The Oldie magazine - March issue (397)

NEW QI COLUMN – JOHN LLOYD NANCY MITFORD

BY SELINA HASTINGS

March 2021 | £4.95 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 397

Just like that!

Tommy Cooper, my magical friend – Barry Cryer Sir Les Patterson’s guide to modern manners Dominic West goes wild in the country Simon Russell Beale on the theatre lockdown

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Barry Cryer on Tommy Cooper page 14

Features 11 Pupils aren’t students James Pembroke 13 I’m far too lazy for country life Dominic West 14 Tommy Cooper’s surreal magic Barry Cryer 16 Wren’s divine City churches Harry Mount 19 Secrets of a QI elf Will Bowen 20 Why did my brilliant friend end it all? William Cook 22 My woke guide to modern manners Sir Les Patterson 24 Keats, king of the ode Sara Wheeler 26 One hundred years of phone boxes Justin Warshaw 28 Nancy Mitford’s sad pursuit of love Selina Hastings 32 John Pope-Hennessy, my inspiration Michael Mallon 40 What do heralds do?

Patric Dickinson 42 My older, wiser friends Mary Killen 45 Henry VI’s double anniversary Benedict King 70 Simon Russell Beale on his theatre fears Louise Flind

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes

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Nancy Mitford’s pursuit of love page 28

7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: Who was Sir Ken Adam? Christopher Sandford 12 Modern Life: What is Dollying? Richard Godwin 30 Letter from America Dominic Green 36 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 37 Country Mouse Giles Wood 38 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 42 Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu 44 School Days Sophia Waugh 44 Quite Interesting Things about ... March John Lloyd 46 God Sister Teresa 46 Funeral Service: Lady Tebbit James Hughes-Onslow 47 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 48 Readers’ Letters 50 I Once Met… Tommy Docherty John McEwen 50 Memory Lane 65 Media Matters Stephen Glover 67 History David Horspool 69 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond

69 Rant: Decimal dunces Huon Mallalieu 97 Crossword 99 Bridge Andrew Robson 99 Competition Tessa Castro 106 Ask Virginia Ironside

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

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QI elf reveals all page 19

Books 53 Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell, by John Preston Peter McKay 55 The Happy Traitor: Spies, Lies and Exile in Russia, by Simon Kuper Richard Davenport-Hines 57 Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith, by Richard Bradford Frances Wilson 57 Francis Bacon: Revelations, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan Matthew Sturgis 59 Frostquake, by Juliet Nicolson Valerie Grove 61 A Coup in Turkey: A Tale of Democracy, Despotism and Vengeance in a Divided Land,

by Jeremy Seal Maureen Freely 63 Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford Alex Clark

Travel 88 Norfolk’s Walpole houses Peter Sheppard

92 Overlooked Britain: Watts Cemetery Chapel, Surrey Lucinda Lambton 95 Taking a Walk: Heavenly Hadrian’s Wall Patrick Barkham

Arts 71 Netflix: Pretend It’s a City Harry Mount 71 Radio Valerie Grove 72 Television Roger Lewis 73 Music Richard Osborne 74 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 75 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 77 Gardening David Wheeler 77 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 78 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 78 Restaurants James Pembroke 79 Drink Bill Knott 80 Sport Jim White 80 Motoring Alan Judd 82 Digital Life Matthew Webster 82 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 84 Getting Dressed: Irma Kurtz Brigid Keenan 87 Bird of the Month: Great Spotted Woodpecker John McEwen Advertising For display, contact: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Melissa Arancio on 07305 010659 For classified, contact: Kami Jogee on 07983 097477 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover

By Lord Lichfield (Lichfield Archive via Getty Images)

The Oldie March 2021 3

The Old Un’s Notes

Double crossing: the old warning sign and the new one

Which of these two oldie road signs do you prefer?

The Old Un loves the original one (on the left), which magically captures the posture, stick and grumpy outlook of him and his Old Lady.

He’s not so keen on the new one on the right – updated by design studio SwaG Design in response to a competition run by the Centre for Ageing Better and Public Health England.

In the new version, the oldies break into a jolly dance, the stick transformed into a Fred Astaire cane.

It will be made publicly available for unlimited use by any individual or organisation. There’s no suggestion that the traditional, bent-over OAPs with their stick will be forcibly removed from our streets yet. Long may the grumpy oldies remain!

The Lady of the Lamp’s light flickers no longer.

Florence Nightingale’s iconic lantern now sits alone on a pedestal, in the dark, at the Florence Nightingale Museum on London’s South Bank.

The spotlight that once highlighted an important piece of British nursing history has been turned off – possibly for ever. The museum has been put to bed.

Relying almost entirely on ticket and shop sales for income, this place of medical pilgrimage is another casualty of COVID-19. Officially, the

museum has gone into ‘indefinite hibernation’. But the lantern may never be lit again.

There’s no magic pill to save it. The museum is in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital. A recent inhabitant of one of the hospital’s beds was the Prime Minister, when he was nursed through and recovered from coronavirus.

But the Government’s cultural recovery plan is concentrated on big, national museums, not self-financing, small ones. The new hangarlike temporary hospitals funded to alleviate COVID-19 wards may be named after the founder of modern nursing,

but there’s no similar plan to cure this museum’s woes.

The Crimean War didn’t put out Nightingale’s light – but COVID might.

