we may believe him when he says that his 13-year-old Juliet was “a sensation”.’

Fine music lifts a great memorial service.

At Scofield’s, hymns included The Lord’s My Shepherd and Now Thank We All Our God. The organist played Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Minor. The choir sang Mannin Veen and The Cloud-Capped Towers by Vaughan Williams, and the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem. The perfect service.

RIP all the greats I’ve memorialised over the years.

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 21

Money talk

Retire with the Midas touch If you play your cards right, you can give money to your children and have a good time, says Garry White

T

oday’s oldies danced with flowers in their hair in the 1960s, fuelled the sexual revolution of the 1970s – as Liz Hodgkinson writes on page four.

They created world-changing technology in the 1980s. Of course their horizons extend beyond cardigans and Werther’s Originals.

Their sunset decades will be lived like their youth – challenging stereotypes. Medical science has given the most financially successful generation of older people ever the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their life’s labour.

But growing old with suitable disgrace requires careful planning – even if that plan is to join the 24-hour party pensioners and spend, spend, spend…

Spend the kids’ inheritance More oldies than ever are SKI-ing through the downhill section of life.

This is motivated by practical reasons or an admirable desire to live their fullest lives. If you’re healthy, fit and ambitious – why not have fun?

Financial planner William Bengen calculated that a safe rate of withdrawal to give retirees confidence their savings won’t run out. The ‘4% rule’ shows that people can withdraw 4% of their investments in the first year of retirement – and the the same amount adjusted for inflation for at least 30 years – without exhausting their portfolio.

Today, advisors use cash-flow modelling to establish an appropriate level for each individual client, but the 4% rule provides a good rule of thumb.

You can avoid spending the kids’ inheritance. You can have your cake and eat it – by enjoying your retirement and

passing something onto loved ones if you create a plan. You can even give some of your wealth away, too.

Give those you love the inheritance they deserve The chunk of your estate that goes to the taxman instead of your nearest and dearest is mitigated by proper inheritance tax (IHT) planning.

Gift money to your children as early as you can – or fund Junior ISAs for your grandchildren.

You’ll see the good your savings do – and will be around to get a thank you. You can even invest in business property relief portfolio, sometimes known as an AIM portfolio. These are generally IHT exempt after two years’ investment.

The best way to give away money to mitigate tax The simple, heart-warming answer is charity.

You could set up a charitable trust. If you involve your children – and create a perpetual legacy, giving to causes dear to your heart – deeds of variation from inheritance can result in a tax refund. With the right planning, any legacy you leave to charity could reduce your IHT liability by 10%.

A watertight will gives you the peace of mind that your assets will pass to the people you choose in the way you wish. If you die without a will, your estate would be

‘He took it with him’

distributed according to intestacy rules. This can result in unintended beneficiaries and an unfavourable tax situation. Intestacy can be particularly disheartening for unmarried couples, who have no entitlement under the rules.

With things so uncertain, who needs a plan?

You do. Now is the right time to get ready for what’s coming next.

In December, the UK government’s budget deficit – the gap between spending and tax income plus other receipts – was almost £271 bn for the first nine months of the financial year. That’s a rise of more than £212 bn compared with the same period in the last tax year.

The pandemic has outstripped the damage done by the 2008 financial crisis to national finances.

With no appetite for a return to austerity, the Chancellor will be seeking to plug this gap by other means. Tax rises are likely.

A time of crisis is always a good time to take stock and reconsider your plan. The uncertainty means it’s essential to get a grip on your finances now.

Preserving your assets A trusted adviser helps your plan to grow old disgracefully. Have open conversations with your family. That way everyone knows what to expect.

Recognised wealth managers with investment strategies that consider market conditions and have metrics to support their decisions can prevent inflation eating away at your nest egg.

Telegraph journalist Garry White is Charles Stanley’s chief investment commentator

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 23

Golden age of austerity Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall, brought up on rations during the war, never felt deprived – and loved her rare sweets

Cod war: British housewives compare fish during World War II. Fish wasn’t rationed

ALAMY

I

wasn’t quite one when food rationing started in January 1940. When it ended at midnight on 4 July 1954, with the ceremonial burning of ration books, I was 15. In all those years, I never felt deprived.

During the war, while their husbands were serving in the army or navy, my mother and her sisters brought their babies to live on my grandparents’ farm in Wiltshire.

The time we spent there was idyllic. We had cousins to play with, hens to feed, eggs to collect and orphan lambs to be bottle-fed.

The garden was given over to growing food and we scrounged peas straight from the pod, crawled under strawberry nets and gorged on plums and pears in the orchard.

Our favourite roost was the mulberry tree, from which we descended with sticky, purplestained mouths.

