The Oldie magazine - July 2021 issue (402)

EARL SPENCER – HAVE I FOUND THE WHITE SHIP? AN WILSON ON PROUST

July 2021 | £4.95 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 402

From Brief Encounter to Downton Abbey Gareth Neame on his family’s film dynasty

Boris and Carrie’s wedding music – Rachel Johnson I guarded Albert Speer – Adrian Greaves Death of the playboy – Charlie Methven

Give The Oldie and get 3 free books See p11

Eva Braun tells all to Speer page 19

Features 10 Have we found the White Ship? Earl Spencer 11 Botham’s strokes of genius and bad luck Christopher Sandford 13 School reports then and now James Thellusson 14 My film family’s greatest hits Gareth Neame 19 I guarded Albert Speer Adrian Greaves 20 RIP the playboys of the western world Charlie Methven 22 Proust changed the world A N Wilson 24 Cleaning the loos at Wimbledon Graham Little 26 Poetry boom in lockdown Thomas W Hogkinson 28 End of The Good Food Guide James Pembroke 30 My stage fright Barry Humphries 32 MeToo hits classics Frances Wilson 33 Confessions of an MP’s wife and daughter Sasha Swire 39 My ten favourite rivers David Profumo

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith

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ABC circulation figure July-December 2020: 47,382

The last playboys page 20

9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 12 Olden Life: Who was Eric Maschwitz? Eleanor Allen 12 Modern Life: What is a nail house? Deborah Nash 27 Small World Jem Clarke 34 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 35 Country Mouse Giles Wood 37 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 38 School Days Sophia Waugh 38 Quite Interesting Things about ... July John Lloyd 40 God Sister Teresa 40 Funeral Service: Lord Rossmore James Hughes-Onslow 41 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 42 Readers’ Letters 45 I Once Met… Brian Sewell Penny Phillips 45 Memory Lane 59 My Favourite Book Jeremy Scott 60 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 60 Rant: En suite bathrooms Katrina Robinson 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

Greek myths cancelled! page 32

61 History David Horspool 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

82 Overlooked Britain: Hadlow Castle, Kent Lucinda Lambton 85 Taking a Walk: Lost in books in Hay-on-Wye Patrick Barkham 87 On the Road: Ted Dexter Louise Flind

Books

Arts

47 The Sea Is Not Made of Water, by Adam Nicolson Lucy Lethbridge 49 Hogarth: Life in Progress,

by Jacqueline Riding Matthew Sturgis 49 Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy, by Anne Sebba Andrew Lownie 51 Re-educated: How I Changed My Job, My Home, My Husband and My Hair, by Lucy Kellaway Kate Hubbard 53 Reading Walter de la Mare, edited by William Wootten Paul Dean 53 This Is Your Mind on Plants,

by Michael Pollan Charles Foster 55 Sorrow and Bliss, by Meg Mason Ysenda Maxtone Graham

63 Film: Elvis Presley: The Searcher Harry Mount 64 Theatre: The Deep Blue Sea William Cook 64 Radio Valerie Grove 65 Television Roger Lewis 66 Music Richard Osborne 67 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 68 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Travel 80 Holidays for hermits Nat Segnit 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

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 74 Digital Life Matthew Webster 74 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 76 Getting Dressed: Anne Robinson Brigid Keenan 79 Bird of the Month: Rock Dove John McEwen Oldie book orders ● Please email bookorders@theoldie.co.uk 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 Brief Encounter (1945) Allstar Picture Library/Alamy

The Oldie July 2021 3

The Old Un’s Notes in glasses’. Indeed, in 1956, she married Arthur Miller.

It turns out that women will make passes at men who wear glasses.

ROCKROSE PHOTOGRAPHY

Specs appeal – Marilyn Monroe

Have Oldie-readers who wear glasses ever thought where specs come from?

The answer lies in a new book, Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles, by Travis Elborough.

Elborough, himself bespectacled, traces the history of spectacles back to late-13th-century Florence. In a sermon at Santa Maria Novella church, given between 1303 and 1306, Friar Giordano da Pisa declared that it had been ‘20 years since the art of making spectacles, which have made for good vision, one of the most useful arts on earth, was discovered’.

Elborough takes his history up to Marilyn Monroe, who played the extremely shortsighted Pola Debevoise in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). In real life, Monroe was short-sighted but was rarely seen in specs. When she was offered the part in Millionaire, she was reluctant

to wear glasses on screen.

Still, she confessed in her autobiography that she had ‘always been attracted to men

How do you find new love during a pandemic?

The Belgians have the answer. They were granted a knuffelcontact – or ‘hug buddy’. Affection-starved Flemings used the knuffelcontact rule to visit their paramours without having to bubble with them indefinitely. It even became the Flemish word of 2020.

‘Flemings love to cuddle,’ said the Word of the Year competition’s judges.

Among this month’s contributors Sasha Swire (p33) is the daughter of Sir John Nott, MP for St Ives, and wife of Hugo Swire, MP for East Devon. Her book, Diary of an MP’s Wife, is an indiscreet account of life as a political plus-one.

Gareth Neame (p14) is a BAFTA, Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning TV and film producer and executive. His credits include Downton Abbey – the film version was number one in Britain and America.

Graham Little (p24) is a Northern Irish TV producer, writer and presenter. He has worked in television for 20 years. He’s represented Ireland at elephant polo and sumo-wrestling.

Earl Spencer (p10) wrote Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier, Killers of the King and To Catch a King: Charles II’s Great Escape. His new book, The White Ship, is out in paperback now.

Health authorities in neighbouring Netherlands advised citizens to arrange a seksbuddy (no translation needed) during its lockdown.

Meanwhile, in Italy, visits to congiunti were permitted – congiunti denoting anything from distant relatives to people with whom you have a close relationship.

So while we Brits were left fiddling our thumbs, things were a lot more congenial across the Channel. The hardest part about picking your knuffelcontact, seksbuddy or congiunto? Being sure you make the right choice.

It is now 60 years since the death, on 2nd July 1961, of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), best known for A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

Not all his works were universally applauded at first.

Of The Sun Also Rises (1926), one reviewer said that it ‘begins nowhere and ends in nothing’. The New York Times called To Have and to Have Not (1937) – later a classic wartime film starring Humphrey Bogart – ‘an empty book’, adding that ‘Mr Hemingway’s record as a creative writer would be stronger if it had never been published.’

Of Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), the Saturday Review of Literature said, ‘It is so dreadful … that it begins to have its own morbid fascination.’

Some of his fellow The Oldie July 2021 5

Important stories you may have missed Legendary ’80s chocolate bar wrapper found in Fairford Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard Man found with drugs hidden in intimate area Matlock Mercury

writers were also critical: ‘[Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary’ (William Faulkner); ‘As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it’ (Vladimir Nabokov).

His famous hairy-chested machismo was even called into doubt when he wrote that Scott Fitzgerald had a mouth that, ‘on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty [which] worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more’.

As for his patriotism, recently declassified FBI files revealed that he had once been a Soviet spy, codenamed Argo, though he apparently failed to send any useful information. Perhaps a

Not very old man and the sea: Ernest Hemingway

His intention was to defuse the situation with a joke: ‘And shall our great Union be broken up because of sausage?’

The answer was a resounding ‘Yes!’ The Union could indeed be broken up over a particular Lithuanian version of the sausage that the locals were

Rejected bike rack is coming to Stamford Stamford Mercury £15 for published contributions

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6 The Oldie July 2021

‘Hi, honey. I’m home-workplace hybrid!’

better codename would have been Argonaut.

The Government and the EU have been rowing over the transport of sausages from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

‘Sausages – British, Irish, French – are no laughing matter,’ says The Oldie’s cookery correspondent, Elisabeth Luard. ‘It’s not the first time politicians have misread the power of sausage.’

In 1991, the year when the Soviet Union crumbled, Mikhail Gorbachev addressed a crowd in Lithuania, where the natives were growing restless.

extremely attached to. There are some 3,000 varieties of sausage throughout the world; each one different, each a matter of national honour, each recipe defended to the death.

Francis King, author of 50 novels, died ten years ago on 3rd July 2011, aged 88.

Francis’s novel The Nick of Time (2002) made the Booker Prize long-list. He was president and vice-president of English PEN, chairman of the Society of Authors, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a judge of the Ackerley Prize for memoir,

and worked for the British Council in four countries. His last novel, Cold Snap (Arcadia 2009), featured German prisoners in postwar Oxford, and a romance between one prisoner, a musician, and an ex-SOE English female student.

His life was derailed in 1970 when, seeing an advance copy of A Domestic Animal (about unrequited, gay love), the man on whom one of the characters was based – despite having been changed into a woman named Dame Winifred Harcourt – recognised himself and sued, using Lord Hailsham as his barrister.

The offended man was former Labour MP Tom Skeffington-Lodge (1905-94).

The novel was withdrawn and, because Francis had to pay Hailsham’s legal costs, he lost his house in Brighton. He moved to London where he became the Telegraph’s drama critic for ten years and one of its fiction reviewers.

A Domestic Animal was rewritten, supervised closely

by Skeffington-Lodge, and was then hardly ever out of print.

When the Cardiff Singer of the World competition began in June, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, now aged 77, was once again one of the judges.

The Daily Telegraph published an interview with the great diva, in which she talked about her career, her family and her two homes, in New Zealand and Sussex.

But there was no mention of one of her favourite pastimes: fishing.

Years ago, The Oldie’s

Francis King (1923-2011), author of A Domestic Animal

Kitchen Garden correspondent, Simon Courtauld, stood at Covent Garden to hear Kiri sing the role of Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro.

‘In the summer of 2004, I was fishing in Iceland when – mirabile dictu – Kiri walked into the lodge where I was staying with a few friends,’ says Courtauld. ‘She and her ghillie/friend joined us for dinner, when all the talk was of fishing – of the salmon we had caught that day, the condition of the river, the prospects for tomorrow.

‘Clearly Kiri was an experienced fisherwoman and

Fisherman’s friend: Kiri Te Kanawa, a keen angler

she spoke enthusiastically of the trout fishing she enjoyed in New Zealand.

‘All I wanted to do was ask her to sing the Countess’s famous aria, Dove sono. But of course I never did.’

Widows are often airbrushed out of literature. But not in the new thriller by Oldie contributor Jane Thynne.

In Widowland, written under Thynne’s pseudonym, C J Carey, widows feature prominently. They star in a horrible, dystopian, Naziruled 1950s Britain, where they are classed as Friedas – short for ‘Friedhöfefrauen – cemetery women. These were widows and spinsters over 50 who had no children, no reproductive purpose, and who did not serve a man’. The widows live in ‘Widowlands encircled with fences, designed to enforce the curfew regulations that applied to Friedas’.

Not to worry – this is a very pro-widow book. Sadly, Thynne knows her material all too well: her husband, writer Philip Kerr, author of the Bernie Gunther historical detective thrillers, died in 2018, aged only 62.

Happy 100th birthday to Captain Jack Race, who celebrated his big day on 30th May. He is the American pilot who flew the Nazi General Alfred Jodl to Rheims on 6th May 1945 to surrender the Third Reich and thus end the Second World War in Europe.

‘In 1944, Jack Race was a US Army Air Force pilot,

‘Just plumping up his pillow’

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Grilled watermelon, prosciutto and feta on wholemeal artisan loaf with mint

delivering US generals to their destinations,’ his friend Geoffrey Holland says. ‘When Eisenhower personally gave Montgomery a C-47, he promised him a pilot, too.

So Jack joined the British 21st Army Group, a Pennsylvania Yankee in King George’s service.’

Captain Race flew British top brass back and forth along the front line as they advanced through France and Belgium. But his most important mission by far was flying into Germany with Montgomery’s chief of staff, Major-General ‘Freddie’ de Guingand, to collect Jodl and the German surrender delegation in Lüneburg and transport them to Rheims to sign the peace treaty.

On arrival in Lüneburg, the young pilot watched from the cockpit as De Guingand approached Jodl and the defeated general extended his hand.

‘I’m so glad that General Freddie shook his hand,’ Jack said. ‘He was extending his hand in peace.’

Jack was inspired to fly at the age of six as Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic solo for the first time in 1927.

After the war, Jack Race became a Pan Am jet captain.

When Captain Race retired from Pan Am, he became Chief Pilot for Project Orbis on a DC-8 jet converted into a state-of-the-art ophthalmic teaching hospital. For five years, he flew Western doctors to 30 developing countries to teach sight-saving skills. He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1981.

In the photograph, Jack is in front of his red Waco open-cockpit biplane during his 1989 recreation of Lindbergh’s epic 1927 goodwill tour around America.

Jack Race in 1989 with a 1940 UPF-7 biplane, Spirit of Orbis

It was a journey of 22,350 miles, with only a map and compass for navigation, with 78 stops in 48 states.

Charles Lindbergh was 25 when he completed it. Jack Race was 68. Happy birthday!

The Oldie July 2021 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Is there honey still for tea at Grantchester?

Yes – and it was served by Rupert Brooke superfan Mary Archer

‘I love him – I really do.’

I am taking tea with Mary Archer at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, and she is not talking about her husband, Jeffrey.

She is talking about the other man in her life: Rupert Brooke.

Dame Mary, 76, a chemist of distinction and chair of the Science Museum, is noted as a cool customer, but get her onto the subject of her favourite poet, who once lodged in the house where the Archers now live, and she throws caution to the wind.

W B Yeats described Brooke as the handsomest young man in England – ‘And he was,’ cries Mary with shining eyes.

‘And bisexual?’ I ask.

‘Irresistible,’ says Mary happily. She is infectiously passionate about Brooke – his looks, his personality, his letters, his diaries, his prose and travel writing as much as his poetry – and reckons he is underrated because people compare him with the other Great War poets, forgetting that Brooke died towards the beginning of the war, in April 1915, and did not write of its horrors but of the old England that was vanishing as the war took hold.

I have not read Mary’s last published book – Nanostructured and Photoelectrochemical Systems for Solar Photon Conversion – but I have suggested to her (seriously) what her next should be: Rupert Brooke: A Posthumous Autobiography, his own story told in his own words, edited and linked by his most devoted admirer.

I owe Dame Mary a favour because, along with Mr Motivator, she has changed my life. While he is transforming my posture (see below), she has transformed my productivity. After tea at the Old Vicarage (and, yes, there was still honey on the table, as well as cucumber sandwiches and home-made coffee cake) and before we go outside to admire the life-size statue of Brooke the Archers have put in

pride of place on a plinth in the driveway (onto which Mary jumps to tenderly put her arms around the effigy of her hero), she mentions, in passing, that she is now managing her time using the Pomodoro Technique.

Do you know it? I didn’t. It was developed by an Italian, Francesco Cirillo, in the late 1980s to help improve your work focus and stop you from needlessly ploughing on past the point of optimal productivity.

The technique uses a timer to break down work into 25-minute modules, separated by short breaks. Each module is known as a pomodoro, named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Cirillo used as a university student. After every pomodoro you take a five-minute break.

After four, you break for half an hour.

Following Mary’s lead, I’m doing it now and achieving twice as much in half the time. I kid you not.

Mr Motivator is a Jamaican-born TV fitness guru and I bumped into him the other day recording an episode of Michael McIntyre’s Saturday night gameshow, The Wheel. Mr Motivator (aka known as actor Derrick Evans), 68, moves (truly) like a man half that age.

He noticed my stooped back and was not impressed. ‘I can do something about that,’ he said.

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘My wife would be grateful.’

‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘that you are holding an orange between your shoulder blades. Hold it tight. Tighter! Now squeeze that orange as hard as you can until the juice is running down your

Mary is passionate about Brooke – his looks, personality, prose and poetry

spine. Do it every hour on the hour and you’ll have a straight back within a month.’ I’m doing better than that. I’m squeezing that orange every 25 minutes, in between my pomodori. I am now an inch taller than I was when you last saw me. Again, I kid you not.

As if my month hadn’t been extraordinary enough already, on 10th June, on what would have been the 100th birthday of the Duke of Edinburgh, I found myself raising a glass to the great man’s memory, seated at the very table on which, 100 years before, he first came into this world.

Prince Philip was born on a table because his mother’s doctor wanted her on a solid surface and not a bed for the birth. He was born on the island of Corfu because his mother, Alice, a greatgranddaughter of Queen Victoria, had married Prince Andrew, a son of the King of Greece. Prince Philip told me he had no sentimental feelings about either his birthing table or, to be frank, Greece. As he reminded me when I first began writing his biography, his Greek grandfather was assassinated and his father was driven into exile soon after Philip’s birth.

In exile, needing to raise money, Prince Andrew sold the contents of Mon Repos to an English buyer. The table (price 7,000 drachmas) ended up in the City boardroom of shipping brokers Howe Robinson, which is where I found it – in good nick: a handsome traditional dining table which, with extensions, could seat 24.

Prince Philip was always irritated by reports that said he’d been born on the kitchen table at Mon Repos. It was a line repeated by the BBC at the time of his death. ‘Journalists!’ snorted the Duke.

‘Why can’t they get anything right?’

Philip: The Final Portrait by Gyles Brandreth is out now (Coronet) The Oldie July 2021 9

Have we found theWhite Ship?

I joined an expedition to find the remains of a shipwreck off Normandy – the worst royal disaster in history earl spencer

To the south coast, for a quick flit across to the Normandy coast – precisely 77 years and two days after my father landed there on D-Day Plus One. I’m not a lieutenant in a Sherman tank, of course, but a historian on a mission: to try to locate anything that might remain of the White Ship – ‘the medieval Titanic’– whose tragic sinking changed the course of history by depriving the Normans of William Ætheling, the sole legitimate heir to the English throne. Carnage ensued, out of which the Plantagenets took possession of the crown for more than 300 years, till the Tudors saw them on their way.

19TH ERA/ALAMY

We set off for Normandy in June in glorious sunshine, with the Channel as still as a millpond. Three and a half hours later, we arrived off the port of Barfleur and saw the brooding Quillebœuf Rock that – 900 years ago last November – holed the White Ship.

The collision sent the 300 passengers (including three of Henry I’s children, and the flower of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy) and 50 crew tumbling into the icy waves: none of them knew how to swim, and only one man – a butcher – survived, by scrambling onto a piece of broken mast.

Our divers were somewhat better prepared, and equipped. We’d worked out where any wreckage from nine centuries back might lie. The divers soon found a three-yard strip of ancient shipwreck, with a combination of metalwork on it that would fit with a vessel made in 1100 or so. A cheer went up when they surfaced with the news.

We now await confirmation of the initial, extremely upbeat findings. It would be amazing to reconnect with the tragic vessel that brought England its worst-ever maritime disaster.

Meanwhile, we prepare for a return of day visitors to Althorp. Last year we were able to open up only the gardens. Now, we hope we can welcome back those who want to look around the interior of the house, on 60 days in July and August.

10 The Oldie July 2021

The White Ship sank in 1120, drowning three of Henry I’s children

My father taught me that those who choose to come to your home for an afternoon should be treated as welcome guests – not merely tolerated as paying visitors. It’s a thoroughly good point, and one we pass on to the house-opening team annually.

My father imparted another pearl of wisdom: ‘Long after they’ve forgotten the van Dycks, people who’ve visited Althorp will remember how good their cup of tea was, and how clean the loo was.’ He was again correct. The essentials of life never change.

Our most celebrated resident at Althorp – thanks to social media – is Tim the peacock. He has a younger would-be rival – Jim – but Tim is still very much in charge, his resplendent plumage on frequent display now, after the arrival of three young peahens.

None of them knew how to swim, and only one man – a butcher – survived

These reinforcements are good news for the guinea fowl and chickens; they were becoming increasingly nonplussed

by Tim’s whirring fantail, which he insisted on showing off to them when his pea-harem was low in numbers. It was all rather lost on the other breeds.

But Tim carried on regardless, betraying that his beauty isn’t matched by brains.

He frequently attacks his own reflection, when he spies it in the sheen of our car.

It’s an excuse not to have the thing overly clean, because Tim does proper damage to the paintwork – and to himself – when seeing off this mirage of a rival.

Returning to archaeological matters, I’ve long wanted to find the ancient village that existed at Althorp at the time of Domesday Book, in 1086. Ulla’s Thorpe was in the park here until, my grandfather would tell me, it was wiped out in the 1340s by the Black Death. With the apparent success of the dive for the White Ship, it’s time to get out the metal detector, and dig for this Anglo-Saxon settlement that gave Althorp its name.

Charles Spencer’s The White Ship is in paperback now (HarperCollins, £9.99)

Strokes of genius and bad luck

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I

t was 7th July 1981, and I was at Lord’s, thinking, not for the last time, ‘Funny business, cricket.’

One moment, the nation’s basking in the all-round splendours of your performance. The next, you’re a laughing-stock. Little did I know that I was about to meet the embodiment of this boom-and-bust cycle.

To the side of the pavilion there was a small writing room. I was sitting there alone, smoking a small cigar, when the second of the summer’s Tests with Australia ended in a draw.

It was Ian Botham’s 12th match as captain of England, and he hadn’t won any of them. People were now calling for him – once the golden boy of cricket – to be sacked. There were a few boos from the crowd as he trudged off the field.

About five minutes later, the door to the room opened with the force of a gas-main explosion. Botham himself, still in his whites, strode in and sat down heavily on the edge of a desk immediately in front of me. He had a small beard and a gold chain round his neck, and looked a bit red in the face. The first thing he said was ‘Where are the others, then?’

When I politely told him I had no idea, he looked at me for a moment and asked if I had another cigar. I did.

‘I’ll buy you one later,’ Botham said, now more affable.

We sat there for several minutes, both smoking away. Eventually a conversation broke out; first about wine and then about the Channel Islands – where, coincidentally, he later bought a home. By now, we were getting on famously.

After about ten minutes, Chris ‘Crash’ Lander from the Daily Mirror poked his head round the door, shouted ‘He’s in here!’ and half a dozen other cricket correspondents quickly followed

him in. After a minute of increasingly acrimonious to-and-fro, Botham, still smoking my cigar, announced, ‘You’ve got your wish and I’m not going to carry on on a match-by-match basis any more.’

He was particularly unhappy that when he’d walked back to the pavilion after being out for a duck, no one there had deigned to look him in the eye or even mutter, ‘Bad luck.’ One tabloid journalist asked, ‘In fairness, Ian, what should they have done? Cheered?’

That got another conversation going, and the man from the Sun asked Botham if he thought he was even worth his place in the team as a player. For a moment, I thought violence might break out in the Lord’s Pavilion. Harsh words followed.

In the end, Botham walked out and we went upstairs to hear Alec Bedser, the chairman of selectors, confirm that he and his colleagues had decided to make a change in the England captaincy, but that ‘We still believe in Ian as a player.’

That confidence would be amply justified a fortnight later at the Headingley Test. Botham took 6 for 95 in the first innings and scored 50. With England forced to follow on, Botham scored 149 not out and Willis took 8 for 43 to dismiss Australia for only 111.

England won by 18 runs .

About 30 years later, I rang Botham to ask him about Imran Khan, about whom I was writing a book. In 1996, the two great all-rounders had been adversaries in a High Court libel action, which didn’t go well from Botham’s point of view. The phone call ended abruptly, and I never had the chance to remind him that he still owed me a panatella.

Botham on his way to a winning 149 not out

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To buy a copy without a sub call 020 7436 8801 The Oldie July 2021 11

who was Eric Maschwitz?

Eric Maschwitz (1901-1969) was one of the most versatile and influential people in 20th-century British entertainment. I doubt we’ll ever see his like again.

In 1934, under his pseudonym, Holt Marvell, he wrote These Foolish Things with those lovely lines ‘A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces, An airline ticket to romantic places’.

He went on to write the lyrics for two other atmospheric and sophisticated standards, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and Room Five Hundred and Four.

Born in Birmingham, Eric Maschwitz – a product of the Cambridge Footlights – was also a talented actor. He wrote book and lyrics for – and also directed – many reviews, musicals and operettas for the West End stage. You might recall Goodnight Vienna (turned into a film starring Jack Buchanan and Anna Neagle), Balalaika and Zip Goes a Million with George Formby. He translated French comedies – and wrote detective novels.

His intriguing love life further reflected his pick-and-mix inclinations. Married to comedy actress Hermione Gingold, he was romantically linked with the celebrated American-Chinese film star Anna May Wong and the nightclub singer Jean Ross (inspiration for Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin, immortalised on screen by Liza Minelli in Cabaret). Each

what is... a nail house?

Don’t confuse a nail house with a nail parlour. A nail house is an old house that survives as new building development goes on all around it.

The name – from the Chinese dīng zi hù – is used by China’s property developers to describe the home of a resident who refuses to relocate and make way for a construction. They stubbornly hold on to their house like a nail sticking up in a plank of wood – hard to hammer down and very visible. So visible, in fact, that startling photographs 12 The Oldie July 2021

Maschwitz wrote These Foolish Things

London and New York. After the war, he took part in the requisitioning of Radio Hamburg and was instrumental in setting up the Overseas Recorded Broadcasting Service. In 1952, he became chairman of the Songwriters’ Guild of Great Britain.

He rejoined the BBC in 1958 as Head of TV Light Entertainment. In 1962, while serving as assistant to the BBC’s Controller of Programmes, he floated an intriguing idea: what about exploring the possibilities of devising a new sciencefiction series?

And so he became one of the founding fathers of Doctor Who. In summing up his life, Maschwitz declared himself ‘a man who had worked too hard at too many things’.

But who could blame him when the rapidly developing world of entertainment was crying out for assorted talents, and he could supply them in spades? Child in a sweetie shop springs to mind.

And although – because largely he worked behind the scenes, rather than centre stage – he hasn’t become a household name (which he obviously regretted), his legacy, like ‘Gardenia perfume on the pillow’, has hauntingly lingered on.

The passion, haphazard genius, dedication and sheer have-a-go verve he applied to the British entertainment industry – and life itself – seems not only extraordinary in retrospect, but impossible to repeat. Sadly, no box these days would be big enough to accommodate another Eric Maschwitz.

Eleanor Allen

exist online of lone houses marooned in muddy building sites, defiant outposts against the moneymen building the shopping mall or apartment block.

Nail houses began popping up in 21st-century China after the passing of two laws, in 2004 and 2007, recognising private property rights and the right to compensation, legislation inconceivable under Chairman Mao. Before then, property-owners had little protection. The building of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River from 1994 to 2006 displaced 1.24 million residents and flooded 13 cities, 140 towns and 1,352 villages.

There were claims that the compensation owed to farmers was never paid.

Thanks to social media, nail houses are difficult to conceal and can be lucrative for owners holding out for a generous offer.

The most famous is the Wu family house in Chongqing. In 2004, a planned sixstorey shopping mall in the city meant that 280 families had to move; the Wu family refused, despite the 3.5 million yuan (£390,000 today) promised to them.

The developers cut off the Wus’ power supply and water, and dug a 33-foot-deep pit round their house. The Wus responded by flying a Chinese flag from their roof and chatting to anyone who’d listen, including the press. Eventually, another compensation offer arrived, and the family left on the afternoon of

of the three speculated whether she had been his muse for These Foolish Things.

A script-writing stint in Hollywood for MGM led to his co-nomination for a Best Screenplay Academy Award in 1939 for Goodbye Mr Chips.

Maschwitz also had a day job, in a shabby, shared office at the BBC. He edited the Radio Times and then got promoted to Director of Variety, introducing dance bands to the airwaves, along with popular programmes such as In Town Tonight. While working at the BBC, he sat down one Sunday morning (fortified by ‘sips of coffee and vodka’) and dashed off the lyrics for These Foolish Things before midday.

In the Second World War, he distinguished himself in intelligence in

2nd April 2007. By evening, the Chongqing nail house was gone.

In a country whose architecture for centuries did not possess a single nail, the nail has suddenly gained significance.

Nail houses are synonymous with the David-and-Goliath struggle between the little person and the authorities, between the antagonistic forces of progress and tradition, and between the free market and a Communist regime.

The existence of nail houses shows a positive development in law-making and awareness of one’s rights in China, as well as the courage to defend them. They are also a reminder of how much history, heritage and sense of place we flatten in the name of economic prosperity. The distinctive alleyways of Beijing (hutongs) have all but vanished from the city.

In London there are nail houses, too.

A former jewellery-and-clock shop on Mile End Road, Spiegelhalter & Son, has been saved from demolition twice: once in the 1920s and again in 2015.

Living on the edge: half-demolished nail house, Hunan province, China

Architect and writer Dr Harriet Harriss says, ‘Much of modern development in London and elsewhere looks the same. It could be anywhere. It would be ironic if

Spiegelhalter’s, a building that Hitler couldn’t destroy during the Blitz, was removed for ever now.’

Deborah Nash

IMAGINECHINA LIMITED/ALAMY

Today’s school reports could try harder We know Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. But did he write him a school report?

Did it say, ‘He is always daydreaming of building empires and must focus more if he is to pass algebra this summer’?

Unfortunately, no record exists.

School reports do survive from the early-19th century, though. At King’s College, Canterbury, Speech Day programmes from the 1840s printed the names of boys in order of their exam results and these results appeared in the local paper. At Eton, housemasters sent a letter to parents at the end of each term, although these didn’t have a standard format until after 1850. Called tutors’ letters, they are still written today.

The Elementary Education Act (1880), which made school compulsory for five- to ten-year-olds, triggered the growth of state education, and reporting exam results grew. Commentary was added. Teachers were encouraged to summarise their pupils’ character and progress; to tell it as they saw it, in their own hand and with a classical reference or two, for good measure.

Then, a caustic comment was the teacher’s chance to drive a stake through the heart of the classroom brat or signal it was time to save on the school fees. It was a chance to say something an exam result couldn’t. Now, heads censor comments that might give offence or trigger a lawsuit. Or, worse, a knuckle sandwich.

The traditional report is almost dead.

Squeezed by political correctness, some schools don’t use them at all. Surely it’s right that an idle child be told, ‘The locust years have taken their toll’; and the arrogant taught humility: ‘If he is half as good as he says he is, he will be a Nobel Laureate by the summer term.’

The death of the old school report diminishes society. Comedians are losing a rich source of one-liners and poetic put-downs. Journalists and historians are losing biographical insight.

Worse, we’re losing memories. An A grade is OK. But it doesn’t give you the insight gained from a beautiful sentence like this: ‘An idle boy with just enough wit

to pass the exam.’ An exam mark can’t resurrect an entire summer as elegantly as my tutor’s comment ‘Every spare moment he spends in his cricket whites, his love of the game unspoilt this year by Jupiter Fluvius.’

Nor can it remind you what a brat you were, as this report did for a friend: ‘He is not content to remain unheard in the form room: his views are soon known. He also has an annoying habit of being sycophantic when he is behaving.’

Let’s save the old school report. Here’s my plan. First, create a National Archive for School Reports (motto: ‘I didn’t get where I am today without a bad school report’). Secondly, establish a hall of fame to celebrate teachers proficient in old-style report-writing. Thirdly, free teachers from the threat of litigation for comments written in school reports or made at a PTA meeting. Lastly, recruit retired schoolteachers to tutor the new teachers in the ancient art of report-writing.

To get the campaign rolling, I’m calling on Oldie-readers to dig out their old school reports and send them to me.

I’m writing a book about the school report and will include the best material in the book. With your help, we can resurrect the old school report.

Do send your reports to editorial@ theoldie.co.uk for consideration by the headmaster.

James Thellusson The Oldie July 2021 13

Petrifying: Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Directed by Ronald Neame, it features Gareth, his grandson

Downton Abbey producer Gareth Neame follows in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great-grandmother, a silent-movie star

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t he Royal Command Performance of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969, my late grandfather Ronald Neame (1911-2010) was admonished by the Duke of Edinburgh.

As the film’s director, he had been instructed only hours earlier to cut a scene deemed to be unsuitable. The scene in question involved the actor Robert Stephens, in the role of art master Teddy Lloyd, and three of Miss Brodie’s girls admiring a sketch of a nude male torso. It wasn’t the image that was thought inappropriate, 14 The Oldie July 2021

but Stephens’s dialogue which involved the words ‘pectoral muscles’.

‘Do you think we’re all children?’ barked the Duke as he passed my grandfather in the receiving line.

Brodie is one of the most celebrated films in Ronnie Neame’s long and illustrious career as a director, producer, writer and cinematographer. In one of her most memorable performances, Maggie Smith received her first Academy Award.

The film also marked my first foray into showbusiness. Another featured painting was of Teddy’s family: to expose

his obsession with Jean Brodie, his wife and five children all resemble her. The children are depicted in descending order of age with me at the end sitting on a potty. As the producer of Downton Abbey, I have a working connection with Dame Maggie that continues over half a century later.

But the Neame film dynasty doesn’t begin with Ronnie Neame; rather with his parents. His mother was Ivy Close (1890-1968), the Edwardian beauty queen who won the Daily Mirror’s 1908 competition to find the world’s most

PICTORIAL PRESS /ALAMY

My film family’s greatest hits

beautiful woman. Stuart Elwin ‘Senny’ Neame was the youngest and certainly the most successful photographer in London (‘If it’s a Neame, it’s you at your best’) and had been engaged to photograph the 25 finalists. They married shortly afterwards.

Then, as now, modelling led to acting – while Senny tried his hand at the new art of cinema, directing his wife in several films, such as the eight-minute-long The Lady of Shalott in 1912. He shot on location and had a daylight studio in Walton-on-Thames, where he built the sets himself, on a revolving platform so that the sun would always come from the same direction.

In a career move that still happens over a century later, Ivy went to make films in America, but before Tinseltown became dominant. Joining the Kalem Company in Jacksonville, Florida, she worked alongside Oliver Hardy – known to her as ‘Babe’. It is her leading role in Abel Gance’s 1927 masterpiece La Roue that placed her firmly in the archives for ever. On a DVD, I have watched a great-grandmother I never knew as a movie star of her day. At a total running time of seven hours, it is quite a commitment.

When Senny was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1923, in his thirties, money became tight. Young Ronnie was removed from school in his early teens and sent to work. He arrived at Elstree in 1927, soon working for the young director Alfred Hitchcock, already considered a genius and already corpulent.

Following his father’s footsteps into cinematography, Ronnie was on the set of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), the first British talkie, which famously started production as a silent film.

Learning his craft on ‘quota quickies’, by the Second World War Neame was one of the leading cinematographers in Britain, with credits such as Major Barbara (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), as well as several George Formby pictures, extraordinarily popular at that time.

Noël Coward was encouraged to make films to help the war effort. He surrounded himself with the most talented young filmmakers of the time: editor David Lean and cinematographer Ronald Neame. Their first collaboration was one of Britain’s most acclaimed war films, In Which We Serve (1942). It was filmed in a tank at Denham Studios, with steel to build HMS Torrin made possible by an intervention by Louis Mountbatten. Coward had to abandon ship, diving into said tank (‘There’s dysentery with every mouthful’).

Family album (from top): In Which We Serve, Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, I Could Go On Singing, This Sporting Life, Monsignor Quixote, Downton Abbey the movie

Ronnie went on to photograph This Happy Breed (1944) and Blithe Spirit (1945), with Coward, who became his mentor and godfather to my father, Christopher.

Sent by Arthur Rank on a fact-finding mission to Hollywood before the end of the war, Ronnie really was asked by a studio boss – like something out of Mad Men – if he wanted a blonde or a brunette secretary. While learning all about the latest Hollywood techniques, he was not averse to a spot of industrial espionage. Britain was unable to afford the state-of-the art Mitchell camera, which had revolutionised film production. Discovering that it had not been patented outside the US, Ronnie carefully disassembled one and copied it on paper, to have it manufactured when he returned home.

Forming their production company Cineguild, Lean and Neame next made three extraordinary films in a row, films which to this day dominate the lists of greatest British films of all time. Ronnie produced Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946). Ronnie also co-wrote both screenplays, for which he got Academy Award nominations. This was followed by Oliver Twist (1948).

As a director, Ronald Neame delivered some of the most beloved films of the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Card (1952), The Million Pound Note (1953), The Horse’s Mouth (1958), The Man Who Never Was (1956) and his personal favourite, Tunes of Glory (1960). Alec Guinness and John Mills feature prominently in most of these films, and Ronnie always told me that everything he knew about acting came from these two stars. He worked in musicals too, directing Scrooge (1970) and I Could Go On Singing (1963), which was Judy Garland’s remarkable final performance.

Most of this was before my time, though. When my grandmother took me to the Odeon Leicester Square, aged six, to see his Poseidon Adventure (1972), they were already separated.

The Oldie July 2021 15

He was living in Beverly Hills, where he spent the last 40 years of his life.

The first of a genre of 1970s disaster movies, Poseidon was quite a remarkable spectacle at the time. Visual effects not yet having been invented, everything – including the entire set turning upside down – had to be done for real and in camera on the sound stage. Here his years of training as a cinematographer were invaluable. Poseidon remained one of the highest-grossing films ever until Steven Spielberg came along at the end of the decade.

Although Ronnie was a rather distant figure to us until we were old enough to travel to Los Angeles to see him, my father, Christopher (1942-2011), had followed him into film. He started out in the camera department on films such as This Sporting Life (1963). During my earliest years, he worked on a slew of horror films with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee at Hammer.

As a producer, he was influential in 16 The Oldie July 2021

Top: Ronald Neame with Ivy Close. Right: with Judy Garland, I Could Go On Singing (1963). Left: Monsignor Quixote (1985): Leo McKern, R Bennett, Graham Greene, Alec Guinness and Christopher Neame

bringing film techniques to TV drama, which had previously been a wobbly-set sort of affair, made in multi-camera studios. At Euston Films, he started to make TV series like films: on location, with film directors and with a single film camera. This is still the way we work to this day, and there is very little difference between how one makes a movie and how one makes a high-end drama.

He formed a strong producing partnership with John Hawkesworth making TV series such as Danger UXB (1979). I would often accompany my father on set and was lucky enough to go to Kenya aged 13 during the summer holidays to see the filming of The Flame Trees of Thika (1981), which starred Downton Abbey’s Dr Clarkson, David Robb.

When I wasn’t with my father on set, I would go at weekends to Elstree Studios, where Ronnie had worked decades earlier and where my stepfather had the catering business. The late 1970s and 1980s were a boom time, with many Hollywood blockbusters being shot in London because of the exchange rate.

I remember going onto the stage of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and realising that a terrifying snake pit consisted of hundreds of rubber snakes and only a few real ones, brought in by a specialist.

I remember walking onto another stage that was Yoda’s planet, before the world knew who Yoda was. Oh, and I once served Brian Blessed an ice cream after his ‘Gordon’s alive’ sequence in Flash Gordon (1980).

I did feel a sense of duty in following the three generations before me. I was lucky to form a very strong relationship with my grandfather as I got older and he would always counsel me, ‘Don’t come into this stupid business.’ But I remember him being covertly delighted when I did.

The thing is that I was so familiar and at ease with this world. Conversations at mealtimes would be about actors, filmmakers or the various projects my father or my grandfather was hoping to get off the ground.

When first taught about Graham Greene at school, I said to my English master that he’d come round to our flat for bangers and mash the previous weekend. Christopher was also a screenwriter: his adaptation of Monsignor Quixote (1985) starred my grandfather’s long-standing collaborator Alec Guinness. And Greene craved old-fashioned British nosh when back home from Antibes. From then on, the same schoolmaster used to refer to him as ‘your mate Graham Greene’.

Ronnie’s death in 2010 at the age of 99 fell on the final day of shooting the first season of Downton Abbey. So he never did get to see it. I know he would have enjoyed the reference in one of the episodes to his mother, Ivy, whom two of the servants went to the cinema one night to see. My father sadly died only a year later.

In Los Angeles soon afterwards, I was the recipient of a Producers Guild of America award. As I made a brief acceptance speech, I noticed the great and the good sitting in front of me – Spielberg and Scorsese among them. I thanked director Ronald Neame and producer Christopher Neame, my mentors, without whom I would never even have been standing there.

I guarded Albert Speer Adrian Greaves, the last surviving soldier to guard Hitler’s architect in Berlin, learnt Eva Braun’s secret from the lying charmer

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n Berlin in 1961, aged 18, serving with the Royal Sussex Regiment, I was detailed for my first two-day duty as guard commander at the nearby gloomy Spandau Prison.

It housed the last three Nazi war criminals: Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess; the Hitler Youth leader, Baldur von Shirach; and Hitler’s architect and Armaments Minister, Albert Speer. I ended up guarding Speer for three years.

I was particularly interested in meeting Hess. In 1941, Hess flew to Scotland in a misguided attempt to make peace with Britain. My father, a recently married artillery officer, was on a course in Wales; his wife was a typist in one of the ministries in London. He was unexpectedly detailed to escort Hess to Surrey for medical reasons – afterwards, the newly married pair met up and, nine months later, I was born.

The British prison governor at Spandau showed me round the prison. I requested his permission to speak to Hess. We reached the cell corridor just as the duty warder was unlocking the prisoners’ cells. It was a short walk from their bleak cells to the extensive prison garden for their afternoon of ‘free time’.

The garden and the prisoners’ activities were under the watchful eyes of my soldiers manning the six observation posts.

Slowly, the three prisoners, dressed in ill-fitting prison uniforms, emerged and stood motionless in front of their cells.

On noticing the governor, they shuffled to attention. The governor nodded to me. I stepped forward and introduced myself to Rudolph Hess with the sentence that started my relationship with Albert Speer: ‘Herr Hess, without your peace-seeking flight to Scotland, I would not have been born. So thank you.’

Both Hess and Shirach ignored me and sloped off. In perfect English, Speer paused and invited me to join him in the prison garden. That was the beginning of my three-year association with him.

Thereafter, to advance my secret conversations with Speer, I volunteered

Bunkered: Eva Braun and Albert Speer

to ‘fill in’ when guard commander vacancies occurred.

Speer was amused that I was such a young army officer and teasingly suggested I should still be at school. He took a shine to me, and I would learn much from him – about his rise to power, his attitude to Hitler’s henchmen, and his own appointment as Hitler’s personal architect before he became the Third Reich’s Armaments Minister.

Despite our disparate ages and positions, he clearly enjoyed our conversations, which I recorded at the time in an old schoolbook. His attitude to me was always friendly and courteous, and he spoke excellent English. Hess and Shirach continued to ignore me.

Speer fascinated me. He always denied any knowledge of the brutality of Hitler’s Third Reich or the cruel fate of German Jews and peoples of neighbouring German-occupied countries. Millions were displaced to Germany as forced labourers in inhuman conditions. Many in Speer’s factories were beaten, shot out of hand or sent to concentration camps, mysteriously without Speer’s knowledge.

Speer frequently reminded me that any challenge to Hitler’s orders risked arrest, along with that of family members and work colleagues – and likely their execution.

He sometimes took me by surprise,

especially when he admitted his intense long-standing relationship with Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress. Braun was vivaciously attractive as a young woman.

For several years, at Hitler’s request, she had accompanied the Speers on their holidays, to give Eva ‘a break’. Frau Speer was well aware that her husband spent long weekends at Hitler’s Alpine retreat, often in the sole company of lonely Eva. Hitler thought Speer was a safe companion for her during Hitler’s constant late-night military briefings.

Speer confided in me about another mystery that has always confused Speer experts. Why, having flown from Hamburg to Hitler’s bunker in Berlin to make his farewell to Hitler, did Speer again fly, two days later, back to Berlin just before Hitler’s suicide? The answer was that he tried to save Eva Braun. Even after he’d plied her with champagne, she refused.

Another bombshell concerned Speer’s urgent post-capture interrogation by senior Americans when he proved that conventional bombing would take years to defeat Japan. He advocated they drop an atom bomb; they did. Still, Speer always lied. He denied war profiteering, but his death revealed his valuable collection of stolen paintings, which his daughter gave to an Israeli charity.

Our conversations, always in the prison garden, were conducted in both English and German. Speer was keen to improve my linguistic skills which, under his tutorship, enabled me to pass the Civil Service German interpreters’ examination at my first attempt. On leaving the army in 1964, I became an interpreter working in Germany.