Elisabeth Basford’s charming new biography, Princess Mary: The First Modern Princess, has some lovely little nuggets.

It was Princess Mary, George V’s daughter, who began the tradition of placing a bridal bouquet on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey.

Among this month’s contributors Barry Cryer (p14) has written for comedians from Bob Hope to Morecambe and Wise. A guest on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue since 1972, he hosts Oldie Literary Lunches and excels in parrot jokes.

Dominic West (p13) was Jimmy McNulty in The Wire. He plays Uncle Matthew (left) in The Pursuit of Love (BBC). Married with five children, he lives in an old brewery near Bath and an old castle in Ireland.

Patric Dickinson (p40) is Clarenceux King of Arms and a leading genealogist. An Honorary Vice-President of the Anthony Powell Society, he retires from the College of Arms after 52 years on 31st March.

Sir Les Patterson (p22) is the Australian Cultural Attaché (Emeritus) to the Court of St James. Chairman of the Tasmanian Cheese Board, he’s married to former top Australian hand-model Gwyneth Dooley.

Wedding belle: Princess Mary and Viscount Lascelles, 1922

She did it in 1922 after her marriage to the Earl of Harewood. Kate Middleton did the same after her 2011 wedding to Prince William.

In his introduction to the book, Queen Mary’s biographer Hugo Vickers describes Princess Mary ‘waving with the circular hand wave of Queen Mary’.

Vickers tells the Old Un that Princess Alice (19012004), Princess Mary’s The Oldie March 2021 5

Important stories you may have missed Uninsured driver crashes into lamppost in Colburn Richmondshire Today Hooded gang run off with pet dog in terrifying Hull burglary gone wrong Hull & East Yorkshire News

Lorry full of cauliflower overturns at Scotch Corner Richmondshire Today £15 for published contributions

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6 The Oldie March 2021

‘We’ve put your husband into a medically induced coma, because he is such a whiner’

sister-in-law, did a nice twist on the royal wave – she wiggled her fingers.

Today, that famous circular wave has sadly died out. The Queen goes for the more democratic, traditional wave, as do the rest of the Royal Family.

How sad to wave goodbye to the royal wave.

Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle is putting a stop to the relaxation of dress codes permitted by his go-ahead predecessor John Bercow.

Hoyle has in recent weeks upbraided former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, veteran Labour MP Kevin Brennan and a new Tory MP, Christian Wakeford, for not wearing ties when making virtual contributions to Commons debates.

Bercow – who has again, most tragically, missed out on a peerage – let male MPs enter the chamber without ties. His wife wasn’t much of a one for dress codes either. It was sometimes a job to get Sally Bercow to wear anything except a sheet.

The Old Un has been pondering other Parliamentary matters.

As if oldie peers did not already have enough problems with their hearing, further complications have been caused by the number of House of Lords members with similar-sounding names.

This was explained by Labour peer Lord Foulkes, who noted the presence of the Lib Dems’ Lord Fox. He pronounced the name with great care, pointing out that there is also a Lady Fookes, a Lord Faulks, himself (Foulkes) and another Fox, the recently arrived former Claire Fox. Too many effing Fs!

After Gainsborough: Lamb’s The Artist and His Wife (1930)

Messums Gallery will be showing an online exhibition of works by Henry Lamb (1883-1960), from 4th February until 13th March.

The doctor-turned-artist won an MC in the First World War and was a founder of the Camden Town Group and London Group of painters.

The exhibition highlights the decade following Lamb’s 1928 marriage to the writer Lady Pansy Pakenham, Lord Longford’s sister, and their move to the Wiltshire village of Coombe Bissett.

One highlight is this monumental 1930 painting (below left) of the Lambs as Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews. It was painted three years after the rediscovery and reappraisal of the Gainsborough picture, now in the National Gallery.

Gainsborough placed his couple in Suffolk. Lamb’s setting is the couple’s Wiltshire home, with the River Ebble, a water meadow and chalk downland beyond.

‘Wit is the ability to say entirely the wrong thing in precisely the right way.’

If that sounds suspiciously like an Oscar Wilde witticism to you, you’re not alone. The Oscar Wilde Society voted it the winner in the second Wilde Wit Competition, run together with The Oldie.

The winning entry above came from Darcy Alexander Corstorphine – who also won last year. Clearly, the lad has style to burn.

In second place, from Dr Ashley Robins in South Africa, came ‘Good friends come and go, but one’s enemies remain forever faithful.’

In third place came an entry from Bill Stevens in Canada, which feels right at

‘What upsets me, Daddy, is that everyone knew it was going to happen’

home in these pages: ‘Retirement must be dangerous; no one seems to survive it.’

The Society welcomes new members, witty or otherwise.

Go to oscarwildesociety.co.uk to join.

Sex Pistols under lock and key: Matlock’s guitar, left

Number 1 Old Park Lane is best known today as the home of the Hard Rock Cafe, the music-themed burger restaurant.

But the handsome 1914 building was originally, in 1923, a branch of Coutts & Co, the grand bank.

That’s why, in the vaults below, there are strongboxes that once glistened with jewels belonging to smart Mayfair ladies.

Now, as the picture from The Buildings of Green Park

by Andrew Jones (above) shows, the Chubb safe protects a guitar that once belonged to Glen Matlock, bass guitarist for the Sex Pistols.

The Old Un was delighted to receive this cartoon (above) from Francis Drake of Dublin.