Meals were the only times when we were even vaguely aware of the war. It was patriotic to ‘eat up your greens’. Not easy when greens meant stalky cabbage leaves, slimy spinach or whole, boiled leeks coated in lumpy, white sauce.

24 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

My grandfather would say, ‘They’ll bring roses to your cheeks’ to no avail. I gagged on every bite.

But treats came to the rescue.

Sweets and chocolate were rationed to 8oz per person, per month. Grown-ups would sacrifice their own ration to treat us children.

In our extended family, sweets were doled out daily after lunch. The choice was between one boiled sweet or two squares of chocolate.

The boiled sweets – alluring globes of translucent rose, amber, green, violet and lemon – if sucked very slowly, lasted longer, but I

would invariably choose the chocolate. Still would.

Additional sweets could be earned as a reward for good behaviour, or to help the medicine go down, as in ‘Just swallow this spoonful of syrup of figs and you shall have a sweetie.’ But there were no sweets for children who didn’t eat up their greens. So you swallowed hard and left a clean plate.

Ingredients for baking were also rationed. Somehow at teatime, there were scones, sandwiches and always two cakes – perhaps a Victoria sponge and a treacly ginger loaf.

Supper was just a bowl of cereals, eaten in front of the nursery fire, making tea the most important meal. It was one big treat, really, with no nasty vegetables to spoil it.

Sweet rationing continued until February 1953. At break at my day school, a cluster formed round an otherwise rather unpopular girl. She would fish a whole Kit-Kat out of her satchel and break one finger into tiny pieces to dole out to the lucky few. She ate the other three fingers herself, watching us slink away.

At my husband’s prep school, each boy was allowed five sweets twice a week or two sweets plus a Mars Bar. ‘The difficulty,’ he says, ‘was making your ration last half a week. The only boy who succeeded

UPMARKET TAKEAWAYS Tired of cooking the same old meals for the same old people under lockdown?

Why not treat yourselves at home?

The agency, Leiths List, helps you find a local chef to prepare tasty meals in small batches or to fill your fridge with ready-to-heat-and-eat meals (leithslist.com).

Chef Alastair Little delivers ‘proper food’ nationwide. (byalastairlittle.co.uk).

Potage, founded in 2012 when Georgia Cummings was looking after her mum, also delivers a broad range featuring seasonal produce from small

One boy kept a razor blade to shave his Mars Bar into waferthin slices kept a razor blade to shave his Mars Bar into wafer-thin slices.’

When sweets came off the ration, I became greedy and could easily eat a whole Mars Bar on the Tube, going home from school. Nowadays if I eat a bar of chocolate in one go, it’s a guilty secret.

Food was not the only rationed commodity. Clothing coupons meant only our oldest cousins got new clothes. The rest of us wore hand-me-downs. School uniforms were bought two sizes too big, so that we could ‘grow into them’.

The only fabrics obtainable without precious coupons were blackout material and parachute silk. My first grown-up party frock was made of parachute silk dyed turquoise – actually rather elegant.

To economise on fabric, skirts got shorter, barely grazing the knee.

Clothes rationing was gradually relaxed. Christian Dior, anticipating its end, stunned the fashion world in 1947 with skirts using yards of fabric, billowing from tiny waists, cascading almost to models’ ankles.

producers throughout the UK (potage.co.uk).

If you like cooking but hate prep, recipe boxes are ideal. They come complete with measured ingredients and precise cooking instructions.

Both Gousto and HelloFresh (gousto. co.uk and hellofresh. co.uk) offer a wide variety of dishes.

Morrisons has a smaller selection of recipes but is the most economical (morrisons. com/eatfresh).

Riverford Organic Farmers provide recipe boxes – primarily vegetarian – full of their own organic produce (riverford.co.uk/ organic-recipe-boxes).

The Cookaway offers world cuisine recipe boxes for 2-4 people with

Initially Dior’s ‘New Look’ seemed outlandish. My school friends and I were not the only ones to stand gawping at the few dashing women who wore it. But we were soon seduced by this symbol of optimism, and let down our skirt hems as far as we could.

Now I’m rather shocked when the style-conscious throw away clothes that go out of fashion. I keep mine until they wear out, get eaten by moths or acquire stains that won’t wash out – like the splash of bleach on my cashmere jumper. A dress may sit in my wardrobe for 20 years, but fashion goes in circles and sooner or later it makes a comeback.

My mother made other economies. The drawer in the kitchen table where she kept the ration books also contained paper bags smoothed out for re-use, parcel string (unknotted and wound), economy labels to be stuck over the address on used envelopes, empty cotton reels and other small items that ‘might come in useful’.

I still find frugality satisfying, and now I feel, rather smugly, in tune with the recycling zeitgeist.

Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall is author of The Ministry of Food – Thrifty Wartime Ways to Feed Your Family Today

the option to pair wine or add a side dish.

Cookaway does not require a subscription (thecookaway.com).

New to the takeaway scene is the dine-in-likeit’s-out option.

It makes for a treat, even if the bill is almost the same as if you were dining out – dishwasher and waiter not included.

You can indulge in Hawksmoor at Home’s roast or steak with all the trimmings (thehawksmoor.com).

Or try a three-course meal from Rick Stein (www.rickstein.com/ steins-at-home).

There’s a full Sri Lankan feast on offer at Hoppers Cash and Kari (hopperscashand kari.com), complete with their signature cocktails.

Côte is also delivering chilled bistro meals throughout mainland Britain (www. coteathome.co.uk).

Another alternative is to cook with neighbours or friends once a week – the Come Dine With Me approach.

I have been teaching a group of children on Zoom on our street. It’s proving very popular with the children and parents.

If you’re going to invest in one time-saving gadget, I suggest a slow cooker that can cook soups and casseroles and braise fruits.

All these are under £30: Swan, Russel Hobbs Daewoo, Croc-Pot and Murphy Richards.

Fran Warde

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 25

Gadgets for oldies

Bored? Don’t be

Read every book in the house? Watched every TV programme? Do not despair You’ve got mail!

And for once it’s not from the NHS! Cinema Paradiso is a DVD rental service with more than 100,000 films and programmes – more than Netflix and Amazon combined! cinemaparadiso.co.uk Can you hear me now?

With amplified incoming and outgoing speech, this landline phone has the added convenience of big buttons; and as a desk phone, it will always be right where you left it.

BT Big Button 200 £27.99 shop.bt.com A book at bath-time This portable audio book player automatically bookmarks your place on up to 20 USB sticks and connects to Bluetooth speakers or headphones. The rechargeable battery lasts for eight hours. RNIB Communiplayer USB £41.99 shop. rnib.org.uk Mend and make mittens Nearly New Cashmere is on a mission to rescue and repair 100%

TIPS FOR GOING BACK IN TIME Ever feel like old age is a return to babyhood?

I first came across the idea of old age as a second childhood in My MiddleAged Baby Book: A Record of Milestones, Millstones & Gallstones,

by Mary Lou Weisman.

Why not compile your own Oldie Record Book?

Instead of baby firsts – a curl from the first haircut or the first tooth – record mature firsts.

pure cashmere destined for landfill.

Swap your unworn jumper for something fresh. Find patches and embellishments to let your beloved cardi last that bit longer. Or, if it is beyond repair, why not ask Nearly New to turn it into mittens? nearlynewcashmere.co.uk The joy of fidgeting Fidget cushions, cubes, toys and twiddlemuffs are all designed to help soothe the anxiety that develops as dementia advances. Buy

ready-made mats and cubes or kits to make your own to provide comfort and engagement.

Busyhandscreative.co.uk Or knit a sensory toy and companion from Fiona Crouch’s ‘Snuggle Bear’ pattern. alzheimers.org.uk

Take your first grey hair and glue it into your book of old age. Start chalking your decreasing height on the wall.

Document all dramatic developments: turkey neck, liver spots and varicose veins.

Why not compile a photographic record of the tragicomedies of getting old? Cherish those photos where you no longer look 17 – or even 70 – any more.

Forget beauty tips aimed at recapturing a

Granny vs grandchildren Beat them at their own game: embark on an epic, medieval fantasy adventure with your grandchildren through Old School Runescape, a

twenty-year-old, community-based game. It is free to play on a laptop, PC, tablet or phone. runescape.com Let the sunshine in Brighten any dark day with this handily portable daylight SAD light.

While not guaranteed to lighten your mood, it will at least add illumination. Great for the shed or wherever you happen to be waiting out the storm.

Beurer TL 30 Ultra Portable Daylight SAD Light, White £59.99 johnlewis.com Slow TV My Life TV is a video-on-demand service catering to people living with dementia. Archive news footage and gentle sitcoms are among the feel good programmes that also spark memories and conversation.

Special offer for Oldie readers: Start before May 31, 2021 for a free three-month trial period and then £4 per month for up to 3 screens per household with code: OLDIEPROMO mylifefilms.org/my-life-tv

long-lost youth. Stick religiously to Growing Old Disgracefully Tips.

First, be sure there are no stains on your clothes or signs of obvious damage. Don’t pretend – like my mother did – that you just got that ladder in your tights!

If you wear lipstick, do follow the lip-line strictly.

Don’t show cleavage or wear sleeveless dresses.

Don’t call women over 40 the ‘Girls’.

Do consider becoming a burden to your children. If

not now, when? It’s payback time!