In 1970, I joined Kent Police, reaching the rank of superintendent. After retirement, I qualified as a clinical psychologist. Aged nearly 80, I am now the last person alive who regularly spoke with Speer in prison.

Dr Adrian Greaves is author of Albert Speer: Escaping the Gallows (Pen & Sword) The Oldie July 2021 19

Charlie Methven mourns his dashing former father-in-law, Luis ‘the Bounder’ Basualdo, last of a dying breed

RIP the playboys of the western world

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here are some words that defy too much definition.

Only the other day, I was trying in vain to explain the concept of cheekiness to a Latin American friend. The dictionary explanation – ‘Being slightly rude, but often in a funny way’ – just didn’t quite capture it.

And so it is with ‘playboy’, an almost quaint term – very rarely heard these days, but still in currency when I started my career as a gossip columnist in the mid-1990s.

All of us following the London social scene knew, somehow, exactly what ‘playboy’ meant and it wasn’t the bone-dry OED effort: ‘A wealthy man who spends his time enjoying himself.’

No, it was something more mysterious and glamorous than that. A touch of disapprobation often accompanied its use, together with the envious implication that this was a man who was perhaps just a little too accomplished in his dealings with the fairer sex.

A playboy was an adventurer. A lounge lizard, yes, but also a man of action when the moment required. He needed style, courage, charm and a carefree attitude towards everything and especially money – preferably somebody else’s.

Rather than dive back into dusty dictionaries, let me offer you Wikipedia’s summary of the life of Porfirio Rubirosa (1909-65): ‘Dominican diplomat, race car driver, soldier and polo player. He made his mark as an international playboy for his jet-setting lifestyle and his legendary sexual prowess with women. His five spouses included two of the richest

20 The Oldie July 2021

women in the world.’ Most of us would settle for that.

Rubirosa – the doyen of his trade – died in 1965, but in the three decades that followed, the roulette tables of Monte Carlo, the slopes of St Moritz and the banquettes of Annabel’s played host to plenty of his successors.

One such was Argentine playboy adventurer Luis Sosa Basualdo (19452020). Known to English society as ‘the Bounder’, Basualdo, who died in December, having somehow made it to 75, was my father-in-law for the ten years I was married to his daughter, Charlotte.

Luis, as I knew him (though his real name was Hector Sosa), arrived in England from Argentina in the late sixties with not much more than a couple of polo ponies, a beaming smile and a pawnable diamond he claimed had been given to him by an older lover in Palm Beach.

Like Flashman’s, his talents were languages, horses and women. Over the following, glittering decade, he eloped with one of the country’s wealthiest heiresses (Lucy Pearson, daughter of Viscount Cowdray) and befriended aristocrats, business moguls, the Prince of Wales (who went on to play for Basualdo’s polo team, the Golden Eagles), while bedding their wives and girlfriends.

He became a staple of Fleet Street’s diary columns – indeed, it was the Mail’s Nigel Dempster who gave him the ‘Bounder’ soubriquet that would stay with him for the rest of his tumultuous life, even as he left wives, lovers, cash and friends in his wake.

As a father-in-law, Luis was

disarmingly uncensorious, often adding a rider to any advice he offered me, ‘Who am I to say, being a cad and bounder?’

On a trip to Argentina shortly after I had married his daughter, we arranged to meet him at the national polo stadium (Basualdo had played the game professionally, with a handicap of seven at his best).

During drinks after a match, one of his cronies asked me if Luis had a girlfriend

at present. Overhearing, but mishearing, Luis thought that his pal had asked me if I had a girlfriend. A rare moment of Basualdo outrage ensued.

‘Have some respect,’ he advised the crony, gripping him by his blazer’s lapels.

‘This is my daughter’s husband. They only just got married. In a few months, maybe he will have girlfriends, but this is only a few weeks in!’

In classic playboy style, Luis could lay claim to a lengthy list of heiress ex-wives.

‘My speciality is the really crazy ones,’ he once confided to me. ‘I know how to make them even crazier.’

He also had a bizarre spell in the 1980s as what can be described only as Christina Onassis’s gigolo. His

‘England in the 1970s was a paradise,’ he said.

‘After that, it all just became about money’ ‘Rich men get bored, and I amuse them,’ he once told me frankly, adding, almost as an afterthought, ‘and, of course, I procure the prettiest girls for them as well.’

Rubirosa had died in a car accident aged 56 in 1965, crashing his silver Ferrari 250 GT cabriolet into a horse-chestnut tree in the Bois de Boulogne, after a night out in Paris

he tried to do periodically. He was occasionally short of money.

In any case, though, as Luis Basualdo’s peak passed, so the age of the playboy withered gently and quietly on the vine alongside him.

One of the Bounder’s favourite yarns was how he left Britain for the last time.

Staying at the Ritz, he was tipped off that the Met was after him for accessing a girlfriend’s bank account illegally. Wearing a tweed cap, he scarpered by train to Glasgow and Stranraer, then by boat to Belfast, train to Dublin and plane to Buenos Aires. An Argentine court found him not guilty, but his subsequent enforced absence from London left him deeply sad.

‘England in the 1970s was a paradise,’

celebrating a big polo win. In truth, that was the right age and way for true playboys to bow out, while the smile was still white, the jokes and connections up to date, virility intact.

For all the remaining charm and style, Luis’s last 20 years – the time I knew him, in fact – were a twilit, melancholy time. The heiresses were less wealthy and even crazier. His own peer group had mostly died or sobered up – as indeed

he once told me, wistfully. ‘After that, it all just became about money.’ Seventies London wasn’t a paradise for many, but it was indeed the last golden age of the playboy. Thatcher’s meritocracy, Blair’s Cool Britannia and the eruptions of the digital age have left the old class structures the adventurer playboys fed off obsolete and near powerless.

Not many will mourn the loss, but we shall not see their like again.

EVERETT COLLECTION/PRINT COLLECTOR/ALAMY

Opposite: Luis Basualdo at polo and with ex-wife, Hon Lucy Pearson.

Clockwise from above: Porfirio Rubirosa with Zsa Zsa Gábor in a Hollywood nightclub, c 1953; on the polo field; kindred spirit Flashman; the Ferrari 250 GT in which Rubirosa died, Bois de Boulogne, July 1965

stipulation for accepting the role, apart from a lavish retainer, was that he was allowed to bring his then girlfriend along for the ride. This odd ménage à trois cruised the Mediterranean on Christina’s yacht for months at a time.

When in London and Paris, the Bounder was often seen in the company of business tycoons such as Gianni Agnelli, James Hanson and Gordon White.

The Oldie July 2021 21

On Marcel Proust’s 150th anniversary, A N Wilson praises his masterpiece, an exquisite comedy with no parallel

The book that changed the world

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hose of us who survived lockdown might not have been aware that the idea for it was invented by a Parisian professor of medicine, who coined the phrase cordon sanitaire to fight the typhoid that devastated 19th-century European cities.

It was Dr Adrien Proust whom we have to thank for the containment and eventual elimination of this terrible plague. In À la recherche du temps perdu, we realise that the narrator’s father is a distinguished man of medicine, but of far more interest is the fact that his family apartment is next door to that of the Duchesse de Guermantes.

Proust is, without any rival, the greatest novelist of the twentieth century and we can all rejoice in his existence. It is 150 years since he was born on 10th July 1871. If you have never read him, do so. Some people are deterred by the length of his novel, but if you put all the Bertie Wooster stories end to end they would take up more room on the shelf.

Proust is as funny as Wodehouse. He is the classic example of art being the philosopher’s stone which turns all to gold. If you had met this prickly, vain little man, you might well have found him tiresome, snobbish and camp.

When Harold Nicolson met him, Proust asked, ‘Give me an imitation of an English duchess. She is standing at the top of a staircase welcoming her guests. How does she display, with some subtle flicker of eyelash, some tone of voice, that she recognises that some of her guests are Jewish; some are commoner than others?’

Nicolson primly, and surely inaccurately, replied that no English lady would allow such distinctions to 22 The Oldie July 2021

‘show’ in her social behaviour. Proust incredulously squealed, ‘Vous vous moquez de moi!’

Yet the funny little (five-foot-six) snob, who, until he reached middle age, had accomplished very little except his national service in the army (which he had greatly enjoyed – all those gorgeous vicomtes in uniform) and the composition of articles for Le Figaro in purplish prose, was carrying within him, like the Madonna at the Visitation, a world-changing phenomenon: a book without any parallels or rivals.

By the autumn of 1907, when he was 36, all the ingredients were in place to allow Proust to begin writing his masterpiece, with which he had been toying for years. He had undergone a deep bereavement – the death of his mother. He had plunged into the depths of despair, and suffered appallingly from debilitating asthma. He had become disillusioned with lovers, and was determined, whatever chance sexual encounters he might have, with waiters, clerks and bellboys, not to waste time on any more romantic friendships with young aristocrats. He was just ill enough to need constantly to cosset himself, and just well enough to be able, occasionally, to surface for some jolly social life.

Even this, for the most part, however, was now behind him. He was in search of a Gothic town in northern France where he could reconstruct some childhood

Proust is, without any rival, the greatest novelist of the twentieth century

‘memories’. And, for the purpose, he had found a faithful chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, who whizzed him about in the back of a car, scattering rabbits from the hedgerows and lacily coiffed old peasant women from their street corners, as Combray, and the childhood of his narrator began to take shape.

Moreover, the newspapers were full of a bizarre scandal which, in its way, attracted Proust’s imagination even more vividly than the two great cases of the 1890s that were of such scalding private significance to him – the trials of Oscar Wilde and Captain Dreyfus.

A fundamental of Proust’s art was concealment. Though there was no secret that his mother was Jewish, the narrator of his ‘autobiographical’ novel is not, and the way in which the Dreyfus affair revealed so many fault lines in French society is one of the grand themes of À la recherche. Another, of course, is the fact that nearly all the males in the story, with the mysterious exception of the narrator, turn out to be homosexual, many of them promiscuously so.

The 1907-8 case that Proust found so imaginatively suggestive was that of Prince Philipp von Eulenberg, an intimate of the German Emperor, who sued a journalist for the imputation that he was an ‘invert’.

The subsequent trial, in which the journalist produced as witnesses a boatman and a milkman who had experienced intimacy with the Prince, revealed the peculiarity of homosexuality, and high society’s hidden world. The Emperor himself (Kaiser Willy) was probably the only person in the Court who did not notice that he had surrounded himself by what was called a circle of Knights of the Round Table.

ALBUM/ALAMY

Marcel Proust: À la recherche du temps perdu is a great moral education

This was the finishing touch to what began as Proust’s portrait of his friend the aristocratic poet Robert de Montesquiou, but was to grow into one of the most magnificent comic creations in all literature, the Baron de Charlus. We first meet him as the lover of Odette, the wife of M Swann; and the narrator’s innocent, middle-class family at Combray all speak of Charlus as an incurable ladies’ man. By the end of the great sequence, we know better.

We know that when Charlus is seen looking melancholy in the corner of grand salons in the Faubourg St Germain, and when the society hostesses believe he is pining with love for one of them, he is in fact yearning with heartfelt adoration for a tram conductor, or secretly impatient to take off to the

brothel where he is known to the proprietors as ‘the man in chains’.

Every time we meet Charlus, we are treated to further layers of complexity in his fascinating character, his pride in the ancient lineage of the Guermantes, his devotion to St Michael the Archangel and his yearning – when the First World War breaks out – for the victory of the more aristocratic Germany over the sordid, Jew-infested bourgeoisie of France.

These are all master touches.

And Charlus is only one of the many, many characters Proust creates. The more we know of his life, the more we realise that À la recherche is truly a construct and not, as might be naively supposed, a mere transcription of experience.

Yes, we can see who, among his

enormous acquaintance, he might have ‘used’ in his depiction of the socialclimbing pretentious hostess Mme Verdurin, the painter Elstir, the novelist Bergotte and the ludicrously incompetent medical professor Cottard.

But the care with which each character is built up and constructed and the exquisite comedy were the result of a marvellous, instinctive gift.

At the beginning of the book, in the childhood section which takes its title from the village where his grandparents originated, we read the entire novel in miniature and meet, or hear about, nearly all the characters who will be fleshed out for us in the later story.

The joke, in which we are allowed by the narrator to share, is that his family of innocents get everything wrong. They pity poor Swann, with his unsuitable wife, and have no idea that Swann enjoys a life in Paris where he is at the highest social peak, friends with the Prince of Wales and any other grandee you could name.

Likewise, Odette, when she first gets to know him, feels sorry for him living among such shabby old things, not realising that he is one of the greatest aesthetes of the age with a priceless collection of paintings and furniture.

As the story unfolds, however, we realise that all judgements formed of another human being have an only partial hope of being correct, that all impressions of life need to be revised. À la recherche therefore becomes, for the reader, not merely one of the richest comic experiences imaginable. It is also a great moral education.

Proust was still rewriting and rewriting the book in his final, gasping asthma attacks, the last of which, on 18th November 1922, at 44 rue Hamelin, killed him. His beloved servant, Céleste Albaret, had been feeding him warm chips and hot milk through the small hours for weeks as, in the cork-lined bedroom, the masterpiece progressed.

When the seriousness of his illness was clear, the 51-year-old told Céleste that, after his death, she should wait half an hour before summoning the Abbé Mugnier; and that, before the priest arrived, she should place a chapelet between his fingers. Every year thereafter, until all the friends died out, Mugnier would celebrate a requiem for Proust, and invite the originals of Charlus, or the Duchesse de Guermantes, to pray for their departed friend.

Perhaps this was superfluous. Had not Proust himself, by fashioning his circle into art, performed his own act of requiem by making them, together with himself, immortal?

The Oldie July 2021 23

My clean sweep Graham Little’s first job was as a lavatory attendant at Wimbledon – and he loved it

T

he return of the Wimbledon Championships this year restores a much-loved fixture of our summer calendar – and delivers an injection of nostalgia for the greatest job I ever had.

In 2000, after graduating from Loughborough University, I rewarded my parents’ investment by beginning my working life – as a toilet attendant. The job provided me with an important lesson. The lowliest role affords the greatest opportunities.

All attendants were allocated one toilet each. I was selected (hand-picked, I liked to think) to attend the male toilets under Court No 1, probably the busiest at the Championships. They are directly underneath what was then called Henman Hill, where thousands of spectators without court seats gather to drink Pimm’s and rattle their jewellery when British players appear on the big screen.

By the evening these bogs become more like the ones at Glastonbury – so this was a potentially disastrous appointment.

But the infamy of the Court No 1 facilities meant the chief toilet attendant appointed a 16-year-old local lad to help me. Billy was delighted just to be there and trustingly accepted the shifts timetable I drew up. My cistern-watching system was divided a tad unevenly, giving me plenty of time to explore the grounds and even watch entire matches without the inconvenience of attending the conveniences.

During my lengthy ‘breaks’, I made a startling and joyous discovery. It turned out that my toilet-attendant pass did not indicate which toilet I was supposed to be attending. So anywhere there was a toilet that might need attending I was admitted. I spent my days idly wandering the courts and corridors, exploiting the pity of the stewards who were happy to escort this lowly bog-cleaner to free seats at any matches that took my fancy.

My friend Jenks had been handed responsibility for the Centre Court

24 The Oldie July 2021

changing rooms and the beautiful, ornate toilet next to the Royal Box. Every day, he had the cheek to leave a pound coin on a saucer beside the sink in the Royal toilet.

And, every day, the Royal Family or one of their entourage had the even greater cheek to remove it.

Jenks and I ran a lucrative sideline in chilled drinks from the changing rooms, which we swapped with the courtcoverers for used Championship towels and snacks from the players’ cool boxes.

We also traded valuable insider information – like where to find the best free meals and punnets of strawberries and cream.

There were also toilets next to the kitchens of the All England Club where five-star food was prepared each day.

Kitchen hands were generous in sharing this abundant bounty. The irony of cleaning toilets, while stuffed to the gills with oysters, olives and strawberries, never failed to amuse me.

In the second week of the Championships, I took on the role of early-morning office-cleaner, starting work at 5.30am. Had it involved cleaning just offices, this would have been another doddle. Unfortunately, cleaning the café used by the ball boys and girls was on our duty list. They were absurdly, disgustingly messy, leaving food smeared all over the walls and rubbish all around the bins but never actually in them.

We were supposed to clean the offices until nine, which would’ve left me half an hour’s break before I started the toilet shifts. But whizzing around the corridors in double-quick time meant we usually finished around seven, which afforded a couple of glorious hours to sleep in the Centre Court baths.

I would swagger confidently through the large doors of Wimbledon HQ and then arrange towels and jumpers from the store cupboard as bedclothes in a bathtub. An alarm clock in the soap dish woke me in time for a leisurely shower, with the Championship toiletries to freshen me up, before the arduous day of toilet-attending that lay ahead.

It couldn’t last. Senior Royals were attending on Ladies’ Finals Day and police teams were carrying out bomb inspections from early morning. They found these checks impeded by a locked bathroom door. Their hammering on the door was answered by the swearing of this Northern Irishman, rudely awoken from a blissful sleep.

Needless to say, that was the end of the Centre Court snoozes as erroneous reports of toilet attendants spending the whole night in the men’s changing rooms spread around the security departments.

All too soon, the Championships were over and that year’s toilet attendants slipped quietly away around the U-bend of SW19. Watching the Pete Sampras-Pat Rafter final from the BBC commentary box (there are toilets on that corridor, too), I lamented the passing of my first Wimbledon, realising it could never be repeated in such style.

No matter how many times I go back, never again will I sleep in the Centre Court changing rooms. Never again will I sit in the courtside stewards’ seats. Never again will I feast in the All England Club and, thankfully, never, ever again will I clean the ball-boys’ café.

What the deuce! Graham Little sleeps in a Centre Court bath

The 2021 Wimbledon Championships are on from 28th June to 11th July

Poetry in commotion Lockdown has inspired hundreds of poets, including the Duchess of Sussex, to put pen to paper, says Thomas W Hodgkinson

C

ompare the Duchess of Sussex with Anne Boleyn.

Both married into the Royal Family and were imprisoned: Anne in the Tower of London awaiting execution; Meghan, like the rest of us, during the pandemic.

Both, too, turned to poetry. Anne wrote the haunting ode O Death, Rock Me Asleep. Meghan produced a children’s book, The Bench, which was published in June.

Sadly, it’s rubbish. Advising Harry on how to bring up their son, she says that sometimes he will fall, but ‘he’ll take it in stride’. In the final line, she notes, ‘You’ll never be ’lone.’

Now I’ve written some pretty bad poetry in my time, but even I know that you can’t just invent phrases and words to fit the metre. That said, there is one justification of the Duchess’s decision to try her hand at verse. That’s the fact that, over the past 12 months – when so many of us have spent so much of our time ’lone – it seems almost everyone has been at it.

Even before a 23-year-old recited a hip-hop panegyric at a president’s inauguration, the newspapers kept running the same story: the line that, amid the chaos, COVID had sparked a poetry boom.

Often, the substance of these pieces consisted of little more than the fact that some poet had written a poem, which had got a smattering of likes on Twitter.

What most reports lacked was much in the way of data. So I dug deeper. The bottom line is: it’s true. Publishers rarely give out figures, but Carcanet Press revealed a 48-per-cent rise in unit sales.

Susannah Herbert of the Forward Arts Foundation reported a 67-per-cent rise in visitors to the National Poetry Day website, compared with 2019. The Poetry Book Society’s Alice Mullen said book sales and memberships were up 40 per cent. Poet Liz Berry, who judged the 2020 Ledbury Poetry Competition, said the contest had had three times as many submissions as usual.

26 The Oldie July 2021

Not much rhyme or reason: Meghan

So did people write more poetry over the past year, or did they just consume more? It’s easier to measure demand than supply. When Frank Skinner launched his poetry podcast in April 2020, it entered the podcast charts at number two. When Emilia Clarke asked her actor friends to offer solace to the masses by reading poems on her Instagram feed, the response was huge.

According to Berry, ‘We often turn to poems at times when we feel most deeply and intensely.’ The practice of reading poetry at funerals and weddings has its roots in the eulogies and epithalamia of antiquity.

The question is: why? Why is it that, when it really matters, when feelings run high, we reach for a Shakespearean sonnet? Clearly part of the answer is that poetry is short. At a wedding, no one is going to sit around while you read out War and Peace. In the Tower of London, Anne Boleyn naturally turned to verse.

Her time was running out.

But I felt there might be more to it. So I asked around. Robin Robertson, a poet and publisher at Jonathan Cape, replied that in a time of introspection, poetry, like all art, ‘makes you think and feel outside of yourself’. Canadian poet Rupi Kaur described the first lockdown as a

‘moment of stillness’, in which people could turn to activities they overlooked in the normal hubbub of life. The Poet Laureate Simon Armitage has suggested that when people are in need of care and consideration, poetry, which is so careful with language, meets the mood.

Poet Andrew Wynn Owen believes the constraints of poetry resonate with the constraints of the human condition, which the pandemic has highlighted. My own theory is that in the face of chaos, poetry offers the most concentrated experience of meaningfulness of any art form. After reading words charged with meaning, you see more meaning around you.

What of the future? COVID has shifted poetry towards the digital. Advantages, says poet Rishi Dastidar, include accessibility for disabled people, who can attend on Zoom what they wouldn’t have travelled to. Poet Harry Man reported that he was able to contribute online to poetry readings in far-flung countries, which previously he couldn’t have afforded to attend.

Pace Meghan, it may be too soon to pass judgement on the quality of lockdown poetry, but I’d like to flag up two of my favourite examples. The first is the collaborative poem Airborne Particles. It consists of 100 loosely linked stanzas about the lockdown, contributed by poets from all over the world. Yes, it sounds like a mess, but the result is wonderful.

The second windfall is Andrew Wynn Owen’s invention of a new poetic form called the portmanteaugram, which he created while out walking with his golden retriever, Charlie, in Oxford’s University Parks. It involves taking the names of two famous people and blending them together to create two hybrid names, then writing a light four-line poem about them. As follows: Borston Churchson and Winis Johnill, Both at the ready when things have gone ill: One a tenacious commander, The other a philanderer.

Small World

Just when I thought I’d found the perfect excuse to bunk off work...

I was all set for a golden afternoon of daytime TV when I made a classic schoolboy error jem clarke

STEVE WAY

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents…

During the communal breakfast we share, I had no choice but to tell my parents I had lost my job.

After breakfast, everything takes precedence over conversation – hospitallevel cleaning regimes; Emmerdale omnibuses; ironing with The Archers; sleeping through University Challenge.

All of them are blockers to my imparting my not insignificant news to this whiskery couple.

It was ambitious but necessary to start by explaining the butterfly effect – the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings can lead to a tornado several weeks later.

It helped to give them a sense that some very small, innocent action on my part could have large, real-world repercussions. I could do it only in the few available minutes between the slurp, crackle and suck of the newly dentured laying waste to cereal like sulky teenagers.

My father misunderstood the concept: ‘Is it like when you drop the toast and it always lands buttered side down?’

But my mother had it licked straight away: ‘No. I decide to randomly hold a lift door open for your father in the 1960s. And now, 50 years later, you’re here piling free jam onto free toast.’

Father was still struggling. ‘Is it when the toast falls butter side up in your lap so it doesn’t butter your flies?’

‘It’s nothing to do with toast or butter.

Mother got it right,’ I snapped.

Mother then went completely off the boil: ‘So it’s not about free toast?’

And Father yelled at no one, for no reason, ‘Let him have the damned jam!’

I withdrew to my office-cum-bedroom.

I felt sad at the thought that it was now a job-seeking-zone-cum-bedroom.

Some weeks earlier, I was doing my call-centre job when I sensed I needed a

well-earned rest. Swinging the lead in this working-from-home universe is harder than it looks. The usual suspects – sprained ankles, childcare falling through, any toilet-hungry bowel business – don’t cut the duvet-day mustard when your work laptop is on top of your duvet.

Thankfully, just as I was speculatively googling ‘Top ten accidents that happen in the home’, I heard a Radio 5 Live feature on power cuts. It prompted me to text my boss and explain how a power cut had put paid to my working day because my tablet was out of juice. I tutted something about the north-south divide and quietly took pride in my improv genius.

The great escape was on! I settled down for an indulgent afternoon of TV’s finest daytime offerings. As is de rigueur for the modern man, I texted my best pal, Kevin, an ‘as-live’ commentary on everything I was viewing. Unfortunately, I was accidentally texting the last number, namely my boss – which prompted an immediate phone call from supervisor Celia.

‘Jem, I’m a bit surprised to receive the following text in the middle of your power cut,’ Celia said. ‘ ‘‘I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. WATCHING JUDGE RINDER AND THE DEFENDANT IS ACTUALLY A DOG.’’ ’

‘Ohhh…’ I balanced my intonation between surprise and ignorance, which strikes the exact same vibrational pitch as profound guilt.

Celia said, ‘I think we all know what that text means, don’t we, Jem?’ Clutching at straws, I exclaimed, ‘Oh my goodness. I see what you mean. I’ve just checked the TV and we’ve still not got any power. Do you think it means I’m seeing things?’

Celia floundered.

I gabbled, ‘Of course I am. It’s not as if Rinder is going to actually prosecute an animal… I think I just need a rest and we’ll pick up tomorrow. Electricity willing,’ I said, signing off with a jaunty laugh.

Never one to look a gift unicorn in the face, I even took Celia up on her kind referral to the occupational health psychiatrist. But, alas, two days later she left a snippy message on my phone. She said she hoped I enjoyed my last day at work as much as she had enjoyed the Judge Rinder pet episode on catch-up.

Other than about six continuity announcers, I’m probably the only person who can blame losing my job on the ITV Hub. Tomorrow, when I explain this to a pair of breakfasting codgers, I’ll probably lose my jam allowance, too.

The Oldie July 2021 27

Closing time After 70 years, The Good Food Guide is no more. James Pembroke salutes the book that let the British complain about restaurants

S

top all the clocks …

The Good Food Guide has ceased publication.

Waitrose, who bought the guide from Which? in 2013, has decided ‘to focus on our other publications, Waitrose Food and Waitrose Weekend’.

In common with Michelin and Time Out, they were giving all their hardearned information away for free on their website, and still are. Most people Google ‘restaurants near me’ and choose the one with the highest score out of five.

That army of volunteer inspectors must now stand down.

I was brought up with the guides. My mother, always in pursuit of a bargain, used them to track down which restaurants would offer children half-portions at half-price. This brilliant concept – which introduced children to adult food – has been replaced by the infantilising tyranny of the kiddies’ menu and sweetened chicken nuggets.

The brainchild of Raymond Postgate (1896-1971), father of Oliver Postgate, of Ivor the Engine and Bagpuss fame, the first guide appeared in 1951. Not minding about food was our national condition and so we got the food we deserved.

Restaurateurs had become incredibly complacent, certain in the knowledge that two wars had taught us not to complain. Derek Cooper, author of The Bad Food Guide, believed it was due to British reserve: ‘An Englishman would rather submit to voluntary euthanasia than expose himself to the possibility of Raised Voices in Public.’

In Postgate, we got the gastronomic champion we deserved, a militant and relentless campaigner rather than a worldly gastronome – Egon Ronay, the Hungarian restaurateur, was to take up that position from 1959.

Postgate’s gastronomic credentials lay firmly in the English tradition. He dreamed not of the Provençal dishes beloved by Elizabeth David but of 28 The Oldie July 2021

Raymond Postgate (left), the ultimate guide to good food

‘lobsters in whisky, roast cygnet, salmon in cider and ormers’. His reputation as a connoisseur was due to wine expertise and, even then, his The Plain Man’s Guide to Wine was for the no-nonsense man on the street.

Postgate had always been an outsider.

A conscientious objector in the First World War, he was on the far left of the Labour Party throughout the Twenties and Thirties. He was a Classics scholar who wrote effusively about John Wilkes.

In 1949, Stephen Potter, the author of the Gamesmanship books immortalised

by Terry-Thomas, commissioned him to write an article on British catering for his magazine, the Leader. Postgate suggested a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Food to expose the rank offerings of UK eateries. He wouldn’t accept this was down to rationing, then at its peak, given that our island is surrounded by fish and seafood.

He wanted to encourage Brits to learn to fight against established practices, and food was his battleground. To achieve this, he formed an army, unsusceptible to bribes, who would root out the profiteers.

And he succeeded. By 1966, he had 13,000 members submitting reports, and was selling over 100,000 copies.

Every Good Food Guide’s introduction exhorted readers to complain about poor food and poor service, and to check the bill assiduously: ‘If you can’t add, do at least scowl at it and look as if you are adding it up.’

He all but treated the trade as the enemy: eager to rip off its customers and willing to sue for libel if the truth was exposed. The last mention of libel threats against the guides was as late as 1979, and the two camps weren’t to work together for 30 years until 1982, when Albert Roux was invited to put the view of ‘the other side’.

Despite his self-congratulatory claims for having revived the restaurant trade, if anything Postgate succeeded in entrenching the mutual suspicion and animosity between staff and customer. In 1963, one report came in of a hotelkeeper who forced his guests to finish their dinner by 7.45pm because he wanted to watch something on the telly.

The guides are a brilliant record of our attitudes to food. Well into the 1960s, portion size seemed paramount in the members’ recommendations in The Good Food Guides. They rejoiced when ‘helpings were generous’ or there was ‘more than I could eat’. The chief inspector of The Good Food Guides complained as late as 1966, ‘A vast mass of our population, as far as I can make out, eat nothing but chips with absolutely everything.’

In his 1970 guide, Postgate complained, ‘There is still a decayed Puritan atmosphere in parts of Britain. It is considered no longer actually wrong but certainly ignoble to concern oneself passionately with the quality of food or wine.’

The 1990 Guide was full of woe: ‘There is an apparent lack of a restaurant culture in large parts of Britain.’

And yet, would London now be the capital of European gastronomy without that army of watchdogs?

A lifetime of pin-ups Barry Humphries still has nightmares about going on stage.

He’s always admired the stars who kept battling on

I

was there again last night.

It looked a bit like old Sydney as I remember it from the fifties, before they pulled it down in the name of progress. But wasn’t it more like the badlands of San Francisco, that once beautiful city that is infested by beggars and muggers and is sadly now past redemption? It was only vaguely familiar, yet the neighbourhood was strange and inimical. In my dream, I am always in an unknown part of town, well off the beaten track, a no-go area of half-demolished buildings and menacing tatterdemalions.

I am very frightened.

Then a stranger approaches me and whispers, ‘Haven’t you got a show tonight?’

Of course I have! It hits me like a thunderbolt.

But what time is it? And how far away is my theatre?

I rush out into the street, brushing aside those clawing hands of the canallas which want to keep me there. Taxis slow down, then at the sight of me speed off. I look down at my clothes. My feet are bare and I am wearing filthy rags. But at last I hitch a ride and ultimately, at the slow pace of nightmare, I reach the theatre.

But it’s unfamiliar. Moreover, it’s being demolished. There are workmen on scaffolds hammering at the remaining masonry, exposing what was once the stage and half a stuccoed proscenium.

A man up a ladder in a yellow hard hat (for a change, not Boris) calls out to me, ‘Where were you? We waited!’

And then, covered with sweat, I wake.

We don’t need what Nabokov called ‘that Viennese quack’ to help interpret this nightmare.

30 The Oldie July 2021

I have it every night, always with small variations.

I find myself in what used to be called ‘the stews’ of a great city. The inhabitants are progressively becoming less threatening, more friendly. I recognise some of them from previous nightmares – as one does repertory players – but although they are as horribly malevolent as before, they greet me as one of them; they regard me with expressions of lewd complicity. That’s even more terrifying.

I might easily have told you about this dream before because I have related it to quite a few people, but it doesn’t matter; after all, it is a recurring dream.

Last night I went to the theatre for the first time in a couple of years. It was the magnificent Lisa Dwan in Beckett’s Happy Days at the Riverside. This is theatre as it’s meant to be and so rarely is. I sat in the socially distanced audience, watching a play about isolation (among other things), and gazed longingly at the stage I might never again inhabit. If lockdown didn’t exist, and COVID were merely a nightmare, would I ever again step fearlessly before an audience?

Losing one’s nerve is the actor’ s greatest fear.

If today I had to audition for a show, and if age didn’t disqualify me, I would be told by a voice from the darkened stalls to come back when I’d had more

Fame took longer to reach Australia even longer than my mother’s Vogue

experience. For such occasions I wrote a clever audition piece inspired by those shifty-looking men selling plastic wardrobes in Oxford Street. They were a common sight when I first came to London, and for auditions I impersonated one of them and sang a little song extolling my wares: ‘I sell plastic wardrobes, rubber rainwear, Mrs-Norris-changes-train wear…’

The arch reference to Christopher Isherwood’s deviant character was rather lost on my auditors, and invariably I skulked back to my real job on the night shift in Wall’s ice-cream factory (Raspberry Ripple division).

I still remember with a wince and a shudder the time, long ago, when I told my mother and father that I had decided to become an actor. It must have been like the experience of a gay man announcing his sexual vocation to his bewildered parents.

The first thing my mother said was ‘But we don’t know any theatre people.’

‘What about Coral?’ croaked my poor father.

‘You mean my school friend Coral Browne?’ exclaimed my mother, who had stopped arranging some camellias. ‘Coral always talked about going on the stage, but she went to England, and no one’s heard of her since.’

They were to hear much more of Coral, the future wife of Vincent Price, star in her own right and later muse of Alan Bennett, but in those days Fame took longer to reach Australia – even longer than my mother’s Vogue, dispatched surface mail.

‘But what about all that money I spent on your education?’ My father didn’t

Clockwise from top left: Coral Browne; Margot Robbie; Max Oldaker & Joy Beattie, The Desert Song (1945); Angela Lansbury

actually say that, but his eyes said something like it.

The worst part of all this was that I was far from certain I really wanted a theatrical life. But it would at least pass the time until I knew what I genuinely wanted to do when I grew up.

Like a character in a Ionesco play, I heard an inner voice repeating, ‘My career is hurting me!’

In my entry in Who’s Who, I put in, under Recreations, ‘Occasionally appearing in shows.’

But this recurring nightmare I have described tells me something else. It says I take my trade very seriously indeed, and demons are stopping me from pursuing my destiny. My beautiful theatre is being razed to the ground.

But I am patron of a new theatre. It is, in fact, a very old theatre. It’s Her Majesty’s in Adelaide, built in 1913 and in

continuous use since then. Now it has been gloriously restored and it has become the finest theatre in Australia.

Yet, unlike almost every other theatre in the world, it isn’t haunted. No supernatural occurrence with chill, tenebrous claws has ever attached to its reputation. No ghosts of troubled actors flit about its dress circle.

I can now announce that I have just offered this theatre, in which I have performed many times with invariable success, my post-mortem services. I will become its ghost.

My bones, or their calcified residue, will be deposited in a secret niche in the upper circle, and at curtain fall every night thereafter, my benevolent phantom will roam the auditorium – observing, needless to say, the correct social-distancing protocols in case an audience member proves allergic to ectoplasm.

Because I am a solo act, I know too few of my fellow actors, and see them only at memorial services and benefits. I wish I knew them better, this brave and generous fellowship of players.

My dream dinner party would feature David Suchet, Eileen Atkins, Michael Kitchen, Anthony Sher, Margot Robbie, Angela Lansbury, Rob Brydon, Maggie

Smith, David Walliams and Maureen Lipman … and that’s only the B list.

My theatrical anecdotes are few, and mostly relayed to me by Gyles Brandreth.

More may come back to me as I stir the murky shallows of memory. But my parents, without much liking the theatre and its myrmidons, often took me to the shows that came to Melbourne. Thus I saw the Oliviers when the Old Vic presented a short season of plays in our town.

I particularly recall Vivien Leigh, piquantly barefoot in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. The frisson produced in me by this performance may have been my first intimation of carnal arousal. The Mayor of Melbourne, in a speech of welcome to this glamorous couple, apostrophised them as ‘Sir Laurence Oliver and Lady Leigh’.

At an earlier time, my mother and I attended at least two matinées of The Desert Song, the spectacular operetta by Sigmund Romberg, in which the Sheik, impersonated by the Tasmanian lyric tenor Max Oldaker as the Red Shadow, rides onto the stage mounted on a white horse. Max was to my mother what George Clooney is to yours.

Many years later, I appeared in a revue in Sydney and my mother’s heart-throb was in the cast. Indeed, Max was the star, inveigled from retirement in Tassie to perform, among other songs and sketches, a cruel piece of selfmockery, I’m an Old Red Shadow of My Former Self.

Max, no longer young and unmarried, and with rouged lips which may well have nibbled the occasional pillow, once gave me some memorable advice.

‘How do you manage, Max,’ I once asked him, ‘to smile with such sincerity at the curtain call on a thin Wednesday matinée?’

‘Dear Barry, it’s an old trick Noël taught me and it never fails.’ He demonstrated, standing in the middle of the dressing room in his Turkish towelling gown, eyes sparkling, teeth bared in a dazzling smile. ‘Sillyc*nts,’ beamed Max through clenched teeth, bowing to the imaginary stalls.

‘Sillyc*nts,’ again, to the circle, the gods and the Royal Box. ‘It looks far more genuine than “Cheese”, dear boy,’ said Max, ‘and you’ve just got to hope that no one in the stalls can lip-read.’ I couldn’t help thinking of all my mother’s friends at those Melbourne matinées, their palms moist, hearts palpitating as Max Oldaker, the last of the Australian matinée idols, flashed them his valedictory smile.

As for me, thin matinée or COVIDdistanced, I miss the laughter of all my beloved sillyc*nts.

The Oldie July 2021 31

Jiggery-wokery Trigger warnings, sleepy thinking and egomania are the enemies of good writing, says English don Frances Wilson

CLASSICPAINTINGS/ALAMY

A

friend who teaches English at one of our more august institutions says her students want a trigger warning on W B Yeats’s Leda and the Swan.

For the lucky few who don’t know the term, trigger warnings – the worst part of the wokery plaguing the study of literature – are given to protect those who have suffered a trauma from content they may find upsetting.

Leda and the Swan describes how Zeus, in the form of a swan, assaults Leda: ‘A sudden blow: the great wings beating still/ Above the staggering girl.’

Her thighs are caressed by his ‘dark webs’; her ‘nape’ is ‘caught in his bill’; she lies in his ‘white rush’. She later lays eggs which hatch into the twin war gods Castor and Pollux, and the sisters, Helen – whose face will launch a thousand ships – and Clytemnestra, who will murder her husband.

Leda’s rape results not only in the birth of the classical era but also in the foundations of Western literature: the Trojan wars are the subjects of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

The consequences of Zeus’s lust are caught by Yeats in three breathtaking lines: ‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower, / And Agamemnon dead.’

Given that it is all very graphically depicted, where’s the harm, you might ask, in cautioning vulnerable students beforehand?

I teach in a university and care a great deal about my vulnerable students, but I also care a great deal about culture, and slapping a trigger warning on this poem is tantamount to the death of Western literature. A trigger warning belittles and humiliates Yeats’s masterpiece.

Trigger warnings, I gather, have little to no impact on the readers they aim to shield, but they have a huge impact on poems. The harm caused to this one is nothing less than the reduction of its meaning.

32 The Oldie July 2021

Leda and the Swan is not about the sexual violence experienced by one woman; it is about the violence at the heart of civilisation itself; how a single event initiates a cycle of historical catastrophe. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘woke’, an AfricanAmericanism deriving from ‘to be awake’, means ‘alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’.

But wokeness is also used to mask sleepy thinking. Take Meghan and Harry spouting their woke word salads across the airwaves – Harry the ‘feminist’ armed with a vocabulary neither he nor we fully understand, Meghan patronising us with her vacuous emotional wisdom.

Take away the jargon and it becomes clear that they have nothing much to say: viz Prince Harry saying recently, ‘What if every single one of us was a raindrop, and if every single one of us cared?’

The weakness of wokeness is that it won’t be argued with and without debate there is no hope of mutual understanding.

I learned this to my cost when a woke student in one of my classes protested solidly for an entire year that the only novels she was prepared to read were those that described what it was like being her.

No lives mattered except her own, and the fact that the book describing her specialness had not yet been written proved that she was a victim of discrimination.

X-rated: Veronese’s Leda and the Swan

She was an extreme example of woke-reason. Yet several of my students insist that those novels in which the novelist describes the experiences of people other than themselves (which, to my mind, is the purpose of all novels) are a sign of ‘cultural appropriation’. What they call cultural appropriation, I call imagination. What they demand from a novel, I expect from an autobiography.

If wokery is a particularly tiresome form of judgement, try being on a judging panel with those who have a-woken.

I recently judged two literary prizes, and on each occasion did battle with co-judges who championed the books that met their ideological criteria rather than the books that met the criteria of the prize.

Any book concerned with a century other than our own was dismissed as ‘ancient history’. Books by or about white men were discarded. And, because wokery has no aesthetic sensibility, all my attempts to discuss the merits of language, style and structure were met with bafflement.

The worst problem was with clichés, which the woke judges couldn’t recognise. But why would people who think in clichés wince at them in writing?

If someone were to set up a prize for the Wokest Book of the Year, perhaps the other prizes could get on with the business of awarding literary merit.

I hear that publishers are now hiring ‘sensitivity readers’ to vet manuscripts for indications of transphobia, Islamophobia, ableism, fat-shaming and other variations of accidental bias.

Before long, the canon will be presented to us in the form of The Collected Wokes of W B Yeats and The Collected Wokes of William Shakespeare, bowdlerised volumes that provide a ‘safe space’ for readers.

Presumably Leda and the Swan will by then be cancelled.

In the interests of my mental health, I hope these books come with a trigger warning.

Diary of a somebody As the daughter and wife of MPs, Sasha Swire had to stay quiet and keep smiling – until she published her bombshell journal

GRIZELDA

a

ppendage. Noun. 1. a thing that is added or attached to something larger or more important.

That’s me! The appendage, my whole lovely life: daughter of an MP (Sir John Knott, MP for St Ives, 1966-83, and Defence Secretary); wife of one (Sir Hugo Swire, MP for East Devon, 2001-19, and Foreign Office Minister).

And actually, as it happens, I was also researcher for one – also Hugo Swire.

This caused problems because most people thought my snout was heavily into the taxpayer’s trough, but that’s a whole other political story.

As a doe-eyed young girl growing up in a Cornish constituency, I was dragged round the cheese-and-wine circuit; staring up between my parents’ legs, like a puppy panting at the promise of a treat.

My limbs have literally been built on creamy chicken vol-au-vents and pineapple chunks topped with glacier cherries on cocktail sticks.

All that was expected of me as a daughter – and later a wife – was a perfect row of gnashers attached to a courtly smile, and gracious pauses to allow the man space to present his views; and then, with great tranquillity, to say to him, ‘That’s so clever of you. I would never have thought of that myself!’

Smiling is key – my mother taught me that. She’s always smiling, which is quite tiring when you are of a naturally gloomy disposition as I am. I think the Duchess of Cambridge must have scaffolding in her mouth.

At dinners full of the great and the good, I educated myself to sit silently when what I wanted to say was ‘Coooeee, over here! I know about that! Ask me.’

When I did break out of my holding pen to share my views, all I could hear afterwards was that deafening silence that comes immediately after the male brain adapts to a different sort of noise.

Mind you, the women were just as bad. I remember sitting next to Penny

Mordaunt, now the Paymaster General, at some dinner and she didn’t address a single word to me. Not one.

Once, Amber Rudd introduced me to Liz Truss who just stared at me like DCS Patricia Carmichael in Line of Duty, all serene and smirking, as if I had singlehandedly betrayed the entire sisterhood with my ‘wife of’ status. She’s quite pleased with herself, that Liz Truss.

I was forever reminded of my utter irrelevance. After the Home Office came to secure one of our properties, my husband told me that on no account was I to press the red panic buttons if a rabid, terrorist psychonut came through my bedroom door. The buttons were for the exclusive use of the primary target – him!