Dear Wilfred De’Ath, The Oldie’s resident gentleman of the road, died a year ago, on 19th February 2020, aged 82.

He is much missed at Oldie Towers. He’s also much missed by several callers to

the Oldie office, from whom Wilfred ‘borrowed’ money.

One of many Wilfred’s many attributes was an indifference to – and occasional pride in – criticism. He would have loved the bad taste of this fine cartoon.

As Charles Pasternak wrote in the January issue, the last men in Britain to do National Service were called up 60 years ago, on 31st December 1960.

You could in fact volunteer for National Service, which is what Oldie-reader Arthur Hearnden did, from 1955 to 1957 – and he loved it.

Hearnden was then teaching in Northern Ireland, where, he says, ‘National Service didn’t apply.’ So he presented himself to the Army Recruiting Office in Belfast, volunteering for National Service.

He was promptly shipped off to the Royal Signals base in

‘On second thoughts, I will have the garlic bread’

Richmond, North Yorkshire.

He started off working in the cookhouse, and then graduated to dusting books in the Education Centre.

He particularly loved Army humour: ‘Am I ’urting you?’ the sergeant said to him one day.

‘No, sarge,’ he replied.

‘Well, I should be,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’m standing on your ’air. Get it cut. Today.

And again tomorrow.’

Hearnden had two happy years of National Service. The Old Un apologises for the error in Charles Pasternak’s piece – The Oldie’s mistake, not Pasternak’s. It suggested that National Service was 18 months long. Initially

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Fried egg with Turkish salad (chopped red peppers, tomatoes, garlic, chilli and pomegranate molasses) on country loaf

18 months in 1949, it was increased to two years in 1950.

Former Arts Minister Grey Gowrie has published a new collection of poetry, From Primrose Hill.

In one poem, Reece Mews: Conversation Piece, Lord Gowrie, 81, remembers his friend Francis Bacon, whose studio was in Reece Mews.

In the poem, Bacon talks about his fellow painter Lucian Freud: ‘I don’t enjoy betting on horses/ because they stop me breathing. Lucian loves them./ At his boarding school, he’d sneak out/ at night to sleep beside one. I’d be dead by morning.’

In the poem, Bacon goes on to say about Freud, ‘He cuts me too. I miss him./ I am 13 years older./ He finds me repetitive, boring. I suppose I am./ Of course I drink more than he does.’

Gowrie cheerfully mocks himself, too, referring to his childhood title, Lord Ruthven.

He writes of ‘my family being, absurdly, associated with vampirism./ If, in the late-18th century, you wanted to write a vampire

story, you called the vampire Lord Ruthven.’

Still, marginally better to be called Lord Ruthven than, say, Count Dracula.

‘I have a fear of abandonment…’

How Goering hated Albert Speer!

That’s one of the stories in Nuremberg, the republished memoir by Airey Neave, the Colditz escapee and Tory MP, murdered by the IRA in 1979.

In 1945, Neave served the indictments on Goering and Speer. Neave saw Goering call Speer a traitor for allying himself with the ‘enemy’, as Goering called the Allied prosecution.

Vain Goering was delighted, though, with the Allies’ IQ tests on 20 top Nazis. He came third. Speer was 12th.

The Oldie March 2021 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

My wife’s lethal jab

She’s quite right to tell me off – I’ve just broken her wrist As I write, I haven’t had my vaccine yet.

As an Oxford man (New College, 1967-70), naturally I am hoping for the Oxford jab, but I’ll settle for whatever I am given whenever I get it. All my friends in their eighties have had their first dose and quite a few have had the follow-up jab as well. It’s been very well organised in my part of south-west London. There is even talk of a 24-hour service.

When I told my wife I didn’t fancy getting up in the middle of the night to secure my jab, she said, rather sharply, ‘I don’t see why – you get up to go to the loo at 2.30 and 4am most nights, don’t you?’

My wife has taken to making sharp remarks in recent weeks – with reason.

Just before Christmas, returning from the shops, we took a short cut down an unfamiliar side street. She was striding ahead, as she does. I was trotting behind, as I do. I was also looking up at the sky, instead of looking where I was going.

Just as I began to say, ‘It looks like rain,’ I stumbled on the root of a tree that was sticking out of the pavement and tumbled on top of my unfortunate spouse, knocking her to the ground. She broke her wrist in the process. ‘Pardon me, Gyles, you broke my wrist in the process.’

The good news is, eight weeks on, thanks to the ministrations of the A&E department at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, she’s very much on the mend.

Her hand is out of the cast. I don’t have to cut up her food for her any more.

The bad news is I’m still doing the cooking. I keep it simple: baked beans on toast, baked beans on a baked potato, fish fingers and baked beans, baked beans with a poached egg on top, and so long as there is a glass of chilled white wine to help wash it down and a Magnum ice cream for pudding she seems happy enough.

We have a break from baked beans on a Sunday. That’s when I do my signature tuna mayonnaise on a baked potato, with steamed broccoli and carrots on the side. Through all this, to be serious, the steamer and frozen meals from a company called Cook have proved invaluable.

We try to eat at the table and not off trays on our knees in front of the TV because we are beginning to think this COVID thing is going to go on for ever and we need to retain our sanity.

We are watching the news only once a day (usually at lunchtime: we reckon it’s presented less stridently then). In the evening, we allow ourselves only one programme per night so that whatever we watch feels like an ‘event’.