Be daring. At this stage of life, you can get away with speaking your mind.

If you don’t ask, you don’t get. What are you waiting for?

A woman of a certain age was walking by a building site where men were whistling at the passing young women.

‘What about me?’ she asked. They whistled – it made everybody’s day!

Susan Schwarz

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 27

Health

To advertise, contact Kami Jogee on 0203 859 7096 or via email kamijogee@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 22nd March 2021

Mobility

Gifts

Books & Publishing

Books & Publishing

Clothing & Bedding

Old friends

A mate and a mentor

Peter Finch taught Trader Faulkner, 93, the tricks of the trade

ALAMY

P

eter Finch (1916-77), 11 years my senior, was my friend and great mentor.

Even now, at the age of 93, I look back fondly on his kindness – and the great help he gave me in the acting world.

Known by his Aussie colleagues as ‘Finchie’, he was determined from an early age to become an actor. He got his first acting job in the drama section of Aboriginal impresario George Sorlie’s travelling circus, touring the Outback in 1935.

At the end of the tour, Finch arrived in Sydney to audition for ABC radio (the Aussie version of the BBC). Producer Lawrence H Cecil was in charge of the audition.

Years later, Lawrie told me, ‘I suddenly heard this warm, compelling voice, and looked up to see this thin, young hopeful in a tattered sports coat but with no shirt. I immediately went into the studio and asked him why.’

‘Couldn’t afford one,’ Finchie said. Lawrie gave him two bob, told him to go to Woolworths and buy himself a shirt and he’d cast him.

When Finchie met Lawrie again, he was wearing a shirt with matching tie and handkerchief.‘I didn’t tell you to buy the matching accoutrements,’ Lawrie said.

‘I didn’t buy them,’ said Finchie.

‘I just tailored them out of the bottom of the shirt’s back and front.’

‘I roared with laughter,’ Lawrie told me, ‘and Finchie’s never looked back, nor has he ever repaid me my two bob!’

In every generation, there has been a group of outstanding actors – Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and Finchie, to name just three I worked with.

I was fortunate to be trained – or, better, guided – by Peter Finch in Sydney from 1946-48; we remained firm friends from that time.

In the late 50s, while I was still living with my mother on the houseboat Stella Maris moored at Chelsea Reach, I received a call from Finchie that was even more than usually memorable.

Finchie, mad as hell, in Network (1976)

‘G’day, mate. I’m just across the river from you at that little pub, the Old Swan. Come over and join me.’

He’d been filming and I hadn’t seen him in a while. Over I went and there he was leaning on the bar, with two schooners drawn and waiting.

‘Pete,’ I said to him a few minutes later, ‘I’m busting for a leak. Where’s the dunny?’

‘Go through that door and along the passage. It’s the last door on the left. It sticks a bit, so give it a hard shove and you’ll be in there.’

I did as he suggested and heaved at the door.

It opened suddenly. I fell forward and ended up floundering in the Thames!

Struggling to stay afloat, I looked back to see Finchie waving a white handkerchief with joy.

Fortunately, I was just diagonally across from the Stella Maris, and the tide had turned, drawing me downstream towards it.

Peter was married three times, first to the ballerina Tamara Tchinarova. She was friends with my mother, former ballerina Sheila Whytock (who had danced in the companies of Diaghilev and Ana Pavlova). Tamara introduced me to Peter – whose voice was by that time very familiar to me from the radio – and I became his protégé. He had two children with his second wife Yolande Turner.

I met his last wife in 1972 under strange and, again, particularly memorable circumstances.

30 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

Finchie had just finished playing Erich Krogh in Graham Greene’s England Made Me, directed by Peter Duffel. He was brilliant as the hard German industrialist.

As usual, he rang me out of the blue: “I’m at De Vere Mews. Come over and meet the love of my life.”

Finchie was briefly in London but had by then moved to Jamaica, where he had met and married a young islander.

‘Finchie!’ I yelled when I got inside the ground floor of his house, a converted stable. ‘Where are you?

It’s bloody pitch dark down here!’

A door at the top of the stairs opened. Then came Finchie’s voice, Come on up, mate, and meet Eletha.’

I was introduced to a pretty, but rather formidable Jamaican, very protective of Peter.

‘Who is this man?’ she asked.

‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured her.

‘He’s an old friend from Oz.’ I remember so well Eletha’s defensive hostility – she was afraid I’d try to persuade him to return to London to stay.

But that was the last I ever saw of my friend Finchie.

He sadly died in 1977, aged only 60. Shortly afterwards, I wrote his biography.Though it was my first attempt at writing, the book did surprisingly well.

It was yet another boost from my old mate and mentor.

Trader Faulkner is author of Peter Finch: A Biography (1979)