Merely marrying an MP doesn’t assure success, but skills do. Ballroom dancing is one of them: the one where the man steps forward with left foot; the lady steps back with right foot. You learn how to dip your perfectly manicured hand into a hat and pull out a ticket: ‘Blue 209 … red 304… Oh, Sheila, not you again?’

This is more difficult than you might think on a diplomatic level, when it’s Sheila’s fourth win in a row.

Manicured hands aren’t great for leafleting. I could do an exam in letter boxes: the vertical ones; draughtexcluders – the brushy kind; small letter boxes in which you play origami with your leaflets; external letter boxes – we like those; porch without a letter box leading to a door with a letter box which you can’t gain access to; floor-level letter boxes, where the snarling dog directly behind wants to bite off your right hand.

Then there’s learning how to sit beside your husband on a platform as he becomes increasingly Churchillian, having hoofed down quite a lot of Aldi house red beforehand. You listen to him drone on and on and on, until you’re slicing your hand across your neck, signifying, ‘Shut the **** up and let’s go home.’

After a round of applause and his ‘That went well’ expression, you rise elegantly to receive gracefully a bunch of faded chrysanthemums bought from the local garage forecourt. You think, ‘What are these actually for? I haven’t done anything except sit demurely, as asked.

Oh, OK – that’s what they are for.’

It’s important to know how to handle a dodgy donor at a lavish black-tie fundraising ball, when his only interest is in looking over his shoulder to target whoever can help him cross-dress in ermine and be placed into the next dumper truck of peers heading for the Lords.

My Slovenian mother spent her childhood eyeing up Russia on one side and Nazis on the other. She advised that revenge is best served soft with a smile, Slav-style. I ignored this completely. I yielded to the absolutely irresistible urge to behave completely contrary to what was expected of me. I picked up a pen, wrote a diary and published it! Naughty, naughty me.

The paperback of Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power (£9.99) is out on 1st July The Oldie July 2021 33

Town Mouse

Feed your mind – and your stomach – at a festival tom hodgkinson

The Scottish philosopher David Hume was not keen on London, according to a new biography by contemporary philosopher Julian Baggini.

He complained it was packed with ‘factious barbarians’. When visiting Paris in the 1760s, he praised the capital of France as a sophisticated hub of letters and learning: ‘The Taste for literature is neither decay’d nor deprav’d here; as with the Barbarians who inhabit the banks of the Thames.’

This seems a little odd, since Hume’s contemporary Dr Johnson famously loved London and could hardly be called a ‘barbarian’, as the foremost English man of letters of his day.

Perhaps Johnson hadn’t been introduced to the delights of Paris. Its literary scene was dominated by a gang of competing salonnières, including Madame Louise d’Épinay. Hume had a wonderful time, speaking at the Parisian salons and half-falling in love with their hostesses. It all sounds like an 18th-century Call My Agent.

Alas, it appears Town Mouse will not be able to visit Paris this summer – not without an awful lot of quarantining and hassle. But what we have in this country 34 The Oldie July 2021

is a modern tradition of festivals which are very much like the salons of the 18th century. I’m looking forward to escaping the barbarity of London town this summer to spend some time in these havens of reflection.

My favourite used to be the Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall but this is, alas, no more. Run by the aristocratic Eliot family, the festival started life as the Elephant Fayre in the eighties. Siouxsie and the Banshees played there and you could go to talks by the likes of John Michell and Heathcote Williams, the now deceased leaders of hippie haute bohème.

In the noughties, the festival was relaunched with more emphasis on books and less on pop music. The wits of the day gathered, from Bruce Robinson to John Cooper Clarke.

As for this summer, the live summer version of Glastonbury was sadly cancelled again. But it looks as if both Wilderness in the Cotswolds – which runs a 400-capacity talk tent – and Latitude in Suffolk, which features various wits, are going ahead.

There’s also How the Light Gets In, which pops up in London and in Hay and where ideas are discussed in yurts. The

original Hay Festival of Literature was an online-only affair this year, and I am less keen on this one – for the simple reason that I am banned from it for my part in a protest, many years ago, against their policy of paying their writers nought pounds.

The great-great-grandson of Victorian liberal pioneer William Gladstone, Charlie Gladstone, and his salonnière wife, Madame Caroline, run a refuge of contemplation and Athenian philosophical reflection at the Gladstone estate in Hawarden, North Wales, in September. It’s called Camp Good Life and is a magnet for chefs such as Thomasina Miers, who come along and cook live.

Town Mouse will be making an appearance at a festival near Oxford run

by Alex James, best known for being the bassist in Blur (that’s a contemporary beat group). It’s called Feastival, to indicate its emphasis on food. I’ll be putting on a toga and, alongside Madame Souris de la Ville, will host philosophical salons there each afternoon. It should be like a little corner of Athens – though instead of lyre players we’ll have ukulele strummers.

Writing to a friend about his love affair with Paris, Hume said, ‘I eat nothing but Ambrosia, drink nothing but Nectar, breathe nothing but incense, and tread on nothing but Flowers … between public Business, the Company of the learned and that of the Great, especially of the Ladies, I find my time fill’d up.’ And that’s precisely the experience we aim to recreate at the summer festivals.

I feel that the amiable David Hume would have approved of the foodie nature of today’s rural salons. Later in life, while living back in Edinburgh in 1769, he took up cooking and turned into a sort of cross between Socrates and Jamie Oliver. He talked of his ‘great talent for Cookery, the science to which I intend to addict the remaining Years of my Life’.

The lovable man of letters then boasted in a letter to a friend, ‘I have just now lying on the Table before me a Receipt [recipe] for making soupe à la Reine, copy’d with my own hand. For Beef and Cabbage (a charming Dish), and old Mutton and old Claret, no body excels me.’ In savouring the pleasures of table alongside those of study, Hume was consciously attacking the ascetic tradition in philosophy.

Fun and feasting can live alongside philosophy very happily, he thought. It’s all part of the good life. We can congratulate ourselves in this country for our festival culture – weekends where we can indulge blissfully in ideas and the sensual pleasures.

Country Mouse

Perils of going wild in the country giles wood

I’ve now spent 30 years transforming an acre of grade one agricultural land into a snake-infested wilderness featuring rank weeds.

A visiting friend had the brilliant idea of setting up a motion-sensitive ‘trail’ camera within the acre, to see what wildlife I could observe by virtue of this spy technology.

Excitement mounted during the next fortnight as I waited for one of my daughters to come home and retrieve the images – a task way beyond this technophobe’s skill level.

The camera revealed a pageant of fauna, featuring the usual suspects. First came a brace of other men’s pheasants.

Then what Mary perceived as a ‘plague’ of bunnies – a major feature of this year – a brown hare, a badger and that unwelcome alien invader from Woburn Abbey (introduced there by the 11th Duke of Bedford in 1894) the muntjac deer.

My attention span having been degraded by Netflix over recent months, my waning focus was restored by the sight of a female primate on her hind legs, breasts heaving, suggesting that she suckled her young. She was a mammal, to be sure, and in place of fur or feather she chose Gore-Tex. A rambler had taken a wrong turn. By insinuating herself into this wildlife habitat, she called to mind a once fashionable, now dated book in my parents’ library by the zoologist Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (1967).

When humans are viewed in such proximity to other species in our national fauna, we are forced to wrestle with a problem that has exercised all the great minds, eg Shakespeare, Heraclitus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Silent Spring author Rachel Carson insisted that ‘man is a part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself’. In short, by tampering with

nature through the use of pesticides and palm-oil plantations we are fouling our own nests.

We are living in the age of the Anthropocene, wherein mankind can be seen as just a geological force, whose calling card is a layer of plastic in the Earth’s crust. So how do we humans fit in – or not fit in – to nature?

Trespassers, paddle boarders, wild swimmers and even kayakers try on the ‘We are nature’ argument ad nauseam.

Indeed, I vividly recall a wild-swimming experience of my own, undertaken a few summers ago with a friend. Cyril and I had entered a lake on the Benacre estate in Suffolk, where the temperature was some degrees warmer than the sea outside his house in Aldeburgh.

Moreover, there were no stony pebbles to cross to gain access to the water.

Unlike characters in a D H Lawrence novel, neither were we naked nor did we wrestle – we were merely eco-signalling.

Look at us – we love to be immersed in nature, even if it involves swimming with frogs, newts and possibly Weil’s disease contributed by rats.

Then, like the proverbial Turk emerging out of nowhere, materialised a wildlife ranger – fresh out of college

‘You should have come to see me sooner’

and still wet behind the ears. He ordered us out of the lake. The poor fellow was no match for Cyril’s debating skills honed in the hallowed halls of the Eton Debating Society.

‘You are disturbing the natural environment of the lake,’ asserted the ranger.

‘But,’ countered Cyril, still in the water, ‘we are part of nature.’

‘Not to be confused with naturists,’ I added. After all, he could see only our top halves and I thought it important to clarify.

By saying so, I irritated Cyril, who had hoped for a good ding-dong on a philosophical question, but the ranger clearly decided not to engage with these awkward customers and slunk away to a safer space.

When Mary was a girl in Northern Ireland, a feature of her Sunday mornings was observing the congregation arriving at the Presbyterian church next door to her house. The townspeople arrived in their most respectable clothing with devout expressions on their faces. In those days, just being seen going to church was all it took to signal your virtue.

Those were simpler times. Today, Christian soldiers are almost defunct.

The idea of man’s dominion over nature has given way to more fashionable proclamations of oneness with it. When it comes to the environment, however, we get it wrong more often than right.

Red kites, once persecuted, are now persecuting us, especially in Henley where they have reached Daphne du Maurier numbers. I am convinced as a citizen scientist that feeding birds is causing major distortions in the predator-prey balance of the British Isles, as well as causing a huge surge in rats.

We would be better employed planting insect-attracting vegetation so that birds could help themselves.

Here in Anglesey, where I’m holidaying, we have a wren nesting and its young frequently fall out of the nest.

Once I witnessed a fall in action and saw how well adapted the tiny speck of life was. With prehensile feet, it clasped onto the table edge that had broken its fall. I admonished myself for twice previously having acted like an avian helicopter parent by placing it back in its nest. Even as a committed rewilder, I couldn’t resist the feelgood factor of saving it.

Being an eco-saviour might always in hindsight end up looking more like ecomeddling. It occurs to me that man is no more suitable to assume the stewardship of the Earth than is a fox to be placed in charge of guarding a hen coop.

The Oldie July 2021 35

Postcards from the Edge

The oldies, they are a-changin’

TOBY MORISON

As rebels like Bob Dylan turn 80, so the cultural generation gap is shrinking, says Mary Kenny

The good news is that the generation gap is over – that incompatible hostility between the generations, described by writers from Shakespeare to Bob Dylan.

And now that Dylan, who’s just turned 80, is part of our oldie culture, the generations understand one another better than ever before.

That is one theory arising from the news that in America and Britain – and elsewhere – more young adults are living with their parents. The COVID pestilence may be part of the picture, but it’s been an ongoing trend for some years: in America, more than half of young adults (that is, up to age 34) share a home with their parents.

In Britain, the current figure is 42 per cent, although admittedly the age bracket is 15 to 34, and you’d expect kids to be living at home aged 15. Still, this statistic was only 36 per cent in 1996. Between the ages of 25 and 34, some 17 per cent of younger Brits still share a household with their parents. Across the EU, 48 per cent of young adults live with their parents.

The prolongation of education and the cost of housing have driven this pattern.

It’s also because parents have become more permissive, less forbidding and more inclined to be ‘down with the kids’ themselves.

In 1960, when the average age of leaving home was 18 – I left home aged 18 in 1962 – we thought our elders were Victorians who would be appalled if we slept with a boyfriend, drank too much or generally ‘let ourselves down’. My mother wept that I ‘looked like a prostitute’ in torn fishnet stockings and garish lipstick.

Now mothers and daughters go clubbing together, sometimes both dolled up like hookers.

The generations today share values, attitudes, music and fashion. Dylan needn’t tell the parents ‘your sons and your daughters are beyond your command’, since they’re now harmoniously ensconced in the family

home. Parents forbid nothing, and occasionally the kids are more sensible than the oldies.

Along with this trend of intergenerational living comes another increasing concern: falling fertility. In pro-natalist America, the birth rate has fallen for the sixth year running. All the European countries now have declining birth rates. Martin Amis lamented in his most recent novel, Inside Story, that by 2060 ‘most Italians will have no sisters, no brothers, no aunts, no uncles and no cousins’.

Could there be a connection between intergenerational household living and falling birth rates? Do putative parents now think ‘A baby now – that means 30 to 40 years of offspring-care?

Too much. Too long.’ In the EU, the countries with the greatest degree of intergenerational living have the fewest babies.

The times, they are a-changin’, but not as we planned them.

Ireland’s poshest golf club, Portmarnock, ten miles north of Dublin, has voted,

after 127 years, to admit women as full club members. It has been hailed as a wonderful victory in the ‘battle for equality’.

May I dissent? How can a golf club whose annual membership fees are over £2,000 be an emblem of ‘equality’?

Nobody on a modest income could afford such recreational dosh. No woman on an average income could afford even the green fees for a weekday’s golfing round: 27 holes for £259 or 36 for £345. The concept of ‘equality’ now seems to ignore both class and income. It appears to apply only to gender or race.

Portmarnock had been under pressure for some time from the Equality Authority, as well as from the influential National Women’s Council, to amend its rules. So the change was officially greeted as a great advance for (affluent) women.

When the Troubles first broke out in Northern Ireland, concern was expressed about the disorder that might spread to society at large. That socialist firebrand Bernadette Devlin, then a young MP, announced sardonically, ‘Don’t worry – there’ll be no riotin’ in the golf clubs.’

And indeed there never was.

A friend recently moved from Italy to the Netherlands. It was such a relief, he reported, to be free from Italian bureaucracy, which is wearing, and affects every aspect of daily life. Holland is so different: everything works efficiently and without fuss. But then, where the Italians were generous, he found the Dutch mean, conforming to the ‘Dutch treat’ concept (where everyone splits the bill), and to Lord Canning’s judgement: ‘In matters of commerce, the fault with the Dutch/Is giving too little and asking too much.’

Sometimes national stereotypes are confirmed by experience. Yet it’s nice that all the harmonising efforts of the EU haven’t made everyone the same. And, anyway, you can’t have everything!

The Oldie July 2021 37

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Fifty quid won’t save a lost generation Let me be honest. We on the chalk face of education had not heard of Kevan Collins before he was appointed the COVID catch-up tsar for education – and then promptly resigned in June.

Worse, I have just done a vox pop among my colleagues and they still did not know who he was. Even when I gave them the hint that he spelt his name with an a, not the normal i. This is a common fault among teachers, who often don’t appear to read or watch the news much.

Maybe it’s because our noses are too close to the grindstone to look outward; maybe we are just lazy.

Nevertheless, to this teacher at least, Kevan is a good thing. He actually used to be a teacher and has worked in education his entire career. So he might have more of an idea of what he is talking about than Gavin Williamson.

When Kevan Collins was brought in to help the millions of children set adrift by lockdown, everything he said made sense.

He was against ‘gimmicks’. He made it clear that all initiatives should come from the schools that know their children. He acknowledged that actually the most important element in education is the teachers. He wasn’t going to be a slave to bureaucracy, and was all for swift action.

But what were the headlines? That he was going to shorten holidays and lengthen the school day. Unions and

students were up in arms. Yet look at what he actually proposed – not tacking an extra lesson on at the end of the day but, instead of homework, using online tutoring to help individuals.

That lovely word – individuals. He knew they were what mattered; not numbers or somersaulting, headlinegrabbing clowns, but individuals.

And the summer schools? They weren’t to be the same sitting-in-rows lessons of the classroom but ‘the whole raft of other opportunities to learn together – whether it’s sport, drama, artistic pursuits or play’.

As E M Forster said, ‘Only connect!’ and that is what Collins seemed to want to do. These children have lost much more than what’s lost in missing one text, or being slow to learn a formula. They have lost the ability to learn together, interact together and bounce ideas off one another.

Some of the tutoring has started, and most of the feedback from students is very positive. Their tutors are on the whole not English teachers, but English graduates. They don’t always ‘do it like you do, Miss’, and they may not all be natural teachers. But all my students are seeing the subject – and the world – in a different, engaging way.

Collins pointed out that many parents have now become used to being involved

in their children’s education, and that this new habit should be encouraged. We teachers know that the children who do worst are not the poorest, or the least clever, but the ones whose parents don’t back us up.

Some children embraced the return to school but are already beginning to veer over to the dark side. How to lasso them back? With more individual teaching, obviously … and that costs.

Collins realises that schools know their individual problems and students best, and should be given the power to choose where the money goes. He could have been our saviour.

But then came Gavin Williamson.

Despite his algorithms and his failures, he continues to hold his position. And Gavin offered Collins a paltry £1.4 billion (£50 per child), as against the £15 billion Collins said he would need.

So Collins fell on his sword, rather than try to deliver the impossible. Once again the (mostly) privately educated government with their (mostly) privately educated children appear to be letting down the 93 per cent of our children who are educated by the state.

It is a time to despair, and to pray the good teachers don’t hang up their mortar boards but struggle on. Thank you, Sir Kevan, for trying to help us and the children.

Quite Interesting Things about … July July used to rhyme with ‘truly’.

In July 2013, more people in Britain believed in ghosts than supported the Labour Party.

In July 2017, woken by a ‘loud crunching noise’, a teenage camping supervisor in Colorado found his head was inside a bear’s mouth.

38 The Oldie July 2021

In July 2018, the highest temperature ever recorded in Scotland was declared invalid because the thermometer was too close to a vehicle with its engine running.

Under a US law signed by Ronald Reagan, July is National Ice Cream Month.

On a single day in July 2020,

Jeff Bezos added $13 billion to his net worth.

On 5th July 1946, the bikini swimsuit was launched, four days after the first peacetime atomic bomb test on Bikini Atoll.

John Adams, second President of the USA, and Thomas Jefferson, third President of the USA,

both died on 4th July 1826, 50 years to the day from the Declaration of Independence.

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

My favourite rivers After fishing across the country for 60 years, David Profumo recalls his top ten angling spots, from the Torridge to the Tweed

E

ver since I caught my first trout with my father, John Profumo, in 1963 – shortly after he had resigned from Macmillan’s government – my life seems to have been embroidered by the course of various rivers.

My angling education proper began at Eton, on the Thames (where, as a notable part of its liquid history, Izaak Walton himself fished in the 1630s).

There I learned to floatfish for perch and bleak – little beauties, with nothing ‘coarse’ about them. I also discovered that angling is good for you: you can’t fish and worry at the same time.

I was raised on a ramshackle chalk stream, where I could observe the behaviour of fish in aquarially transparent water. I have since become beguiled by the Hampshire Itchen – with its peaceable, bosky surroundings. Running water features in many versions of Arcadia, and I relish the chance to try for wild brown trout, hovering ‘on the fin’ as if swimming in clear air. In winter – time of bonfire smoke and hip flasks – you can cast for the spectral grayling, even in a snow shower.

Since my student days, I have been visiting the West Country rivers (there are some 50), with an especial fondness for Devon’s numinous Torridge, deep in Henry Williamson’s Tarka territory. In summer, you can fish the gloaming for school peal (sea trout), but there is also a (now depleted) run of Atlantic salmon: novelist Graham Swift and I once hit it right on a falling spate – a flood settling nicely – and landed four fish between us.

This was a favoured haunt of our mutual friend, Ted Hughes, who sneakily attached to his line a fish from his deep freeze, and tricked Michael Hordern into believing the cold water had frozen it alive.

Sea trout are our loveliest fish – capricious, athletic and delicious to eat.

In Wales, they are called sewin, and the finest method of catching them is by fly-fishing at night. I was introduced to the Cothi by my wife’s uncle, a local sewin wizard who conjures them from

Profumo, six, at Braemar Castle, 1961

the midsummer darkness with skills I have never acquired. You begin at dusk, once ‘the green has gone out of the grass’, and it can be thrilling as a silver beauty crashes at your surface lure, all unseen.

One September, staying at stately Baronscourt in County Tyrone, I hooked three salmon in an hour on the delightful and variegated river Mourne, part of the Foyle complex which embraces both Province and Republic. I was on the prolific Snaa Pool, with its edgy, ledgy wading, and later fell out of a tree where I was attempting to retrieve a snagged fly.

Fishing is in Ireland’s genes. The ghillie offered me a jolt of poitín, ‘ter dry yer feet’.

Although I have swum my hooks in more than 40 different countries, I am eternally biased toward the waters of Scotland, where now I live. For many autumns, I have been fishing the charismatic Tweed, mainly around Mertoun and Dryburgh, with their gorgeous pink cliffs (‘scaurs’) and lovely leafscapes. Fishing for Atlantic salmon is an irrational iteration of a peculiar pastime, as these fickle nomads apparently cease feeding when they return to fresh water, but there is more to the business than the mere catching of fish – the keen anticipation fuels your determination, for hours on end.

My home water here in Perthshire is the rugged and feisty river Tilt – a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the mighty Tay – which trundles and foams its way down through pots and bonsai canyons, along the route Queen Victoria rode on horseback from Balmoral to nearby Blair Castle. I once picked the pockets of Shepherd’s Pool, and grassed three salmon in a morning, a feat I doubt I will repeat in this lifetime.

Over on royal Deeside itself, I have tried my luck on beats from Balmoral and Birkhall down to Banchory, and the silvery Dee is peerless as a picturesque, piscatorial destination – in spring particularly, when the strath is redolent of conifers, and the banks are a rug of bluebells. The current enjoys a sprightly rhythm, on its long course from the high, cold corries above Mar. There are occasionally violent floods: in 1829, the innkeeper at Cambus found ‘a sma’ trootie’ swimming in his kitchen.

Sutherland is where I served my fly-fishing apprenticeship, a venerable sporting uncle introducing me to the formidable river Shin when I was a teenager in the seventies. So bouldery and precipitous is this stream that in places you have to hang onto a wire to cover a ‘lie’ (angling is not as sleepy a pursuit as some imagine) and the spectacular Falls Pool is like an amphitheatre. As a callow youth, I landed a 22-pounder in the pool named Paradise – as a callow oldie, I remember every delicious moment.

Amhuinnsuidhe Castle estate in Harris is one of the rare places where, from your bedroom window, you can see salmon leaping in the bay. The rivers here are short but, once fish reach the wilderness lochs and the furrowing grey wind stirs them up, you can be in paradise – even if you return with only ‘a sma’ trootie’.

David Profumo’s The Lightning Thread: Fishological Moments and the Pursuit of Paradise is out now (Scribner, £20) The Oldie July 2021 39

sister teresa

A nun’s guide to isolation An assortment of people have asked me what difference lockdown made to life in the monastery where I live. Precious little, in that we live almost entirely inside an admittedly generous enclosure.

Trips to the outside world are kept to a minimum and are limited to such practical matters as health, or buying shoes that fit properly.

Occasionally, when a complete rest is needed from the hard work of Carmelite life, a short stay with family or friends is permitted. This is wonderfully refreshing.

We don’t go to shops, pubs, gyms, meals in restaurants, theatres, concerts or to other people’s houses, because the purpose of our lives is to be focused on God. We live this way voluntarily, in order to pray for a world which contains so many people who do not think that God and prayer are necessities. Some are firmly convinced that both are woolly minded luxuries.

Although there has been the odd article – mostly in the Catholic newspapers, which have comparatively small readerships – comparing lockdown

to enclosure, over the months I have come to be surprised that advice from enclosed monasteries has not been asked for on a wider basis. I feel we might teach governments a thing or two.

We have been trained to accept monotony and restrictions of movement, we stick to a rigorous timetable, we work hard in a variety of ways, talking is very limited and we are committed to being charitable, whether we feel like it or not.

The latter, of course, is by far the most difficult to accomplish and by far the most important if everyone is to stay

Dutch courage: Anne Frank in 1941, the year before she started her diary

sane. Invariably, there are differences of opinion in a monastery, with exactly the same irritations to be found anywhere with people living together. What matters is how these annoyances are dealt with. The main question should always be ‘Is it kind?’

I have been feeling desperately sorry for the young – so I was very impressed by our chiropodist. Every evening from the beginning of lockdown, he read, out loud with his 13-year-old daughter, the diary of Anne Frank. I can’t think of any better advice to give to people who have, all of a sudden, become obliged to stay in the same place.

Anne Frank was given a blank notebook for her 13th birthday on 12th June 1942.

She went into hiding on 5th July – so she had the use of her birthday present for barely three weeks of freedom before two years of exceptional restriction began.

She lived in a state of great deprivation – the diary almost her only diversion – and yet she managed not only to retain her sanity, but also to expand her wisdom far beyond her years.

Funeral Service

MIRRORPIX/ALAMY

Lord Rossmore (1931-2021) Photographer Lord Rossmore briefly hit the headlines twice. First in 1970, when he announced his engagement to Marianne Faithfull. And again in 1981, when his house at Rossmore, County Monaghan, was burnt down by the IRA during the Bobby Sands hunger strike.

Having helped Marianne with her addiction problem, Paddy Rossmore set up the Coolmine Therapeutic Community near Dublin in 1973. Still going strong, it has saved hundreds of lives.

He chose to be buried in a wicker coffin in an unmarked grave in a green ceremony at Bath Natural Burial Meadow.

Typically self-effacing to the end, Paddy Rossmore lies next to his sister Brig in a field near Midford in the Cotswolds.

It was wet and windy. The celebrant, 40 The Oldie July 2021

Norman Bowman, struggled to make himself heard to 40 friends and relations on a grassy hillside.

Jason Rouse played Sliabh Na Mban on antique bagpipes played Lord Rossmore with by a previous Lord Rossmore.

Marianne Faithfull, Nicola Howard, June 1970 Paddy’s niece, read a traditional Irish blessing: ‘May the road rise to meet you. May the wind always be at your back.’

Sarah Williams, another niece, read from 1 Kings 19; Ev Hesketh from Auguries

of Innocence by William Blake; and Matthew Slater from The Third Policeman

by Flann O’Brien. Jonny Berliner sang Jerusalem by William Blake.

Paddy’s daughter Charlotte Westenra read Edward Lear’s poem The Pelican Chorus. Catherine FitzGerald read a reflection on Paddy by Sally Phipps.

Kevin Trainor read Patrick Kavanagh’s poem Primrose. And Paddy’s son Benedict Westenra read two dreams noted down

by Paddy on the morning he died.

As Paddy’s nephew, I was honoured to be invited to give the eulogy for my favourite uncle. I’ll spare you the details but I concluded by saying, ‘So farewell, your lordship, you were an example to us all. We all miss you more than I can say.’

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Aspirin makes me sick

I hate the taste – and the magical elixir has mixed results theodore dalrymple As readers will no doubt by now have noticed, life is a complicated business, and even supposedly straightforward questions often do not give themselves to easy answers. Take, for example, the question of aspirin: should one take it as a matter of course?

For long time, it seemed this humble medicament was almost the elixir of life.

It prolonged the survival of – or prevented heart attacks and strokes for – those with angina or transient ischaemic attacks.

Taken by the symptomless in daily, small doses, it reduced the risk of developing many cancers. It also reduced the death rate after heart attack by half – as measured by survival at five weeks – if a person suffering the crushing central chest pain took 600 milligrams of the soluble form nearly at once.

And, of course, it was cheap, though worth much more than the guinea a box that Beecham’s Pills (which consisted of aloe, ginger and soap) were claimed to be worth.

Sometimes I even feel guiltily irresponsible for not taking it, as if, by failing to do so, I were a treason against myself, punishable by early death. My problem is that I detest it: I shudder at the very thought of its taste, and it always upsets my stomach as cholera and dysentery never did. I can induce nausea in myself just by thinking of the taste of aspirin, though I know people who like the taste. I wonder whether there is a genetic basis to their perversion, as there is a genetic basis to the ability to taste phenylthiourea.

It was not without a certain sense of relief, then, that I read the results of a double-blind trial of 19,114 people over the age of 70. Free of cardiac disease, dementia or disability, they were randomly allocated to a regime of daily, low-dose aspirin or a placebo.

At just over 4½ years of follow-up, those in the aspirin-treated group had a higher death rate than those who took the placebo. The difference was not great

but it was statistically significant – that is to say, it was unlikely to have arisen by chance. And one must always remember that the onus is on a prescription drug to do the patient good, not just to do him or her no harm. Why bother to take a pill every day that does you no good?

The result was unexpected. The excess deaths were caused not by the wellknown gastrointestinal side effects of aspirin, but by cancer. A subsequent analysis showed that the deaths were caused not by an increased number of cancers, but by an increase in their virulence.

As is always the case, however, and as life’s complexity might lead one to expect, the results were not definitive. In earlier trials of daily low-dose aspirin given to younger people, there was a marked reduction in the incidence of many cancers, and of colon cancer in particular. This beneficial effect was not observed until patients had been taking the aspirin for more than five years.

It might be, then, that some benefit of giving it to older people ‘kicks in’ only after the 4½ years of follow-up in this study, and that would more than offset the deleterious initial effect.

Probably, though, I have missed the boat as far as aspirin prophylaxis of cancer is concerned – thank God! The idea of taking aspirin daily for years to reduce by 40 per cent my chances of getting various cancers – ugh!

There was one very revealing sentence in the report of the trial. ‘We enrolled community-dwelling persons in Australia and the United States who were 70 years of age or older (or more than 65 years of age among blacks and Hispanics in the United States).’

This reminded me that when I started out, geriatricians treated patients of 65 and over. Now they treat those of 80 or even 85 and older, provided they have multiple pathologies. So, 85 is the new 65.

The Oldie July 2021 41

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

Downton Abbey ’s big debt SIR: In his letter in the June issue, Anthony Evans is quite correct that the remarkable Grade I-listed Palladian house Basildon Park was extensively used during the making of both Downton Abbey and Belgravia – as were numerous other National Trust and privately owned historical buildings across Britain.

At a time when the Trust is experiencing political difficulties, it is appropriate to acknowledge that the period film and television dramas for which this country is world renowned would be unviable without the extraordinary properties under the Trust’s care, or indeed the civic commitment of its legions of volunteers.

Yours, Gareth Neame, Executive Producer Downton Abbey and Belgravia

Smarties show their metal SIR: Regarding Philip Norman’s article about the Smarties tubes (June issue), I remember the predecessor of the plastic caps. It was thin metal – aluminium, I think − which used to squash out of shape with the grip needed to remove it.

This, combined with the paper-thin tube, made it almost impossible to replace for later consumption.

The boxes I remember getting only in my Christmas stocking.

Richard J Pickering, Leicester

‘This view is extra, sir’

(June issue). Elaine Pittuck and I must have been at the same gigs. Indeed, the Walthamstow Granada was the place where I became a Kinks fan in November 1964.

I was luckier than Elaine, though, as I was one of the winners of a Kinks fanclub competition and got to meet the boys in May 1965.

It’s not John Dalton in the photo, but Pete Quaife, the original bassist. John joined when Pete left the band.

Still Kinky after all these years.

Olga Ruocco, Basildon, Essex

I was Kinky, too

Cheltenham first

SIR: What a delight to read a piece about another Kinks fan’s reminiscences

SIR: I am surprised that Valerie Grove thinks that the Bedford Square Book Bang in 1971 was the first British literary festival.

The Cheltenham Literary Festival, launched in October 1949, was the first not only in Britain but in the world.

I was born in October 1949, near to Cheltenham, and feel quite proprietorial about the festival.

There is life outside London…

Yours, Wendy Edmond, Slawston, Leicestershire

‘I’m afraid it’s curiosity’ 42 The Oldie July 2021

Virginia’s Golden Years SIR: It was good to read the article on Virginia McKenna (June issue). I remember the films mentioned in it.

I was surprised that the film she made in 2016 was not mentioned. It is called Golden Years. It is a wonderful British comedy concerning a group of oldies who get the better of the system that deprived them of their pension. The film starred, as well as Virginia McKenna, Bernard Hill, Simon Callow, Sue Johnston, Una Stubbs and other well-known faces. In these troubled times, it is good to see a feelgood film especially relevant to our generation. I can recommend it.

Yours sincerely, Robin Wood, Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire

The Lion queen SIR: It is always a wonderful experience to see a beautiful smile on the face of a beautiful woman. When I saw the photograph of Virginia McKenna and the lion cub in your June edition I just had to smile back!

Yours, Gabriel Lavelle, Milton-underWychwood, Oxfordshire

Bell keeps chiming

Cumberland Island, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia in the USA. We were there as the guest of a descendant of Thomas Carnegie, brother of Andrew, the wealthy 19th-century industrialist. Thomas had once owned all or most of the island.

At dinner’s end, the guests were handed an ancient visitors’ book. We were each instructed to close our eyes and draw as best as we could an armadillo, the mammal that infested the island. (Armadillos are superb swimmers and had made their way long before to the island.)

My attempt – so far as I remember – was pathetic but I was glad to join the hundreds of others who had joined this unique Carnegie tradition.

James Smith, Delancey, NY, USA

SIR: In the interview with Leslie Caron (June issue), she is quoted as saying that, after an incident at the 1962 BAFTAs, ‘Tom Bell never worked in films again … he was totally banished from films’.

Tom Bell’s Wikipedia entry lists about 40 films that he appeared in after 1962, though of course his may have been only minor roles.

Peter Fry, Witney, Oxfordshire

An archer writes SIR: In your June issue, Stephen Glover in his Media Matters column says that News UK has ‘other bows in its quiver’. I think not; it may have ‘more strings to its bow’ or, possibly, ‘more arrows in its quiver’.

Yours faithfully, David Maddock (once a keen archer), Fleet, Hampshire

What a lovely Storey SIR: I was delighted to see the thorough review (June issue) devoted to David Storey’s last book, published years after his death. We in Wakefield held in high regard a man who never forgot his roots, as a council-house boy

Latin lovers...

‘And it all ends up in the cloud’

speakers, all limited to five minutes.

He invited David, who, unable to take part, asked to be informed of how the event went.

Proudly I wrote, telling him we had raised £2,350, all of it to be used in alleviating suffering. By return, I received a cheque for £650 – ‘to round up your figure’, as David wrote.

What a fine gesture from a lovely man.

Yours sincerely, Norman J Hazell MBE (Millennium Mayor of Wakefield), Wakefield, West Yorkshire (also a council-house boy)

Ingrams flies a kite

‘I’m an urban fox during the week – rural at weekends’

who passed a scholarship to our grammar school.

Forty years ago, Brian, my brother, a fellow pupil, spotted a photo of a girl dying on an Ethiopian rubbish dump and resolved to ‘do something’. With friends and brothers, he started collecting money at churches and setting up all sorts of concerts (Charlie Williams was a great supporter).

What became known as the Suzy Fund has now raised over £1 million, our principle being ‘no overheads’.

In October 1996, Brian arranged what he called a five-minute evening in Wakefield Town Hall, with an array of

SIR: The kite has suffered very many years of persecution as a result of ignorance and greed, to such an extent that they very nearly died out in this country.

So it is indeed worrying to read (Bird of the Month, June issue) that people still have no understanding of red kites and what they feed on etc. Despite this ignorance, they are happy to condemn them out of hand!

I fully realise that Richard Ingrams’s rants are done for effect but the harm that can result from drivel like this can set attitudes back another generation or more.

Yours faithfully, John Davies, Llanddew, Brecon

SIR: Mr Buchan (Letters, June issue) may enjoy this Latin version of his favourite Ogden Nash poem. Not by me, but from Ave Ogden!, published by André Deutsch in 1975: Certe, orna crura bracis; Membra tua sunt, deliciae.

Veniens divina videris – Vidistine abeuntem te?

Isabel Raphael, London NW1

...and Latin errors SIR: Your columnist John Lloyd (Quite Interesting Things about … June, June issue) states that ‘45 per cent of Britons didn’t know what the Magna Carta was’.

He obviously does, and therefore should also know that the ‘the’ before Magna Carta is redundant.

Latin nouns do not require an article, yet he uses ‘the’ twice. Glass houses and stones spring to mind…

Yours pedantically, Annie Mortimer, Ware, Hertfordshire

Dinner at Carnegie’s hall SIR: Eleanor Doughty’s article about visitors’ books (May issue) reminded me of the time my then-wife and I visited

‘In a way, you can say that marriage is like binge dating’ The Oldie July 2021 43

I Once Met

Brian Sewell It was always the voice. If you knew nothing else about him, as soon as you heard that voice – on the radio, on the telephone – you’d know it was the art critic Brian Sewell.

He seemed permanently to have at least one plum either in his mouth or at the back of his throat. But what he said made you listen, and think – and see. His analysis of art, both on the radio and on the page, was shrewd, incisive to the point of ruthlessness, funny – and compelling.

You always wanted to hear, or to read, more. Thousands turned to his weekly Evening Standard column to savour Brian’s viciousness. Pull punches he did not.

I first met him in 1989, when I was an assistant editor at Bloomsbury Publishing. He was exactly twice my age. That autumn, I was copy-editing a book called A Life with Food, for which Brian had written most of the text. The book had been commissioned as a memoir by restaurateur Peter Langan – who had since died, having completed only one Almost faultless: Brian Sewell (1931-2015)

chapter. Peter had been an enthusiastic (if often drunk) art collector – so Brian, who was a friend of his, seemed like the man to finish the job.

And so he proved. He wrote brilliantly.

He was one our best authors.

Brian was nothing if not pedantic – ‘particular’, he would have said. When my editing was done, he insisted on checking every last tweak to his immaculate (in his eyes) text. He arrived at 2 Soho Square and we spent a long afternoon cooped up in my office – not much bigger than a phone box.

His prose was, indeed, almost faultless.

Almost. He scrutinised every mark I had made on the manuscript. We argued over the plural of hors d’oeuvre. (I won. In French, it doesn’t change.) We argued over the plural of ‘still life’. (He won – but I was right. It is NOT ‘still lives’!)

By teatime, he was looking weary. ‘All right, Brian,’ I said. ‘Not much more.

But here, I’m afraid, is something you definitely have got wrong.’

‘Oew.’ He peered down at the page. ‘And what’s that?’

‘Well, it’s…’ I pointed at the line. ‘Here. It should be cunnilingus, not cunnilungus.’

I could hear my boss in the adjoining office suppressing a gulp.

‘Oew,’ said Brian. ‘Well…’ He pressed a hand to his temple. ‘Well. Yes.’ He pursed his lips. ‘I’ve not had much experience of that.’

A tiny shard of ice had been chipped away. I wouldn’t say we were suddenly friends, but after that meeting Brian seemed somehow more willing to listen to my editorial comments – or at least to tolerate them. And I saw a more human, more vulnerable side of this apparently hard-boiled wiseacre.

Delivering page proofs to his home one evening, I was moved when he appeared at the door with a tumble of dogs, all tenderness and affection. His aged mother lived upstairs, and Brian looked after her. His answerphone message ran: ‘I can’t come to the phone right now, because I’m doing something unspeakable with my mother.’

It was only a glimpse. He didn’t always like women. He told my boss, ‘The trouble with women is that they want to be thanked all the time.’ He was talking about his aged mother’s nurse – not about me – but still. In his eyes, I was even more dispensable than I knew myself to be.

Brian died in September 2015, aged 84. His Standard column was unique. I don’t read the Standard any more.

Penny Phillips

MIRRORPIX/ALAMY AND WENN RIGHTS ALAMY

I was in the real Dad’s Army

On 14th May 1940, at the age of 17, I listened to a wireless broadcast by Anthony Eden.

His message was that the Government intended a new home defence army. It would consist of ex-servicemen beyond the call-up age and young men not yet of conscription age or in reserved occupations.

I was in that category – so I decided to volunteer.

The army would be named the Local Defence Volunteers.

Applicants had to register at the local police station, where they would be vetted, and

their names would be passed to the recruitment office.

This took several weeks, by which time a local platoon had been formed by the owner of a local pub, a retired captain of the Grenadier Guards.

When I arrived at my first evening parade, he said to me, ‘I am glad you have arrived: I have you down for guard duty tonight.’

He gave me an armband labelled LDV, then handed me an ancient Lee Enfield rifle and clip of ammunition.

‘I’ve put you with Joe here.

He is an ex-serviceman – if you haven’t handled a rifle before, he’ll show you how to use it.’

We set off on our bikes to Ready with his gun: Home Guard recruit, May 1940

the local church and graveyard, which overlooked a large field, deemed to be a possible landing ground for invaders. Our platoon and many others patrolled such locations for months.

But, thanks to the ‘gallant few’ of RAF Fighter Command (or was it the presence of the Royal Navy?), we never had to fire those 20 rounds. Lucky for us because if an invading party had arrived, they would

have had more than the 20 rounds apiece that we had.

Later, when Churchill renamed us the Home Guard, we were issued with a small patch of khaki material, labelled ‘Home Guard’, which had to be sewn on an armband covering the old letters, LDV. Dad’s Army on TV made great comedy, but those of us there at the time took it all very seriously. The Home Guard received numerous citations, including 13 George Medals, and was disbanded on 31st December 1944.

By Arthur Bush, New Zealand, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie July 2021 45

Books Pools win LUCY LETHBRIDGE The Sea Is Not Made of Water: Life Between the Tides

By Adam Nicolson

GARY WING

William Collins £20 The great Victorian naturalist Philip Gosse is remembered in Adam Nicolson’s new book not for being the unbending religious fundamentalist of his son Edmund’s memoir, but as the godfather of rockpool wonderment.

These shoreline cups, nourished by the in and out of the tides, are teeming miniature theatres of life. ‘Never more great than when minutely great’, Gosse said of the tiny glories of the rockpool.

In The Sea Is Not Made of Water, Nicolson describes how he created three pools near his Scottish home, Ardtornish.

He then lets the contemplation of these ‘micro-Arcadias’ take him on fascinating voyages through history, science, philosophy and literature. Over the course of several summers, he finds hosts of inhabitants in his pools, including winkles, whelks, sea urchins, starfish – and, in one, ten different kinds of seaweed.

There is nothing that can’t be illuminated by the examination of life at its tiniest, of the ‘flitter and skitter’ of flux and flow. Nicolson finds in his pools ‘the cupping of reality in several layers of itself’. It is an experience akin to gazing into fractals with their dizzyingly infinite spirals: ‘The closer you look, the deeper it dives.’

Nicolson quotes from William Golding’s review of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water: ‘We stand among the flotsam, the odd shoes and tins, hotwater bottles and skulls of sheep or deer.

We know nothing. We look daily at the mystery of plain stuff. We stand where

any upright food-gatherer has stood, on the edge of our own consciousness.’

Take the sandhoppers, those glossy little amphipods to be found on beaches all over Britain. We learn that they have sophisticated grooming rituals for keeping grit from their shiny carapace, and complicated social systems, and, most fascinating of all, that they have inner compasses that guide them across their territories, as they navigate by sun and moon.

Could prawns be considered conscious? wonders Nicolson. Their meaty tail which makes them so delicious is actually a giant muscle which enables the prawn to flip out of danger at a sudden movement. But what are they thinking, if they are thinking? Scientists, we learn, have found that crayfish, similarly equipped, are sometimes flippers and sometimes freezers – and the circumstances they are in make no difference to their reactions.

Then there is the ruthless, survivalist

efficiency of crabs. In one of Nicolson’s rockpools, there is a stand-off between a colony of small, green crabs and an old matriarchal mussel attached to the side.

She is too old for the crabs to eat but they gobble her tiny offspring – and she eats theirs.

Crab copulation takes place over two or three days – it can happen only when the female has moulted and her new shell is soft. Sometimes the male, seeing she is almost ready, will embrace a female in his pincers and hold her there for several days to keep her safe and out of range of the competition.

Female crabs, like most rockpool crustaceans, lay millions of eggs over their lifetime, releasing their larvae into the deepest swell of the sea – because that is the safest place for them until they are ready to float inland on the tide and into a brimming rockpool of their own.

Nicolson writes beautifully of how the tiniest organisms carry within them a cosmic echo. Everything is bound to

I can see the sea: Philip Gosse (1810-88) popularised the seawater aquarium The Oldie July 2021 47

the universe by the eternal push and pull of lunar gravity on the tides. In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler, rationalist though he was, saw the ebb and flow of the oceans as expressions of longing by the moon for the earth, that ‘the universe is filled with mutual but unchecked desire’, as Nicolson puts it – a kind of planetary ‘I love you, I love you not.’