Our go-to channels are Netflix and Talking Pictures. On the former, we have loved Call My Agent, Emily in Paris, The Queen’s Gambit and Schitt’s Creek, to name just a few.

On Talking Pictures, where they specialise in British movies from the 1940s to the 1960s, we love the lot. I am totally smitten with Glynis Johns (now

‘Yes, that’s him, officer – number three’

97) and my wife has the hots for the late Kenneth More. (If you can, catch him in The Comedy Man, 1964. It’s an underrated classic.)

Our New Year treat was The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947), which nobody rates because it came out the year after David Lean’s universally acclaimed Great Expectations. It’s not so cinematic, perhaps, but it’s just as dramatic and stars the great Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Ralph Nickleby and my friend and mentor, Cyril Fletcher, as an amusing Mr Mantalini.

There’s a reason I have been thinking about Cyril Fletcher. It is 50 years this month since I first chaired a panel game for BBC Radio 4. A Rhyme in Time was a comedy quiz with a poetry twist. Cyril Fletcher, a comedian famous for his Odd Odes, and the writer Caryl Brahms were the team captains.

At the end of the series, Miss Brahms gave me a hideous tie as a present. She said, ‘I’ve left the receipt in the box so you can change it. You won’t like it – nobody does.’ When I went to the shop in Jermyn Street to change the tie, the manager said, ‘You must be a friend of Miss Brahms. She buys the same tie by the dozen and gives it to all her friends.’

Cyril Fletcher said he would like to give me a small picture by his friend the artist Edward Seago. He forgot, which is a shame because I see Messum’s Gallery is now selling Seagos for £40,000.

And, speaking of Seago, my friend Octavia Pollock, when working as a sub-editor on Country Life, once wrote an inadvertently memorable caption to accompany a portrait of the artist: ‘The Queen Mother loved his paintings so much that he gave her one every Christmas and birthday.’

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

Grumpy Oldie Man

My bubble is at boiling point

Visiting my mother is lovely – until she reaches for the thermostat matthew norman While I haven’t a clue precisely how many hours have been spent in my parents’ sitting room since the plague descended, it must run into several thousands.

About this, however, I can be temporally precise. Not for one of those myriad hours – not for a nanosecond – have we agreed about the desired room temperature.

While close confinement dictated by extraordinary events will give rise to irritations, this past year the three of us have enjoyed a bemusing level of harmony.

There is nothing so disgusting in this world as a happy family, of course, and no one would be demented enough to accuse us of being that.

Yet we have survived these trying 12 months within a bubble of harmony that stretches belief. Not even once has, for instance, a murder been attempted.

Even the sort of low-level sniping that tends to grease the axles of the intergenerational relationship has been scarce.

In fact – and while I in no way wish to minimise the psychic damage inflicted by my mother’s penchant for Phillip Schofield and other daytime TV fixtures – these months have by and large been a joy.

What tensions there have been may be sourced to one thing. The heat. Oh, my great aunt Ada, the heat!

Before we go on, let it be stated that here no blame attaches to anyone. As some of you might wryly agree, the ageing process is not a uniform delight.

Getting old ain’t, as Bette Davis wisely observed, for sissies.

One typical side effect is the slowing of blood circulation, and the consequently heightened sense of cold. So no one, as I said, is hereby charged with premeditated cruelty in setting the thermostat to temperatures more commonly noted in high-summer Death 10 The Oldie March 2021

Valley than in midwinter Primrose Hill, north London.

When I report that I write these words on a frosty morning clad solely in the thinnest of T-shirts and a pair of cotton Y-fronts, I do so less for the benefit of an audience in constant need of erotic stimulation than to hint at the problem.

Historians have spent untold decades, if not centuries, trying to pinpoint the causes of the intractable frictions that beset the Middle East.

But really – and not to belabour you with an over-technical, academic analysis – it all boils down to the heat.

How can anyone not be continually furious when they find it impossible, however close to nakedness they venture, to stay hydrated?

The good folk of Iceland seldom have civil wars. When did you read of suicide bombers stalking Santa’s Lapland stronghold? In the wild, Arctic tundras of Canada, amity rules.

In Primrose Hill, meanwhile, our morning exchange follows a literary structure so rigid that it might be a haiku.

‘You can’t seriously be cold?’ I ask my mother on arrival at about 9am. ‘Cold?’ she scathingly replies. ‘I’m not cold. I’m freezing. Feel my hands. I think I may have hypothermia.’

Having duly felt her hands, I assure her that there is no frantic need for the Bacofoil yet.

‘Well, I’m freezing,’ she reasserts while I angrily tear off my jumper. ‘And so is your father.’

My father, whose ungodly stoicism sadly evaded my genetic inheritance,

‘Having felt her hands, I assure her that there is no need for the Bacofoil yet’

never complains. But the blanket over his knees speaks eloquently for him.

As so often, the subject was first and best addressed by the philosopher Larry David. In Seinfeld, the sitcom he created and wrote, Jerry’s jaunts from New York to his parents’ retirement condo in Florida are beset by heat-induced, migrainous fatigue.

In Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which David plays a parodic version of himself, he broadens his study to take in ethnic variations. Where he prefers the temperature at below 70° Fahrenheit, his African-American girlfriend demands it be maintained in the mid-80s.