The book makes deep dives into Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch and Socrates among others – and because he is such a gloriously lucid writer, each of Nicolson’s discursions is perfectly illuminating.

He touches on human sacrifice to the sea; on the superstitious tradition that suicides should be buried on the shore at low tide; on Scottish legends, fairies and sea people. Mesolithic man roamed the intertidal regions gathering shellfish and hunting cormorant and otters (you’d need to eat 31,000 whelks to get the protein fix of a single cow) and the oil spills from modern supertankers cause ‘wild oscillations’ in the natural turbulence.

But turbulence is what rockpools and life are all about; Nicolson sees that the pool, with its seawater cycles of birth, change and death, is the microcosm of the mystery and unity of all things.

Gorgeous Georgian MATTHEW STURGIS Hogarth: Life in Progress

By Jacqueline Riding Profile £30 Hogarth (1697-1764) holds a special place in our cultural landscape: the first really distinct, distinctive British artist.

His images – paintings and prints, portraits and ‘conversation pieces’, ‘modern moral subjects’ and ‘comic history pictures’ – teem with the life of mid-18thcentury London: theatrical, unidealised, raucous, comic, tragic and human. They still have the power to engage and divert.

But what of the man who created them?

Here is an entertaining new biography of ‘the father of English painting’. In the terms of Hogarth’s own practice, it is perhaps less a formal ‘portrait’ than a richly worked and varied ‘progress’. I am not sure that it adds anything to the record of his life. Nevertheless it enhances much of the colouring.

Among the scant biographical sources that have survived, the one contemporary document offering a sustained view of Hogarth in his own time is a mock-heroic account of an impromptu five-day Grand Tour taken by him, and four friends, from Covent Garden to, and around, north Kent.

‘He claims he was at a fancy-dress party and there’s been some mistake.

What should I do?’

The Peregrination is a delightful jeu d’esprit, and Riding uses it as the framework for her book, breaking up its incidents into eight ‘interludes’, to sit between her more formally ‘biographical’ chapters.

It is a happy conceit. We are plunged directly into the world of drinking songs, and Thames wherries, of shaving barbers and blind fishermen, of raw shrimps and naval dockyards. We see Hogarth, taken short in the churchyard at Hoo, trying to relieve his bowels on one of the graves in a most ‘unseemly manner’ – only to be interrupted by a companion chastising his exposed posterior with ‘a bunch of nettles’. Each stop and incident along the way – from breakfast at the Nag’s Head to the tour of the HMS Marlborough – is glossed and expounded upon.

And the same approach is carried over into the biographical chapters where Hogarth’s pictures come into focus.

Charles Lamb said, ‘Other pictures we look at; [Hogarth’s] we read.’ And Riding offers detailed readings of the various works – pointing up their contemporary concerns and resonances. Having written previously on the subject, she is particularly good on the lurking threat of Jacobite rebellion behind the growing stability of Hanoverian rule.

The incidental detail is profuse – so profuse, indeed, that there are moments when the person and personality of Hogarth are in danger of being lost in the crowding context. But then he reappears again – ambitious, practical, irreverent, patriotic and combative – as we follow him from his straitened London childhood (his father ended up in the debtors’ prison, following the failure of an ill-conceived Latin-speaking coffeehouse venture) – through his early triumphs (artistic, commercial and social) – to his later, often misguided battles with critics and rivals.

There are fresh perspectives. Drawing away from the familiar images of Gin

Lane and A Rake’s Progress, Riding offers a good account of Hogarth’s exalted (and much ridiculed) ambitions as a ‘history painter’. He was the creator of large-scale religious scenes for St Bartholomew’s Hospital and St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol.

She spends time, too, elucidating his boldly idiosyncratic, aesthetic inquiry – The Analysis of Beauty. With fine, practical aplomb, he eschewed the abstract and idealising tendencies of foreign art theorists and self-styled connoisseurs and sought to discover what actually most pleased and entertained the viewer’s eye.

Standing out for variety against symmetry, and nature against art, he came to the conclusion that the ‘the line of beauty and grace’ was an S-shaped arabesque. Both his views and his method provoked some merriment and derision among the critics – and much defensive energy from the author. It was a pattern that recurred throughout his professional life.

But, amid the displays of wounded vanity and cantankerous self-assertion, there remains something hugely impressive, and rather attractive, in the Hogarth who emerges from these pages.

He was a man of remarkable energy and vision. He was always ready to reach beyond the actual business of picturemaking to enhance the status and the quality of his profession. He sought to secure the artist’s copyright and establish proper artistic training and independent exhibiting spaces. He had a moral vision, allied to a practical stamp. He did many good and generous things. And also he loved pugs. His was called Trump.

An American Dreyfus ANDREW LOWNIE Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy

By Anne Sebba Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20 A few minutes after her husband, Julius Rosenberg, was executed, Ethel Rosenberg was executed, too, on the evening of 19th June 1953, for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The couple left two sons, aged ten and six.

The story of the Rosenbergs and the wider spy ring has been told many times before. What Anne Sebba has done in the first sole biography of Ethel in 30 years is to humanise the story behind the headlines, which she sees partly as a domestic drama of betrayal and partly as an American equivalent of the Dreyfus case.

The Oldie July 2021 49

The Rosenbergs are the only Americans put to death in peacetime for conspiracy to commit espionage, and Ethel the only American woman executed for a crime other than murder. No other convicted member of their spy ring received a death sentence.

The subtitle of the book is A Cold War Tragedy and it is clear where Sebba’s sympathies lie. She feels that Ethel’s death was a huge miscarriage of justice and she became not just a pawn in a dysfunctional family situation but also a victim of the wider American propaganda war against the Soviet Union.

The arrest in 1950 of Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist at Los Alamos, led to Ethel’s husband, Julius (codenamed ANTENNA and LIBERAL), and her brother, David Greengrass. Both men betrayed Ethel – Julius by refusing to confess his own guilt, thinking he could brazen it out on behalf of both of them, and Greengrass by testifying against Ethel in order to reduce his sentence and save his wife, Ruth.

Sebba has skilfully taken a well-known spy case and breathed fresh life into it, not particularly with new material, but by examining it with 21st-century sensibilities. Her book is about the human cost of the Cold War, rescuing one of its victims and fleshing out the wider story of a young woman determined to better herself and improve the lot of others.

It’s a book about fractured family relationships – Ethel’s mother supported her son over her daughter – and the misuse of power. The FBI admitted they had insufficient evidence to issue proceedings but, in what was called the ‘lever strategy’, hoped pressure on Ethel would force Julius to confess.

The carefully picked jury – those against capital punishment were excused service – did not believe Ethel would be executed, even if found guilty, and that anyone testifying against their sister must be telling the truth.

Sebba sees it partly also as a story about Jewish identity and prejudice – the judge, both prosecuting attorneys, the defence team and the Rosenbergs were Jewish. But one side, the ‘good’, assimilated, patriotic Jews, were pitted against the Lower East Side Jews, whose loyalties were more suspect.

The execution of the Rosenbergs became a cause célèbre and many continued to believe that both had been unfairly executed. The publication of the hitherto unknown Venona decrypts – Soviet codes broken by the Americans – in 1995 confirmed that Julius had run a spy ring for almost a decade, but the

evidence against Ethel was limited to a text dated 27th November 1944: Your 5356. Information on LIBERAL’s wife. Surname that of her husband, first name ETHEL, 29 years old. Married five years. Finished secondary school. A FELLOWCOUNTRYMAN since 1938.

Sufficiently well developed politically.

Knows about her husband’s work and the role of METER and NIL. It is almost certain that the judge had been secretly apprised of the Venona evidence and that had shaped his judgment and the rejection of subsequent appeals. Sebba is persuasive about Ethel Rosenberg’s punishment being disproportionate, but her attempt to downplay her guilt will strain credulity in some quarters. The FBI opposed the death sentence. They hoped the Rosenbergs would co-operate with the government in order to receive a lesser punishment but, even after her husband was dead and Ethel was being led to her execution, she refused to save herself.

Anne Sebba has written a powerful biography of a wife, mother and woman, caught by a system determined to make an example of her and betrayed by those she thought she could trust.

Those who can, teach KATE HUBBARD Re-educated: How I Changed My Job, My Home, My Husband and My Hair

By Lucy Kellaway Ebury Press £16.99 The midlife crisis can take many forms, but it commonly begins with a feeling of ‘Is this it?’

And, if it is, is it enough? Do you just trundle along on the same path for another 30 years? Or could you throw it all in? Become an osteopath? Ditch the spouse? Move to the Hebrides?

Few act on such fantasies. Lucy Kellaway is the exception. Kellaway, aged 57, was living in a solid, many-storeyed

‘Me? Raid your drinks cabinet, Dr Jekyll?!’

house in Highbury, with her husband and four children. For over 30 years, she had worked at the Financial Times, writing ‘sarky columns’ and amusing interviews.

In the space of two years, she ‘tore it all down’. Circumstances played their part – her marriage collapsed, her children grew up, her parents died and her job no longer provided much satisfaction or excitement. What galvanised her, however, was moving house.

Browsing the Modern House website, the ‘crack cocaine of property pornography’, she spied the Framehouse in Hackney and fell in love. Being a Modern House addict myself and having instantly googled the Framehouse – an airy, wood and glass triangle of a building – I saw this made perfect sense. Of course you’d want to live there!

Kellaway took her share of the sale of the family home, sank all her savings, ignored the dire survey and moved in. It was a decision that ‘released’ her ‘from the force of habit’ that had defined her life. Just as the office had once provided ‘a different way of being’, so did living in a modern house. Emboldened, Kellaway went further and decided to leave the FT and become a maths teacher.

Kellaway is clearly not a woman to do things by halves. Simultaneously she co-founded a charity, Now Teach, to recruit and train other middle-aged would-be teachers. There were 45 applicants in the first year, the eldest aged 73. Twelve dropped out. Dropouts are more often men, who seem less willing to unlearn long-held traits, such as self-importance. But the year of COVID has brought a record number of recruits. Most are motivated by a desire for change and to be useful.

Kellaway can only feel grateful for the military levels of discipline at her Hackney academy. But her first weeks in the classroom, as she flaps and fumbles and grapples with technology, are every bit as humiliating and nerve-racking as you’d expect.

‘I’m not being funny, Miss. But I could learn this better from a video,’ says one pupil.

She’s confounded at every turn. Being bad at something is an unfamiliar experience. Unthinkingly using the phrase ‘whiter than white’, as a roomful of non-white faces gaze up at her, she has to acknowledge that she’s ‘a bundle of unconscious biases’.

Never having set much store by exam results (her own were poor), she comes to realise that an ‘exam stickler’ is exactly what her pupils need her to be. Teaching, she concludes, is ‘brutal and brilliant in equal measure’.

The Oldie July 2021 51

When Kellaway tells her sister she’s going to write a book, she gets a sceptical response: a whole book about her change of career?

So is this more than an extended newspaper article? On the whole, yes. It’s certainly a quick read, written with journalistic ease and Kellaway’s usual wit and sharpness. As an honest account of navigating middle age, which in Kellaway’s case involves becoming a teacher, it works very well. It’s a reminder of the value of taking risks, continuing to learn and discovering how change invigorates.

Kellaway makes an excellent advocate for the middle years, which, mortal illness notwithstanding, seem to stretch on these days. Being ‘young-old’ (60-75) is, she feels, greatly preferable to being young-young. Less stressful. Less intense. And there’s less at stake.

Now Teach teachers don’t have to prove themselves – they’ve already done that in their previous careers. They’re not interested in promotion; they can afford to work part-time.

The same applies to romance.

Kellaway doesn’t need to meet the man who will father her children, or even share her house. She can weather the disappointments and (occasional) successes of internet dating with good humour.

Today, aged 60, Kellaway lives alone (with the odd child lodger) in her modern house, and teaches (economics; no longer maths) three days a week at her Hackney academy.

Having canvassed friends and family, she accepts that she hasn’t reinvented herself – her character is essentially unchanged. Rather, she’s been reeducated. Her daily experience of life feels utterly different. More interesting.

More surprising. More rewarding. Better.

De la Mare revisited PAUL DEAN Reading Walter de la Mare

By Walter de la Mare and William Wootten (editor) Faber £14.99 At one time, lots of children were made to read Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners at school. Nowadays, even if the Traveller broke the door down, he might find there was nobody there.

De la Mare, once a literary lion, centrepiece of the Georgian anthologies, was bypassed by the academy, written off as a melodious daydreamer with great technical skill but nothing to say.

Despite being admired by T S Eliot and

‘Fantastic – I’ve finally solved my weight problem’

W H Auden, he has dropped from view.

‘Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) wrote the dreamy Nod and the ghostly The Listeners’ is all John Carey has to say in A Little History of Poetry.

William Wootten’s new, intelligently annotated selection of 50 of his poems deserves to revive his reputation. We can once more appreciate that as a poet, he was tougher, more troubled and deeper than the graceful Georgian lyricist of popular memory.

Wootten’s discussion provokes questions. Was de la Mare really just ‘dreamy’ and ‘ghostly’? Wouldn’t ‘visionary’ and ‘uncanny’ be better? Or even ‘mystical’ and ‘macabre’? The blend is distinctive. For de la Mare, something lies about us in our infancy, but it may not be Heaven. He respected, even revered, childhood, as shown by his substantial critical study Early One Morning (1935), but he was less indulgent about it than A A Milne, and less mawkish than J M Barrie. His favourite Shakespeare plays were Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. He was a Romantic with a metaphysical strain.

De la Mare had a strange life. After singing as a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral, he endured 18 years of statistical drudgery at Standard Oil, keeping his wife (ten years his senior) and four children just about solvent. His poems, written after office hours, began to appear in magazines.

In 1908, when a Civil List grant freed him to write and review, his social world expanded to include Rupert Brooke, Katherine Mansfield and, later, Thomas Hardy. As a reader for Heinemann, he worked on manuscripts by D H Lawrence – a deliciously unlikely pairing.

Just before the First World War, during which he worked for the Ministry of Food, de la Mare published The Listeners and Other Poems (1912) and Peacock Pie (1913), which contain many of his best-known pieces. From then on,

volume followed volume: poems, stories, essays, fiction, and fine anthologies such as Come Hither (1923).

He was an adult who remained a child in important ways, intrigued by the borderland between innocence and experience, impulse and caution. He was a bit of a mystic, too, convinced that this world is not all there is, and that we can catch glimpses, from time to time, of what lies beyond. In his eyes, a newborn baby was already an exile.

As a family man, de la Mare had mixed success. His own father died when he was four, and he was always close to his mother.

After his wife died in 1943, de la Mare wondered if he had ever really known her. From 1911, his muse and (platonic) love obsession had been the novelist and journalist Naomi Royde-Smith.

He was more open and spontaneous with his children, as a natural partythrower and player of games. But he clung to an idealised image of them.

When his daughter Jinnie’s marriage collapsed in alcoholism and divorce, he hid from the facts and became estranged from his small grandson.

In old age, when the academic world had relegated him to the status of minor versifier, other honours accumulated: he had turned down a knighthood at 50, but became a Companion of Honour and was given the Order of Merit.

His last poems kept their trademark polish and grace, with darker shadows and more muted notes. Surviving recordings of him reading his poems and recalling a visit to Hardy have a natural, confiding, quite un-‘poetic’ tone. On his deathbed, towards the close of Midsummer Night 1956, he recited Fare Well, with its injunction to ‘Look thy last on all things lovely,/Every hour.’

He did just that, and his voice can be heard clearly again in William Wootten’s excellent book.

Natural highs CHARLES FOSTER This Is Your Mind on Plants

By Michael Pollan Allen Lane £20 I’ve never met a normal human adult. I’m not sure I want to.

We’re not satisfied with our ‘normal’ states of consciousness. We’re always seeking something else. Many plants help in the search. We sniff them in gardens, inhale their essential oils, make drinks from them and wander through woods, ‘forest bathing’.

So the people I know are human-plant hybrids: products of ancient and The Oldie July 2021 53

‘Sorry I’m late … or early … or on time’

Mid-1750s rococo at Powderham Castle, Devon. From Old Homes, New Life: The Resurgence of the British Country House by Clive Aslet, Triglyph Books, £50

drinks are caffeinated, and not for taste, but for buzz and addiction. Some 90 per cent of humans ingest caffeine regularly. You’re almost certainly an addict. When you drink your cup of coffee in the morning, the good feeling comes from mitigation of the withdrawal symptoms that have crept in overnight.

Caffeine is thought to have evolved in plants for two main reasons. It reduces the destructiveness of some insects by sending them haywire and making them vulnerable to predators; and it attracts some pollinators (perhaps making them addicted) and increases their memory of the caffeine-producing flower’s scent. But at a cost: caffeinated bees don’t forage as efficiently. They store less honey.

Caffeine makes us ‘faster but not smarter’. It boosts a particular kind of productivity – the kind associated with

to-do lists and intense focus on an individual point. The kind associated with the destructive, nerdish, tyrannous left hemisphere. The kind that makes you lose sight of context.

It has certainly caused a breach with our own biology and with the non-human world. It rides roughshod over our circadian rhythms and the natural pace of things. Surely it is more than a coincidence, Pollan observes, that caffeine and the minute hand on clocks arrived at more or less the same historical moment.

Most interesting of all is mescaline, the product of various cacti, including peyote and the San Pedro cactus. It was mescaline that made the folds of Aldous Huxley’s trousers fascinating. It seemed to Huxley, as to Pollan, that mescaline disabled the valve that normally The Oldie July 2021 55

DYLAN THOMAS

elaborate symbiosis. Say hello to your friend and you’re talking to an ecosystem.

That’s worth knowing.

Pollan’s brilliant, compulsively readable book is an attempt to acknowledge and explicate this symbiosis. He examines, consumes and abstains from three plant substances – opium, caffeine and mescaline – telling us what it’s like to be on and off them.

These three drugs, he contends, ‘hold up mirrors to our deepest human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world’. He’s right.

To describe that entanglement involves much more than a diary of tripping and cold turkey. It demands a cultural, economic and political history of our liaison with the plants. Pollan’s story telling is deft, forthright and fascinating. We learn that opium preparations were as common in the Victorian medicine chest as aspirin is in ours; that poppy tea is served at Middle Eastern funerals to take away the sadness; that Nixon’s drug war was – explicitly and cynically – a proxy war on the anti-war hippies (represented by marijuana) and black Americans (represented by heroin).

‘Did we know we were lying about the drugs?’ asked John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic adviser. ‘Of course we did.’

It makes you wonder what our current – highly selective – wars on ‘drugs’ are really about.

This potpourri of historical facts would itself make the book worthwhile.

But it is mainly – and most absorbingly – concerned with the effect of these substances on individual human heads and identities.

Opium is the least interesting. Pollan’s home-brewed poppy tea ‘didn’t seem to add anything new to consciousness’, as many other drugs do. It merely subtracted melancholy, worry and grief.

Caffeine is an issue for most of us.

That includes our children: most soft

turns the flood of data from the dazzling world out there to the measly trickle with which we construct our dreary, unsatisfying views of reality.

Mescaline made the moment incandescently beautiful and sufficient.

This, Pollan decided, was how the universe really is. We’re dissatisfied with our usual view of reality because that’s not reality at all – and we intuit that it is not. We know we’re missing out.

Pollan leaves many questions hanging.

Other than railing at the hypocrisy and incoherence of much of state regulation of psychedelics, he doesn’t preach or prescribe. So let me do that for him.

Opium is probably best kept as a prescription drug but the discretion to prosecute for possession should be wielded intelligently and sensitively.

And all incoming MPs and CEOs should be required to give up coffee and have a prolonged session on mescaline.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Oxford blues YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM Sorrow and Bliss

By Meg Mason Weidenfeld & Nicolson £14.99 Love and depression in the age of emojis: Meg Mason’s second novel is an education in how all that works.

The unhappy first-person protagonist, Martha, sends her sister, Ingrid, emojis of ‘the bathtub, the three-pin plug and the coffin’. Ingrid (the fertile one of the two) sends Martha ‘the eggplant, the cherries and the open scissors’.

But is it love? And is it depression?

Martha’s ‘43-day starter marriage’, as she calls it, is a marriage of untrue minds from the start. I’ve no idea why she married the ghastly Jonathan, who picks up a bowl of sashimi from the conveyor belt at the Japanese restaurant, eats half of it and puts it back on the conveyor belt. And who always says ‘full disclosure’ before stating something really bland about himself.

Her second marriage, though: that really does seem to be love, but we learn from the beginning of the novel that this, too, will break up. Martha has known Patrick Friel since childhood when, as a neglected boarding-school boy, he used to come and spend Christmas with her cousins in Belgravia. He has always loved her, though at first he denies it.

They get married and move to an ‘executive home’ in Oxford, where Martha writes a food column for the Waitrose magazine. She is at first nice

and then increasingly horrid to Patrick, throwing things at him, a poor, exhausted, kind young doctor trying to do his best. She did warn him she was insane, but he replied, ‘Insanity is not a deal-breaker, if it’s you.’

We start to live inside Martha’s mind and feel what it’s like to suffer from an undiagnosed mental illness. ‘There isn’t day and night. There isn’t time. Only pain, and the pressure and the terror that is like a twisted cord running down the centre of your body.’ What on earth is wrong with her? Eventually a psychiatrist in Harley Street correctly diagnoses her illness as ‘– –’. It turns out that ‘– –’ runs in her family and her mother never told her.

That’s clever of Mason: by playing the illness as a blank ‘wild card’, she allows us to project our own mental disorders onto Martha’s. Whatever it is, it can make Martha rather tedious, self-obsessed company. Take this typical ‘I’-filled paragraph: ‘I have been loved every day of my adult life. I have been unbearable but I have never been unloved. I have felt alone and I’ve been forgiven for the unforgivable things I have done.’

Yet, through it all, she manages to be hilarious, and this is what makes the novel stand out. Perhaps because she’s so taken up with her own dark mind, she has neither the time nor the desire to do, read, see or learn complicated new things. So her hilarity is the hilarity of vagueness. When Patrick tries to teach her to play backgammon, she describes him ‘setting up the suitcase thing’. Yes! I’ll never look at a portable backgammon board again without thinking ‘the

suitcase thing’. Browsing a psychotherapist’s website, she sees the question ‘What’s Worrying You?’ and scrolls down the drop-down menu. ‘I selected Other.’ Brilliant. No need for her to list the items on the ‘What’s Worrying You?’ list that she didn’t select.

Witheringly she sums up boring things or people she can’t be bothered to try hard to like. Such as an exhibition ‘of works by a photographer who only seemed to photograph himself, in his own bathroom’. Or of someone she met ‘at a charity dinner for a cause I can’t remember, even though the purpose of going was to have our awareness raised’.

I loved all that. And I loved Patrick’s sweetness in understanding that because Martha had started to watch a certain film, she would need to watch it to the end. ‘Because it was based on a true story, I obviously wanted to watch the entire thing, just for the words that come up at the end. Someone died aged 83. The painting was never found.’

Yes. I too relish ‘those words that come up at the end’ of films based on a true story. Then she and Patrick watch the baked-Alaska episode of The Great British Bake Off together, and I sighed with relief at this peaceful interlude. She uses the ‘speeded-up camera’ method to describe three years of their marriage passing: ‘a holiday, a leaking pipe, new sheets, happy birthday, a technician between 9 and 3…’.

It’s these flecks of universality that enhance this novel about one quite attention-seeking and often bewildering person.

‘Oh, we have only tofu down here’ The Oldie July 2021 57

My Favourite Book

How to win friends

As we return to social life after the pandemic, how can we be good company? Learn from an 18th-century peer jeremy scott

‘C

all it vanity if you will but, from a very early age, my great object was to make every man and every woman love me.’

4th Earl of Chesterfield (1674-1773) Chesterfield’s ambition strikes a chord today (particularly as we re-enter society after the pandemic), though one might shrink from admitting it. But to be liked – better yet, loved – rates high for most of us.

I stumbled on Chesterfield in my teens, and have found him invaluable in negotiating the potholes in life’s road.

Chesterfield identified his goal – to be loved – at seven and devoted his youth to achieving it. In this, he possessed many advantages – born to wealth, title and connection – but one major handicap.

He was grotesquely ugly. Short and disproportionate, he had a head so large he looked like ‘a stunted giant’. George II described him as a ‘dwarf baboon’.

Yet he enchanted everyone he met, made a trophy guest at any gathering, and was judged ‘the wittiest and most engaging man in England’.

In his Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774), Chesterfield offers us a how-to guide to accomplishing the

Lord Chesterfield: ugly yet enchanting

same result. Personal style and manner ‘captivate the heart’, he says. ‘They gave rise, I believe, to the extravagant idea of magic charms and love potions, whose effects were so astonishing they were reckoned supernatural.’

But, he says, with study and application these ‘gifts’ can be acquired by anyone. ‘When you meet a person whose general style causes you to have a good opinion of them and like them, though you don’t know why, analyse the several parts that compose it. Then copy them, not servilely but as the greatest painters have copied others, so that their copies are equal to the originals.’

‘Seek the company of those above you; there you rise as much as with those below you sink. Get into the highest company available and address yourself to the highest in it.’

‘Easiness of bearing and behaviour, which is extremely engaging, only means that one is not to be stiff, formal, embarrassed, disconcerted, or ashamed like a country bumpkin.’

‘Gain the heart or you will gain nothing.

Merit will not do it for you. The way to the heart is through the senses. Please their eyes and ears and the work is half done.’

‘I have frequently known a person’s fortune decided for ever by their first words on [their] meeting someone.’

‘Speak the language of the company you are in. Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with…

Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket. Do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one.’

‘Talk often but never long; if you do not please, at least you are sure not to bore your hearers. Tell stories very seldom.

‘Take, rather than give, the tone of the company. If you have intelligence, you will show it, more or less, on every subject; and if you have not, it is better to talk sillily on a subject of another’s choosing rather than your own.

‘Seek to discover each person’s particular merit, their predominant passion or their prevailing weakness, and you will then know with what to bait your hook to catch them…

‘You will easily discover everyone’s prevailing vanity by observing their favourite topic – for everyone talks most of what they wish to be thought to excel in. Touch them there and you touch them to the quick… Strike at the passions; if you do, you will prevail.’

And then, Chesterfield gives some CRUCIAL advice: ‘Above all things and upon all occasions, avoid speaking of yourself.’

Chesterfield’s advice runs counter to the narcissism and self-promotion that form the current mode of conversation.

Oldie-readers may remain open to what he says, but the young are beyond redemption.

‘When and if you are obliged to mention yourself, take care to drop not one single word that can be construed as fishing for applause.’

‘The more you know, the modester you should be. And, by the way, do realise that modesty is the surest way of gratifying your vanity.’

‘Even when you are sure, seem rather doubtful. Suggest but do not proclaim; and, if you would convince others, seem open to conviction yourself… Take especial care not to speak of your own or other people’s domestic affairs.’

‘A person of sense soon discovers, because they carefully observe, when and how long they are welcome, and take care to leave the company before they are wished out of it. Fools never learn when to go.’

I believe that last warning particularly is sound. It has saved me from all kinds of trouble. Chesterfield’s advice is timeless, for it is based on human nature – which is exactly the same now as in the 18th century.

Do read him. Then, as he says, ‘Go sweetly and easily on your way.’

The Oldie July 2021 59

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

The word that dare not speak its name

TOM PLANT

Is it possible to kill a word?

Many words certainly go unuttered. If you’re a typical English-speaker, you have a vocabulary of roughly 20,000 words, or perhaps 40,000 if you’ve been to university. Yet the OED puts the number of words at over 500,000. That means at least 450,000 English words hardly ever get an airing. But they aren’t dead.

For some people, that’s a pity. They want to kill off words and phrases that offend them and often impose substitutes more to their liking. One victim is ‘Essex girl’, which has been removed from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (I’m not sure of the approved alternative).

No doubt the intention behind that excision was good, but some might say it’s the job of a dictionary to provide the meaning of words and phrases whether or not readers find that upsetting.

Throughout the ages, censors have tried to stop people writing or reading material deemed offensive. Chaucer was among the first writers of English to feel – and resist – the pressure. He argued that whoever tells someone else’s story must repeat as closely as he can every single word, although that may mean speaking rudely and extravagantly, or else he tells his tale inaccurately, or makes things up or finds new words.

Publishers like William Caxton did just that: they found different words – adopting ‘buttocks’ instead of ‘arse’ in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, for example.

En suite bathrooms An en suite bathroom is meant to give the impression of continental luxury.

You can tell that because it’s spoken of in French, like toilet and serviette, for that added sense of, er, mystique.

In a five-star hotel, an en suite bathroom may resemble a glistening double-page 60 The Oldie July 2021

In 1529, Henry VIII became the first European monarch to draw up a list of banned books. Over the next 500 years, all sorts of works were suppressed. We like to think such censorship ended in the 1960s when the curtain came down on the Lord Chamberlain’s powers over the theatre and the Crown failed to ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We smile at Thomas Bowdler’s zealous expurgations of Shakespeare 200 years ago and the absurdity of apartheid South Africa’s prohibition of Black Beauty. It could not happen now, we say.

But something related is happening now. One example is the widespread use of euphemisms, a form of self-censorship.

If we are not to cause offence, we’re told, we must abandon plain English and adopt ‘offenders’ for ‘criminals’, ‘residents’ for ‘prisoners’ and ‘special needs’ for ‘handicapped’. The pressure comes not from governments but from interest groups, and you ignore it at your peril.

A manifestly well-intentioned football official was obliged to resign last year after publicly speaking of ‘coloured footballers’ rather than ‘footballers of colour’. Never mind that he obviously meant well, nor that the largest civil-rights organisation in America is called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

I dislike public swearing. I abominate the use of racial epithets – so commonly albeit unthinkingly used in my childhood.

Often it will cost us nothing to change our

spread in Better Homes Than Yours Will Ever Be. But its counterpart in today’s newbuild house usually consists of a thinly partitioned-off corner of a thinly constructed master bedroom.

This has unintended consequences. Imagine the shock to the newly married, romantically minded young couple, coming straight from their honeymoon hotel to their cardboard castle on a new estate.

They are forced to hear their beloved’s ablutions at uncomfortably close quarters, noise magnified to what feels like rock-stadium level, echoing round and ricocheting off all that

vocabulary. The Scots, who for some reason dislike being called ‘Scotch’ – as they were by one and all for at least three centuries – have succeeded in having ‘Scotch’ now used to describe only eggs, whisky, shortbread and a bonnet that shares its name with a chilli pepper. If they are pleased, we should not mind too much.

Neither should we be intimidated.

There is a place for satire, invective and humour in public discourse. There is also a place, indeed a necessity, for plain language. Inevitably, offence will sometimes be taken. That has always been part of the price of free speech.

Today’s word-killers may have some successes. Most people have no wish to upset others gratuitously. But the truth is incompatible with euphemisms and Orwellian newspeak. Moreover, you cannot ban a word without writing it. You cannot explain why it is objectionable without using it. You can insert an asterisk or two in place of letters, but please recognise that this is a feeble form of self-censorship. The ‘F word’ and the ‘N word’ are born of cowardice, not courtesy. You can also change Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Niggers and Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, but you cannot change the fact that these titles were once bestowed on books.

In short, you cannot kill words. And if you try too hard, you may find the people you silence in public will vote for Donald Trumps in private.

chrome and tile. The sound effects prompt visions of the Niagara floodgates opening, followed by two warthogs mating in a mud bath.

Along with this comes the nasty suspicion that one of you (in all honesty, probably you) is going to have to scrub

SMALL DELIGHTS Phoning a call centre and getting straight through to someone who can solve the problem.

WILLIAM DAY, NEWCASTLE, AUSTRALIA Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

a universe’s worth of dark matter off the porcelain.

En suite bathrooms don’t bring luxury so much as too much intimacy. As the musical Jersey Boys put it, ‘Marriage is not love.

Marriage is you take a shave while your wife sits on the can and clips her toenails.’

This was the case to an even greater extent before indoor plumbing. Here’s Pepys with a bladder fit to burst at 6am: ‘I lacked a pot, but there was none, and bitter cold, so was forced to rise and piss in the chimney.’

Mrs Pepys would have wearily observed that, these days, we get off pretty lightly.

KATRINA ROBINSON

History

The lying game

An enormous conman starred in two of the longest trials in history david horspool Now that we’re all being asked to prove our identity every time we go out to lunch, the idea of being an impostor seems quite attractive.

But could we go as far as Anna Sorokin, the lorry driver’s daughter from a Moscow suburb who passed herself off as a $60-million trust-fund heiress on arrival in New York City in 2013?

She managed to convince people she was who she said she was… And, darling, I seem to have forgotten my credit card – would you mind paying the hotel bill?

Sorokin was part of a rich tradition of impostors. Because of her national origins, she reminded people of ‘Anastasia’ – the woman who for years claimed to be a missing Romanov princess, who had somehow survived the murderous cull of Yekaterinburg.

But when I read about Sorokin, I thought of another impostor who travelled to the other side of the world to fool the upper crust, that great Victorian cause célèbre the Tichborne Claimant.

In 1866, a ship docked at London carrying a passenger named Tomas Castro.

Castro was the name adopted by a man who was in reality either Sir Roger Tichborne, long-lost scion of the Tichborne family and heir to their extensive estates in Hampshire; or Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wagga Wagga who had first emigrated to Australia from Wapping, London, via South America in the 1840s.

Did Castro and Tichborne, even allowing for the passage of time (Roger had disappeared in 1854), bear a strong resemblance? Not really. When last seen, before his ship went down between Rio and Kingston, Jamaica, Roger had been a slim, dissipated young man of conventional English upper-class upbringing and education, who had been a fluent Frenchspeaker. The Claimant weighed 27 stone, spoke no French and did not seem to know much about Roger’s past or his family.

It is difficult to believe that the case

Not titchy: the Tichborne Claimant

would have lasted more than a week had the Dowager Lady Tichborne, in Paris, not confirmed the Claimant as her son when he arrived there in 1867. Lady Tichborne had, after her husband’s death, advertised throughout the empire asking for information leading to her son – who she was convinced was still alive.

Her confirmation of the Claimant’s identity, and her subsequent death before the identification could be tested, contributed to the survival of the claim.

The Claimant’s case led to two of the longest trials in English legal history. The civil case began in 1871. It lasted for ten months, heard the testimony of 350 witnesses – and resulted in the dismissal of the claim, and the revelation of the Claimant’s likely identity as Arthur Orton.

Then came the criminal case, during which Castro/Orton/Tichborne was charged with perjury. He lost that one, too, in an even longer trial, lasting 11 months. His unconventional defending QC, Irishman Edward Kenealy, did more than anyone

to promote and draw out the trial. He also managed to insult the judge so comprehensively that he was disbarred.

The Claimant, meanwhile, was sentenced to a savage 14 years’ imprisonment.

The case had some old historical echoes. At the end of the Wars of the Roses, two ostensibly royal impostors emerged, Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel. Their fates set some of the conventions that the Claimant followed 400 years later. They claimed a crown rather than a decent country estate.

Warbeck claimed to be the Duke of York, the younger of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, who, according to Warbeck’s claim, survived his uncle’s murderous orders.

For Warbeck, as for Tichborne, the evidence of a ‘foolish, fond’ old lady was vital. In Warbeck’s case, it was his putative paternal aunt, Margaret of Burgundy, who confirmed his identity as the Duke of York.

The Claimant’s fate was less grim than Warbeck’s (eventually hanged by Henry VII).

When the Claimant was released after ten years’ exemplary behaviour, his brief had kept his claim in the public eye. Kenealy had yoked the case of a man who wished to be an aristocrat to the campaign for parliamentary reform, repurposing it as a tale of the little man (not that little) traduced by the Establishment. In the long run, none of it did him any good, and the Claimant died in penury in London in 1898.

The only relict of this peculiarly Victorian curio is in our language. The comedian Harry Relph (1867-1928) was known as Little Tich not because he stood only four-foot-six tall but because, as a child, he had borne a resemblance to the chubby Claimant. His fame led to the re-spelled word ‘titch’ being adopted in the vernacular to mean a short person.

If you’ve ever called someone titchy, you are keeping alive the story of a man who in his day was known for vastness – in body size, length of legal battle and scale of the whoppers he told.

The Oldie July 2021 61

Arts NETFLIX HARRY MOUNT ELVIS PRESLEY: THE SEARCHER You might think this Elvis documentary would be biased. It was devised by his ex-wife, Priscilla Presley, and his great friend, Jerry Schilling, cleverest of the Memphis Mafia.

Instead, it’s a two-part, 215-minute, objective view of Elvis’s life, as told through his songs. The talking heads are serious: from Priscilla to Ronnie Tutt, Elvis’s drummer in the 1970s; from Bruce Springsteen to the late Tom Petty.

Petty’s words stand for the whole film: ‘He was a light for all of us. We should dwell in what was so beautiful and everlasting – the great, great music.’

The title of the film comes from Priscilla Presley’s words to its producer, Jon Landau: she called Elvis ‘the searcher’.

That searching tendency produced his rare alchemy, combining rhythm and blues, country and gospel. Listen to the Sun Sessions, recorded at Sun Studios, Memphis, in 1954 and 1955, when he was 19 and 20, just before he became globally famous in 1956. His voice then was higher but still a miracle.

Bing Crosby’s voice was said to be the perfect singing-in-the-shower voice.

Elvis in Hawaii, 1973. His belt features the Great Seal of the United States

Elvis’s voice wasn’t just the ideal rock ’n’ roll voice. It was also the perfect voice for ballads like Wooden Heart, Don’t and Can’t Help Falling in Love.

Thom Zimny, who co-edited, coproduced and directed the film, takes a convincing approach to the arc of Elvis’s career. It’s more nuanced than John Lennon’s line, ‘Elvis really died the day he joined the army.’

In fact, Elvis hit an artistic high spot on his immediate return from the army in the 1960 album Elvis Is Back!, particularly in the songs Fever and The Girl of My Best Friend.

How odd, too, that the most influential rebel of the 20th century should produce two gospel albums, His Hand in Mine (1960) and How Great

Thou Art (1967), in the trendy, epochshattering 1960s.

Yes, most of Elvis’s films in the 1960s were rubbish, with the odd inspired song – such as C’mon Everybody in Viva Las Vegas (1964), where Ann-Margret and Elvis pull off a thrilling, erotic, hightempo dance act. Elvis’s dancing was an underrated arrow in his quiver: DJ Fontana, his 1950s drummer, said Presley could signal a sophisticated series of drum beats with the tiniest of body moves.

The film acknowledges the bad effect of Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, forcing him into those terrible films. But, still, it was the Colonel who made Elvis big in the first place.

And Elvis did have the gumption to countermand the Colonel’s schlocky tendencies in his magical, later moments– in the ’68 Comeback Special and the strikingly original 1969 album From Elvis in Memphis.

Because this documentary is about Elvis’s music, it barely deals with his tragic death in 1977, at the age of only 42.

But the 1970s still produced its high moments. Before he ballooned in weight, his live shows were a unique, vast spectacle. His band was combined with backing vocals by the Sweet Inspirations, the Imperials, the Stamps, Kathy Westmoreland and a 30-piece orchestra.

Few other American artists could have afforded the expense. Few other artists could have been quite so spectacularly American, for that matter. Watch him sing An American Trilogy in the 1973 Aloha from Hawaii satellite broadcast to a billion viewers. He’s wearing a white jumpsuit, emblazoned with 6,500 gemstones depicting two American bald eagles, and a belt featuring the Great Seal of the United States (pictured).

With any other singer, it would have been embarrassing. With Elvis, it just feels startlingly authentic, as he always was.

The Oldie July 2016 63

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK THE DEEP BLUE SEA NATIONAL THEATRE AT HOME

GARY SMITH

Helen McCrory’s death in April, from cancer, aged just 52, robbed the British theatre of one of its great performers.

To honour her memory, the National Theatre is streaming one of her greatest performances, as the tragic heroine of Terence Rattigan’s finest play. It’s a fitting tribute to a woman who achieved so much yet promised so much more. In this haunting production, which premièred in 2016, she’s at the height of her powers.

During the first lockdown, the National streamed numerous productions free of charge. Although they’re no longer streaming them for free, the sums they’re charging are still pretty modest: £7.99 for one play, £9.99 for a month’s unlimited viewing, £99.99 for a whole year. Sure, it’s not quite the same as seeing a play in the theatre, but online you can see productions that have been and gone, starring people who are no longer with us. I’m so pleased they’ve preserved this performance of Rattigan’s 1952 play.

McCrory plays Hester Collyer, a vicar’s daughter slipping into middle age, who’s left her dutiful husband, a High Court judge, for Freddie Page, a feckless former RAF pilot. Tormented by the realisation that she loves him far more than he can ever love her, she tries to kill herself. The play begins with her attempted suicide and charts the passage of the day after.

During that day, Rattigan reveals the true nature of his characters: Hester’s husband is a decent chap, but he’s incapable of understanding her; Freddie is a war hero, but in peacetime he’s entirely selfish. The moral centre of the play is Miller, a struck-off doctor who saves Hester’s life. A German refugee, he was interned on the Isle of Man and subsequently sent to prison for some unspecified, scandalous offence.

Rattigan’s message is clear: we are all flawed, and the people with most flaws often have the most love to give.

‘Does it hurt when I do this?’

64 The Oldie July 2021

Also on now: Joel MacCormack and Isabel Adomakoh Young in Romeo and Juliet, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre (until 24th July)

Rattigan’s astute and subtle stagecraft transforms this melancholy storyline into something exhilarating – almost uplifting.

He allows us no false promises or easy sentimentality but, amid the misery and heartbreak, something wonderful shines through – the indefatigability of the human spirit. Miller’s advice to Hester is blunt and simple: ‘Go on living.’ Not because better times lie ahead (they may not) but because we must.

Tom Scutt’s cavernous set evokes the drab austerity of ration-book Britain.

Once a smart townhouse, now divided into bedsits, the shabby setting reflects Hester’s bleak predicament. Her generation have won the war but lost the peace. Their best days may be behind them. But, like all the best plays, The Deep Blue Sea doesn’t leave us feeling hopeless. It finds some comfort in the darkness. It lights the way ahead.

After his death, aged 66, in 1977, Rattigan’s well-made plays were dismissed as safe and stuffy, but they’ve aged far better than the kitchen-sink dramas that replaced them. Belittled for his posh background and commercial success, he was actually a champion of the underdog – not people in abject poverty, admittedly, but respectable folk like Hester who’ve fallen on hard times.

Despite his Establishment credentials, he knew how it felt to be an outsider. The Deep Blue Sea was inspired by the suicide of his lover, the actor Kenneth Morgan.

Carrie Cracknell’s direction is sensitive and unobtrusive, and Tom Burke is superb as the shallow, self-centred Freddie – he makes you want to slap him.

Nick Fletcher is sublimely understated as the enigmatic Miller.

But the show belongs to McCrory. Her portrait of a woman on the edge of an abyss has everything – passion, defiance, desolation, despair… She dares to reveal every emotion. She lays herself bare. Her voice has extraordinary range, yet she remains utterly naturalistic. Some of the most moving moments are when she’s silent and alone on the stage.

She left behind so many monuments, on TV and in the cinema, from Peaky Blinders to Harry Potter, but this is the one I’ll really cherish. RIP.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE I wish I could create a podcast I might ‘host and monetise’, as websites advise.

Something simple; infantile even. Like Michael Mosley’s Just One Thing, which suggests you should stand on one leg every day. Or breathe in and out, slowly.

Or I could keep a ‘gratitude diary’, to cheer myself up. I once met Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking. He was 92 and quoted Marcus Aurelius: ‘Our life is what our thoughts make of it.’ God, that’s so true, Norman!

There’s simply no escaping self-help, is there? And people lap it up.

There’s even an award-winning apocalypse-podcast parody called Preppers (Radio 4), with Sue Johnstone.

But can it be parody, by just talking down to listeners? In my view, that’s mimicry.

As Craig Brown says, all he had to do to

parody Paul Morley on Bob Dylan was write down exactly what Morley said.

So much of life now being beyond parody, how do comedy writers manage?

Stand-up comedians like Stewart Lee deal with it by deconstructing and dismantling their own humour. His Archive on 4 on unreliable narrators challenged us to believe anything anyone said, starting with Geoffrey of Monmouth. I was a bit baffled. My son explained, ‘Lee has no interest in winning over his audience. It’s the audience’s privilege to be in his company.’

I enjoyed the pacy podcast about Shergar the wonder horse – his mystery kidnapping was the great unsolved crime of 1983 – narrated by a rapper, Vanilla Ice. When did Radio 4 become deluged by rappers? We’ve had a Book of the Week by a rapper, Thought for the Day by a rapper and Pick of the Week by a rapper: ‘Rappers cover wimmin, spor’, music and mentoo’ healf,’ that one said.

And I see Rag ’n’ Bone Man is top of the bill at this year’s Kenwood concerts.

I asked my sister, a horse-racing expert, for her view of the Shergar drama. She thought it fascinating, but added, ‘Narration by Vanilla Ice beyond irritating. Is this the BBC’s clunky idea of drawing in yoof?’

My favourite My Life in Music podcast was the last one, featuring oldsters: Marianne Faithfull at 74 (‘I don’t smoke any more!’ she croaked), unable to sing As Tears Go By; the folk singer Shirley Collins at 78; plus an old Welshman, Effie, from the Dunvant Male Choir.

Music is my refuge from the spoken word – the clichéd, distorted, upwardly inflected, strangled, croaky, infuriating, wittering-on spoken word. On Times Radio, Stig Abell said to Danny Finkelstein, ‘So! We can all hug each other from today. What’s your strategy for hugging, Danny?’ Lord Finkelstein said, ‘Er – I can’t say I’ve spent much time planning the logistics of my first hugs, Stig…’

As I walk on Hampstead Heath, Radio 3’s Building a Library on Saturday morning is my favourite companion. It’s the quintessence of radio pleasure: expert voices who know everything about every recording of a certain piece of music, such as Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, so they can commend the best version, conducted by Riccardo Muti. One week it was Sibelius’s violin, and the tops was the late Ida Haendel – whose stick-thin figure I once saw and heard on Myra Hess Day in the National Gallery. Sublime.

Hooray! Ed Reardon is back, now receiving a state pension, installed in a

former office block, in a 300-square-foot capsule living unit, Lifespace 4C. He heard a weatherman this morning applying the phrase ‘postcode lottery’ to today’s ‘scattered showers’. ‘So what’s your backstory?’ asks the annoying Jenna, who joins him at Prosecco o’clock.

And the supermarket checkout robot says politely, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.’ Ping’s squeaky voice says, ‘Byeee!

Bye-bye-bye-bye-byeee!’ ‘Soz it didn’t work out this time but awesome to meet!’ runs a text from one of Ping’s clients.

Elgar the cat has the most unconvincing miaow – but at least, phew, Ed is back.

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS A watercolourist with bowel cancer tells me she’ll shortly be in St Mary’s, Paddington, ‘having a camera shoved up my arse’.

I suggested she sells the footage to Netflix or the ITV Hub, or any of the other channels, as it’ll be more interesting than much of the fare on offer – at a glance, Dragon’s Den, in which a father-and-daughter duo demonstrated their airbag safety equipment; Chris Packham reporting on the plight of Scottish puffins, on Springwatch; or Bradley Walsh being confidently informed by a contestant on The Chase that the language of Ancient Rome was Greek.

Otherwise, there was Innocent, in which the guilty party was easily identified by his possession of an over-groomed beard. Where Katherine Kelly’s Sally had been wrongfully imprisoned for five years, for seducing and murdering a sixteen-year-old boy, it was her husband (Jamie Bamber) who had been the villain all along – a secret paedo meeting partners in woodland and public lavatories, using the false alibi of being a probation officer off seeing clients.

There was what was meant to be a moving scene, where Sally said she’d suffered a miscarriage in prison. The look on her husband’s face reminded me of the story of the Hollywood celebrity hairdresser who was ordered by the studio to get married to Janet Gaynor. By some fluke, she managed to get pregnant, but lost the baby. Her husband was heard to say, ‘Oh, don’t tell me I have to go through all that again.’

The setting was the Lake District, where everyone behaved badly – slapping, spitting, glowering, telling lies, quick to judge. Don’t think of moving to Keswick was my conclusion. Shaun Dooley was the policeman, sorting out the excuses, which handily included alcoholism, post-traumatic stress

syndrome (‘I did three tours in Kosovo and was not in a good place’), paternity tests, teenage self-harming and dementia, plus the homosexual denouement. Not that I heard much of what anyone said. I couldn’t get the subtitles to come on, and they might as well have been mumbling in Welsh.

Wales is where we were for The Pact – or as I mistakenly kept calling it The Pledge, which would have been about furniture polish. Going back to the Macbeths, it is axiomatic in drama that covering up a misdeed leads to any number of further misdeeds, as the characters lose control while hoping to gain control.

Thus The Pact, or The Pledge, set in a brewery beside a reservoir in what to my eye looked like Monmouthshire. There was an office party, during which the arrogant and well-fed new boss (Aneurin Barnard) rubbed everybody up the wrong way, snorted coke in the toilets, groped the new secretary, bit the old secretary in the neck, shouted down his mobile at his father (Eddie Marsan), shouted at his auntie (Eiry Thomas) and boasted about his flashy sports car. So when he passed out by the bins, a group of female employees, to teach the bastard a lesson, bundled him away to the forest. Within a few minutes, he was sitting on a log and turning blue. Next he was dead.

Instead of phoning the police, the silly women made a pledge, or pact, to remain silent, so as not to implicate themselves.

Everything then went predictably wrong – blackmail, concealed additional motives, animosities and threats. There were too many episodes (six) and it was in danger of springing apart, with kleptomania, gambling debts, historical sex abuse and lesbianism each getting an airing.

But the performances were marvellous, particularly ringleader Julie

Innocent in Innocent. Katherine Kelly as the wrongfully imprisoned Sally The Oldie July 2021 65

Len Hawkins

‘A great man – but terribly scared of heights’

Hesmondhalgh’s. After playing Hayley in Coronation Street 1,436 times, what an actress she has become, able to touch deep chords. Laura Fraser is another favourite. I’ve been nagging Stephen Frears for years to cast her in an adaptation of the story of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, simply so I can see her in a mock-up of the headless-man polaroid.

Frears, incidentally, was a participant in Memories of Lindsay Anderson, a documentary broadcast late at night and with a budget so small, there weren’t even clips. What struck me, though, was that Anderson, the director of This Sporting Life, If and David Storey plays, while professing to be anti-establishment and nonconformist, was the son of a major-general, born in India. His mother was born in South Africa. He himself was born in Bangalore, a child of the Empire.

He was educated at Cheltenham and Wadham. Where the hell did the chippy sense of alienation come from?

As I prefer my own company, to me 66 The Oldie July 2021

the much-loved series Friends was particularly off-putting – all that exaggerated silly banter and sentimentality; the air of American selfcongratulation. Yet I laughed to see how catastrophically the six characters have aged, dragged back in the reunion episode – grey, fat and waxy-faced, or else emaciated and scooped by the surgeon’s knife. Why aren’t they screaming?

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE THE TURK RETURNS TO GLYNDEBOURNE Fifty summers have passed since Glyndebourne first staged Rossini’s Il turco in Italia. And here I was again on a Bank Holiday Sunday, treading those same flowering lawns, with the same warm sun beating down from an azure sky – and a brand-new production of Il turco in prospect.

This small gem of an opera, a distant relation by text of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, was revived in Rome in 1950 by the great Italian film director Gerardo Guerrieri.

It had been a long wait – 136 years to be precise. But here at last was a director shrewd enough to realise that this seemingly banal tale of an amorous Turk and guileful Italians was a spoof on contemporary opera libretti. Beneath the surface, Rossini’s subversive young librettist Felice Romani had added a chilling disquisition on the perils of marital disloyalty. The whole thing is set in motion, what’s more, by a protoPirandellian poet in search of a story.

The 1970 production, conceived and designed by a team who had left Glyndebourne three years earlier, was a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Mariame Clément’s new production is both an inspiration and a joy.

The only mishap in 2021 was the loss to quarantine regulations of the firstchoice conductor, an eventuality that left the show in the hands of a smug-look party who didn’t seem much interested in bringing together pit and stage with the kind of split-second timing Rossini’s music both invites and requires.

With her background in literature and fine art, Clément is well placed to tackle Il turco. And she scored double. First, by directing the opera itself with unfailing attention to every jot and tittle of Romani’s and Rossini’s published script.

Then by providing a valuable additional layer to the opera’s satire on pulp fiction by placing the poet centre stage as he attempts to create his novel with the characters milling mutinously about him.

His laptop scribblings were visible on a video screen on the wall behind. Writer Lucy Wadham has clearly relished drafting these mental battles royal, with their diagrams, sudden imprecations, creative-writing course memoranda and occasional Jilly Cooper-style rushes into actual writing.

Funniest of all were the sudden cancellations and crossings out that I imagine many contemporary writers deploy to avoid offending the Twittersphere, especially when a flighty wife and a not entirely subservient husband feature in the dramatis personae.

The video narrative will have provided an excellent crib for those guests who’d failed to do their homework before pitching up with their champagne and smoked salmon by Glyndebourne’s famous ha-ha. It also explained why the cast changed clothes minutes into the show, swapping period costumes (‘Not sexy,’ decides the poet) for 1950s Italian

The current run ended on 20th June, though the production is bound to be much revived. Meanwhile, Così fan tutte returns to Glyndebourne on 4th July with a series of 15 performances through to late August. It’s currently sold out, but more tickets will be released if and when the theatre police permit.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON

BILL COOPER

THE PM’S WEDDING BAND

Turkish delight: Don Narciso (Michele Angelini) in Il turco in Italia

smart casual – a sure-fire winner where any film or opera is concerned.

Julia Hansen’s designs were good to look at, though the poet’s lair was better at accommodating the set-piece trios and duets than the meticulously recreated 1950s Italian delicatessen in which the musically superior and largely poet-free second act took place.

It’s wonderful what you can do with a string of sausages and a bottle of olive oil.

That said, the central quintet – the masked ball in which Fiorilla’s put-upon husband fears he’s losing his mind – would have been better staged in the tavern that Romani’s libretto prescribes.

A week into the run, the excellent cast had bedded in nicely, not least Michele Angelini in the high-tenor role of Fiorilla’s toyboy, her cavaliere servente Don Narciso.

Fiorilla was shrewdly played by Elena Tsallagova, a bright-toned coloratura, whose astonishing aria of anger, remorse and despair, after she’s been abandoned by the amorous Turk and locked out of her house by her husband, provides the opera with its tragicomic dénouement.

The Fiorilla in that 1950 Rome revival was the 28-year-old Maria Callas. She never got to sing the aria because of a less-than-complete edition. What she would have made of it, both there and on her later EMI recording, remains one of the great has-beens of operatic history.

In the end, Geronio (the splendid Rodion Pogossov) takes back his wife, as the couple agree to tolerate each other happily ever after. Bored (or worse) by the idea of grey sex, the 22-year-old Rossini farmed out this duet of reconciliation to an assistant, though it’s an earnest of the truth-to-text of Clément’s superb production that it was strangely moving nonetheless.

This column has been on gardening leave.

The kibosh on live events combined with my torpor and late-onset FOJI (fear of joining in) meant I even missed Van Morrison’s appearance at the London Palladium during his long-delayed anti-lockdown tour, which was one of the only concerts that has happened for over a year.

I was excusing my absence thus to the editor, saying the only live music I’ve actually heard all year was at my bro’s recent wedding in the Downing Street garden. Guests were serenaded by an acoustic, waistcoated trio of such pep and spritz and brio that I wanted them at all future weddings, not just the PM’s. I frankly longed for them to be around every time I went out, so I didn’t have to talk to people.

In fact, I continued, I’d like all social occasions in future to be some raucous, drunken singalong to all the greatest HOAT (hits of all time) around a campfire, with people sitting on hay bales, while the helicopter from Sky News hovered like an angry wasp overhead.

I then told him off the record I’d requested that they play Creep by Radiohead, and belted it out on the small dance floor of a pretty, white-swagged marquee in the Rose Garden…

‘Gold dust, Johnson,’ he murmured, stopping my flow. ‘By Monday, please.

What were they called, again?’

I huffily said I couldn’t possibly write about the nuptials and confessed I was so drunk by the time I left that I’d forgotten the name.

Now, because I underwent a sixmonth journalism training course and was a graduate trainee at the Financial Times, he knew and I knew that I had the very special and refined skills to find out who that band were who entertained guests at the secret wedding of the century.

A nanosecond’s work revealed this, in the Mirror: ‘There was a small bash at No 10 afterwards with music provided by a folk band called The Bow Fiddlies who reportedly played covers of Mumford & Sons songs, followed by a dance around the firepit at 1am.’

No comment! All I will reveal is that the Bow Fiddlies – I remember the name

‘Suit yourself, Fiona – there are plenty more people on the land!’

now – are the most talented threesome you have never heard of. They play covers. Who wants ‘original compositions’ at a wedding, or ‘the new album’ at a gig? Exactly.

As my further researches (ie a look at their website) revealed, ‘They deliver a wide repertoire of all your favourite classics, as well as chart hits in finely tuned, three-part vocal harmony accompanied by lively guitars and their signature virtuosic fiddlin’.’

Right now, who could ask for more?

Take a bow, Bow Fiddlies!

By appointment to Number 10: the Bow Fiddlies The Oldie July 2021 67

Paula Rego’s The Dance, 1988

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU PAULA REGO

©PAULA REGO/TATE

Tate Britain, 7th July to 24th October At 86, painter and printmaker Paula Rego is one of the most important figurative artists working today.

Extraordinarily, she was elected RA only in 2016, although already a DBE (2010) and Grand Cross of the Order of St James of the Sword (2004) in her native Portugal. Since 2000, there has been a Paula Rego museum in Cascais, fittingly titled the Casa das Histórias, the House of Stories.

In the 1960s, she went through a period of surrealism, influenced by Miro, and for a while her style verged on the abstract. This was a reaction against the formal drawing style she had been taught as a student at the Slade.

But in 1990 she was appointed the first associate artist, effectively artist in residence, at the National Gallery, and that close encounter with Old Masters turned her back towards her origins in formal draughtsmanship.

Above all, she is a teller of tales. Some are political, campaigning against Salazar’s dictatorship or for women’s 68 The Oldie July 2021

rights. Others give visual expression to stories she heard as a child from her grandmother. She blends the real and the imaginative, suggesting, rather than stating, what might be going on.

There is a kinship with Goya. He, along with many novelists, would echo her words ‘Pictures tell stories, but not sometimes in a very straightforward way, and you might start with one story and finish up with a very different one.

You have to trust the picture, because it’s the picture that you’re doing that is telling you what is inside you, and what you really feel sometimes ain’t very nice.

And then you discover at the end who you are.’

This retrospective includes over 100 paintings, drawings, pastels, prints and collages, covering 60 years.

Now highly esteemed, with London and Cape Town shows to celebrate his 80th birthday, Hylton Nel was not always so. When he was 28, a South African radio reporter’s reaction to his ceramics was ‘What is the point of this, anyway?’

Anyone seeing his loopy, Wemyss-like cats today could tell her. The exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London continues to 30th July.

Seaside Modern at Hastings Contemporary (né Jerwood) until 31st October is a timely look at staycations in the first half of the 20th century through the eyes of major Modern British artists.

The Romance of Ruins at Sir John Soane’s Museum to 5th September is an equally timely reminder of 18th-century Britain’s discovery of Greece through those of the watercolourist William Pars.

‘Will you be my password?’

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER IN THE NIGHT GARDEN Midnight. A three-quarters moon. A gibbous moon, thinly veiled under a gossamer haze. Further south, on the horizon, cauliflower clouds drift eastwards to worry the Cotswolds – no threat to my nocturnal plan. It’s high summer, 18°C (65°F) and balmy, yet fresh.

I was in bed by 9.30pm (listening to Chopin), daylight barely diminished, the alarm set for two hours thence. I slept until the alarm squeaks woke me; the CD long since stopped, the moon riding high.

Drained of colour, the landscape portrayed itself in keen monochromatic tones. Moonlight lacks the intensity for our eyes’ cones to see colour properly; the rods that see shapes instead of colours work with very low light intensities compared with the cones. Hence moonlight’s near black-and-white affect.

Owls. I dress and pull on warmer clothes than I really need in the expectation of an hour’s foray around our five-acre woodland garden.

Mad? No. I’m off to rehearse my olfactory skills. Just me, the owls, flitting bats and flurries of pollinating moths.

My fragrance guru is Stephen Lacey, whose Companion to Scented Plants (2014) is among my library indispensables.

More recently, and more relevant to these scribblings, I discovered American horticulturist Peter Loewer, whose earlier (1993) book The Evening Garden has prompted several after-dark meanderings.

Subtitled Flowers and Fragrance from Dusk till Dawn, it’s written for the curious, like me, and for ‘the many people who work and only have time to … enjoy their gardens after the daylight hours’.

Among chapters on aspects other than purely sweet- (or, indeed, foul-) smelling plants, one numbers around 125 species

that, according to the anonymous versifier he quotes, are ‘… flowers that keep/ Their odour to themselves all day;/ But when the sunlight dies away,/ Let the delicious secret out/ To every breeze that roams about.’

After this year’s frosty April and May’s dismal cold, wet weeks, many springtime plants were late in flower. Some – a bonus – held on to their eventual blooms for longer than usual. In June, as pinks and carnations began to emit their exotic, clove-like scents, fragrant azaleas continued to seduce the nostrils. Viburnums hung on as well, especially the fabulously scented V x judii and V carlesii.

Now the roses are at it. Any good nurseryman’s catalogue will highlight the most generously perfumed – in our garden, it’s the easily sourced, richly scent-endowed Rosa rugosa ‘Roseraie de l’Haÿ’ and the numerous gallicas, albas, damasks, bourbons and hybrid musks that Lacey’s book so lovingly describes.

Choices are endless, not only for summer: jasmine, some rhododendrons (I must find another ‘Lady Alice Fitzwilliam’ – ‘lily-scented with a dash of nutmeg’, says Lacey), philadelphus (mock orange), pineapple-scented Cytisus battandieri, many of the daphnes, sweet Williams, lavender, honeysuckle, buddleia, lilac, freesias,

Highly fragrant Elaeagnus ‘Quicksilver’

Cestrum parqui (a supreme after-dark wafting – though potentially poisonous – shrub from Chile), heliotrope, numerous lilies and – a signature plant in our garden – Elaeagnus ‘Quicksilver’.

This untidy, deciduous muddle grows about eight feet tall and across, with shining, metallic-grey foliage and minute, highly charged yellow flowers that any parfumier would give his eye teeth to replicate. From names like these, voluptuous, night-fragrant gardens are made.

You don’t have to emulate my routine before heading out for a nocturnal sniff (with its worries about the less agile among us tripping over and being left unfound).

Simply set a couple of night-scented and blessedly soporific, flowering plants below the bedroom window and throw open the casements. Beware: hay-fever-suffering, sleeping partners will rightly protest.

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD MELONS Victorian gardeners growing fruit for grand houses were fond of their melon hothouses, and some developed their own varieties, such as Blenheim Orange.

If you want to grow melons today, on a much smaller scale of course, the cantaloupe is the one most likely to be successful in this country’s climate. The cantaloupe group includes charentais and ogen melons, which are best grown in a greenhouse or cold frame, although there are varieties – one is called Outdoor Wonder – that suggest otherwise.

When Monty Don conducted an experiment with Outdoor Wonder, the plants that he grew outdoors, in a raised bed, were, in his words, ‘a total disaster’.

Melons need heat, which he provided in a greenhouse, and in a cold frame with compost and leaf mould on a bed of horse manure.

The Oldie July 2021 69

Seeds should be sown in April under cover, in a temperature of about 20°C, and the plants moved to their final position in June. When they are in flower, ventilation is important for the plants to be pollinated. When the fruits are gooseberry size, select the best four on each stem, remove the rest and pinch out any more flowering growth.

Regular watering is important, plus a weekly feed of a liquid fertiliser, until the fruits begin to ripen and the foliage dies back. If the plants are grown up a trellis, the melons may need the support of netting when they swell. The best way to judge a melon’s ripeness is with one’s nose.

I’m not a great fan of watermelons, but they too can be grown in Britain. Of the cantaloupe melons, Honey Bun grows as a compact bush; so it’s suitable where space is limited. Emir F1, which has an RHS Award of Garden Merit, is a charentais-type bred for northern climates, with a special interest for me.

Charentais melons originated in the part of western France, Charente, that my Huguenot family, who lived on an island off La Rochelle, was compelled to leave towards the end of the 17th century, thanks to Louis XIV when he outlawed the Protestant religion.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD DOWN MEXICO WAY

ELISABETH LUARD

Exotic holiday destinations are unlikely this summer. So wrap up warm, light the barbecue and head into the wilds – thanks to Mexico artist-illustrator Corinna Sargood’s story of love and learning in the 1980s, The Village in the Valley.

No recipes are included; it’s the exquisite pen-and-ink drawings that make the book such a joy for the armchair traveller.

Read all about Mexico’s traditional tortillas, griddle-baked scooping breads, made with masa harina, a dough prepared with lye-treated cornmeal. Join the hunt for grasshoppers, chapulines, to toast as a crisp little high-protein snack, washed down with a swig of mescal.

Uncover the secret sex life of the vanilla orchid, and explore the ancient Aztec art of fermenting cocoa beans. Irresistible.

Barbecued pork, sweetcorn and green peppers Three good things for a Mexican barbecue – one for carnivores and two vegetarian – to eat with maize-flour tortillas: lomo en adobo, pork fillet, marinated with chilli and garlic; maíz asado, roasted sweetcorn with guacamole; rajas poblanas, green peppers sauced with cream. Enough for six, depending on appetites.

70 The Oldie July 2021

lemon juice and a little salt; then mash the mixture into the avocado, leaving it lumpy. Chop the corncobs into thick slices for dipping.

Brush the peppers, stalks left on, with a little oil, sprinkle lightly with sea salt and blister over high heat till soft and blackened in parts. Serve with a dipping sauce of hot cream stirred with grated cheese.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE THE BEST, FASTEST FOOD The meat About 1kg whole pork fillet 2 tbsp sunflower oil 2 tbsp wine vinegar 1-2 garlic cloves, crushed 1 level tbsp chilli flakes 1 tsp crushed cumin seeds 1 tsp crushed allspice Scant tsp salt Sweetcorn with guacamole 6 unhusked fresh sweetcorn 1-2 ripe avocados Thick slice mild onion 1 green chilli, deseeded Handful cilantro leaves Juice of 2 limes or 1 lemon Sea salt Peppers sauced with cream 8-12 long, thin-skinned green peppers Oil for brushing Sea salt About 350ml double cream 2-3 spoonsful grated cheese To serve Fresh tortillas Chopped tomato, onion and mint Trim and wipe the pork fillet, blend the rest of the ingredients into a paste and work it into the meat, then wrap in foil (or a few sweetcorn leaves secured in place with string) and leave to take the flavours for a couple of hours.

Light the barbecue and let it burn down to a gentle, even heat. Wrap a supply of cornmeal tortillas in foil and set to warm on a cool corner.

Set the pork parcel over a gentle heat and leave to cook for about an hour – longer if thick. Allow to rest before slicing and serving with warm tortillas and chopped salad.

To roast the corn, pull off the silky tassel, leaving the leaves in place, and grill for 8-10 minutes, turning the cobs regularly and sprinkling with water if the husks look as if they’re catching fire.

Meanwhile, prepare the guacamole: scoop the avocado flesh into a bowl; roughly chop (by hand or in a processor) chilli, onion and cilantro with lime or

My son recently accused me of writing only about formal restaurants. The ones in which people use knives and forks. To which I disdainfully replied, ‘Well, I am hardly going to review K-F-bloody-C.’ I could feel the wrath of the gods; such hubris, worthy of a Euripidean tragedy, could not go unpunished. To avert my ruin, I pledged my penance would be a whistle-stop tour of fast-food joints near Covent Garden.

We formed a crack team. It was made up of: my son, Leo, a framed photo of whose bright red face can be found on the Hall of Flame at Wing’s, in Edinburgh, where he devoured chillis that scored 660,000 on the Scoville scale – 66 times the strength of Tabasco; his student mate, Will ‘the Kebab’; my beauteous 16-year-old goddaughter, Frankie, an aficionada of cutlery-free dining; and her barrister dad, Adam, who is on firstname terms with all the local Domino’s Pizza delivery boys.

We agreed we would score the four joints out of a maximum five points, according to our new FAST system (Food, Atmosphere, Service and, of course, Time). At 7.30pm, our posse of five assembled at Pizza Pilgrims, in Garrick Street. Adam dashed in and ordered an eight-cheese pizza with extra truffle sauce for £10.75 and a half-litre of white wine for £14. We were given a table on the street. This was the last time we would see cutlery that evening. Scores: F: 4 (not a little sickly); A: 4; S: 5; T: 25 minutes from start to finish.

Then we headed straight to Jollibee, ‘a multinational Filipino chicken joint’, in Leicester Square. There was a long, roped queue when we arrived at 8.02pm. So Frankie told her dad to wait in line for a six-piece Chicken Joy Bucket with their Asian Ginger Chilli Sauce, at £9, while we ran back to KFC to buy a six-piece Bargain Bucket plus gravy for £8.29.

That way, she figured, we could compare their respective wings on a bench outside. And their gravies and dips.

We all agreed KFC’s chips were cold and stodgy, but the jury was locked about

whether the beefier spices of Jollibee’s coating were superior to the famous 11 herbs and spices in the secret blend invented by Harland ‘the Colonel’ Saunders, in 1935.

In 1965, Raymond Allen brought KFC to the UK, only to sell out in 1973 to Simon Roberts, who made a fortune.

There are now 900 branches in the UK, enabling his eminent son, Andrew, to write award-winning biographies of Churchill and Napoleon. History doesn’t relate whether either great man had a penchant for deep-fried chicken, but why else would Roberts choose them as his subjects?

Back to business. KFC scored low: F: 3; A: –5; S: 3; T: 14 minutes (no queue).

Jollibee romped home with F: 4; A: 3; S: 4; T: 20 minutes (half spent queuing).

Then came the American burger bar, Five Guys, which stole the show. On arrival, we begged for water. My mouth felt as if the greasiest mountain goat had slept in it. We ordered a mixture of normal and little bacon cheeseburgers (£9.95/£7.95), which were made in front of us. One of their slogans says, ‘… there isn’t a freezer in the joint’. And we could have chosen any or all of their 15 toppings to envelop them.

The patties were trim and tasty, and the fries cooked in peanut oil (one portion feeds three) were delicious.

We sluiced it all down with Oreo and salted-caramel milkshakes. What else?

Ninety minutes later, we were done, and were in bad need of beer.

DRINK BILL KNOTT GETTING THE SACK ‘Duke Ellington? What was he doing there?’ asked a confused member of our group of wine writers.

Artur Gama, the softly-spoken owner of Quinta da Boa Esperança in the hills north of Lisbon, was hosting an alfresco lunch, and one of our number hadn’t quite caught his drift. We were tasting Artur’s Arinto, an indigenous Portuguese grape variety that makes golden, citrussy wines, much favoured, so our host informed us, by … the Duke of Wellington. Following the end of the Peninsular War in 1814, he

‘I could only get dried’

apparently brought huge quantities of Arinto back to London with him. The legendary bandleader was yet to be born.

In fact, fortified wines from what is now the DOC region of Bucelas had already achieved popularity in Elizabethan times. Shakespeare’s ‘cup of charneco’ in Henry VI, Part 2, probably came from there, but was also probably fortified, like Falstaff’s ‘sack’.

Wellington’s wines were not. They became fashionable in Victorian England under the wonderful moniker ‘Portuguese hock’, although Arinto is, so ampelographers assure us, unrelated to Riesling.

Artur’s vineyards are north of Bucelas, in a sort of amphitheatre arrangement.

They benefit from the cooling influence of the Atlantic. Ripening grapes is rarely a problem anywhere in Portugal, but fostering enough acidity to keep white wines fresh often is. He also makes a gently floral, slightly spicy white from the Fernão Pires grape, formerly used solely to add aroma to red wines, rather as Viognier is used in Côte-Rôtie.

But I was there to try his new rosé, Atlantico. I wouldn’t have minded spending a few weeks on a hillside drinking rosé until Portugal went back on the green list. But we were in fact lunching in Lyme Regis, which (at the time of writing) is still a permitted destination, and we could at least gaze over one arm of the Atlantic.

Artur’s new rosé is a mistake, but a happy one. Paula, his winemaker, was away from the vineyard having a baby during harvest last year. So Artur took charge and pumped the juice from one of his vineyards usually earmarked for rosé into a 10,000-litre tank, instead of the 20,000-litre tank that would allow him to blend in the juice from another parcel of vines, as in previous years.

That tank produced a wine that he thought special enough to be worth bottling and labelling on its own, and Atlantico was born. At first glance, pale salmon pink in its clear glass bottle, it could be any of a hundred Côtes-deProvence rosés, but it is a cut above.

Made from Touriga Naçional (the port grape), local variety Castelão and a splash of Syrah, all freshened by the same Atlantic breezes as the whites, it has a distinct redcurrant-ish bouquet, like the best pink champagnes, a gentle grip on the palate and a hauntingly long finish. It is a sipper, not a glugger, and priced accordingly – just north of £20 – but, as I discovered over lunch, it is a fine match with seafood.

Serendipity in a glass.

Quinta da Boa Esperança’s wines are available from www.sommelierschoice.co.uk

Wine This month’s mixed case from DBM Wines comprises six bottles each of two Portuguese wines: a fresh, lively vinho verde with considerably more precision and elegance than most, and a complex, fruity red with plenty of bottle age from the venerable old Dâo region, but made in a modern style.

However, if you wish, you can buy 12 bottles of the individual wines.

Vinho Verde DOC ‘Vale do Homem’, Quintas do Homem, Portugal 2020, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Crisp, dangerously drinkable vinho verde, made from indigenous grape varieties. Perfect on its own or with grilled sardines.

Mariposa, Quinta da Mariposa, Dâo DOC, Portugal 2016, offer price £12.99, case price £155.88 Big, bold red in the Dão region’s modern style: rich damson and black-cherry fruit, supple tannins and great length.

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The Oldie July 2021 71

SPORT JIM WHITE THE SEX-FREE GAMES Back in 2000, ahead of the Sydney Olympic Games, there was a sudden panic about sharks.

The swimming leg of the triathlon was scheduled to take place in the harbour and a warning had gone out about danger from snappy great whites. The news spread rapidly, and the fear snowballed into an outrage. The only acceptable option seemed to be cancellation.

Closer examination indicated that since records of this sort of thing began, some 195 years earlier, there had been just one registered shark attack in the harbour. Triathletes were more likely to be struck by lightning than to have their toes nibbled by a hungry apex predator.

But that didn’t stop the scare stories.

This is what always happens ahead of an Olympic Games: panic grips the discourse.

Before the Athens 2004 Games, people insisted nothing would be ready on time.

In the lead-up to London in 2012, nervous newspaper columnists were demanding cancellation to prevent the inevitable humiliating embarrassment that was about to befall the nation.

Before Rio in 2016, the anxiety was about the Zika virus, a horrible condition rampaging through South America that caused issues for pregnant women. What if the runners in the 100 metres didn’t know they were expecting? Did the potential danger really make it worth going ahead with the Games?

And so it continues. This summer, Japan is gripped by an epidemic of traditional pre-Olympic panic. The Tokyo Games were postponed in 2020 when COVID was at its height. One year on, nothing seems to have calmed the rows.

The let’s-call-the-whole-thing-off movement has gained real traction: opinion polls tell us 75 per cent of the Japanese population would rather it be cancelled entirely. Perhaps because the country has had the lightest brush with the pandemic, the fear grows of thousands of foreigners arriving with their germs and infecting the locals.

The International Olympic Committee are driven by a different fear, the one that insists their bottom line will be severely compromised if they don’t go ahead.

Broadcasters and commercial partners demand that contracts are fulfilled. The future of the organisation depends on it.

The Games will happen, albeit in odd circumstances: no crowds; social distancing; and all the visiting teams required to stay within their own 72 The Oldie July 2021

bio-secure bubbles. For the athletes, this means no mixing with members of other teams. That cancels what for many participants is the most memorable part of any games: the rush for intimate contact the moment competition is over.

That is where this Olympics will be properly different. Unlike at any other time, in the last couple of days of the Games the athletes’ village will not resemble ancient Rome. When I asked the Jamaican men’s 100-metres team in China how they were going to celebrate their gold medals, ‘With the Danish ladies’ handball team,’ came the grinning reply.

As for the visiting press, kept under house arrest in their hotels, precaution will be the watchword. The history of preGames panic insists anything could happen – sensible visitors will pack the shark repellent.

The Olympic Games is expected to be on from 23rd July to 8th August

MOTORING ALAN JUDD BEST-VALUE-FOR-MONEY CAR In 2014, my friend Celia bought a new Dacia (pronounced Datcha) Sandero, a range whose £5,5995 base model was then the cheapest new car in Britain.

Celia opted for the more expensive Stepway version, finding that the extra height made getting in and out easier.

She also added various extras such as a five-year warranty and servicing deal, ending up paying £10,995.

During the next seven years, she drove under 50,000 miles – mostly local journeys. The lively little 900cc threecylinder petrol engine never failed to start first time, and the rest of the car held together well. She had no unexpected repairs – in fact, no problems at all. Repeat that sentence to yourself next time you’re contemplating a new car, of whatever breed. It’s what most of us want, isn’t it?

Well, Celia has just traded in her Dacia for the latest version. The range is now £7,995–£11,995, which means it’s still

Maximum miles per pound: Dacia Sandero Stepway

the cheapest new car you can buy here.

At the top end, you can have a bi-fuel model running on LPG (liquid petroleum gas), as well as petrol.

The advantages of LPG are that it’s cheaper, offers increased power and torque and emits less CO2. The disadvantages are that it does fewer mpg than petrol and that not all garages stock it (around 1,864 do). Also, the LPG tank sits where you would have had a spare wheel and if you’re planning continental touring, however unlikely at the moment, you’ll have to book the ferry because Eurostar won’t allow LPG cars through the tunnel.

I once had a Range Rover converted to LPG. It ran cleanly and quietly until the engine gave up – not all engines take to conversion. But the Dacia is engineered to be bi-fuel. If you fill both tanks, you should go 800 miles before needing a refill (52.3mpg on petrol; 39.8mpg on LPG). And you’ll have the satisfaction of leaving a litter of recharging electric vehicles in your wake.

However, Celia opted for the straightforward 900cc petrol, going upmarket to the Stepway Comfort with a basic price of £10,021. As before, she added various extras, including a seven-year warranty for £795 and a four-year service plan for £650.01.

The total price, including road fund licence (£215) and delivery fee (£594.99), was £13,350.

What’s this delivery fee? I hear you ask. If you buy a new pair of shoes, you don’t expect to pay for them to be walked to the shop. Agreed, but anyone ordering a new car seems to get stung with it. The only way to avoid it might be to buy off the forecourt − if you can find what you want – or possibly buy online.

However, Celia is well pleased. They paid her £3,000 for her old car – which therefore depreciated at the remarkably low rate of just over £1,100 a year − and she should now be guaranteed troublefree motoring for seven years. She finds the new engine livelier than the old and the drive altogether better.

Grown men may sit comfortably in the rear seats, the boot is commodious and the interior fitments and materials are perfectly acceptable. She also gets a satnav with this one. Her only grouch is that the boot has to be opened with the key. But she can live with that, she reckons.

There probably aren’t any bad new cars. They all work, they don’t rust before reaching the showroom as with some British Leyland cars of the 1970s, and most are warranted for three years. But it’s hard to find any offering better value for money than these Dacias.

‘At this time, if everyone would please switch their palates to airplane mode…’

The Oldie July 2021 73

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Zooming into the future We all know the rules of a committee meeting. The more convenient it is to be there and the less time it lasts, the more likely there will be decent attendance and sensible decisions.

This is why the innovation of online meetings has been a revelation. There have been challenges (‘Minister, you’re still on mute…’) but, in my view, these are outweighed by the benefits. For example, I attended a club AGM this year for the first time simply because it was online; otherwise it would have been a four-hour round trip, and I wouldn’t have bothered.

Indeed, that AGM attendance was

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

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Art from all angles https://artsandculture.google.com/ project/360-videos Explore paintings, sculpture and architecture in virtual reality; click and hold to move around as you listen to the commentary.

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems.

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their highest ever; other organisations are having similar experiences. Since meetings have moved online, more people have been able and willing to turn up and, while we miss some of the personal aspects of such events, the fact that people from far away can easily take part has been a boon.

The same has been true within our village; too small to have a parish council, it has a parish meeting, and our online AGM had the highest-ever recorded attendance. This included several less mobile villagers who would have struggled to go to a physical meeting, but whose contributions were invaluable.

I am also a trustee of a charity that has found Zoom meetings to be not only effective but preferable. Trustees can attend from here or abroad; nobody has to drive anywhere, we don’t need a meeting room and so on. In fact, we have even changed our trust deed to permit all future meetings to be held online.

I have a regular ‘working lunch’ with a couple of colleagues; we make our own sandwiches and then chat for an hour, spread between Suffolk, Newcastle and Edinburgh. We enjoy it very much, and will be carrying on, pandemic or not.

So far, so good; online meetings, if properly run, can be effective and well attended. They can also take up much less time than a meeting in person, which is especially important if you are all volunteers.

Despite this, it is now illegal (yes, illegal) for local authorities and parish councils to meet online. The relaxation of the rules during the pandemic expired on

6th May. This was bonkers; you’ll recall that the general unlocking was not expected until 21st June at the earliest.

It left councils in an impossible position: they were not allowed to hold meetings online and not allowed to gather in person by virtue of the COVID rules. Ridiculous.

I suppose they could meet in a field, socially distanced, using megaphones, but somehow that lacks an appropriate level of civic dignity.

However, the ban has undoubtedly galvanised opinion in favour of allowing the option of remote attendance. To be fair to the Government, a consultation on the issue was briskly launched and may result in a change in the law. I certainly hope so; to pretend that the technology just doesn’t exist is futile, and to ignore its undoubted benefits would be foolish.

There are issues to overcome; one parish councillor in Yorkshire who couldn’t get the hang of Zoom fell foul of rules that force disqualification for non-attendance. Obviously that sort of thing needs sorting out, but surely councils should have the chance to meet online if they want to. Apart from anything else, it means we can watch what they are up to. Very democratic.

In fact, I believe that we are heading towards a world where meetings are hybrids of online and offline; in other words, both at once. Believe me, it’s coming.

It would be also great if more people could learn how to position their computer so it’s not looking up their nose – but let’s fight one battle at a time.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

The law against private traffic wardens Parking fines are irritating, particularly if you believe they are unfair – and they are more likely to be unfair when you park on private land. Private-car-park owners issued 8.4 million tickets at the last count – one ticket every four seconds, according to RAC Foundation research.

New legislation – the Parking (Code of Practice) Act – came into force more than two years ago, promising a code of 74 The Oldie July 2021

conduct and independent appeals service which have yet to arrive. Now the Government is planning a further crackdown on rogue private parking firms, though the new rules will not arrive in time for this year’s staycations, when you might be looking for spaces in unfamiliar car parks.

You already have some protection against unfair treatment. Under the

Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, it is illegal to clamp, tow or block in a vehicle parked on private land.

And parking companies that belong to a trade association – the British Parking Association or the International Parking Community – have their own voluntary codes of practice and appeals schemes.

One of them, Parking on Private Land Appeals (POPLA), says 40 per cent

‘Shouldn’t he have reached that age where he can’t stand being in the same room as us by now?’

of complainants had their fines cancelled.

Strictly speaking, private car-parking firms cannot impose fines. Only localauthority traffic wardens and the police issue fines, labelled ‘penalty charge notices’ or ‘fixed penalty notices’. Private firms issue invoices – ‘parking charge notices’ or ‘parking ticket notices’ – which are usually designed to imitate the official fines.

The latest proposals for private car parks include: l Tiered penalties, capped at £40 to £80

(currently it’s £100) depending on the seriousness of the offence – whether using an expired permit, parking in a taxi bay or reparking within a prohibited period. As there are now, there will be reductions for prompt payment. l Higher fines up to £120 for serious offences, such as wrongly parking in a disabled bay or ambulance bay. l A ten-minute grace period after the parking time ends. l A five-minute cooling off period to change your mind about parking.

l Clearly displayed terms, conditions and prices. l A mandatory appeals charter. This can cancel fines or reduce them to £20 for genuine mistakes and mitigating circumstances: perhaps your car broke down, your parking ticket slipped off the dashboard or you made a small mistake keying in the registration number.

Punching in the number of your other car is a more serious error.

Parking companies can track you down because the DVLA sells them your names and addresses. It charges just £2.50 a time, enabling car parks to penalise you £100, and it makes millions of pounds a year from the service.

Private firms that fail to join a trade association could lose access to the DVLA database, which would make it impossible for them to contact you after you had driven away.

For advice on challenging unfair parking tickets, check out the free resolution service Resolver, at www. resolver.co.uk; or Moneysavingexpert, at www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/ private-parking-tickets.

The private parking firms are arguing against cutting their charges, claiming it will not be a deterrent and will encourage expensive rogue operators.

‘He’s the best tracker we’ve got – he even figured out our fugitive is English’ The Oldie July 2021 75

Getting Dressed

The boldest link

Anne Robinson likes a colourful, kookie look on Countdown brigid keenan

ADRIAN BROOKS

Afternoons have just got a whole lot livelier.

Anne Robinson has become the first female host on Countdown, the game show beloved by afternoon TV viewers.

Robinson and I were at school together 65 years ago. Her family were Irish Catholics in Liverpool. From a list of convent schools they had selected for her, she chose Farnborough Hill because she liked its uniform blazer. (I hated the blazer.)

After school, our lives went in different directions – until we met for this interview and found ourselves giggling about one of the Irish nuns who used tell Robinson she was ‘a BOLD girl who would make NOTHING of her life’.

She didn’t stay for A levels (very few girls did in those days; I didn’t, either) but you could say Robinson has done well. She puts that down to having been made to read out loud to the school during silent retreats (the nuns’ way of keeping her quiet). ‘Nothing like having to stand on a chair with your knickers showing, reciting from the holy book, to overcome your fears.’

At 76, Robinson is five years younger than me. I wondered if she would have been scared to call me the weakest link.

But Robinson, despite her slight physique (5’3”, size 10), isn’t nervous of anything.

She grew up tough. Her mother built up a successful poultry business and had a market stall.

‘My brother and I spent half the summer holidays selling chickens at the stall,’ she grins, ‘and half at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes.’ She Dress by Marni, glasses from Specsavers 76 The Oldie July 2021

describes her mother as ‘the Queen of Misrule’: critical, sarcastic, cynical.

‘Being with my parents was pretty much like being in the newsroom at the Daily Mail. I felt quite at home when I ended up there.’

Soon after leaving school, Robinson was taken on by the Mail as its first female trainee. She was quickly promoted when she got her first scoop – about Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s suicide at 32, in 1967. Her second, as an editor on the Mirror, was the news of Princess Diana’s eating disorder. It made headlines around the world – but the Palace complained. Robinson was told by her boss, ‘You go off and do television, blossom. That’s what you’re good at.’

She did just that and soon drew a huge following for her many programmes, most famously The Weakest Link, which aired from 2000 to 2012.