At this moment, I’d take the latter. If the unedited version of this column appears to be written in a recherché dialect of Polish, this could be because the keyboard is so coated in sweat that the fingers are sliding maniacally from key to key.

Every now and again, I have a commercial idea that requires nothing more than a trusting investor to change the world.

Admittedly, the one about fitting all spectacles with transponders hasn’t taken off, possibly because the optician’s business model depends on dummies like me losing two pairs per month.

Let that one remain on the back burner, simmering away and raising the temperature by another degree. What we need, right now, is an elasticated body suit – so thin and comfortable that you barely know it’s on – with thermostatic controls that can be set to anywhere between 60° and 90° Fahrenheit. An initial development fund of £25m should cover the prototype.

While awaiting the call from an ambitious entrepreneur, I am going outside. In a bid to quell the rage and restore equanimity, I am going outside on this icy morn in only my Y-fronts and T-shirt. I am going outside, and I may be some time.

A student used to mean an undergraduate or a don. Nowadays, the word is used of undeserving children. By James Pembroke

O

ver the Christmas holidays, when newsreaders talked about the start of term, they referred to ‘students’ returning.

I assumed they meant beardie long-hairs in their early twenties returning to university. Yet they also tended to interview an overwhelmed head (or ‘lead learner’, as they’ve been called in a primary school in the People’s Republic of Islington), who talked about their students while surrounded by 12-year-olds in school uniform.

Apparently, these ‘young adults’ are learners with whom the teachers learn and grow together, and they don’t like to be patronised by such unambiguous terms as ‘pupils’ or ‘schoolchildren’.

My old friend Sophie, a deputy head, says ‘student’ has been de rigueur at her secondary school in Dorset for 20 years.

Most British primary schools still refer to ‘pupils’, but Americans have been calling primary and secondary schoolchildren students since 1900.

Surely the distinction is simple. A student voluntarily decides to study and chooses their own course, whereas a pupil (OED: ‘one who is taught by another; a disciple, 1563’) has no such choice about the syllabus, whether they are 12 years old or a graduate training to be a barrister.

The OED gives three definitions of a student. The first (‘a person who is engaged in, or addicted to, study’) demonstrates that lexicographers are deluded: study is the one waking activity to which students are not addicted.

The second is very clear: ‘a person who is undergoing a course of study and

When students were students – Student Grant, Viz character

instruction at a university or other place of higher education or technical training’.

The third: ‘At Christ Church, Oxford: a member of the foundation, corresponding to a ‘fellow’ or ‘scholar’ of other colleges, 1651’. So not a term to be used for those still playing hopscotch, albeit on a PlayStation in their bedroom.

At medieval universities, the students’ focus was on the ancient classical curriculum of the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the advanced quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy). In 1400, when the population of England was around two million, there were only 2,000 students (three-quarters at Oxford and 500 at Cambridge).

The distinction between undergraduates (OED, 1630) and graduates emerged only in the 14th century, when very young students began to be admitted. At its foundation in 1441, King’s College, Cambridge, ordained that students must be at least 14 to counter this; its co-foundation, Eton, took five-year-olds.

The university day for these ambitious teenagers was daunting, even by civil-service mandarin standards. It started at 5am and progressed until late afternoon, without any frolics. Even chess was banned. Lazy students at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, got a lie-in until 6am, when they launched into a discourse on Aristotle.

Why upgrade nonchalant 12-year-olds to such exalted status? By superannuating them, are schools telling their charges that school is cool to counteract truancy; that they really are grown-ups?

What would Wackford Squeers have said?

N W !

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

Pupils aren’t students

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The Oldie March 2021 11

who was Sir Ken Adam?

Throughout the 1960s and into the ’70s, Ken Adam, born a century ago, ruled the world of film production design.

His sets for Dr No and six subsequent James Bond blockbusters became as iconic as Bond’s signature introduction, or his shaken, not-stirred martini. Adam created the interior of Fort Knox for Goldfinger, the volcanic lair for You Only Live Twice and the space station in Moonraker.

Steven Spielberg called him ‘the greatest visual artist in movie history’.

Adam could go small, as well, once remarking that his favourite scene in the entire 007 franchise consisted of Bond alone in a room with a chair, a table and a predatory tarantula in Dr No. ‘It cost £400, which is about what [the director] Terence Young spent on lunch,’ he chuckled.

Sir Ken was born Klaus Adam on 5th February 1921 in Berlin. His family escaped to Britain in 1934 and ran a small boarding house in north London.

When the war came, Adam saw action as a Hawker Typhoon pilot, flying lowaltitude raids over Normandy on D-Day. He used to remark with justifiable pride that he’d been one of the few Germanborn officers to serve in British uniform.

After demobilisation, Adam worked as

what is Dollying?

Dollying is when a celebrity does something unexpectedly marvellous outside their usual field of expertise – and emerges with their reputation enhanced.

Anyone lucky enough to receive a dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in the coming weeks has an unlikely benefactor to thank: country-music legend Dolly Parton.

Back in April 2020, when the search for a vaccine was in its tender, early stages, the writer of Jolene made a $1-million donation to the Vanderbilt University Medical Centre near her home 12 The Oldie March 2021

a draughtsman at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, from where he graduated to helping design epics such as Around the World in 80 Days and Ben-Hur. Of the famously difficult Stanley Kubrick, with whom he collaborated on 1964’s Dr Strangelove, Adam said, deadpan, ‘We got on like a house on fire.’