Robinson says she owes her success to what the nun called her ‘boldness’ – her daring. ‘If I had been Huw Edwards’s identical twin sister, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. Curiosity, a notebook and a biro were what I needed on a newspaper, but for TV it’s fitness and nerve and really decent clothes. And a very good haircut.’

Robinson likes what she calls a ‘slightly kookie’ look.

‘I am always terrified of being like a lady mayor or a motherof-the-bride.’ She chooses edgy designers with a modern feel: Comme des Garçons, Bottega, Alexander McQueen, Marni and Issey Miyake.

Dover Street Market is her favourite source.

The huge success of The Weakest Link had everything to do with Robinson’s sexy schoolmarm

At Farnborough Hill school (right), 1961

style – which came about almost accidentally. She turned up for the very first rehearsals in her own black leather clothes and everyone loved the look.

There will be no black on Countdown – they are going for colour. Over the six months of the series, Robinson and her stylist will have to find dozens of outfits that will look good not just on her, but alongside those of Rachel Riley and Susie Dent, the assistant presenters. This degree of shopping is truly challenging.

It was seeing herself on Watchdog that prompted Robinson go for her famous facelift. ‘There was a bit at the end when I had to move forward and say, “Goodnight and thank you for watching Watchdog” – AND IT WAS MY MOTHER SPEAKING.’ She lives in the Cotswolds, and spent lockdowns with daughter Emma and her family. As her mother once advised, Robinson has a facial every week. She loves Liz Earle hot-cloth cleanser, Chanel foundation and MAC make-up. The immaculate haircut she owes to Robbie at Richard Ward, and the colour to Adam, in the same salon. Specsavers provides most of her 60 pairs of glasses.

Robinson follows a daunting weekly regime of daily running, two sessions of Pilates and two sessions with a trainer. ‘I don’t do any of these things because they are fun. It is all in the name of keeping fit enough to work eight hours a day. If you want to be on TV at 76, it matters.’

Countdown is airing now (Channel 4)

The Rock Dove by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd Suddenly round the cliff face bolt Pigeon and falcon – they tear the air And are gone in it, the air stands, without motion, As though nothing had drawn that savage blue stroke there.

Norman MacCaig, from A Good Day A cliff top is the most likely place to hear or see the most thrilling of all bird spectacles: the stoop of a peregrine or eagle in pursuit of the cave-dwelling rock dove (Columba livia).

Mark Cocker (Birds Britannica) calls the rock dove ‘the pigeon’, the ultimate progenitor – from the global city pigeon of feral indistinction to the 228 named varieties estimated by Charles Darwin, most renowned of pigeon-fanciers.

From these rock-derived varieties, famous pigeons have emerged, especially the carrier-pigeon winners of the Dickin Medal, the VC for animals. The medal was instituted in 1943 by Maria Dickin, founder of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals.

Georges V and VI lent their carriers for the Army Pigeon Service in both world wars.

There is an animal cemetery at Ilford, with a special section for bird burials. A fifth of Dickin medallists are buried there.

In 2007, when the cemetery reopened after lottery-funded restoration, a bugler played the Last Post, accompanied by a pigeon fly-past. Unfortunately, at the first toot, the fly-past turned tail.

The most expensive racing pigeon is New Kim, which fetched $1.8 million in a 2020 online auction. It was raised in Belgium – heartland of pigeon-racing, with 20,000 current owners – and sold to a Chinese bidder. Chinese plutocrats are the latest pigeon enthusiasts. The price was especially remarkable since New Kim was a female – males are considered the more productive investment.

In 1876, King Leopold VI presented the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, with racing pigeons. Edward built the pigeon loft at Sandringham and the

tradition has been upheld. The Queen’s birds have won all the principal UK races.

She is patron of several pigeon-racing societies, notably the Royal Pigeon Racing Association and National Flying Club.

She has donated royal birds to charitable auctions, including for research into pigeon-fancier’s lung disease.

Prince Philip was an enthusiast, and at 12 noon on 17th April, to mark his funeral, racing pigeons were released from the royal lofts at Sandringham and Windsor, and by the RPRA in 65 UK cities – ten birds per city, in honour of his ten decades.

Feral birds have gone native and returned to the caves. So the pure rock

stock – white rump; double-barred wing – is confined to the remotest coasts of Scotland and Ireland. Norman MacCaig (1910-1996) also witnessed the stoop of a golden eagle on one of these: But suddenly I was introduced to suddenness, As though a train entered a room, a headlong pigeon Cometed past me, and space opened in strips Between pinions and tail feathers of the eagle after it – It had seen me. What vans of brakes!

What voluptuousness!

From In Everything The Oldie July 2021 79

Travel Retreat from the world

For his new book, Nat Segnit visited Britain’s quietest monasteries and islands to talk to monks, hermits and recluses

S

ara and I sat on the pebbles as Zoë, her dog, skittered ahead on her sharp claws. Like a spiritual goal, Zoë disappeared at intervals, where the beach dipped or a boulder proved too irresistible a surface not to pee on.

Sara had recently returned from a 40-day, silent retreat in the Sinai Desert.

‘I like desert silence better than any other sort,’ said Sara. ‘Because it is very, intensely silent.’

I had come to south-western Scotland to talk to Sara Maitland – writer, Catholic convert and recluse – about her decision, 24 years ago at the age of 47, to break with family and friends and commit to a life of silence and solitude.

Compared with the great highland wildernesses of Wester Ross or Sutherland, Sara’s neck of the woods, on the depopulated peat moors of northern Galloway, is something of a hideout in plain sight, close to the English border and overlooked by the hordes of tourists whistling past on the A74 to Glasgow.

From her isolated shepherd’s cottage high on the moor, we had driven down to

80 The Oldie July 2021

the coast to visit Ninian’s Cave, reputedly the personal retreat of a fifth-century missionary whose church at Whithorn, five miles away, has a claim to being the birthplace of Scottish Christianity.

We were alone, save for Zoë. Just above the horizon, roughly where Ireland ought to be, the winter sun had diffused into a smear of blinding light, transmuting the stony beach into gold.

We sat and listened to the waves bid the shoreline be quiet. From somewhere inland, a sandpiper’s cry registered less as sound than as part of the stillness.

What sort of person, I wondered, would find this degree of tranquillity wanting – to the extent of feeling a need to retreat to the Egyptian desert for 40 days?

Over the 18 months I spent researching my new book on spiritual and secular retreat, I talked to monks, hermits and recluses from suburban Manchester to San Francisco, the Aegean to the Arctic Circle.

If anything united them, it was this: a dissatisfaction with what we might ordinarily think of as isolation, a

yearning to go deeper into the silence and solitude which, for Sara, cleared the way for a radical encounter with the Divine.

For a crowded island nation, the UK offers no shortage of opportunities to distance yourself from humanity. The island of Easdale, off the coast of Argyll, was once a thriving centre of the slate industry, but now has a population of less than 70. (Up, admittedly, from the early 1960s, when it fell as low as four.)

If you miss the ferry from Ellenabeich, in summer you can swim the 60 yards across to the island, and bathe, alone, in the rain-fed slate cuttings, or sit on the cliffs and watch for minke whales.

Less far afield, at the Sharpham Trust near Dartmouth, experienced meditators can undertake a week-long, silent, solitary retreat in a hut on the wooded fringes of the estate: a West Country Walden, with nothing but a bed, a wood-burning stove and a view of the Dart though the trees.

Tranquil surroundings, of course, are no guarantee of their inner equivalent.

The conventional wisdom that retreat is

Trappist Mount St Bernard Abbey (above) and Calvary (top). Right: cell & cider lunch, St Hugh’s Charterhouse

more a state of mind than a place was borne out most memorably in Salford, between a low-rise housing estate and a branch of Tasties Takeaway.

The Saraniya Centre is an unlikely outpost of the Panditarama Monastery in Yangon, Myanmar. It’s housed in a peeling, Edwardian villa, where, at the time of my stay, U Tarraka, a stern-looking monk in saffron robes, had been posted from Yangon on secondment.

The style of meditation practised there is in the Mahasi tradition, which meant that everything – walking, eating your cornflakes and tying your shoelaces – had to be done with excruciating slowness.

We rose at four, and spent the next 18 hours in alternate sitting and walking meditation, nipping to the loo or to the dining hall at breaktime as if we were wading through a viscous medium. It was like an experimental zombie movie: horrifying, but low on drama. Talking was

forbidden, as were sex, killing, telling lies, listening to music and eating after midday.

The aim was awareness: to give ourselves the chance, as we inched across the carpet, to notice not only each sensation but all its component parts, the sequence of millimetric shifts that went into each footstep; the tiny discrepancies in depth and duration between one breath and the next.

It was enough to drive you nuts.

Maintaining satipatthana – mindfulness – without let-up involved a degree of tedium that was often indistinguishable from pain. For the beginner, at least, it was an exercise in Olympic (or sectionable) pedantry, Knausgaardian attention to minutiae and Warholian immersion in boredom.

The only response was to press on and embrace the pain – something made that bit more painful by Greg, one of my four fellow retreatants, who not only ate like a

warthog but was in the habit, passing me on walking meditations, of leaning in and whispering, ‘I’m so f***ing bored.’

And yet, three or four days into the ten-day retreat, something clicked, or shifted, and the effort to concentrate, formerly so difficult, became selffulfilling, with the result that a calm descended, the like of which I had never experienced – no matter that I was in the middle of the city, and the kids in the housing block opposite were blasting dubstep through their open windows.

Still, in the contemplative traditions, silence loads the dice in favour of fulfilment. ‘When thou prayest,’ says Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, ‘enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.’

At St Hugh’s Charterhouse, the UK’s only surviving Carthusian monastery, near Horsham in West Sussex, I spoke to Fr Cyril Pierce, who entered the order aged 27 in 1960.

Of all the Catholic orders, the Carthusians are the most enclosed and committed to silence. Just as Sara Maitland felt the urge to go deeper into stillness, it’s not uncommon for Carthusian novices to be ex-Benedictines or Cistercians grown dissatisfied with the relative leniency of their rule.

The silence is very deep here. To become a Carthusian monk, Fr Cyril told me, was not a matter of acquiring virtues.

‘It’s getting stripped down,’ he said.

Divesting yourself of all impediments to prayer. ‘It’s only bit by bit that you begin to hear Christ.’

Later, I spent a few days at England’s only Trappist monastery, Mount St Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire. As at Parkminster, I was struck by the great outbreaks of noise that characterise the monastic round, the clamour of bells and the singing of the liturgy, both as acts of praise and as delineators of the silence that surrounds them.

It was the same at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, in northern France, and at the other Catholic and Orthodox monasteries I visited around the world.

Attend Mass, and the hush that follows the Alleluia feels like an opening on another dimension.

This was the intense quiet Sara Maitland was aiming for, where the Carthusians began to hear Christ.

Irrespective of your faith or lack of it, it was hard not to perceive this as an awakening.

Nat Segnit’s Retreat: The Risks and Rewards of Stepping Back from the World is out now (Bodley Head, £18.99) The Oldie July 2021 81

Overlooked Britain

Kent’s stairway to heaven

lucinda lambton Walter Barton May’s Hadlow Castle is the ultimate Gothic folly

Pugin said, ‘Gothic is more holy the nearer it reaches Heaven.’

After his myriad ecclesiastical designs, he would have been refreshed by the domestic rarity of the Gothicry of Hadlow Castle in Kent.

What a building! What a heart-soaring, sky-kissing, slender beauty of a building; a fantastical flight of architectural fancy that, out of the blue, you suddenly come Denton Welch’s 1937 poster: the tower upon, rearing out of a little village in the is eight foot taller than Nelson’s Column flatlands of Kent.

Keenly aware of the disaster, May Built over a number of years from the appointed engineer/architect George 1780s by Walter Barton May, it must Ledwell Taylor to design the building. have been startling from the start. The Taylor had in the early-19th century fiery radical reformer William Cobbett persuaded William IV to call the great expostulated, ‘It was the most singular open space near Charing Cross Trafalgar looking thing I ever saw. An immense Square, rather than William IV Square, house stuck all over with a parcel of as had been originally planned. chimneys with caps on the tops to He had also been the engineer/ catch earwigs.’ architect responsible for the works at the Little did he know what was going to appear 15 years later, when, at the behest Royal Dockyards at Chatham, Woolwich and Sheerness. In other words, he was of Walter May’s son, Walter Barton May, spot-on perfect for ensuring that the a 170-foot-high Gothic tower was attached to the body of the building. Built tower would not crash to the ground, as Fonthill Abbey’s had. eight feet taller than its contemporary Thereafter, Hadlow had many and Nelson’s Column, it was then to be various owners – including a surgeon stretched yet further into the clouds by called Dr MacGeagh, who would set off an octagonal lantern, decorated with every morning by horse and carriage to delicately dancing pinnacles!

Tonbridge Station, thereby earning Photographs survive of this renown as one of Britain’s first extraordinary apparition in the 1930s, commuters to and from London. soaring skywards as a backdrop to Over the years, the house gradually children playing hopscotch in the drifted into a dire decline. By 1946, when countryside. Walter Barton May was it was finally abandoned, a violent storm obviously a most winning character. It ravaged what was left of its ornamental was said that ‘He was no less remarkable Gothicry. Pillars crashed to the ground for his quaint and agreeable manners and it was thought best to take off all the than for his love of Gothic architecture.’ decoration that remained; leaving a lone, In building his tower, Walter Barton sad stump in the landscape.

May created a folly that was to become Thanks to the Herculean efforts of famed nationwide. Shell trumpeted its local portrait-painter Bernard Hailstone, glories as one of their renowned it was saved from the annihilating jaws ‘Britain’s landmarks’. of demolition. Better than saved, it was A ‘folly’ it most certainly was, having revived, in what in my view was one been built with three bedrooms for the of the most successful restoration manservants alone! It was modelled on programmes ever carried out in William Beckford’s tower that had the country. collapsed 13 years earlier in 1825.

82 The Oldie July 2021

Support came from numerous bodies: local councils, the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage, the Architectural Heritage Fund and the Country Houses Association – heroes all.

Finally and triumphantly, it was taken over by the Vivat building preservation trust, with its director Laura Norris ‘taking a deep intake of breath’ that such a historic restoration programme should go ahead. There was a complete re-rendering, redecoration and, if you please, actually remaking, of all the fantastical Gothic detailing.

Most thrillingly, the work was done in its original ‘Roman cement’. It’s no more Roman than you or I but a material invented by a Kentish clergyman in the 1780s. It gave the tower all the delicate distinction of an 18th-century folly, created for the sheer joy of pleasing the eye.

The material is no longer made in England but has continued in France as Vicat Prompt, having been devised by Joseph Vicat, the son of Napoleon’s engineer. For Hadlow, it was imported from Grenoble for the job, where its silky smoothness is perfection.

What a labour of love it was, toiling knee-deep in Gothic detailing, with slender buttresses, gables, crocketed pinnacles and the pierced parapet. The stages were marked with string courses of elaborate rosettes. Crosses were incised above all the windows – tall and Gothic, as well as lancet, transomed and quatrefoil. Gothic- and trefoilheaded arcading abounds; some of it glazed, some blind. All in all, a fanciful concoction.

In 1852, Edmund Burke delighted in the place. ‘The interior of the castle’, he wrote ‘is of the same character, consisting of arched groins, ramifications and various flowers of gothic grandeur.’ He did not mention the thumping great Corinthian columns that stood amongst the Gothicry throughout! The house was organised around a main corridor which ran the full length of the building from

east to west and was filled with statuary glowing from enormous stained-glass windows at each end.

Vivat made enticing arrangements to stay at Hadlow and they were no mean arrangements: having whizzed up in a lift – part of a new and frighteningly efficient technological affair – you can look out

from a Gothic window on high and imagine how your lone figure, framed by such a dizzying wealth of outlandish Gothicry, must appear from below.

When Walter Barton May died, his hatchment in Hadlow church had been emblazoned with the motto Nil desperandum.

Sadly, so very sadly and dispiritingly, the costs of restoring Hadlow became too great and it had to be sold by Vivat. After various changes of ownership, it is still on the market. Let us hope and pray that this sheer miracle of Gothic architecture will one day be completely safe.

The Oldie July 2021 83

Taking a Walk

Lost in a world of books in Hay-on-Wye

GARY WING

patrick barkham

Y Gelli Gandryll, a magical place known to the admiring English as Hay-on-Wye, is ‘a town of books’. Bookshops apart, like the best fictional places – the Isle of Sodor springs to mind – it seems to have one of everything that makes a place interesting.

Of course there’s a school, fire station and library. And then there is Hay Castle, the river, the streams, the mountain, the farmers’ collective. Hay’s original cinema is now a cavernous bookshop, but don’t worry – the original bookshop has built a cinema.

Most small towns used to have everything. Now Hay is an exception – and a deservedly popular tourist town.

During its famous festival it becomes a bit too popular, but the festival was online only this year which bequeathed the town just the right amount of bustle – so visitors could enjoy its prettiness.

I took a walk around Heaven– sorry, Hay – on a warm afternoon in May. Sparrows chatted down low, swifts screamed up high and a lad and his girlfriend raced into town for a beer, side-saddle in their tractor.

I sidestepped a gaggle of comely

ponies tearing grass from the turf faster than it was growing to follow Llwybr Clawdd Offa, more prosaically known as Offa’s Dyke Path, entering a valley-load of green, flowery pasture and hedges. The May blossom sparkled; the scent of cow hung in the warm air.

I left Offa’s Dyke for a path less trodden which steadily climbed into the hills above Hay and reminded me that a walk is rarely straightforwardly glorious.

One stile was blocked by nettles.

Reassuring signposts disappeared. The map showed that the path headed straight through a succession of small farms, but the path appeared unwalked and the map could not tell me whether I should dart through someone’s farmyard, garden or kitchen.

This was terrifying. Like most English people, I scrape subserviently before property rights and am much too cowardly to defy them. (Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass is a useful antidote.)

I havered by a gracefully ungentrified old Welsh farm. Eventually, a white-haired farmer materialised from a dark shed.

‘Excuse me, where does the footpath go?’

‘Which one? You want the mountain?’

‘I’m not from London, you know,’ I nearly spluttered, Withnail-style, but the farmer kindly dispatched me through his garden and over a well-kept stile. Once I had negotiated this hurdle, my next challenge was escaping a field of frisky young bullocks.

I hopped into a sunken lane, its banks filled with cow parsley and honeysuckle.

Now there was an aerial view of Hay below, blue hills beyond, and the broad Wye Valley snaking east to less interesting England.

At a crossroads of footpaths by a spring, I took the most quirky-looking path which plunged downhill, through Wern Wood – a fascinating piece of wood pasture where sheep grazed beneath fine old trees. It felt like France or Spain, not Wales.

The path descended onto Hay Common, full of rushes, ant hills and gorse, and then on to a miniature gorge and Mynwent y Gelli, Hay cemetery, which featured a striking line of sculpted yews, providing black shade under a Provençal sky.

I twisted through the suburbs and on to the buttercup-filled meadows of the Warren, where Hay was at play beside a generous curve of the magnificent Wye. Bikes were strewn on the banks. Shouts echoed over the valley. Lads hurled themselves from willows into the water.

Exhausted bookshop workers breaststroked upstream. Intellectuals stroked chins on picnic blankets. A kingfisher flashed. Couples snogged.

The water was cold and soft and my whole body tingled deliciously after a long, slow, cool swim that was the perfect end to a day in paradise.

Pick up Offa’s Dyke Path from Hay car park. After half a mile, take the path up hill to the right, cross lane and continue past Dan-y-fforest farm and others.

At Long Cairn, turn right down through Wern Wood and Hay Common.

OS Map: OL13 The Oldie July 2021 85

On the Road

Ted Dexter, 86 not out The Sussex and England legend tells Louise Flind about his favourite innings, an Italian childhood and drinking rosé with Richie Benaud

What is your favourite cricket ground in England and the world?

Old Trafford was the place I enjoyed batting most because it was the only test ground in England with sight screens at both ends. And Melbourne: you felt if you’d made some runs there you’d conquered Australia. When I captained there in ’62, there were four draws and we beat them in Melbourne [pictured].

Was that your favourite innings?

Yes. I was not out overnight and walked out in the morning with David Sheppard, the Bishop [of Liverpool]. He was the wise one and said, ‘Ted, fifthday pitch – I don’t think it’s a day for big shots – let’s just take ones and twos.’ We drove the Australians mad.

What are your memories of playing for Sussex?

I was just married and I could walk to Victoria from our Pimlico flat, and take the 9am Brighton Belle. I played as an amateur but got expenses – so I had a first-class ticket. I was in Hove by 10, and the game started at 11.30. I went on to captain Sussex.

What is your favourite bit of Sussex?

The cricket ground.

Why were you born in Milan?

My dad had his business in Italy.

PA IMAGES/ALAMY

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

It was wartime, you see – the nearest I got to a holiday was bicycling once a week to the nearest cinema.

– a second lieutenant, given charge of a troop of men in the middle of the jungle.

What is your favourite memory of Cambridge?

The drinking clubs where you were drinking till you fell down – disgraceful behaviour.

What’s your favourite destination?

South of France – we lived in a lovely apartment in Nice for 13 years. Because I’d done 70 years as Ted Dexter the cricketer in England, I thought we’d retreat. On the second day, I went to church and somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You’re Ted Dexter, aren’t you?’

When you were in the South of France, did you ever bump into Richie Benaud?

Yes, I knew Richie. He captained against me in Australia in ’62/’63 and we’ve been good friends ever since. He had an apartment in Beaulieu. We used to have lunch with them. I’ve never poured so much vin rosé down anybody’s throat as I did with Richie.

You’re very keen on motorbikes, aren’t you.

I was passing a shop and asked, ‘How do I learn to ride one of these things?’

And they said, ‘You just get on it,’ and I was hooked.

What was Peter Cook like at Radley?

Do you remember him?

The comedian chap? Absolutely not.

And why did you start flying?

After my cricket career, I had some newspaper work and was whizzing round the country in a hot little Mini Cooper. I had two accidents and decided to learn how to fly. I flew my family to Australia and back.

What are your memories of National Service in the Malayan Emergency?

I remembered it was my 19th birthday at 5 o’clock in the morning, with the sun coming up in Rangoon, and there I was

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

We got married on 2nd May 1959, spent our wedding night in Rye and went to Paris for a week.

Do you go on holiday?

With the children we did – in Falmouth.

And later I took the whole family down to the Grand Hotel, Torquay – I’d got some money by then. We celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary in Barbados.

Have you made friends when away?

Richie. And Gary Sobers – I respected him so much as a cricketer because he came from almost a slum background.

He was also a perfect sportsman.

Do you have a go at the local language?

I left Italy when I was four and a half but picked up Italian later on. I also speak French, a bit of German and Spanish.

Biggest headache?

Losing your passport. Mine slid out of my pocket in a rented car in Nice. And when we were moving back to England, we waved the removal vans goodbye at 6pm, and at about 7.30 Susan realised her passport had gone with the luggage.

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away?

On the tour of India in ’62/’63 they did all they could to make us comfortable, but some places were pretty rough.

What is your approach to life?

Treat everybody the way you’d like to be treated.

Fred Trueman, Ted, David Sheppard and Colin Cowdrey. Melbourne, 1962 The Oldie July 2021 87

Genius crossword 402 el sereno G will be the definition wherever it appears Across 1 G’s cheap beer? (11) 7 Purpose of axioms intermittently used? (3) 9 Imperial period returns embraced by both sides (5) 10 Creature made by deity inspiring a tantrum (9) 11 Beer all gone? That’s the limit! (6,3) 12 G speaks - about time! (5) 13 Twin tub’s origin is G (7) 15 Mock poor actor after opening scene (4) 18 Area to the east of channel island state (4) 20 One who regrets pinching key for deliveryman (7) 23 Exploitation American president accepts (5) 24 Fish lovers do upset me, ultimately (5,4) 26 A new talent out to protect area for clinic like this (9) 27 Foul up, caught between the two (5) 28 Row resulting from uncovering secret cache (3) 29 Auditions held to cover internationals (6,5)

Down 1 Have a premonition beer and food must be bad (8) 2 Absolutely legal, but terrible having missed the start (8) 3 Vote originally cutting healthy split (5) 4 Forget name and choose to drink gallons (7) 5 A note about team and distances from centre (7) 6 Old people may make nurses act strangely (9) 7 The attraction of a toll to cover parking (6) 8 Simple fashion statement lacking content (6) 14 Unsettled business of facilities viewed with policeman (5,4) 16 100 different outlets for G (8) 17 Gets to broadcast after listener leaves Bear G (8) 19 Discovered fraud - it ordinarily involves this professional (7) 20 Got out of planned travelogue to adjust exchange rate (7) 21 Born a shark, finding capital (6) 22 Doctor must keep cooked suet for G (6) 25 Erect a barrier to protect revolutionary capital (5)

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: 28th July 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 402 Across 1 Sit; attitude (4) 3 Sweeties (7) 8 Refuse to acknowledge (6) 9 Reach (6) 10 Smutty allusion (8) 11 Den (4) 12 Hot spring (6) 15 Instant; support (6) 17 Ran off (4) 19 Advancement (8) 22 Testing experience (6) 23 Forty winks (6) 24 Quill (7) 25 Neat; pare (4)

Genius 400 solution Down 1 Heathen (5) 2 Japanese military governors (7) 4 Public speakers (7) 5 Deadly (5) 6 Issue; version (7) 7 Enthusiastic (4) 13 Make bigger (7) 14 Rebuff; cause revulsion in (7) 16 Custodian (museum etc) (7) 18 Resided (5) 20 Formerly (4) 21 Crowd on the move (5)

M was the key, representing moons of Saturn (or mythological figures associated with Saturn!)

Winner: Carolyn Rebstein, St Martin, Guernsey Runners-up: John Jackson, Trysull, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire; Valerie Farrar, Edinburgh

Moron 400 solution Across: 1 Mars, 4 Hoop, 8 Yell, 9 (Marsupial) Stone-deaf, 11 Queues, 13 Parlour, 15 Collie, 16 Ethics, 18 Bicker, 20 De luxe, 22 Numeral, 23 Dampen, 25 Do-gooders, 26 Zany, 27 Afar, 28 Dump. Down: 2 Asti, 3 Sandal, 4 Huddle, 5 Opaque, 6 Beautiful, 7 Alas, 10 Further, 12 Scab, 13 Placement, 14 Ripened, 17 Step, 19 Runoff, 20 Devour, 21 Landed, 23 Doze, 24 Prim.

The Oldie July 2021 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO I feel very privileged to have spent many happy evenings at the Portland Club, the oldest bridge club in the world. No conventions are allowed – no Stayman, no Blackwood, no Transfers, no nothing (except for a Weak Notrump and a take-out double). All bids are quantitative – which really teaches you how to evaluate a hand (and lessons are learnt quickly at the prevailing large stakes).

Plan the play in Six Hearts on the queen of diamonds lead from one such jolly evening.

Try to maximise your chances.

Dealer South North-South Vulnerable North

♠ AK53 West ♠ 10 8 7 ♥6 ♦ Q J 10 8 5 ♣Q 10 8 7

♥ Q 10 2

♦AK3 ♣6 3 2

South ♠ J42 ♥KJ9853 ♦4 ♣A K J

East ♠ Q96 ♥A74 ♦9762 ♣9 5 4

The bidding South West North East 1 ♥ Pass 1 ♠ Pass 2 ♥ Pass 5 ♥ (1) Pass 6 ♥ (2) end (1) Classic Portlandesque quantitative slam invitation.

(2) The singleton diamond swings it.

Win the ace of diamonds and lead a heart to the king, winning the trick as both opponents follow low. Now, with entries slightly short to dummy, take your first chance, namely the queen of spades dropping in two rounds, leading low to the ace-king (taking the necessary slight chance that a top spade will be ruffed with a low heart). If the queen falls, lead a second trump to force out the ace, and with the knave of spades promoted you’ll soon be cashing the king of diamonds, shedding the knave of clubs and claiming.

Here, both opponents follow low on the ace-king of spades. Now, cash the king of diamonds, shedding the knave of spades, and ruff a third spade (high). On the layout, the 3-3 spade split is revealed and you have a lucky 13th spade nestling in dummy. Lead a second heart to the ten, East winning the ace and (say) switching to a club. Rise with the ace, cross to the queen of hearts (drawing East’s third heart) and shed the knave of clubs on the long spade. Slam made.

If spades had not split 3-3, you’d have drawn trumps finishing in dummy (forcing out the ace en route) and had to rely on the club finesse (low to the knave). Did you spot all your chances?

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 268, you were invited to write a poem with the title The Writing on the Wall. Anthony Young observed of the makers of those great spray-paint tags that we see from trains, ‘They paint their aims with aerosol,/Abiding to the protocol:/ The letters have to overlap,/They never, ever leave a gap.’ Gillian Gain made things plain about the future for us oldies: ‘At 88 you know for sure, the writing’s on the wall./You’ve only got to slip the once, to have another fall.’

D A Prince marked the technique of Rembrandt: ‘Belshazzar’s face in profile, vivid, stays/When story details fade; one eye, its white/A circle of pure living fear.’

Oldie-readers include some accomplished versifiers who would win each month were there not so many other constant and occasional geniuses.

Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Ann Drysdale.

Sad is too small a word; it will not do.

It can’t accommodate what’s in my heart.

I want to say the right goodbye to you; The tricky bit is knowing where to start.

Grief is too big somehow, and not your style; You couldn’t do with that pretentious shit, Always preferring what would make you smile.

You wouldn’t wear it if it didn’t fit.

It’s out there somewhere in this sudden dark, The slick one-liner that will say it all.

I need to pin it down and bring it back To spray in ten-foot letters on a wall So as to show the thing that can’t be said: You are here, reading this, but he is dead.

Ann Drysdale Here resteth in assured hope To rise in Christ the bodye of Henry Kellinghusen borne at Hamburghe in Germany who Came to see this countrye And learne the language And died here in the feare Of God the 11 August Anno verbi incarnati 1615 Et aetatis suae 19.

This tablet in St Cuthbert’s, Wells, Of H K’s brief existence tells.

He came to learn a foreign tongue; His own fell silent far too young.

Jerome Betts In the Bible the writing was on the wall for Belshazzar.

Now on an underpass ‘Shazza sez Jazzer has a Grate bod’. This sounds like an ancient hearth-cleaning tool, But no doubt Shazza thinks history and spelling ‘ain’t cool’.

Every so often the Council paints over each daubed scrawl, But who had to clean the writing off Belshazzar’s wall?

Did Daniel tell Darius the writing was from God Or did the conqueror get the wall wiped by an unnamed slave bod?

Fay Dickinson Mosaic bakes. His sandalled feet walk warm Across the forum floor in silent sun.

The fountain plays. An earthen wine jar, smashed, Has strewn the stepping-stones that span the street.

He picks a terracotta shard, and tests Its sharpness on the winehouse wall, and seeks A space to scratch upon the basking clay, And leaves his words, and idly strolls away.

Their sandalled feet walk warm on baked mosaic In silent heat; I greet them, point, translate: ‘I wonder, wall, that you have not collapsed, So many writers’ clichés do you bear.’

The sun hangs heavy in the weighted air.

They seek a space to stand on basking clay And raise their phones to Pompeii’s burdened wall, Then leave its words, and idly stroll away.

Jane Bower COMPETITION No 270 In my house, the hall is hardly a room at all. But please write a poem called The Hall in any sense you choose. 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 270’, by 29th July.

The Oldie July 2021 91

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside Take the weight off your feet

Q

Having spent a year wearing soft shoes, I was due to lunch at my club recently, which meant putting on proper lace-ups. It was a lovely day, so I walked from Sloane Square to St James’s Street. Fine. But when I left, I found that both heels were bloody and gouged out with giant blisters. I shuffled about in agony until I caught a bus home. I have been hobbling all week. So, dear oldies, please wear in your post-lockdown proper shoes, gently. And avoid the dreaded blisters.

Ben Howkins, Northamptonshire As you get older, your feet can get bigger. It could be that during the time we’ve been locked up, you’ve put on weight. Not only have your feet got fatter along with your tum, but your body’s putting extra pressure on your feet, which makes them spread out a bit to bear the load. Or your ligaments might have got looser, or perhaps bunions have sprung up. All this usually affects length rather than width, but what you’re experiencing is not unknown. I’m afraid that unless you endure the agony, which isn’t good for your feet, you’ll just have to buy wider – and more comfortable – shoes for the foreseeable future.

A

Q

I can’t forget her

Fifty years ago, I had a passionate affair. It lasted only six months, but I was in agony for 18 months and pined for her for 20 years. At a chance encounter early in those 20 years, she told me why she left me and described the cliffs where she and her new lover consummated their relationship. I had no idea then where

The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

98 The Oldie July 2021

the cliffs were, but very recently realised I walk on them several times a week. The agony has returned, as sharp as if it had all happened last week. How can I make it go away?

AG, Scarborough The obvious answer is to walk in the other direction. But that’s glib. My suspicion is that a lot of us oldies – well, I and several friends – are in a dreadful state just now. As we grow older, we become less adaptable to change. We’ve been locked up for a year, many of the freedoms our parents fought for in the last war are being snatched from us and, to top it all, the digital and online revolution has left a lot of us baffled, upset and confused. Isn’t this backward look, to an idyllic time in our lives, perfectly natural? Even I find myself constantly and wistfully casting my mind back to blissful days with my grandmother and crying to think the world will never be the same again for any of us. These memories are in some way a comfort but, at the same time, they bring pain, too. If they continue to haunt you, try visiting a cognitive behavioural therapist, who should be able to help you at least a tiny bit in a couple of sessions.

They won’t be burrowing into your past or anything. Good luck.

A

Q

Missing kissing

How do you cope with greeting people these days? As I live on my own – no partner, children or friends to cuddle – one of the things I missed a lot when we were locked up, and miss even now sometimes, is kissing acquaintances on meeting them. How do we make clear to our friends that we would like a kiss? Just a peck on the cheek is enough but human contact, for

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those who normally have absolutely none, means a great deal to people like me.

JD, Bridport I’ve found that opening one’s arms, pursing one’s lips and approaching the other person like a steamroller with the words ‘Are we kissing?’ works quite well. The other person is usually too embarrassed to push you away and say, ‘No!’ If they do, that is their prerogative. Most will give in, even if they just offer their forehead or the top of their head. Carry on kissing, say I. I agree: it’s essential.

A

My meddling sister

Q

It was bad enough being locked up for most of the last year against my will, as we all were but, to make matters worse, my sister has booked me into a care home in her area. But I want to stay in my home. Am I being unreasonable?

Jane, by email If you aren’t deemed unsafe to yourself or others by your doctor, she has no power to move you. I’d get advice from a sympathetic third party. As long as you’re not constantly falling downstairs, pouring boiling water over yourself or accidentally setting fire to the kitchen, I’d try to stay put as long as you can. It’s up to you if you want to take the risks. I’m sure your sister means well but basically she wants to get rid of her own worries about you, and isn’t really considering your feelings even if perhaps they do involve risks. But they’re your risks, not hers.

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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Review of Books Round-up of the reviews

Lucy Lethbridge on Margaret Kennedy’s charm Michael Barber on Hollywood writers Harry Mount on Charmian Clift’s Greek tragedy Biography & Memoir History Fiction Sex Nature Robots Music Paperbacks Summer 2021 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Reading time Review of Books Issue 56 Summer 2021 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie A Stinging Delight by David Storey Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life by Frances Bingham Going with the Boys by Judith Mackrell The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright The Broken House by Horst Krüger Napoleon’s Plunder and the Theft of Veronese’s Feast by Cynthia Saltzman The Paper Lantern by Will Burns Malice in Wonderland: My Adventures in the World of Cecil Beaton by Hugo Vickers

Have you read more books in this Covid-infected year than you have in any other? With my obsession for lists I know that I definitely have. And at least a couple (Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, and Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots) have been whoppers. So I suppose having more time to read has been an advantage (the only?) of the pandemic for me. But now that theatres, cinemas and art galleries are opening again I fear that my reading quota will go right down. Not that I’m competitive or envious, of course, but I can still remember reading a few years ago that a fairly wellknown journalist found time to read a book a week despite a challenging job and young children. Impressive – and not something I have been able to equal. However, in a completely unscientific survey (ie, I asked several friends) I found that reading more was not the case generally: concentration in this time of stress proved a stumbling block for many.

But according to a recent, rather more scientific survey, at the beginning of the pandemic people were, in fact, reading more and choosing books about isolation – for example, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera; Albert Camus’s novel The Plague had booming worldwide sales. But during the year, habits changed and people were wanting more formulaic genres – for instance, thrillers and detective stories: Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club has probably hit a million by now. An extraordinary number in such a short time. And, of course, a lot of people comfort-read old favourites.

Now that lockdown’s eased this is the perfect time to open this supplement and discover a feast of new books, whatever your preferred genre: history, biography, memoir, fiction, music…

Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19th-Century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women by Antonia Fraser

19 SCREENWRITING Michael Barber on writers in Hollywood

20 CURRENT AFFAIRS

Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her Life and Long Loves by John Sutherland

COVER ILLUSTRATION: BOB WILSON

Lean Fall Stand by John McGregor

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Pembroke Editor: Liz Anderson Design: Lawrence Bogle Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Deborah Maby, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Melissa Arancio, Kami Jogee For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, email editorial@ theoldie.co.uk

9 FORGOTTEN AUTHORS

Lucy Lethbridge on Margaret Kennedy

10 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

22 MISCELLANEOUS 25 FICTION 27 NATURE

15 SEX

30 REPRINTS

17 ROBOTS

Harry Mount on Charmian Clift

18 MUSIC

30 PAPERBACKS The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 3

History Beevor’s Stalingrad reminded us that the eastern front of WW2 was of far greater consequence than its western theatre, so Jarman shows how the westward trading and slaving voyages of the Vikings were only half the story. The real source of Viking wealth lay far to the east.’ Dalrymple concluded by saying that it is ‘one of the most thrilling works of archaeological detective work I have ever read... will cast a spell on any reader who enjoys their history well-written and clearly argued.’

‘Tiny trills of detail give way to pounding drums of drama’

The Norwegian Oseberg Viking ship

RIVER KINGS

A NEW HISTORY OF VIKINGS FROM SCANDINAVIA TO THE SILK ROADS

CAT JARMAN Wm Collins, 336pp, £25

As a 17-year-old, Financial Times reviewer William Dalrymple was one of ten diggers who made an important archaeological discovery in a vicar’s garden near Repton Abbey, namely the charnel of 264 bodies with trophies buried by a band of Viking raiders. Ranging from Greenland and the Baltic to Kiev, Constantinople, Baghdad and beyond, Jarman traces a carnelian bead to its source in Gujarat, western India. ‘Jarman likes her Vikings violent,’ wrote Dalrymple, and her book ‘is at least as lively as any Netflix Viking romp, and a great deal more intellectually satisfying... It helps that she has an enviable gift for turning dry archaeological data into thrilling human stories as she weaves cutting-edge science with chronicles, histories and Nordic sagas, moving effortlessly from laboratory readings of strontium and carbon-14 to the tales of the Icelandic bard Snorri Sturluson and legends of the Valkyries.’

He said that ‘just as Antony 4 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

Gerard DeGroot, in the Times, was similarly ‘held captive by that single orange bead’ and echoed Dalrymple’s judgement that ‘in addition to being a wonderful writer, Jarman is a skilled bioarchaeologist’. It is ‘a tale told by objects – lead weights, gaming pieces, iron nails, fragments of silk, a prosthetic penis’. At the same time, it is ‘like a classical symphony, perfectly composed and exquisitely performed.

Tiny trills of detail give way to pounding drums of drama. Fur-clad Volga boatmen carry us relentlessly towards the exotic. Along the way, Jarman takes a sledgehammer to fantasies of ethnic purity. In Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea that was like a 9th-century Felixstowe, less than 50 per cent of human remains unearthed are local.’

DO NOT DISTURB

THE STORY OF A POLITICAL MURDER AND AN AFRICAN REGIME GONE BAD

MICHELA WRONG Fourth Estate, 512pp, £20

A ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign was placed on the door of the Johannesburg hotel room where the murdered body of Patrick Karegeya lay. He had been the boyhood friend and brother-in-arms of Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame.

No longer. A hit squad had despatched him.

‘This superb book tells their entwined story, an epic tale of blood, bitterness and betrayal,’ Ian Birrell wrote in the Times. ‘Michela Wrong,

among the sharpest western writers on Africa, uses the murder of Rwanda’s affable spy chief as a device to dissect the ugly reign of Paul Kagame … It is a gripping tale.’

Michael Dobbs in the Washington Post described the book’s revelations as ‘devastating’, while Alec Russell in the Financial Times called it ‘an extraordinarily brave piece of reporting’.

‘Her brave and tremendous book, the product of 30 years’ reporting, demands that we revise the entire history of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide,’ Nicholas Shakespeare noted in the Spectator; ‘she has produced a classic.’ ‘There is abundant evidence of Kagame’s atrocities,’ Martin Fletcher agreed in the New Statesman, ‘much of it chronicled in this powerful, compelling and meticulously researched book.’

Chris McGreal in the Guardian described the book as an ‘engrossing and revelatory investigation’.

Western regimes praised Kagame for ending the genocide and, to expiate their guilt for not intervening, lavished Rwanda with aid, giving his criminal regime a free pass. It ‘will make uncomfortable reading’ for them.

Sadly, as Howard W French noted in the New York Times, Kagame ‘remains the darling of the international donor community and the Davos crowd’.

EMPIRE OF PAIN

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE SACKLER DYNASTY

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE Picador 515pp, £20

Keefe begins his secret history of the Sackler dynasty with three immigrant Jewish brothers who qualified as doctors in Brooklyn in the 1920s but quickly moved into pharmaceuticals.

He makes the saga of their lives and the families they founded into the story of a century of American capitalism. The first fortune was built

by Arthur Sackler, who marketed Valium for Roche (to solve the problem of ‘being female’), in the 1960s, cultivating politicians and buying up experts on big salaries in much the same way as Purdue Pharma would do 30 years later.

Purdue Pharma was the Sacklerowned company responsible for the manufacture and distribution of the

History opioid OxyContin which was authorised by the FDA in 1996. (The official responsible for its authorisation shortly afterwards left the FDA and joined Purdue on a salary of $400,000.) The philanthropy for which the Sacklers were until recently best known also began in the 1960s. The family endowed vast sums to galleries, theatres, medical schools, universities, museums and libraries in Harvard, Washington, New York, London, Oxford, Tel Aviv, Paris — always in return for naming rights and tax write-offs.

Arthur M Sackler: family fortunes

HITLER’S HORSES

THE INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY OF THE DETECTIVE WHO INFILTRATED THE NAZI UNDERWORLD

ARTHUR BRAND TRANS JANE HEDLEY-PROLE Ebury, 272pp, £16.99

When someone showed him a photograph purporting to be a pair of 1930s equine bronze sculptures that once stood outside Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin and were now being offered for sale despite having been presumed destroyed since 1945, Dutch art investigator Arthur Brand’s interest was piqued. He set off on a quest to find out whether they were the genuine sculptures by Josef Thorak and if so, where they had been hiding all this time.

‘It is an extraordinary tale that needs no embellishment,’ wrote Saul David in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Yet for some reason Brand – or possibly his editor – felt the need to ramp up the tension by constantly emphasising the danger he was in, and the ruthlessness of the people he was dealing with. Neither claims are particularly convincing. Chapters end

on cliffhangers more typical of pulp fiction. Brand is described as the art world’s answer to Indiana Jones. Yet his naive and, at times, blundering attempts to navigate the dark world of German neo-Nazis are more reminiscent of Inspector Clouseau.’

For James McConnachie, in the Sunday Times, it read ‘like a thriller – more Dan Brown than John le Carré’, but one that left him cold: ‘The problem with the book is that it is overpumped... German museums are starting to exhibit “tainted” art as part of what is called a Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “past-times-coping-strategy”, and this book feels like a similar exercise, with a double shot of adrenaline. I finished it feeling breathless – it is gripping – but also a little tainted myself.’

BARBAROSSA

HOW HITLER LOST THE WAR

JONATHAN DIMBLEBY Viking, 640pp, £25

Daily Telegraph reviewer Julian Evans described Dimbleby’s book as an ‘encyclopedic new account... a vivid, meticulous tapestry, densely weaving the threads of German and Soviet military strategy, political calculation from Washington and London to Moscow, and war’s pitiless human cost’. Nazi Germany invaded Russia in 1941, wrote Keith Lowe in the Daily Mail, ‘with the greatest invasion force in history, along a front that stretched from the Baltic to the Balkans... As a consequence, the scale of the killing described in this

Soviet poster: ‘We will mercilessly smash and destroy the enemy!’

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 5

GETTY

OxyContin is a highly addictive and powerful painkiller with a patented slow-release coating.

Empire of Pain describes how sales reps from Purdue wined and dined doctors and offered free 30-day subscriptions as a way of getting patients hooked. Some victims were already addicts who crushed the pills to release their drugs. Others were people who found that the pill’s slow release did not relieve pain for the promised 12 hours, and increased their dosage. The court cases began to pile up but the Sacklers had a financial incentive to keep selling OxyContin, even after a 2007 case in which Purdue pleaded guilty to a federal charge of misbranding.

Eventually the company went bankrupt and in the final days of the Trump presidency the family offered to contribute a comparatively small sum to help to settle thousands of outstanding lawsuits.

Keefe’s telling of this terrible story zips along thanks to the author’s eye for detail, gift for character and ability to write lucid descriptions of arcane business practices. Reviewers

commented on the thriller-like qualities of the book without casting doubt on the authority of an account pieced together from recently released court documents, internal emails and memos, and hundreds of interviews with people close to the family who got in touch with Keefe after the publication of his first investigation into the Sacklers in the New Yorker in 2017. The source notes run to more than 100 pages.

Lloyd Green in the Guardian described Empire of Pain as ‘a chilling and mesmerising read’ while John Arlidge wrote in the Sunday Times that it was one of those books that ‘make you so angry you want to chuck rocks at the bad guys they expose’. Melanie Reid in the Times went further and suggested that Keefe’s book belonged in the tradition of ‘great and fearless investigative writing that… achieves retribution where the law could not. The greedy, shameless Sacklers have not lost their personal wealth. But… Keefe has… dismantled their reputation. Many of the grand buildings have already dropped the tainted name. This book should finish the job.’

History book is quite sickening. Those six months saw not only the death and wounding of more than a million soldiers, but also the deliberate starvation of entire populations of civilians, particularly in cities such as Leningrad... Operation Barbarossa turned a series of local atrocities into a continental genocide. Dimbleby describes these events with great skill, care and attention to detail. The only flaw in this book is his repeated assertion that the failure of Hitler’s attack was “inevitable” and “preordained”.’

Far from being sickened, Gerard DeGroot, in the Times, found that Dimbleby ‘chooses to tell the Barbarossa story without dwelling on its horror. He virtually ignores, for instance, the siege of Leningrad, which revealed humanity at its best and its ugliest. He instead favours high politics, in particular British and American tribulations in having to support an ally they widely despised.

While his narrative is vivid and informative, the story he tells is not horrific enough; it does not do justice to how hideous Barbarossa was.’

THE BOMBER MAFIA A STORY SET IN WAR

MALCOLM GLADWELL Allen Lane, 256pp, £20

The bestselling author of highconcept popular science books, written in a homely style, turns his attention to the Second World War. ‘A novelty of this book is that Gladwell says it began as an audiobook and then became a written one, reversing the usual process,’ noted Thomas E Ricks in the New York Times Book Review. ‘It is indeed a conversational work, almost garrulous at times...

However, this chatty style also glides over some important historical questions. Gladwell is a wonderful storyteller. When he is introducing characters and showing them in conflict, The Bomber Mafia is gripping. I enjoyed this short book thoroughly, and would have been happy if it had been twice as long. But when Gladwell leaps to provide superlative assessments, or draws broad lessons of history from isolated incidents, he makes me wary.’

Military historian Saul David was rather less generous in the Telegraph. This ‘is Gladwell’s first foray into military history and, while 6 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

Times Square, New York: the city ‘contains the whole world’

engagingly written, it is bedevilled by the same oversimplification of the world into a single Big Idea that is characteristic of his other work... In Gladwell’s binary world (precision bombing = GOOD, area bombing = BAD) Hansell is a hero and LeMay a villain. He also places in the latter camp Arthur Harris, the RAF’s chief supporter of area bombing, whom the author calls a “psychopath”. The war might have ended earlier, Gladwell claimed in a recent interview, had the RAF not conducted itself so “recklessly”.’ David’s assessment was that ‘by using one-dimensional figures to prop up a misleading thesis, The Bomber Mafia reveals itself as history lite.’

NEW YORKERS

A CITY AND ITS PEOPLE IN OUR TIME

CRAIG TAYLOR WW Norton, 415pp, £25

This is ‘an ambitious and entertaining attempt to channel the city’s collective voice’, wrote Hari Kunzru in the Guardian. Much of the book’s pleasure ‘comes from a kind of sly parataxis, the rhetorical trope in which elements are placed side by side, without being overtly connected together. The cop speaks, then the trans social justice activist. The lawyer is followed by the car thief...

There’s an implicit idea of the cosmopolis, the city that contains the whole world, and Taylor has certainly talked to a wide variety of people.’ If

Times reviewer Laura Pullman had read New Yorkers before moving to the city, she ‘might have been more hesitant to get on the plane because it brilliantly highlights the city’s darker elements... Workaholics grind their teeth to pegs, according to a dentist.

Every client fantasises about escaping, a therapist says... The book is at its best when we hear from the often overlooked: a homeless veteran, a mother grieving for her son who is in Rikers Island jail and a man who recycles cans to scrape by... New York isn’t an easy place to live for most of us, but after reading this beautifully woven tapestry, you’re forced to recognise that for some it’s relentless.’

For Mary Norris, in the Times Literary Supplement, Taylor’s book is ‘a symphonic choir of voices rising from the five boroughs’. The city is ‘hopping, punching, reeling, dancing, thrumming, honking, thriving’ and ‘Taylor is as skilled a writer of literary nonfiction as I have ever read.’

THE GUN, THE SHIP AND THE PEN WARFARE, CONSTITUTIONS AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

LINDA COLLEY Profile, 512pp, £25

‘Major traumas reset the political landscape’ and this ‘superb retelling of the past... will surely make us rethink our present and future’, wrote Miles Taylor in his Guardian review.

History Colley’s book starts ‘not where one might expect – in the America of the founding fathers or in revolutionary France – but in Corsica in 1755 where a former soldier, Pasquale Paoli, drew up a ten-page constitution for the island. Such military men crop up throughout the book as unlikely draftsmen of political order. In a series of vivid portraits we come across Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, Napoleon Bonaparte in France and Simón Bolívar in South America. This preponderance of the soldierlegislator provides Colley with one of her main themes: the combination of sword and pen – might and right – in the making of constitutions.

The other two factors are mass communications and the increasing ease of sea travel. Sheri Berman in the New York Times said that much of the book ‘is devoted to analyzing the ideas, motivations and activities of the pioneering men (and few women) involved in designing and championing constitutions. The book discusses not only well-known figures from Western history like James Madison and Jeremy Bentham, but also constitutional champions from places as varied as Japan, Tunisia, Pitcairn Island, Tahiti, Russia and India... Colley also reminds us of how revolutionary and inspirational constitutions were — and still are.’

The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore was full of praise for the book, calling it ‘incandescent, paradigm-shifting’.

Colley ‘has upended much of what historians believe about the origins of written constitutions. If there were a Nobel Prize in History, Linda Colley would be my nominee.’

THE IMPOSSIBLE OFFICE?

THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH PRIME MINISTER

ANTHONY SELDON Cambridge University Press, 430pp, £19.99

British prime ministers ‘struggle to set their agendas and realise their goals’, wrote Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer. ‘They come to office with their big dreams only to find that most of them crumble to dust. They try to make things happen by yanking at the levers of state, then complain that the controls are made of rubber.’

Seldon and his co-authors have produced ‘an intelligent and

Johnson once compared MPs to wasps in a jam-jar, or rugby players waiting for the ball to squirt out of a scrum. Seldon is keener on administrative tidiness: he wants the position of deputy PM formalised and he longs for stronger civil service structures.’

THE WARRIOR AND THE PROPHET THE SHAWNEE BROTHERS WHO DEFIED A NATION

PETER COZZENS Atlantic, 537pp, £25

Tony Blair: big dreams

‘Anthony Seldon’s book does make one wish that we could have some better prime ministers’ insightful account of the evolution of the role’, but ‘the notion that it has got harder to be the tenant of Number 10 is surely influenced by a recent run of occupants of the office who have been unsuited to it... No, it is not an impossible job. Just a bloody difficult one that demands a wide spectrum of skills, the full set of which are possessed by very few people.’ As Ian Cawood in the TLS wrote, ‘Seldon’s book does make one wish that we could have some better [prime ministers].’

Parliamentary sketch-writer Quentin Letts, reviewing it for the Times, noted that of the ‘seven prime minister skills’ the authors identify, five are positive — persuasion, oratory, energy, intellect, temperament – and only two (ruthlessness and opportunism) less estimable. ‘What happened to lying, flattery, corruption, greed, anger, animal drive?’ he asked.

‘Seldon and his co-authors are historians and operate within the rails of documentary evidence, complete with repeated use of the dismal present-historical tense. For a more vivid guide to political character we must turn to literature – Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, say...

Following on from his previous book The Earth is Weeping, about the campaigns to subjugate Native Americans west of the Missouri, Cozzens looks back to an earlier period, when Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa (the prophet) brought together various tribes to resist the colonial population around the Great Lakes and in the Ohio River valley. ‘Cozzens expertly mines the surprisingly varied array of sources for the brothers’ early lives,’ wrote Steve Donoghue in the Christian Science Monitor. It is ‘an epic tale’ which ‘paints in vivid colours the grandest effort of Native Americans to retain their independence – and the political and spiritual leaders who tried to make it happen.’

Chris Rutledge, the reviewer for the Washington Independent Review of Books, found that Cozzens ‘animates’ the various battles ‘by sharing the human stories behind the fighting. By ably piecing together a history that is equal parts engaging and amply sourced, Cozzens has crafted a satisfying work that leads us to sympathize with his subjects without putting his finger on the scale to prove his point.’

For Gerard DeGroot, in the Times, ‘Cozzens is a master storyteller; his books weave a wealth of intricate detail into gripping historical narrative... descriptions of battles are especially enthralling; one can almost smell the gunpowder, the blood and the loamy forest floor.’ The Wall Street Journal’s Kathleen DuVal thought ‘the compelling prose and deep research in both primary sources and histories of the period combine to place the reader on the ground with the Shawnee brothers...

Sharply drawn.’

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 7

Forgotten authors A kind of sentimental snobbery runs through Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, an example of a ‘good bad book’, explains LUCY LETHBRIDGE In 1983, when The Constant Nymph was reprinted by Virago, Penelope Fitzgerald described it an excellent example of a ‘good bad book.’ She felt its ‘good-bad enticement’ at once, she wrote in the London Review of Books: ‘I know that the 15-year-old Tessa, graceless, witty and shabby, is the Undine or Constant Waif and she will end up in a shady rooming-house, and die for love.’ Actually, the under-age nymph does not precisely die of love but of a pre-existing heart condition which is set off by trying to open the bedroom window. But nonetheless, in true good-bad book style, she dies before she is ruined: her story was saved from itself at the eleventh hour. Her death immortalises Tessa as a child-woman: pure yet abandoned, free yet devoted, naive and knowing, ruthlessly loyal and innocently cruel. Brought up to be the handmaid to male genius, she has fallen for the penniless avantgarde composer Lewis Dodd – with whom she ends up in the rooming house (which she finds filled with her father’s illegitimate children).

Margaret Kennedy wrote 16 novels of which The Constant Nymph, published in 1924, was her bestknown and most successful. It was made into a play starring Noël Coward and was filmed four times: the first, in 1928, was silent and starred Ivor Novello as Lewis Dodd and Mabel Poulton as a pert and mischievous Tessa; the fourth in 1943 gave the Tessa role to Joan Fontaine who looked all of 35 in winsome plaits, and Charles Boyer played Lewis. Boyer, suave in a Left-Bankish black polo neck, seems such an unlikely choice for the part that it makes one wonder if turning the selfish, self-engrossed Lewis into a Frenchman made it easier for 1940s audiences to accept a story in which a married man in his early thirties elopes with a terminally ill schoolgirl.

It’s a love-triangle story – or rather a story of two women competing for the love of a man who (as Kennedy seems to acknowledge although she seems a little in love with him too) cannot really love at all. On the one side, there is Tessa, one of the many children, ‘a circus’, of Albert Sanger, a

brilliant composer (another one) living in the Austrian Tirol. On the other is her cousin Florence, sent to Austria to retrieve the children after Sanger’s death and bring them back to school in England. Florence, beautiful, cultured, conventional, is temporarily seduced by the freespirited, musical sensuality of Sanger’s Circus and falls in love with Lewis to whom the young Tessa has given her heart.

Back in England, Lewis and Florence marry but it’s all disastrous.

The children run away from school (the 16-year-old eldest girl already living with her rich lover) and Lewis refuses to bow to Florence’s determination to steer his career.

When Tessa moves in to Florence’s self-consciously artistic house in Chiswick, she becomes, quite knowingly, the embodiment of all that Lewis most craves and Florence will never be able to give him. Mostly, he wants to be entirely tolerated; to live without being judged. Florence, with all her social polish, is no match for the subversive allure of the artless but ruthless Tessa whom she comes to hate bitterly. Although Florence, we know from the start, can never win this contest, she and Tessa are woven together in the novel in disturbing ways. Kennedy is very good at describing the power of mute non-acquiescence and there is a moment when Tessa simply presides over a tea table that is as disturbing as physical violence .

The novel is full of clubs and cliques and class, often very astutely

delineated. Sanger’s bohemian outlaws with their high musical standards and low sexual morals are set against artistic but respectable London with its smug consensus about what is ‘good’. But a kind of sentimental snobbery runs right through the novel. Sanger’s children cannot escape the birthright of their mothers’ backgrounds: they are doomed to be sensible, superior or vulgar, depending. The superiority of Tessa and her siblings, with their tangled hair and innate ‘grace’ is put down to their mother’s aristocratic background. But all Sanger’s women, no matter their background, end up in the same place in the end – domestic drudges in the service of his genius.

Surrounding characters are less well-drawn, such as Trigorin, the musical acolyte with his vulgar foreign suits and amusing adoration and Sanger’s wealthy German friend Jacob who seduces Tessa’s 16-yearold sister. Both are anti-semitic caricatures who are allowed to be generous with money and to have good taste in music but to be otherwise bereft of finer feelings.

It is Lewis Dodd, the object of all this raging passion, who is the mystery. Because we can’t hear his music, the reader must take Lewis’s genius on trust and the novel invites us therefore to cut him some moral slack. Lewis is a kind of monster: emotionally shallow, callous and self-serving – yet he has something, there is a truthfulness to him: we feel the agony of him being fettered by Florence’s ambitions. No mention is made in The Constant Nymph of the First World War but the collective grief and trauma of that period must have had an effect on Kennedy in 1924. Lewis Dodd, a charismatic man-child of the Jazz age is all men – son, lover, brother and friend – to her powerful, submissive women. He and his talent must be nurtured and protected – in the end, he must even be died for. Romantic bohemianism is a lot of hard work for women.

The Constant Nymph and other novels

by Margaret Kennedy are published by Vintage Classics; Kennedy’s The Feast and others are published by Faber The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 9

Biography & Memoir can be’, she said that ‘the weakest parts of the book, by far, are Hunter’s political analysis and considerations’.

Josh Glancy in the Sunday Times was mesmerised by what he called ‘a sizzling mess of grief, addiction, self-justification and misdirection. It’s admirable – and also abominable...

While his father went off to build a career in the US Senate, Hunter and Beau built an almost impossibly close fraternal bond. The relationship between the brothers is the one undeniably beautiful thing in this book, which at its best is a love letter to a lost soulmate.’ But there is also ‘an important message buried in all this mayhem: the utter joylessness of addiction. The vodka is warm and unmixed, the fiends are nasty and vacuous, and the degradation of smoking cheddar popcorn debris in the hope it might be crack flakes is unforgettable.’

Portrait of Napoleon as First Consul: lover of grandiose schemes

NAPOLEON

A LIFE IN GARDENS AND SHADOWS

RUTH SCURR Chatto & Windus, 400pp, £30

‘Improbably glorious and exceptionally herbaceous,’ was Simon Schama’s pronouncement in the Financial Times. ‘Scurr has achieved something remarkable: a completely original book on a completely unoriginal subject.’ For David Crane in the Spectator there was ‘little in this book that suggests that Napoleon’s ideas about gardens or his tastes were original or interesting, and yet the man we see through these gardens – the lover of straight lines and grandiose schemes – is only too recognisably the same centralising, controlling micro-manager who set out to impose his will on Europe and his civil code on France’. Crane praised the book’s ‘rich details, fresh perspectives... [and] a different cast of characters’.

In his review for the Times, Paul Lay wrote that Scurr ‘brings shades of subtlety and nuance to a life well known... She can write, beautifully; and she casts a cold eye on proceedings, unfazed by previous adoration or condemnation of her subject... Napoleon’s horticultural ambitions on Saint Helena mirrored those of his previous military campaigns, albeit on a much smaller 10 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

scale. His workers complained of tiredness, but they were unrelenting in their efforts to please him as they created a world from unsympathetic soil, a shady idyll for a man who once bestrode Europe.’ Scurr’s book, wrote Caroline Moorehead in the Literary Review, is ‘history at its most enjoyable, a discursive ramble along its edges, away from matters of power and into its byways’. It is ‘a delight to read’ and ‘must have been an immense pleasure to research’.

BEAUTIFUL THINGS A MEMOIR

HUNTER BIDEN Simon & Schuster, 255pp, £20

Together with his late brother Beau, President Biden’s other son Hunter was a toddler when he survived the car accident in which their mother and sister were killed. His memoir is ‘both an easy book to read – I finished it in less than a day – and a challenging one’, wrote Emily Tamkin in her New Statesman review, ‘because to read it is to listen to a man recount a journey into despair: the end of a marriage, a return to alcoholism, crack addiction and an attempt to push away the people who love him’. While she found it ‘moving in its reflections on pain and grief’ and ‘at its best when the author reflects on addiction – how powerful and merciless and all-consuming it

THE CHURCHILL GIRLS THE STORY OF WINSTON’S DAUGHTERS

RACHEL TRETHEWEY The History Press, 320pp, £20

‘It is hard to imagine a worse fate for a child than to be born to such parents as the Churchills, not because they were cruel, but because they were giants who dwelt among giants,’ Max Hastings observed in the Sunday Times. ‘Extreme fame is a kiss of death, which afflicted too many of those around the Greatest Englishman.’

‘In the role of parent as guide and protector, Churchill was far better in terms of his country than he was with his own offspring,’ Simon Heffer noted in the Sunday Telegraph. The

Winston Churchill saluting his daughter Mary: a close bond

Biography & Memoir girls were not given equal status with Randolph. The adult lives of Diana and Sarah were marred by unhappy marriages, divorce and alcoholism.

‘Both had inherited Churchill’s depressive nature and Diana eventually took her own life.’ Only Mary, the youngest, had a close bond with her father.

‘Churchill could not but have the most enormous impact on his children,’ Heffer noted, ‘not so much by his presence, for he was often away, but by his reputation and the massive sense of dynastic expectation that was heaped upon them. The lack of attention from both Churchill and Clementine clearly took its toll, too, particularly on the eldest two daughters and Randolph, who was effectively killed if not by kindness, then by chronic over-indulgence.’

‘Rachel Trethewey’s book is old-fashioned in its Woman’s Own-like kindness,’ Hastings concluded. ‘She either does not know, or chooses to omit, many things about her subjects, including some nasty bits. But no account of such people as these can fail to grip. The message of the girls’ experience is that children should be thankful to have obscure parents.’

THE SECRET LIFE OF DOROTHY SOAMES A FOUNDLING’S STORY

JUSTINE COWAN Virago, 320pp, £20

When Thomas Coram established the Foundling Hospital in 1739 he had the best of intentions. To give the abandoned children of the poor vocational skills was a worthy aim, but surely he didn’t envisage the cruelty routinely meted out to these helpless children, as described in Dorothy Soames’s mid 20th-century memoir. Her ‘descriptions of whippings, beatings by a leather strap, of being shuttered alone for days in an airless cupboard without food, pushed into a swimming pool and held under the surface, are the most harrowing parts of this disturbing, heartrending, brave book,’ Juliet Nicolson wrote in the Spectator.

‘But that’s what happens when individuals are given power over the powerless without real accountability,’ Melanie McDonagh commented in the Evening Standard.

Dorothy, aged 12, the day after she was reclaimed

‘What happens to a child raised without love? This is the agonising question that the American lawyer Justine Cowan braces herself to address in a memoir that seeks to explain her relationship with Eileen [aka Dorothy Soames], her monster of a mother,’ Nicolson noted. ‘As a social history of the Foundling Hospital this is a fascinating read,’ Lucy Atkins opined in the Sunday Times, ‘but as a memoir of a catastrophic mother-daughter relationship it feels slightly — and oddly — reserved.’

‘I’m not sure the author comes out of it well,’ McDonagh decided. ‘She is a hotshot lawyer, but she was a callous daughter.’ Only after her mother’s death did she read the memoir and visit London to reach some understanding of her mother’s wretched background and the reasons for their fraught relationship. As one of her mother’s fellow foundlings pointed out with devastating clarity, ‘How would she have known how to be a mother?’

‘The result is a fascinating, moving book,’ Lucy Scholes concluded in the Telegraph.

Mark Hussey’s well-received life of Bell all reflected on why it had taken so long. ‘After all,’ wrote Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian, ‘he belongs to the innermost circle of Bloomsbury, being both married to Vanessa Stephen and, unusual in a culture that made a point of not worrying what others thought, addicted to public utterance. Indeed, for many years Bell was a fixture in the press, at opening nights and, later, on the Third Programme at the newly minted BBC. While his family and friends wrote, painted, danced and bedded their way into the 20th century, it was Bell’s job to explain to the world just what they were doing and why it mattered.’

Bell was a comfortably-off scion of middle-England, the son of a wealthy industrialist. In his Who’s Who entry he described himself as a ‘civilised loafer’. He was not much of a looker but he was a glorious conversationalist and his many lovers reported on his proficiency in bed.

Most reviewers passed swiftly over Bell’s Nazi sympathies but in the Spectator, Tom Williams put the boot in, listing the rude things said about him by other Bloomsberries. ‘The young Leonard Woolf, while writing a roman à clef, based a character on Bell: he tosses around his “fat, round little body and his little, round, fat mind”. Strachey, a gifted hyperbolist, described him at one point as a “corpse puffed up with worms and gases”.’

But in the Times, Laura Freeman thought Hussey’s biography captured him just right. ‘Like its subject, it is amusing, charming, stimulating, urbane. It is a bit on the plump side, but then so was Bell. As Hussey writes, “After the war: buttons burst, rolls of fat protruded from his collar.”

This book could be a roll or two slimmer, but it is a most sustaining read.’

HEAVY LIGHT

CLIVE BELL AND THE MAKING OF MODERNISM A BIOGRAPHY

A JOURNEY THROUGH MADNESS, MANIA AND HEALING

MARK HUSSEY

HORATIO CLARE

Bloomsbury, 592pp, £30

Chatto, 352pp, £16.99

Bloomsbury-group completists will rejoice that Clive Bell has a biography at last. As Frances Spalding put it in the Literary Review, ‘This one offers a missing piece in the familiar Bloomsbury jigsaw.’ Reviewers of

Two years ago the memoirist and travel writer Horatio Clare suffered a manic episode on a family skiing holiday in the Dolomites which eventually resulted in him being taken to hospital in Yorkshire under The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 11

Biography & Memoir section 2 of the mental health act.

The delusions he suffered were extreme but not uncommon – Clare imagined himself a secret agent of MI6, on a mission to secure global peace. In hospital he quickly understood that ‘If you wish to be let out you have to admit that some part of you is ill. Therefore you have to take pills.’ But after leaving hospital he secretly stopped taking his medication and proceeded to revisit all the people and officials he had encountered during his mania as well as to interview a number of other experts in the field of mental health.

He finds a broken system, and concludes that we should look less to drugs and more on nature, exercise, mindfulness, art, creativity and horticulture and conversations with therapists.

Helen Brown in the Telegraph praised the ‘gentle wisdom and acute self-awareness’ of the memoir.

Sheena Joughin in the Times Literary Supplement described it as a ‘remarkable charting of a risky journey’. But Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman was disturbed by the way the second half of the book – ‘a polemic that pharmaceuticals are not the answer’ – was ‘so redolent of his account of his own mania. Flushing the drugs will be a benefit to all.

Governments are lazy or corrupt. He is the messianic undercover agent, exposing Big Pharma…There’s no magic bullet, except my magic bullet.’

THE BOY

STIRLING MOSS: A LIFE IN 60 LAPS

RICHARD WILLIAMS Simon & Schuster, 306 pp, £20

Stirling Moss lived life in the fast lane at a time when most Britons, weary from two world wars, were happy to chug along in second gear. Describing himself as a racer, not a driver, he relished the prospect of going ‘flat out through a bend that has a stone wall on one side and a precipice on the other’, or driving at an average speed of 97.95 mph for more than ten hours, which he did when winning the Mille Miglia. So arguably his greatest achievement was dying in his own bed at the age of 90.

Thrice married, Moss in his pomp was said to change his girlfriends as often as he changed gear. Inevitably his exploits, both on the track and in 12 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

Stirling Moss with his VW5

the bedroom, inspired adolescent boys, among them Richard Williams, who at the age of ten began to keep a scrap book devoted to Moss. Sixtyfour years later this pacey and affectionate tribute is the result.

According to the Times’s Matt Dickinson, Williams has written a book ‘that is rather more than a biography. Call it an appreciation of what makes a sporting hero… He argues that Moss’s knighthood in 2000 was as much for services to a generation of boys like him as his multiple accomplishments at high speed.’

In the Sunday Times, Justin Marozzi says a ‘fleeting chapter on the four-wheel drift, the almost balletic, physics-defying cornering so spectacularly mastered by Moss and Fangio, elevates driving to the art form that Moss claimed at its very best it could be’.

IN THE THICK OF IT

THE PRIVATE DIARIES OF A MINISTER

ALAN DUNCAN Wm Collins, 512pp, £25

‘A desperate craving for attention is hardly uncommon among politicians,’ wrote Andrew Rawnsley in the

Alan Duncan: ‘rollicking memoirs’

Observer, ‘but rarely is the neediness so naked as in this case. The serialisation in the Daily Mail, an outlet chosen despite describing it as the Daily Hate, emphasised the look-at-me vitriol that he unleashes upon other Tories. There is certainly an acid rain of it... As a Remainer, it is the Brexiters who most excite his venom gland.’ Rawnsley compares Duncan to those great diarists who ‘combine access to the centre of power with an engaging prose style and a keen eye for human frailties, including their own’, but concludes that ‘while [Alan] Clark and [Chris] Mullin had the self-awareness to find rueful entertainment in their junior positions in the pecking order, Duncan is too trapped in his resentment that he was never one of the stars himself.’

Letts described Duncan as ‘a frisky little pet, sharpfanged, liable to nip’ For Max Hastings, writing in the Sunday Times, ‘a roll call of ruderies – John Bercow as “Speaker Hobbit” – does not add up to a case for publication’. An MP for 27 years and the first openly gay MP, Duncan was a minister for most of the period from 2010 to 2019. ‘Duncan was a minorleague politician but a force for good sense. This makes me regret publication of these unreflective diaries, which diminish him. I disagree with few of the opinions that he expresses but the language and sentiments are cheaper than Britain’s plight deserves. A tragedian was instead needed, to compose a eulogy for civilised governance.’

Parliamentary sketch-writer Quentin Letts, in the Times, described Duncan as ‘a frisky little pet, sharpfanged, liable to nip. This is ideal in a diarist. Insults fly like shot at a pheasant shoot. Actually, make that bullets from a machinegun.’ But what makes these ‘rollicking memoirs’ so valuable is the period they cover, from 2016 to 2020. ‘Having chosen Remain, Duncan became an increasingly demonic anti-Brexiteer.

It is this transformation, along with his diplomatic access, that makes the diaries more than merely bracingly

Biography & Memoir readable. They serve the historical function of describing the vortex of vehemence that infected our elite from mid-2016.’

THE BEAUTY OF LIVING TWICE SHARON STONE Allen & Unwin, 244pp, £18.99

reflective in the Washington Times: ‘While it contains some startling personal revelations, equally affecting is Stone’s warmth and grace, qualities that, by the end, feel quite miraculous.

“I have learned to forgive the unforgivable,” she writes. “My hope is that as I share my journey, you too will learn to do the same.”’ It seems the second life enabled Stone to make peace with her first.

WHAT DOES JEREMY THINK?

JEREMY HEYWOOD AND THE MAKING OF MODERN BRITAIN

SUZANNE HEYWOOD William Collins, 556pp, £25

MICHAEL MULLER

Sharon Stone: unpredictable energy

Sharon Stone rocketed to superstardom at the age of 32 when she played the ‘leg-crossing, underwear-shunning serial killer’ in the 1992 film Basic Instinct. For Victoria Segal in the Times, The Beauty of Living Twice, is about survival; Stone’s tough childhood in Pennsylvania, a young victim of sexual abuse, the mad, bad attitudes of Hollywood, and – her second chance to be alive – when in 2001, she recovered from a terrifying neardeath stroke.

‘Her writing zigs and zags with an unpredictable energy,’ said Segal. ‘It can be electrifying, especially when she’s describing her early life or her illness; at other times, a drizzle of Hollywood spirituality and cosmic learning dims the brightness.’ Lynn Barber in the Telegraph agreed, but ‘there are enough great yarns and sardonic jokes in the rest of the book to make up for the woo-woo “inspirational” babble at the end.’

Barber described Stone as ‘a fighter, a brawler, from kitchen-sink Irish hillbilly stock’. Before you have got to know Stone’s combative character, ‘you think possibly she’s mad, but by the end, you’ll want to cheer’.

Charles Arrowsmith was more 14 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

Jeremy Heywood, the former Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, who in 2018 died from lung cancer aged only 56, was the very model of a modern mandarin: a bureaucrat who never shirked a challenge, yet whom very few people outside Whitehall had ever heard of until they read his obituaries. ‘I try my best to stay invisible,’ he admitted, something that became increasingly difficult as he rapidly rose through the ranks and became known as a problem solver – hence the title of this moving portrait by his widow, Suzanne.

In the Sunday Times, Tim Shipman noted that Heywood was ‘present for most of the key moments in British politics over the past 30 years: Black Wednesday, Iraq war, the economic crash, the formation of the 2010 coalition and, of course, the EU referendum’ – which he correctly predicted would open ‘a Pandora’s box’. When that happened, said Shipman, ‘it is hard not to conclude that Heywood’s imagination and intelligence were sorely missed’. The Financial Times’s Bronwen Maddox concurred: ‘I have lost track of the times people have said, “that wouldn’t have happened with Jeremy there.’’’

Jonathan Portes in the Guardian said ‘the real challenge Suzanne sets herself here is to convey to those who didn’t know him what made Heywood so unusual – not least his empathy, both personal and political. On a personal level it made him charming and attractive. And when it came to policy, it gave him an unparalleled ability to convince people that they should do what he wanted them to do.’

THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH ALISON BECHDEL Cape, 240pp, £16.99

Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist whose long running cartoon strip Dykes to Watch Out For popularised the Bechdel test, which asks of a work of fiction whether it features two women talking alone about something other than a man.

She is also the author of two darkly witty graphic memoirs about her parents – Fun Home (2006) and Are You my Mother? (2012) The Secret to Superhuman Strength focuses on Bechdel’s life-long preoccupation with keeping fit. The memoir doubles as a history of exercise and is peppered in typical Bechdel fashion with literary references – Wordsworth and Coleridge, Margaret Fuller and Adrienne Rich all get a look in. (Gloria Steinem described Fun Home as being ‘sort of like a comic book by

Alison Bechdel: ‘likeable protagonist’

Virginia Woolf’.) Lucy Knight in the Sunday Times enjoyed the decadeper-chapter journey through various fads before an ‘inevitably trite’ ending which doesn’t jar because ‘Bechdel makes for such a likeable protagonist’.

James Parker in the Atlantic enjoyed Bechdel’s deft and witty depiction of her journey – physical, mystical and political – but regretted the closing note of ‘serenity and existential forgiveness… Selfishly, I’d prefer this utterly absorbing book to end in a welter of confusion and failed chin-ups.’

But in the Guardian Rachel Cooke found the book ‘quietly astonishing’ and revelled in the wisdom of her conclusion that ‘there is more to escaping the anxious moment, let alone the abyss, than spending an hour on a rowing machine’.

Biography Sex & Memoir CONFESSIONS OF THE FLESH MICHEL FOUCAULT Modern Classics, 416pp, £25

For most of the last four decades or so, the obscure philosopher Michel Foucault has been a name seldom mentioned outside academic social studies departments. Now, though, he’s all the rage – blamed by culturewarriors for a generation of young lefties no longer believing, apparently, that there’s any such thing as truth. Good timing, then, for the unfinished fourth volume of his giant project on The History of Sexuality to have been assembled from his notes by his executors.

Foucault himself never wanted it to be published, but as with Virgil and Kafka before him, he was ignored.

This volume is concerned with the early Christian Church Fathers’ approach to sex – and is, said David Sexton in the Times, ‘not so much a work of commentary as of citation, paraphrase and exposition, but it does illuminatingly present the primary sources of the morality that became codified in medieval Christianity’. But Sexton had glad news: ‘perhaps because it is a draft, the book is almost devoid of the high theorising and innovative vocabulary that entrances Foucault’s admirers’.

Stuart Jeffries in the Spectator was much intrigued by Foucault’s interest in the ‘extra anuses’ of hyenas and in ‘gender-bending hares’. Nevertheless he felt that ‘Foucault’s posthumously published book about sexual norms in early Christendom takes on poignant resonance now given claims earlier this year by a fellow French professor that its author was a paedophile rapist who had sex with Arab children while living in Tunisia in the late 1960s.’

WOMEN ON TOP OF THE WORLD

WHAT WOMEN THINK ABOUT WHEN THEY’RE HAVING SEX

LUCY-ANNE HOLMES Quercus, 224pp, £20

Freud famously struggled to answer the question: what do women want?

In this book Lucy-Anne Holmes takes on part of the question by asking what women are thinking about

Tondo, c.470 BC, Tarquinia Museum

when they’re having sex... and the results should at least be concerning to their partners.

Holmes, who has campaigned against Page Three Girls and is training as a ‘sacred sexual priestess’, has interviewed 51 women about their experiences between the sheets and discovered that very few of them are having any fun at all. ‘Holmes has done an admirable job of including women of every sexual preference,’ reported Daisy Goodwin in the Sunday Times. ‘There are women who masturbate with 200 other people, women who cuckold over the internet, mothers who find it difficult to be a mother and a lover, tantric sex practitioners, and pensioners who use Tinder but worry about their knees on the kitchen floor.’ Liadan Hynes, in the Irish Independent, agreed: ‘The breadth of Holmes’s research, and her ability to encourage such honesty, is impressive.’

The remedy for all that unsatisfactory sex? Why, better communication.

CHAUVO-FEMINISM

ON SEX, POWER AND #METOO

SAM MILLS Indigo Press, 144pp, £7.99

‘This is what a feminist looks like.’ So read the T-shirts that the likes of David Cameron and Ed Miliband liked to wear in order to show their right-on credentials. But in her pungent polemic, Sam Mills warns that self-proclaimed male feminists are as often as not just as bad as the unreconstructed bloke: their virtue-signalling provides a convenient cover for some very unreconstructed misogyny in their personal relationships. These are what Mills christens ‘chauvofeminists’.

Mills has the scars to show it from

her relationship with a prominent academic she calls ‘R’. His predatory and controlling behaviour towards her confused her. He was always posting feminist content on social media. Didn’t that mean he was one of the nice guys?

Mika Ross-Southall in the Spectator called Mills ‘an engaging and astute companion, in particular on the effects of “gaslighting”. One of the warning signs you’re dealing with a gaslighter, she tells us, is the constant “nagging of whispers” in your head: “Am I being too sensitive?

Am I good enough for my partner?

Why am I always in the wrong?”’

Andrew Gallix, writing in the Irish Times, called the book ‘a coruscating disquisition on the mind games of Jekylls who Hyde in plain sight. Mills corrals a vast array of material, blending poignant memoir and meticulous research to great effect.’

TOMORROW SEX WILL BE GOOD AGAIN WOMEN AND DESIRE IN THE AGE OF CONSENT

KATHERINE ANGEL Verso, 160pp, £10.99

In the wake of the #metoo movement, there has been a growing sense that the key to safety from sexual violence and the route to sexual happiness is ‘consent culture’.

Women should know what they want, and not be afraid to ask for it. But what, Katherine Angel asks, if they don’t know what they want, or if it changes from moment to moment, or if they agree to sex because they feel they have to?

As Stephanie Merritt put it, reviewing Angel’s book in the Guardian: ‘To insist that women discover their sexual preferences independently and then communicate them clearly to prospective partners, or otherwise bear the blame if the experience turns out to be unsatisfactory or damaging, is just another, subtler version of the idea that it is a woman’s responsibility to avoid being raped.’

Mika Ross-Southall in the Spectator called Angel’s book ‘a well-researched exploration of what sex, sexism, desire and power mean now’, but didn’t finish it uplifted: ‘Angel finishes by causing confusion and disappointment rather than igniting progress.’

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 15

Robots THE NEW BREED

HOW TO THINK ABOUT ROBOTS

KATE DARLING Allen Lane, 336pp, £20

Kate Darling, author of a new book on future automation, is an expert in technology ethics at MIT. Moral panics about imminent robot takeovers are, she says, ‘faith-based, not science’. Darling argues that the chief problem with robots is the way we human beings think about them: as James Bloodworth put it in the Times: ‘we should stop thinking of robots as “quasi-humans”. Instead we should view them like domestic animals: as partners – albeit mechanical ones – rather than adversaries.’ Andrew Robinson in Nature enjoyed an ‘original, humane book’ and he quoted Darling: ‘Like robots, animals can sense, make their own decisions, act on the world, and learn.’ But they cannot replace human beings.

In his review of the book in the New Scientist, Vijaysree Venkatraman observed that the human habit of personifying robots ‘particularly ones with infantile features’ and then bonding with them was widespread: ‘Even in a military context, where robots are designed to be tools, soldiers have mourned the loss of bomb disposal robots.’ But he wondered if this tendency to anthropomorphise made us vulnerable to corporate Tekno the Robotic Puppy

exploitation. And Bloodworth thought Darling a little too optimistic about an automated future: ‘It won’t be us deciding which jobs get automated; it may not even be the governments we elect. Instead it will be people such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.’

KLARA AND THE SUN KAZUO ISHIGURO Faber, 320pp, £20

FUTUREPROOF

9 RULES FOR HUMANS IN THE AGE OF AUTOMATION

KEVON ROOSE John Murray, 256pp, £12.99

Kevin Roose, technology columnist on the New York Times, thinks we should prepare to be put out of work by robots. We can’t turn back the tide of automation – we need to develop those skills which robots will never be able to perform better than us. In the Times, Tom Knowles noted that the book came out of a dinner party where, ‘amid plates of foie gras, beef tenderloin and glasses of champagne’, the guests wondered if there was anything that humans can do that cannot be eventually surpassed by AI. Not much was the conclusion.

Roose set out his stall in an interview in New York Magazine: ‘I think we’ve been training people for the future entirely wrong. We’ve been teaching them to become more machinelike — to major in STEM, to become super-efficient, to optimise and life hack their way to success.’

Roose is not a dystopian, he says, but he’s calling for jobs that aren’t about making things but about making people ‘feel’ things – ‘things that bring about human connection’.

Mike Jakeman on the Strategy and Business website liked the premise but warned that robots were still in their technical infancy: they could design clothes, for example, but no technician has been able to replicate the actions of the human hand sufficiently for a robot to stack a shelf. And he pointed out that the self-checkouts in supermarkets were still so inadequate to the job that a human still had to be on standby to help out.

Kazuo Ishiguro: an imagined society

Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel returns to the authoritarian and hierarchical dystopias of earlier novels such as Never Let Me Go – in which the narrator is a clone created for organ-harvesting. Klara is a robot, or ‘Artificial Friend’, sold to be a child’s companion in a future in which there are no schools and the children of the elite are educated at home. It is through Klara’s eyes that this world is explained to the reader. As James Purdon put it in the Literary Review: ‘Klara is our window onto an imagined society in which artificial intelligence, whether in the form of genetic enhancement or digital programming, is the new normal.’

But being solar-charged, Klara is dependent on sunlight, referring to the Sun as a beneficent deity. Not needing food and drink, she hungers and thirsts for the sun. Judith Shulevitz in Atlantic found this aspect of the novel intriguing: ‘Ishiguro has anointed her, a high-tech consumer product, the improbable priestess of something very like an ancient nature cult. Gifted with a rare capacity for reverence, she tries always to remember to thank the Sun for sustaining her. Her faith in him is total.’

For Jon Day in the Financial Times, it is Klara’s view of the world she inhabits with her child ‘owner’ Josie which reveals it so devastatingly to us. ‘It’s an effective way of generating a sense of temporary uncertainty over what’s being described, an uncertainty that, in this case, matches Klara’s own, deeper uncertainty about the nature of the world she inhabits. You could call this naivete, but really it’s innocence, and it is innocence that forms Ishiguro’s major subject, explored in novels at once familiar and strange, which only gradually display their true and devastating significance.’

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 17

Music ever said about himself turns out to be true… But there is no link between virtue and talent. Dylan had an amazing capacity for absorbing influences, and incorporating them into his own style, all the time driven by ruthless self-belief.’

Brown remained unimpressed with Heylin, though, of whom he said: ‘He never uses one word when he has 20 to spare.’

Hodgkinson had a similar view: ‘Everything [Heylin] has found is put on display rather than buried into the story. It is the opposite approach to Dylan, who hid the truth to let the magic shine.’

ARTHUR SULLIVAN

A LIFE OF DIVINE EMOLLIENT

IAN BRADLEY OUP, 240pp, £30

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF BOB DYLAN VOL 1: 1941-1966 A RESTLESS HUNGRY FEELING

CLINTON HEYLIN Bodley Head, 528pp, £30

Just one of many publications tied to Dylan’s recent 80th birthday, this one garnered the most attention. ‘Heylin’s 13th book on Dylan,’ said Will Hodgkinson in the Times, is an ‘attempt to go further than any Dylanologist has gone before... an archaeological approach to digging up the facts beneath the legend’.

Heylin has always been good on Dylan’s mastery of ‘the art of covering his tracks’, wrote Andrew Motion in the Spectator. Dylan was ‘constantly asking himself “Who am I?” – and deciding that the best way to be himself was to be any number of people squeezed together. Hence the mixture of rock and roll and folk music, with the Beat Poets, and with the art of saying one thing and meaning another. The point is not to make Dylan seem devious; it’s to prove that his gift has always depended on the amazingly deft magpie-assimilation of new ideas.

He’s at once highly original and deeply in hock to the past.’

‘How odd,’ observed Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday, ‘that a man long regarded as the greatest truth-teller of his generation should emerge from these pages as quite such a fibber. Virtually nothing he has 18 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

Arthur Sullivan ‘was the musical half of the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership that created ten of the world’s most durable comic operas’, said Richard Morrison in the Times.

‘Those seemingly effortless melodic gifts made him not just one of the richest men in Victorian England but also a figure of scorn for snobbish music critics.’