They created the film’s iconic War Room, a futuristic cross between a bomb shelter and a Busby Berkeley musical set.

Their collaboration on 1975’s period drama Barry Lyndon proved less happy.

‘By then, Kubrick saw himself as General Rommel, whom he admired greatly,’ Adam recalled, ‘and I ended up in hospital with a nervous breakdown.’

Nonetheless, the film won Adam the first of his two Oscars; the other was for 1994’s The Madness of King George.

Adam’s other credits include The Ipcress File, Goodbye, Mr Chips and the Bond team’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

He was knighted in 2003 – the first production designer to be so honoured – and died in 2016, at 95.

After contributing to nearly 100 films in his 45-year career, Adam saw his two outings with Kubrick as his defining moments. ‘I enjoyed the status, and paid the price, for working with the most demanding movie director on earth,’ he said.

Christopher Sandford

Peter Sellers (right) in Dr Strangelove. The room was created by Adam and Kubrick

in Nashville, Tennessee. Parton had become friends with a surgeon there, Dr Naji Abumrad, following a minor car accident in 2013.

When Dr Abumrad told her about the vaccine-research project that was getting underway at the hospital, Parton was moved to help. She described her contribution as a ‘little seed money that will hopefully grow into something great and help to heal this world’.

The US government ended up topping up the Dolly Parton Covid-19 Research Fund to the tune of about $1 billion – and medics at Vanderbilt say the Parton injection was ‘critical’ to the success of the vaccine, which has the highest effectiveness rate of all the vaccines.

‘This lady has a terribly inquisitive mind,’ said Dr Abumrad. ‘She is probably one of the smartest and most giving human beings I have ever met.’ Other medical professionals have been just as effusive. One British doctor posted a video on social media of himself singing (to the tune of Jolene), ‘Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vacciiiine/ I’m begging of you, please go in my arm.’

Dolly Parton is not the only celebrity to be emerging from coronavirus with her reputation boosted. Suddenly, deprived of red carpets, concerts and sporting events, celebrities have been keen to prove their value to society.

The Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford is the best example of a

British Dolly. His impassioned campaign on behalf of the poor schoolchildren left hungry because of the Government’s coronavirus response is the most effective single-issue political campaign in recent memory. It had the unexpected side effect of rehabilitating the public image of footballers.

You could also point to the singer Rihanna’s donation of $2 million to charities supporting domestic-violence victims, or Brad Pitt’s giving groceries to the homeless in LA. Those of us working the nine-to-five (what a way to make a living!) are usually pretty cynical about celebrities these days – especially celebrities who make grand claims about saving the world. But what Parton and Rashford share, wrote Rhodri Davies of the Charities Aid Foundation, ‘is an apparent reluctance to position

Putting on a good front: Dolly Parton gave $1m to fund vaccine research

themselves at the centre of the story, and a desire instead to emphasise the contribution of others’.

This is at odds with the image of the ‘lone saviour’ that has dominated tales of celebrity philanthropy in the recent past – and helps explain the adulatory response to their actions.

But perhaps something else has happened, too. Normal celebrity culture has ground to a halt. We have been applauding not demigods in concert halls and football stadiums, but everyday heroes on our doorsteps.

Who cares about the Kardashians’ bums in the midst of a pandemic? The new currency is generosity, utility, efficacy and selflessness.

Well – until the vaccine takes effect, anyway.

Richard Godwin

I’m far too lazy for country life No one has ever worked me so hard as Tom Hodgkinson, The Oldie’s Town Mouse columnist and co-founder of the Idler magazine.

His exhortations to be idle are relentless. His challenges to fill every spare second of our time with useful pursuits have run me ragged over the years.

I was a happily inert strolling player, lounging in my trailer, dressed as a cop and practising how to pronounce ‘daughter’ in American when I was first drawn to Tom’s promise of the idle life.

‘What a good idea!’ I thought.

‘Something to take a load off...’

There followed days at a beekeeping course and weeks of hoping to catch a swarm on a London rooftop, moments away from the honey pots of a local Co-op. I spent hours struggling through Hesiod and murdering the ukulele.

Twice, Tom hauled me onstage at the Idler Academy, his London version of Plato’s school, and made me explain myself. What was I up to? Where was my philosophy? What had my idling achieved?

As the famous loafer published yet more books and articles on the simple life, I sold up in London and moved to the country, to live according to the seasons and grow my own veg, just as Tom used to in Devon. I laboured in the strawberry patch and among the kale and courgettes, seeking in vain to make a cooked marrow appealing to children.

I raised chickens, rushing out in the middle of the night, barefoot in the mud, when we’d forgotten to lock them away.

I even took up hunting to avenge their mauling by the fox; charging terrified at fences, in the manner of Merrie Olde England.

It was exhausting. I longed to be back at work, just to get some rest. My potbelly was filling with real ale and home-made sourdough. Trying to keep up with Idle Tom, the sluggish old lazybones who runs an academy, a magazine and an Airbnb; who lectures on bohemian business planning, calligraphy and foraging and has published dozens of books, some of them twice a month … seemed increasingly futile.

Then suddenly came the pandemic and the world, like Tom, got medieval: locking down and working from home.

We were reminded of the fragility of our health and of our food supply;

reminded too of our need for nature and the inequity and inanity of much of our work.