As author Ian Bradley himself explained on the Oxford University Press Blog those crowd-pleasing operettas ‘are not what he wanted to be remembered for. In a newspaper interview during a visit to the United States in 1885, he said: “My sacred music is that on which I base my reputation as a composer. These works are the offspring of my liveliest fancy, the children of my greatest strength, the products of my most earnest thought and most incessant toil.” ’ ‘Sullivan composed a huge amount of serious, sacred music,’ said Morrison, ‘60 hymn tunes (including the one that was probably played as the Titanic sank), dozens of anthems, oratorios and the tear-jerking The Lost Chord, written as his brother lay dying.’ But Sullivan was certainly not saintly or monkish – taking great delight in his amorous adventures with women. ‘American socialite Fanny Ronalds [was] his mistress for 25 years. The fact that she was already married to someone else was probably part of her attraction, but the two clearly had a deep emotional attachment and a lot of stonking sex

– which Sullivan recorded in his diary by using different codes for different positions,’ explained Morrison. ‘Bradley, a Church of Scotland minister, draws a discreet veil over that.’

BEESWING

FAIRPORT, FOLK ROCK AND FINDING MY VOICE 1967-1975

RICHARD THOMPSON Faber, 272pp, £20

Richard Williams in the Guardian was appreciative of the renowned guitarist’s autobiographical modesty: ‘“I think we write songs for pleasure,” Thompson notes, “but also to understand ourselves and to decode life.” The same impulse seems to have guided this quiet joy of a memoir, in which honesty and humour are burnished rather than dulled by a certain restraint.’

In the New York Times Paul Elie concurred: ‘Because the sound Thompson created with Fairport Convention was rooted in centuriesold songs, he isn’t captive to 1960s clichés; and because British electric folk is off the classic-rock grid – as he ruefully observes, “The niche remained a niche” – the book’s period accent makes it feel fresh and exploratory.’

‘Throughout Thompson comes across as an innocent, an open-toed sandals-wearing geography teacher type lost in the rock’n’roll circus,’ said Will Hodgkinson in the Times. ‘He also has an Englishman’s innate understanding that things will invariably go wrong.’

And there is real tragedy in the Fairport story. Hodgkinson explained: ‘After a gig in Birmingham [in 1969] they were driving back to London at dawn when their roadie fell asleep at the wheel of the van. Thompson’s description of the crash that killed his girlfriend, Jeannie Franklyn, and 19-year-old drummer Martin Lamble gives the book its most powerful moment.’ There are lighter moments too. Williams enjoyed Thompson’s ‘fond and precise recall of such details as witnessing “the arrival of a new culture” at the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace, where he sees John Lennon “wandering around, looking every inch an impersonation of himself, with his moustache, NHS spectacles and Afghan jacket”.’

Screenwriting MICHAEL BARBER on how writers struggled to have their say in Hollywood Writers, like cats, are resistant to herding, hence how fraught their relationship with the film industry has often been. The arrival of talkies put them in the frame, but also under the yoke.

Coarse-grained movie moguls like Jack Warner, who boasted of owning a ‘Toujours Lautrec’, called screenwriters ‘schmucks with Underwoods’ and made them clock in and out every day like factory hands and work in teams of a dozen or more. For Warner and Co, words were a necessary evil. What really mattered was who spoke them – the Stars.

Writers were well paid for their servitude. In 1931 PG Wodehouse spent a year in Hollywood earning $2,000 a week. Very little of what he wrote reached the screen. The same was true of American writers like William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom went to Hollywood in order to buy time to write books. But Fitzgerald ‘had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best-selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures’.

A generation later Gore Vidal, for whom the cinema had always been ‘a womb with a view’, acknowledged the 20th-century primacy of film over the novel, but doubted whether such a collective activity really qualified as art. He knew whereof he spoke, having served his time at MGM in the 1950s, where his credits included Ben-Hur. In one of his essays Vidal introduced a droll figure called The Wise Hack, an unrepentant studio lackey who proclaimed that ‘Shit has its own integrity’. Tongue in cheek, Vidal insisted this was the best line ever said about art.

Arguably the best line ever said about movie making is ‘Nobody knows anything’, the opening sentence of Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. ‘Nobody in pictures,’ he continues, ‘knows for certain what’s going to work.’ How about a tragedy with a happy ending? Sadly, only the Resurrection fits that bill.

Christopher Isherwood, who spent many years in Hollywood, had

This was the first feature-length film (1927) to have a synchronised recorded score and lip-synch singing and speech

no patience with writers who sniffed at screenwriting. ‘You think you’re too good for the movies? Don’t you believe it. The movies are too good for you. We don’t need any romantic 19th-century whores. We need technicians.’ Appropriately, the first line of Isherwood’s Good-Bye to Berlin, filmed as Cabaret, is ‘I am a camera’.

Writers had to learn the language of film, speak knowledgeably about dissolves, cuts, fades, zooms and so on. Frederic Raphael, who at the age of 34 won an Oscar for the screenplay of Darling – ‘Ned Sherrin said it was a very bad script.

That shows how good it was!’ – said screenwriting was for him, ‘a degenerate way of writing Greek iambics or Latin verses – which I had to do at school – only better paid. You fit the words as neatly as can be into an established form within which you have to be terse, witty, allusive, rhythmic and (key

Frederic Raphael said screenwriting was for him a degenerate way of writing Latin verses

element) varied.’ Raphael also admitted that he was ‘most at ease when speaking with many voices’.

No wonder he could command a fee of $250,000 per script.

Raphael turned the screenplay for Darling into a novel, but has never, I think, dramatised one of his own novels. John Fowles did this with The Magus, and shouldered much of the blame for what was generally agreed to be a disaster (Woody Allen, asked if he had any regrets, said he would do everything the same ‘with the exception of watching The Magus’). ‘If you want your book reproduced,’ Fowles told an interviewer, ‘go to television and ask for an eight-hour serial.’

Television blindsided the moguls, helping to destroy the old studio system and with it the assembly line on which writers were expected to toil. But independence brought its own problems. John Gregory Dunne, who with his wife Joan Didion formed a very successful screenwriting team, wrote of the ‘splenetic rage’ he invariably suffered when negotiating a contract. Disney studios, known locally as Mouschwitz or Duckau, were particularly tough to deal with.

And on set, writers were still well below the salt. Simon Raven, who like Raphael was in the Classical Sixth at Charterhouse, recalled how, having been flown out to Switzerland ‘at huge expense’ to doctor the dialogue of a Bond film, he was invited to sit at the director’s table, ‘a great privilege’. There, while the director was absent, he was joined by a starlet, who began to scratch the inside of his thigh. ‘Will you write some lines for me?’ she purred. ‘Gladly’, said Raven. ‘But I don’t think the director will want them.’ Then the director reappeared, and assumed Raven had invited the girl to join him, a very serious breach of protocol.

The Wise Hack had no illusions about a writer’s place. Rewind 40 years to the era of Polish jokes. ‘This Polish film star arrives in Hollywood. Wants to make a good first impression. So what does she do? She fucks the writer!’ Exit cackling.

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 19

Current affairs

Eliot Higgins and Alina Polyakova, 2015

WE ARE BELLINGCAT

AN INTELLIGENCE AGENCY FOR THE PEOPLE

ELIOT HIGGINS Bloomsbury, 272pp, £20

Bellingcat is an investigative journalism website founded by Eliot Higgins, who ten years ago was a college dropout who became obsessed with the Arab Spring and the discovery that by searching online ‘you could find facts that neither the press nor the experts knew yet’.

During the Libyan war he posted a rebel soldiers’ video from YouTube under the Guardian’s live blog which contradicted the regime’s claim of controlling a certain town. A reader challenged the information and he proceeded to draw a map of the streets that the rebels were walking and found it matched a Google map of the same area. ‘Sat in my office in Middle England… I had clarified the front line of a war zone thousands of miles away.’ He has gone on to piece together evidence of gas attacks in Syria, the shooting down over Ukraine of MH17 by separatists using a Russian-supplied missile, and the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal.

Harry de Quetteville in the Telegraph described Higgins as ‘a peculiarly contemporary amalgam of activist and nerd, human rights investigator and journalist’. Hugo Rifkind in the Times found the book dense in parts but with ‘enough little detective tricks revealed to keep you hooked’. He was most interested in passages in which ‘Higgins wrestles,

20 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

BEYOND ORDER

12 MORE RULES FOR LIFE JORDAN B PETERSON Allen Lane, 402pp £25

More rules from Jordan Peterson, the charismatic Canadian professor and YouTube star who divides opinion like almost no one else on earth. Peterson has had an annus horribilis: his wife was diagnosed with cancer and he himself had to go to Russia to cure a dependency on anti-depressants that brought him near death.

Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian summed up Peterson as a ‘ kind of personal trainer for the soul. He is stern, sincere, intolerant of fools, sometimes hectoring, fond of communicating harsh truths by means of Bible stories, ancient mythology, the works of JK Rowling and Tolkien, and lengthy flights of Jungian-tinged abstraction and assorted archetypes.’ In the Observer, Andrew Anthony, though he balked at Peterson’s ‘messianic passion’, conceded that his ‘radical traditionalism was seen as a bracing corrective to the notion that there was no objective truth, only a matrix of prejudicial power relations’.

Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times ‘came to him cold’ and wondered what the fuss was about.

‘He appears serious-minded, clever

and knows his Freud and his Wordsworth. He likes family values.

He believes in hard work and discipline. And he’s very religious.

Almost every path, no matter how trivially it starts, leads him to the Bible, or thereabouts.’

Kellaway saw Peterson as more a preacher than a writer, as did Philip Hensher in the Spectator who struggled with the turgid prose, the brimstone sermons and ‘Savanarolalike jeremiads about things going to the dogs’.

FREE SPEECH AND WHY IT MATTERS ANDREW DOYLE Constable, 134pp, £9.99

Andrew Doyle’s alter-ego is Titania McGraph, ‘who regularly publishes a satirical guide to the latest lunacy in the world of identity politics,’ Noel Yaxley wrote in Reaction. But now he ‘has put aside the jokes and offered up a very sensible (and needed) new book’.

‘Free speech is a fundamental civil liberty — it contributes to the advancement in knowledge and challenges the excessive power of the state,’ Yaxley stated, ‘it must be defended and supported at all costs.’

Simon Evans in the Critic wrote that ‘One might have thought this issue had been settled long ago in this country, in liberty’s favour. But no, it seems we need to sharpen our tools once again, and Doyle’s new book is an excellent place to start.’

Unfortunately, he continued, ‘It is a

Free speech: Speakers’ Corner, London

HEINZ-JOSEF LÜCKING

‘I had clarified the front line of a war zone thousands of miles away’

thoughtfully, with the power he has’.

For in contrast to other transparency pioneers Higgins is not a nihilist – in 2017 he and a colleague realised that their network could probably identify everybody present at the white supremacist rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, but they decided to stick to those who were photographed committing crimes.

David Patrikarakos in the Literary Review saw the importance of Bellingcat in direct proportion to public’s loss of faith in public institutions since Saddam Hussein was found not to have any WMD in 2003. ‘Counterfactual forces are now embedded in public life. Political leaders seek to cast doubt on everything, while Higgins and his colleagues continue to insist on evidence. “Click the links and check our conclusions for yourself,” he writes. That is the Bellingcat method, and now anyone can do it – without ever having to leave their kitchen table.’

Current affairs beautifully balanced and comprehensive overview that will of course be read by no one who needs to hear it.’

‘The book should have been longer to give Doyle space to fully develop his points … it therefore leaves a lot to be desired,’ Bucky’s Book Reviews decided, while agreeing with its arguments.

The ‘UK has gone crazy for hate-speech laws’, Lionel Shriver observed in the Times, ‘hatred is in the eye of the beholder … you can accuse anyone of using hate speech and, voilà, it’s hate speech.’ The police recorded 120,000 ‘non-crime hate incidents’ between 2014 and 2019. ‘Is it any wonder that the adjective “Orwellian” is so worn out?’ she despaired.

real evidence, he wrote, that the development of fully automated sex dolls had made any meaningful progress. And he took issue with the book’s general doominess: ‘To me, lab-grown meat represents an optimistic view: that we can still have things we like (meat) at hugely reduced costs (of animal suffering and environmental damage) seems to me a positive. But Kleeman thinks giving people what they want is harmful.

Instead, she says, we should try to change our attitudes so that we don’t want those things.’

SEX, ROBOTS AND VEGAN MEAT

Faber & Faber, 304pp, £14.99

ADVENTURES ON THE FRONTIER OF BIRTH, FOOD, SEX & DEATH

JENNY KLEEMAN Picador, 368pp, £16.99

DAVID BADDIEL TLS, 123pp, £9.99

CONFLICTED

WHY ARGUMENTS ARE TEARING US APART AND HOW THEY CAN BRING US TOGETHER

IAN LESLIE

Conflict is what makes readers keep turning the pages of a thriller. But can it also be productive in real life? Yes, says New Statesman columnist Ian Leslie, but only if we go about it constructively, which does not mean abusing total strangers on social media. Aggression, he says, is a way of asserting status, often by those whose claim to status is delusory. As part of his research, Leslie talked to people who have ‘conflict-ridden conversations’ for a living, like hostage negotiators, addiction therapists, and divorce mediators. He explains how they get something valuable from the toughest, most antagonistic conversations.

Would that the rest of us could learn from them, said James Marriott in the Times. But thanks to the ‘moronic inferno’ of the internet, this is a pipe dream. Instead of bringing us together, the internet is tearing us apart. ‘Networked at vast scale, humans tend towards fury – towards mob justice, conspiracy theories, political polarisation, public shaming, trolling and shitposting.’ Cui bono?

Silicon Valley. Because the more people post, the more ads they read.

The Financial Times’s John Gapper was more optimistic.

Conflicted, he wrote, is ‘a fascinating rumination’ on what Leslie calls ‘the rules of productive argument’, which boil down to ‘the rules of every Pixar movie – get to know the other guy, show empathy, be curious.’ Easier said than done? Yes. But definitely worth the effort.

This is ‘one angry book’, wrote Dominic Lawson in the Times, while for Nick Cohen in the Spectator it was a ‘piercing essay that throws you back to the age of pamphlet wars’. Its premise, as described by Sarah Brown in the Fathom journal, is that ‘anti-Semitism is too often blanked out by just those progressives who would usually rush to support any beleaguered minority group’. The fact that Baddiel’s anger is ‘directed entirely at what he sees as his own political home’, i.e. the left, makes it ‘even spicier’, said Lawson.

‘Baddiel builds his argument by weaving in examples so skilfully all but the most bigoted reader has to accept he has a case,’ wrote Cohen, adding that there were many, such as a poem ‘bubbling with hate’ by Alice Walker, of which he had previously been unaware. One of Baddiel’s key points is that for the left the Jews can never be regarded as oppressed because of their association with money and power.

So for Jeremy Corbyn, wrote Marianne Levy in the i, ‘when anti-Semitism blurs into anticapitalism, “his first instinct is to protect the anti-capitalism and dismiss the anti-Semitism with irritation” ’. ‘For all that it is funny and furious, I hated reading this book,’ she went on. ‘It made me feel wretched, and it made me feel vindicated and I wish it had been longer’. Jeremy Havardi in the Jewish News thought it ‘an engaging polemic, providing a witty and intellectually nimble riposte to those with a blind spot about Jews’. We can only hope, he concluded, that ‘for its progressive readers, it very much does count’.

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 21

LAWRENCE BOGLE

Journalist Jenny Kleeman has voyaged to the weird outer-reaches of innovative technologies and has come back horrified. All these new inventions, the sexbots, do-it-yourself suicide kits and far-out reproductive technologies, she argues, are obscuring the real questions we should be asking about modern life.

As Ben Cooke put it in the Times: ‘Instead of giving lonely or violent men sex robots, we should be asking how they came to be so estranged from women; that instead of growing meat in a lab, we should be asking why we are eating ourselves and the planet to death; that instead of growing babies in artificial wombs, we should be asking why pregnancy need harm a woman’s career.’

In the Bookseller, Caroline Sanderson found it ‘eye-opening’: ‘The sceptical Kleeman makes a witty and tenacious guide as she probes unsettling visions of our human future; interviewing a sex robot, eating a lab-grown chicken nugget, watching foetuses growing in plastic bags.’

But science writer Tom Chivers, reviewing the book in the Spectator found himself in vigorous disagreement with its over-dramatic conclusions. Kleeman produced no

JEWS DON’T COUNT

Miscellaneous in the New Statesman, Rowan Williams wondered if Bate’s subtitle ‘the beautiful works and damned lives’ came ‘dangerously near to trivialising the notion and does less than justice to the book itself. It seems to imply that the two writers are primarily examples of a common type: self-destructive aesthetes.’

But Cooke followed Bate’s instruction and went on YouTube to listen to Fitzgerald reading Ode to a Nightingale. ‘The voice is slow, almost drowsy: under the influence, not of liquor, but of something even stronger. Poetry.’

Maria Czaplicka studied the Evenks, most of whom had around 25 head of reindeer

UNDREAMED SHORES THE HIDDEN HEROINES OF BRITISH ANTHROPOLOGY

FRANCES LARSON Granta 352pp, £20

Between 1907 and 1918 nearly 30 women registered for the new diploma in anthropology at Oxford.

Undreamed Shores tells the story of five of these students, who all threw themselves into fieldwork in areas remote from foreign intrusion.

The Siberians joked that Maria Czaplicka and the other women on her team were suffragettski: banished to Siberia by the British government.

Katherine Routledge’s visit to Easter Island saw her intervening in the islanders’ revolt over indentured labour in Peru; Winifred Blackman’s key informant was killed during the Nile uprisings among the fellahin; Beatrice Blackwood, having sidestepped the protection of the colonial anthropologist, spent nine months with the Anga warriors in New Guinea.

Caroline Moore in the Spectator praised Undreamed Shores as a ‘fascinating book. Occasionally it seems a struggle to contain five such varied lives in one volume; but that frustration is precisely because Larson succeeds brilliantly in engaging our sympathy for these women who “dared to navigate the edges of society”.’

Lucy Scholes in the Telegraph acknowledged the expansiveness and meticulousness of Larson’s research but confessed that ‘reading this book felt like walking around a museum; watching the women’s lives as a series 22 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

of static dioramas preserved in glass vitrines rather than having them leap off the page’. Rana Mitter in the Literary Review noted ‘an air of melancholy’ about the women’s stories – one committed suicide, two ended their lives in mental hospitals.

But Larson had ‘convincingly vindicated their careers… with this tender and luminously written work’.

BRIGHT STAR, GREEN LIGHT

THE BEAUTIFUL WORKS AND DAMNED LIVES OF JOHN KEATS AND F SCOTT FITZGERALD

JONATHAN BATE Wm Collins, 415pp, £25

Jonathan Bate has squeezed the short, dazzling lives of John Keats and F Scott Fitzgerald into one volume: ‘Crikey, but this is daring’ was the Observer’s Rachel Cooke’s comment. ‘Keats was Fitzgerald’s guiding star’, wrote Laura Freeman in the Times. ‘He read Keats’s poems until he had them by heart, copied Keatsisms into his notebooks (“Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect”) and borrowed titles from Keats for his books (“tender is the night” is a line in Ode to a Nightingale). He must have read Ode on a Grecian Urn a hundred times.’

Bate said the book followed Plutarch whose biographies coupled Greek and Roman figures together to compare and contrast. Freeman wondered if Keats and Fitzgerald fitted together that neatly. ‘What Bate calls a “striking parallel” I call stretching it a bit,’ she reflected. And

STOP BLOODY BOSSING ME ABOUT

HOW WE NEED TO STOP BEING TOLD WHAT TO DO

QUENTIN LETTS Constable, 240pp, £16.99

Nagging is not new. Quentin Letts believes it arrived in this country with the Norman Conquest, but it has gathered fire power in recent times.

The real pandemic for him is the passive-aggressive finger-wagging of what Letts terms the ‘Bossocracy’, and in this book he takes aim and names the guilty men and women.

Julie Burchill in the Spectator appreciated his argument: ‘The beauty of this book is that it doesn’t huff and puff and threaten to dob in anyone who thinks differently.’

Roger Lewis, in the Times, applauded the energy of the book: ‘Underneath the jocularity of Letts’s style is a lot of real anger. We are no longer allowed to be naughty, eccentric individuals. We have to “comply, conform, surrender” our humanity.’ Andrew Roberts in the Telegraph went further; Letts is not only very funny, but also a ‘political philosopher whose message is needed now more than at any time in the past half-century’.

Andrew Brown, in the Church Times, reflecting specifically on Letts’s criticism of the role of the church in supporting the fingerwagging had little sympathy, ‘If an extremely well-paid sketch-writer … suffers under the tyranny of the Deep Woke State, it’s hard to imagine how hard life must be for the little people.’

Sneering at the book’s title he added, ‘…it sounds even better in an arrangement for an orchestra of tiny violins.’

Miscellaneous THE CRICHEL BOYS

SCENES FROM ENGLAND’S LAST LITERARY SALON

SIMON FENWICK Constable, 354pp, £25

Just after the war, three upper-class aesthetes set up home together in Long Crichel House, Dorset – a Georgian old rectory with no electricity. Eddie Sackville West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys were all gay and they knew everyone who was anyone in mid20th century British grand-bohemian literary circles. In the Mail, Kathryn Hughes enjoyed Simon Fenwick’s ‘gossipy but scholarly, funny-sad’ account of the ‘Crichel boys’ and their many famous guests.

It’s an elegy to a lost world. In the Spectator, Peter Parker observed that Crichel life coincided with the development of the National Trust where Knollys worked with his close friend James Lees-Milne. ‘Indeed, the preservation of old houses, a cause with which many of the leading characters were involved one way or another, is skilfully used as a running theme in a book that, with a fine balance between nostalgia and clear-sightedness, commemorates a privileged world long since vanished.’

DJ Taylor enjoyed the gossip but found the Crichel boys’ snobbishness and pedantry wearing. ‘There is no getting over the air of mustiness,’ he wrote in the Literary Review. ‘A faintly devitalising scent that drifts over these recitations of bygone domestic arrangements and love triangles.’ And in the Times, Laura Freeman couldn’t keep up with the dramatis personae. ‘I’m afraid that some of the boyfriends of boyfriends

in the book aren’t so much fringe, as fray. I found myself hooting, morose and owl-like: “Who? Who? Who?” ’

SEA STATE TABITHA LASLEY Fourth Estate, 240pp, £14.99

‘Sea State is contemporary writing at its finest,’ wrote Lucy Sweeney Byrne in the Irish Times. But what is it exactly? Journalism, memoir, non-fiction or even fiction? The facts are these, as detailed by Sweeney Byrne: ‘After four years’ worth of a novel-in-progress is stolen from her London flat, Tabitha Lasley leaves her magazine job and her boyfriend to travel to Aberdeen, ostensibly to write about the men who work the oil rigs in the North Sea.’ For Fiona Sturges, in the Guardian, ‘Sea State was planned as a portrait of riggers, but soon turned into something else’, as Lasley ‘plonks herself right in the middle of the story of other people’s lives’, partly by falling in love with the first (married) oil-rigger she meets.

‘One moment,’ wrote Sturges, ‘the author is reflecting on the grotesque failures that led to the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, which killed 167, and the next she is trying to take a photo of her breasts to send Caden on his third week offshore.’

‘Lasley infuriated me from the off,’ stormed Rose George in the Literary Review, ‘by saying that some of her characters are composites. In that case they are not true and neither is the story.’ Nevertheless, she was impressed by Lasley’s ‘bravery, bolstered by drink, in interviewing more than a hundred male oil workers simply by accosting them in bars, stations and on trains’. Sea State is a ‘hybrid’, concluded Sturges, a ‘confession that reads like a novel’. It is also a ‘startlingly original study of love, masculinity and the cost of a profession that few outside it can truly understand. The cost to Lasley herself is yet to be revealed.’

THE SHADOWY THIRD

LOVE, LETTERS AND ELIZABETH BOWEN

JULIA PARRY Duckworth, 386pp, £16.99

Eardley Knollys: a privileged world

When she met Humphry House in 1933, the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen was 34 years old.

Elizabeth Bowen: unusual marriage

She had lived with her husband Alan Cameron, a BBC producer, in Headington, Oxford since 1925. Their marriage was companionable but never consummated. Humphry House, later to become a distinguished scholar of Victorian literature, was ten years younger.

Although Chaplain of Wadham, he had undergone a recent crisis of faith and his prospects were uncertain. His affair with Elizabeth was conducted from 1933-1936 alongside his marriage to his wife Madeline. Their grand-daughter, Julia Parry, has used the correspondence she inherited between Elizabeth and Humphry to create a portrait of this unusual literary love triangle.

Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph called it ‘an essay of rare sensitivity and intelligent reflection … at its heart is a fascinating clash of complex characters’. But Lucy Lethbridge in the Literary Review reacted with distaste to ‘a push-mepull-you kind of relationship’. She focused on Bowen’s spitefulness towards Madeline, writing of ‘that little anxious blonde woman and those plain blond babies’. She considered Madeline’s own voice ‘vigorous, perceptive, witty and intelligent’ and wondered ‘if the preservation of these letters was her act of revenge for those years in which she suffered the mean-spirited disdain of her husband’s mistress’.

Lucy Atkins in the Times described Parry as ‘deliciously alert to the echoes and parallels that sometimes feel like ancestral instructions on how to approach the material’, while Patricia Craig in the Times Literary Supplement thought the letters would prove an ‘immense resource for Bowen scholars’.

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 23

Fiction meaning’ and where the ‘delicate precision of the language contains this watchful separation: every word, inevitably, has been carefully chosen.’ She concluded, ‘It is superb.’

Madeleine Thien, writing in the New York Times, shared Atkins’s analogy, ‘It’s not that the descriptions are clumsy; rather, language glides along the surface of things. The polished words sometimes seem to lose contact with living existence, providing instead a skilful description of a twodimensional world — a picture of a picture.’

Jhumpa Lahiri: magnetic writer

WHEREABOUTS JHUMPA LAHIRI Bloomsbury, 176pp, £14.99

Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize for her short stories in 2000. Twenty years later, having moved to Rome, she swapped her native language for Italian to write Dove mi trovo; ‘I am, in Italian, a tougher, freer writer,’ she said of herself. Lahiri translated her novel herself and gave it the more alienating title of Whereabouts. Its 46 short chapters describe a single woman’s life and create a mosaic of narrative.

‘I am, in Italian, a tougher, freer writer,’ Lahiri said of herself For Anthony Cummins in the Guardian, ‘part of the book’s peculiar magnetism lies in its clash of candour and coyness’. The observations ‘land like plot twists’.

He found Lahiri’s spare writing style ‘a mark of how the novel’s hypnotically surgical gleam can verge on bleached sterility’. Writing in the Times, Lucy Atkins agreed.

‘Perhaps this sounds outrageously dull? It isn’t. It is oddly compelling.

The narrator vibrates with unexpressed emotion, sealed inside her painstaking detachment. Her observations are minute, precise, poetic.’ For her, the concept of Lahiri’s novel was reminiscent of Matisse’s cut-outs where ‘white space, like silence, can have

EARLY MORNING RISER KATHERINE HEINY 4th Estate, 336pp, £14.99

Katherine Heiny is a fiftysomething American brought up in Michigan married to an Englishman. Her first novel, Standard Deviation, about a couple bringing up an autistic child, was widely praised as a comic masterpiece full of flawed relatable characters. Early Morning Riser has been hailed by her admirers as ‘possibly even better’. The story – of a schoolteacher and handyman making out, splitting up and getting back together – takes place over 17 years in Boyne City, Michigan. Jane loves Duncan but finds it difficult that he has slept with every woman in the county, and that he continues to be at the beck and call of his ex-wife. Duncan is that rare thing – a genuinely benign and kind-hearted commitment-phobe. But then Jane’s abrasive mother accidentally kills the mother of the mentally disabled Jimmy, and Jane and Duncan find a way of stepping up.

India Knight in the Sunday Times described it as ‘more funny than I know how to describe and, in places, profoundly sad… Quiet things become loud. You put the book down and feel glad to be alive.’ Janice Turner in the Times compared the author to Anne Tyler in her ‘evocation of small-town America, where you get your upper lip waxed by someone’s cousin and every supermarket cashier knows your business’, but suggested Heiny was ‘a more modern, bawdier, messier spirit. Her domesticity still has a libido.’ Hephzibah Anderson in the Guardian enjoyed the novel’s

‘deadpan charm, local focus and sharp truths’ and also compared Heiny to Tyler, ‘with added grunge’.

GREAT CIRCLE MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD Doubleday, 608pp, £16.99

This is a huge sweep of a novel – two novels in one, in fact – about two very different women, set a century apart, linked by a common theme of the commodification of women by men in power. If this sounds woke and worthy, none of its reviewers thought so. The first woman, wrote Lynn Steger Strong in the New York Times, is Marian, who at the age of 12 decides that ‘a pilot is all she will ever want to be’. Melissa Katsoulis in

Maggie Shipstead: convincing

the Times described how she ‘cuts off her hair, persuades the mechanics at a local airfield to teach her the workings of biplanes and she’s off’.

For Ron Charles in the Washington Post, ‘so convincingly does Shipstead stitch her fictional heroine into the daring flight paths of early aviators that you’ll be convinced you remember the tragic day her plane disappeared’ on her ultimate journey to circumnavigate the globe. Interspersed, according to Katsoulis, is a ‘whole other novel, set in present-day LA, a rollicking tale of sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ sushi rolls’, with, at its centre, film star Hadley, cast as Marian in an artsy biopic, an experience that will change her life.

For Steger Strong, ‘Great Circle starts high and maintains altitude,’

‘A glorious tribute to women who push the boundaries’ The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 25

Fiction SECOND PLACE

while for Katsoulis, it was a ‘glorious tribute to women who push the boundaries of their one, brief life to soar higher and faster than others’.

Ron Charles named it his ‘top recommendation for the summer’.

No doubt it will soon be flying off the shelves.

RACHEL CUSK Faber, 224pp, £14.99

KITCHENLY 434 ALAN WARNER White Rabbit, 357pp, £18.99

Alan Warner’s ninth novel certainly divided opinions. Set in 1979, in the Tudorbethan mansion of an ageing rock-star called Marko Morrell, it is narrated by Crofton Clark, the dogsbody ex-roadie who runs Marko’s household. Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman said that for the first time in 20 years reviewing books, he finished a novel and ‘my only thought was: well, I’m flummoxed’.

In the Times, James Walton thought Crofton ‘the piercing character study at the book’s heart’ while in the TLS, Molly Guinness wrote: ‘Early on, it looks as though Crofton might largely be a stately home bore, and he is a bit.’ For Katie Goh in The Skinny ‘it was a biting, relentless and subtle deconstruction of a particularly English sensibility and a particularly masculine delusion’. And Jude Cook in the Literary Review saw in Crofton ‘a clownish holy fool and an uptight, if loveable, bore’.

In the Sunday Times, Phil Baker was a fan: ‘Warner’s novel is a memorial to the rock star country house dream, an illusory Merrie England soon to be as bygone as the old-style phone number of the title.

Sliding from comedy to elegy to a final moment of redemption, this is a lovely, idiosyncratic book, canny and generous and full of life.’ But Jon Day in the Spectator couldn’t get on with Kitchenly 434 at all. He thought it ‘monumentally tedious’. In fact, ‘the overall effect is like being buttonholed by an aging roadie obsessed with Grand Designs’.

UNSETTLED GROUND CLAIRE FULLER Fig Tree, 304pp, £14.99

In the TLS, Kate McLoughlin noted that the novelist Claire Fuller’s speciality are ‘parental lies, absences 26 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

Claire Fuller: sensitive and intelligent

Fuller unpicks the complexity of the modern world and manipulation’. Fuller’s new novel opens on an elderly woman, Dot, who is dying in the remote cottage where she lives with her two middle-aged twin children Jeanie and Julius. When she dies, the twins are evicted from the cottage and cast out into a modern world about which they know nothing.

In the Guardian, Christobel Kent was full of praise. ‘With sensitivity and intelligence, Fuller unpicks the relentless complexity of the modern world, in which mobile phones are connected to bank accounts are connected to central heating systems, and the hopeless poignancy of our longing for simplicity in the shadow of that monolithic interdependence.’

In the Times, Melissa Katsoulis loved it. ‘To see Jeanie going from a strong, capable subsistence farmer with a gorgeous voice and a collection of tasty recipes in her head to the embarrassed, smelly woman in the town hall struggling to read a form about death certificates gets under your skin as it should. Her humiliation reminds us that the struggle of looking for work when you have no email address — of walking for miles in cheap shoes in the rain because you have no bus fare — is a reality for more native sons and daughters of Britain than we might imagine. This is their story, told with compassion and honesty by a novelist doing her strongest work yet.’

Second Place is narrated by a nameless writer, M, who invites a painter, L, to live in an annexe on her marshland property specially built for visiting artists. L turns up with a young heiress called Brett who has casual manners designed to enrage the wounded controlled and controlling M. So far so Cusk-ingeneral. Throw in an unnamed pandemic – travel has become difficult, an adult daughter and her garrulous boyfriend are mysteriously marooned with her mother and her mother’s strong silent second husband in the marshland property – and an explanatory endnote naming the novel’s debt to another book – and you have this Cusk in particular.

The other book is Lorenzo in Taos (1932), a memoir by Mabel Dodge Luhan, the rich patron of modernism who invited DH Lawrence to stay at her artists’ colony in New Mexico.

That visit ended badly but Mabel Dodge Luhan wrested something back from the encounter by writing about it.

‘As a tale of midlife malaise, Second Place glints with many of Cusk’s typically frosty pleasures,’ wrote Anthony Cummins in the Observer. But he judged the bid to recast Luhan’s memoir ‘excessive and undigested’. A pity, because ‘freed from its source, the story would have got along just fine by itself’.

Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times was less forgiving – ‘Cusk’s prose, always oddly fustian, starts to sound like a cut-price Victorian novelist. It feels like a strange rehashing of a DH Lawrence novel, with talk of wills and true origins and destroying one another.’ The critic is mystified, then comes the endnote.

‘Everything is accounted for — except the central, utterly baffling question.

Why did Rachel Cusk write this book?’

But Cusk has always divided readers. Sam Byers in the Guardian hailed the author as ‘our arch chronicler of the nullifying choice between suffocation and explosion’ and revelled in the narrator’s understanding of L’s power – ‘He drew me with the cruelty of his rightness closer to the truth.’

Nature FINDING THE MOTHER TREE ANNA SIMARD Allen Lane, 368pp, £20

Nightingale: chorus of approval

BIRDSONG IN A TIME OF SILENCE STEVEN LOVATT Particular Books, 160pp, £12.99

Among the unanticipated effects of last year’s daily walks in lockdown was the nation’s rediscovery of birdsong. As PD Smith, reviewing Steven Lovatt’s new book, put it in the Guardian: ‘The pandemic struck in the northern hemisphere just at the moment when birdsong was resuming after the bleak winter months. That “strangest spring” will be remembered not just for the new virus, but as the time when the nation became aware of birdsong. Silent streets and gardens were filled with “a rising choir of chirps, trills and warbles”. People shared recordings made on their phones of “the woozy fluting of blackbirds” and “the deep purring of wood pigeons”.’

Lovatt charts his own personal experience of listening to birds singing in the ordinary parks and gardens of his home town in South Wales – and the book is beautifully illustrated by Katie Marland. In the Daily Mail, Bel Mooney loved it: ‘Lovatt is no professional nature writer – he’s a down-to-earth bloke who looks and listens carefully and as a result sees his own relatively humble locality afresh every day.

Then he describes what he sees in exquisite prose that soars as high as his beloved birds.’ And in the Financial Times, Nicola Chester also found a call to learn from the strange events of the last year: ‘Let the remarkable spring of 2020 not become the swansong before nature itself fades into silence.’

Anna Simard is the original tree hugger. A Professor of Forestry in north America, she has spent her professional life studying the ways that trees communicate with each other, the ‘wood wide web’, a vast network of mycorrhizal fungi. And at the centre of these complex webs sit the old-growth matriarchs, the ‘mother trees’ who sustain the entire system. In the Financial Times, Rosie Boycott thrilled to her descriptions of a ‘vast, ancient and intricate society’ and of the mothers, ‘the hubs that feed this intricate system and support saplings and seedlings’. Simard has found that trees support each other in times of stress, drought, or disease.

They can “communicate” needs, and in return, send supplies.’

The Guardian’s Tiffany FrancisBaker loved how Simard described the excitement of her discoveries, her writing demonstrating ‘how storytelling can ignite something science alone cannot’. And in the New York Times, Jonathan Slaght thrilled to the book’s combination of the autobiographical and the observational. ‘Her argument is elegantly detailed here alongside a deeply personal memoir, with her story and that of the forest tightly interwoven. “We think that most important clues are large,” she writes when recalling the first seedling that sparked her curiosity, “but the world loves to remind us that they can be beautifully small.”’

FIELD WORK

WHAT LAND DOES TO PEOPLE & WHAT PEOPLE DO TO LAND

BELLA BATHURST Profile, 240pp, £16.99

To understand from the inside what farming life is really like, Bella Bathurst spent a year with Welsh hill farmers. Her record became the basis of a wider investigation into those who work the land in different ways.

Jamie Blackett of the Daily Telegraph was among many reviewers who were impressed by Bathurst’s fine and empathetic reportage: ‘It is anthropology not hagiography, a genuine attempt to get under the

fingernails of the people who work in land-based industries and to understand why they carry on doing what they do, usually for little financial reward and often in great discomfort and in the face of adversity.’

‘A highly researched and deeply thoughtful account’ In the Times, James Rebanks praised an unsentimental, ‘highlyresearched and deeply thoughtful’ account of the hard grind ‘of an old and fading farmer, Bert, as he fights to keep his farm going’. Bathurst retains an ‘empathy and kindness’ for Bert’s daily struggle. ‘She sees, and lets us see, the human cost of it,’ wrote Rebanks. And in the Guardian, Alex Preston applauded the book’s aim which he thought was to ‘insert nuance into our understanding of farming’ and hailed what he called (rather alarmingly) Bathurst’s ‘seemingly supernatural ability to get people to speak to her honestly and movingly’.

HOW TO LOVE ANIMALS

IN A HUMAN-SHAPED WORLD

HENRY MANCE Jonathan Cape, 400pp, £20

Henry Mance wonders why we humans are sentimental about some animals and ruthlessly indifferent to the suffering of other ones. He began this book as a vegetarian and ended it a vegan, appalled by the ‘mass-scale, thoughtless nature’, of modern livestock farming. In the Times, Ben Cooke, found the book ‘fascinating’ though Mance’s solutions were often surprising: ‘His first answer — stop eating meat and dairy — is obvious, but others are counterintuitive. For instance, he’s not that perturbed by hunting, and favours it in some circumstances, because the sale of hunters’ licences can provide hefty funding for national parks.’ And Caroline Sanderson in the Bookseller was also impressed by a ‘provocative, witty and sometimes brutal consideration of the inconsistencies in how we treat other species’, noting that animal-loving Mance’s conclusions ‘are not always as cuddly as you might think’.

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021 27

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Reprints HARRY MOUNT enthuses about Charmian Clift’s descriptions of the simple Greek life If Harold Pinter’s plays were about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, Charmian Clift’s memoirs are about fish rotting in the Greek island sun.

With her writer husband, George Johnston, and their three children, she decamped from London in 1954, first to Kalymnos and then to Hydra.

The Australian couple, previously successful journalists, were among the first post-war literati to colonise the islands. On Hydra, they coincided with Leonard Cohen and his muse, Marianne Ihlen, as in the elegiac song So Long, Marianne. It all looks so impossibly glamorous – not least because Charmian was a real looker: high cheekbones, plump lips and a tide of black hair spilling over the collar of her white linen shirts, collar turned up.

In these two bittersweet memoirs – Mermaid Singing (1956) about Kalymnos and Peel Me a Lotus (1959) about Hydra – she does indeed paint an enchanting picture of the simple Greek life she encountered – to begin with, at any rate.

Clift has a gifted eye for detail, combined with a line in poetic writing that never gets sick-making. Here she is on Mikailis’s tavern on Kalymnos: ‘It is in a brightly coloured alleyway close to the sea. When you turn down it, you can hear the waves soughing under the gratings beneath

Charmian Clift, 1941, by FS Grimes

your feet. Beneath its buckling ceiling of pasted-together sheets of paper, the tavern is like a huge, vaulted cave.’

The problem is that Charmian was rather too keen on the tavernas. As she confesses, she often found herself ‘two retsinas ahead’.

What’s more, once the couple got to Hydra in 1955, they were seriously short of money: ‘Our royalty statements have come in and we must accept the fact that we are caught.’

Wrinkled linen shirts are all very well as an artful indulgence. They’re not so appealing when necessarily worn over and over again through poverty. Clift’s clothes become ‘a variegated pattern of darns and

patches… held together by pins or bits of string’. The picture-postcard views of Hydra literally turn rotten, as she describes ‘the oozy, sweetish, briny smell of black sponges dying, of rotting shellfish, of stranded weed aswarm with flies’.

The couple may be in paradise but it is a confined island paradise. Soon the faces of the fellow literati and artist blow-ins become horribly familiar. Clift finds herself in the horrid position of watching Hydra ‘in the process of becoming chic’. Worst of all is the self-indulgent painter, Jacques – ‘How offensive, how artificial and silly his provocative, shuffling walk, his skintight pants, his jasmine flower and that damned earring.’

What Clift doesn’t reveal is that she had an affair with the real-life model for Jacques, painter Jean Claude Maurice – with literally fatal consequences.

When the couple returned to Australia, George Johnston wrote a novel, Clean Straw for Nothing (1969), detailing Clift’s affairs on Hydra. She took an overdose on the night before the book’s publication and died in Sydney, aged only 45.

Peel Me a Lotus and Mermaid Singing

by Charmian Clift are published by Muswell Press, at £8.99 each

Paperbacks At the age of 35 in 1934, First World War veteran Maurice Wilson attempted the first solo attempt to climb Mount Everest. In The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of Love, War and Everest (Penguin, 288pp, £10.99) Ed Caesar tells the story of how Wilson ‘hatched his crazy plan – to climb Everest alone, after flying himself there. The fact that he had no experience of flying, or of mountaineering, did nothing to deter him; he could learn,’ explained Sam Wollaston in the Guardian. ‘Wilson’s story is bonkers,’ continued Wollaston, ‘but also beautiful. The profile Caesar builds is compelling, colourful and warm – of a complex, contradictory man with admirable self-belief and a healthy disregard for class boundaries 30 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

and national borders.’ The book is a ‘hell of a ride’, confirmed John Self in the Times, ‘scrupulously researched’ and filled with ‘journalistic panache’.

And Dan Richards in the Literary Review praised Ed Caesar because ‘the sheer madness of Wilson’s life would surely have thrown off all but the most sure-footed biographer’.

House of Trelawney by Hannah Rothschild (Bloomsbury, 368pp, £8.99) is ‘a lavish saga about privileged people behaving badly… a light-hearted state-of-the-nation novel’, wrote Kate Saunders in the Times. The novel revolves around the ‘aristocratic and dysfunctional Trelawneys as they struggle to deal with the financial crash of 2008, their own bad choices and their crumbling

800-year-old castle’, explained Amanda Craig in the Guardian, though she thought its ‘mildly satirical portrait of unearned privilege’ palled.

Francesca Carington in the Telegraph thought the book ‘uneven in tone’ and ‘baggy’ but called it ‘satisfying’ overall, with ‘plenty of good one-liners’.

The comedian, writer and classicist Natalie Haynes has ‘forged a career reinvigorating the classics’, explained Madeleine Feeny in the Daily Mail. In Pandora’s Jar (Pan Macmillan, 320pp, £9.99), she unravels ten women’s myths, ‘forcing us to re-evaluate figures we thought we knew’. James McConnachie in the Sunday Times called it ‘an impassioned and informed study’, and Stephanie Merritt in the Guardian was also full of praise.