The householder’s calendar and ‘the fine art of looking after yourself’ seemed to have a new significance. I thanked St Drogo of Sebourg that I now lived in the country, a disciple of Thomas, a prophet and a radical in a long tradition.

Wake up, strivers! Grab your almanacs! Let’s get idle again!

Dominic West This is an edited version of the foreword to Tom Hodgkinson’s How to Live in the Country, to be published by Unbound this autumn The Pursuit of Love, starring Dominic West, is on BBC1 in the spring

The Oldie March 2021 13

Barry Cryer celebrates the centenary of his friend – a sadistic, fiendish, brilliant one-off

Tommy Cooper’s surreal magic

T

he first time I met Tommy was when I wrote for one of his Thames Television shows in the early 1970s.

We were rehearsing in a church hall in Hammersmith. One afternoon, we nipped out for a drink in the Britannia pub nearby.

If there were just the two of you, he’d buy you a drink. But he never bought a round. He’d say, ‘I’m not buying drinks for strangers.’

There were only three people in the pub.

One of them looked up and said, ‘Oh, it’s Tommy Cooper. Can I tell you a joke?’

So he started telling the joke: ‘Two men walk into a pub…’

Tommy suddenly interrupted and said, ‘Hold it.’ He turned to the barman and asked, ‘Have you got a bit of paper?’

He got the bit of paper and the man continued: ‘Two men walk into a pub…’

Tommy interrupted again and said to the barman: ‘Have you got a pen?’

Then the man went on: ‘Two men walk into a pub…’

‘Is the name of the pub important?’

Tommy asked.

By this time, the pub was filling up and everyone was noticing what was going on.

The man was now red and embarrassed and still trying to tell the joke. At this point, a cameraman from the show came in.

‘Harry, you’ve got to hear this joke,’ Tommy said. Then he turned to the man and said, ‘Would you mind starting again?’

Tommy had this sadistic side to him.

He did a similar thing in a pub with a horseshoe bar – where you could look across to the other side of the bar.

Here, again, a man started trying to 14 The Oldie March 2021

tell Tommy a joke. Tommy, on the other side of the bar, dropped his trousers – so everyone on his side of the bar was falling about with laughter. And the poor man was thinking his joke had never gone so well.

When Tommy was on tour, he couldn’t walk down the street without someone asking for an autograph.

In London, funnily enough, he didn’t get much trouble. So he could go on the Tube. Once, when he was on the Underground, a poor old beggar with a dog started walking up and down the carriage, saying, ‘I need some food.’

Tommy looked up and said, ‘Eat your dog.’

I wrote for him for around five years.

He had a fiendish quality – which could also be very funny. One time at a Water Rats charity lunch, Dean Martin came along.

Tommy stood up to speak. ‘It would have been great if Jerry Lewis had been here,’ he said. ‘Along with that one he works with. That Italian.’

Everyone was laughing – including Dean Martin. Now why would Dean, who had no idea who he was, laugh?

Just like that! He played the fool to perfection

Tommy had a quirky quality. He had funny bones – that indefinable element.

He was tall and gangly and played up his clumsiness. But he wasn’t remotely clumsy.

His magic act was apparently chaos.

He would be trying to loosen up three interlinked metal rings and then he’d just throw them away.

In fact, he was a brilliant magician – but there are 100 brilliant magicians in this country. He’d say, ‘I’m the fool’ – and that’s what made him unique. It was an extraordinary feat – the audience would realise what a gifted magician he really was and laugh at his mistakes.

It was all meticulously planned. I walked past his table of props once. And it was all written out: ‘Bottles bottom right’; ‘Bowl centre of table’.

Tommy loved props – even off-stage. I was once in the pub next to Thames TV in Teddington. I was chatting to a couple of friends who told me they were meeting Tommy; he was late. And then he suddenly turned up, in dressing gown and pyjamas.

‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘I overslept.’

He had gone to all the bother of visiting the wardrobe at Thames TV just for this one gag with friends.

TRINITY MIRROR/MIRRORPIX/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

His most famous prop was his fez. He used to wear a pith helmet. Then, one day in Cairo in the war, working as a NAAFI entertainer, he forgot the pith helmet. He was in a restaurant, where the waiters wore fezzes. So he just borrowed one from a waiter and it got a huge laugh.

That shows how eccentric – surreal, even – his comedy was. In one act, there was a pedal bin on stage. A few minutes in, he’d suddenly notice it and say, ‘What’s that?’ He’d beam with delight, like a kid with a new toy. He’d turn his back to the bin and work it with his heel.

He was a complete one-off. You can’t say of any other comedian he’s ‘a sort of Tommy Cooper’. One or two comedians tried to copy his clumsy magic act and the audience just thought, ‘Oh, he’s doing a Tommy Cooper act.’

He could say quite ordinary things and they were still funny. Eric Morecambe once went with a young Des O’Connor to see Tommy at the Golden Garter club in Manchester. The club was full. Tommy turned up late as usual, started his act and got lots of laughs.

At one point, a waiter walked in front of Tommy and, purely by

accident, dropped a tray full of glasses.

Tommy leant forward. Everyone was waiting for him to say something – and he just said, ‘That’s nice.’

He got an enormous laugh. Eric said to me, ‘It was brilliant. He wasn’t thinking of doing a funny line. He did a Tommy Cooper line.’

I was once working on a show with Tommy when he suddenly said, ‘Eric and Ernie are downstairs. Come on.’

So we walked down to the studio and I slid in with Tommy. Eric and Ernie were doing their warm-up.

Tommy walked onto the stage and got a big laugh.

Dick Emery was all over the tabloids then. He’d been married several times and had a very active love life.

‘What is it, Tom?’ Eric asked.

Tommy, who could cry to order, started sobbing. He then leant on Eric.

It was very hard to get rid of Tommy if he was leaning on you. ‘Oh, Eric,’ he said, weeping.

Eric in desperation said, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Dick Emery’s left me,’ Tommy said.

Eric Morecambe, to his credit, said, ‘I

could have murdered him – but he was very funny.’

Still, it was a breach of protocol.

Things had to be about Tommy. If you were in company, talking about current affairs, say, he’d get a pack of cards out and start saying, ‘Pick a card, any card.’

He had to be the centre of attention.

There was a formidable ego.

That didn’t mean he was confident.

I’ve stood in the wings with him and he was almost trembling. It’s no coincidence that, very sadly, he died on stage, aged 63, in 1984, at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

I was watching Tommy that night on TV. When he suddenly sank to his knees, the audience innocently laughed. But I knew something was wrong – varicose veins were a problem – and so did the director, who cued the commercials and got the band playing. Yes, there had been health difficulties and too much drinking.

But he was still very good.

Towards the end of his life, an interviewer said it was amazing how Tommy could just walk on stage and people would start laughing.

‘You don’t know how much it takes just to walk on,’ Tommy said.

The Oldie March 2021 15

After a year of coronavirus, Harry Mount admires the divine result of another tragedy – Wren’s City churches. Pictures by Angelo Hornak

Phoenix from the f lames M

y God, we’ve had a terrible time over the last year since the pandemic first struck. Over 100,000 people have died in Britain alone.

It won’t be much consolation but things were much, much worse – for Londoners, anyway – 355 years ago, with the Great Plague of 1665-66, followed swiftly by the Great Fire of London in 1666.

The Great Fire did, though, produce the finest architectural achievement this country has seen: St Paul’s Cathedral and the 51 City churches (88 were lost in the Fire), all by Sir Christopher Wren.

Deep tragedy caused exceptional beauty. Is it too much to hope for that an artistic genius will produce something similar, if not on such a magnificent scale, after, God willing, the pandemic goes?

No architect before or since has had such a commission: to build so many churches and a cathedral. They were all built in Wren’s long life – he died in 1732, aged 90. But, still, St Paul’s was the first

cathedral to be finished in its architect’s lifetime – medieval cathedrals took centuries to build.

Appallingly, Wren was taken off the St Paul’s job in 1718, aged 86. George I replaced him as Surveyor of the King’s Works with a jobbing Palladian architect, William Benson.

In his late 80s, the sacked Wren walked along Cheapside to see his cathedral finished with a pointless stone balustrade. A distraught Wren declared that some people, ‘like ladies, think nothing well without an edging’.

Otherwise, though, Wren largely got his way, producing a sort of Light British Baroque. He couldn’t go as far as Borromini and Bernini, who filled Rome with high baroque – all swirling convex and concave curves, with dancing skylines and ever-shifting planes. That would have been far too Catholic for cool, Protestant, northern tastes.

Wren did sneak in some baroque touches – in the St Paul’s dome, the rhythm of its colonnade subtly broken

by stone niches (pictured, bottom right).

At Saint Vedast-alias-Foster (below left), it’s thought the spire was designed

by Wren’s gifted young assistant, baroque master Nicholas Hawksmoor.

St Vedast’s was John Betjeman’s favourite spire. He loved the subtle, baroque way the lower stage is concave and the upper stage convex. He loved, too, how the light changed in the open windows of the spire as you walked by – sometimes lit by sky through the windows on the other side, sometimes in black shadow (below left).

Wren tried to realign the City’s street plan with straight boulevards – as Paris and New York would later do. But the power of land law meant residents held on to their irregularly shaped, pre-Fire plots.

Thus the shiny City’s steel-and-glass skyscrapers still sit on a medieval street pattern. And thus Wren’s genius in fitting mighty, light-filled churches onto tiny footprints.

His masterpiece, St Stephen Walbrook, sits on the small site of the

Gothic St Dunstan-in-the East; baroque St Vedast; the Doric Monument; St Bride’s wedding cake; the Perpendicular fan vaults, St Mary 16 The Oldie March 2021

Christopher Wren’s magic trick: his dome on a square, St Stephen Walbrook

obliterated pre-Fire church.

Enter the church and you’re in heaven – a heaven that feels surprisingly big (see above). Wren achieved this by flooding the building with light from surrounding windows and an oculus in the dome.

A Fellow of All Souls and a Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, Wren was a brilliant mathematician. He pulls

off two mathematical design tricks at St Stephen’s. He places a Greek cross (with equal-length arms) at the heart of the church. And he extends it towards the entrance into a Latin cross (shaped like Christ’s cross).

So you get the double effect of processing along a nave before finding yourself right at the centre of the action.

Aldermary; Grinling Gibbons’s cherubs, All Hallows by the Tower; St Paul’s & St Augustine’s

It’s now occupied by Henry Moore’s travertine marble altar – compared by John Betjeman to a Camembert.

Wren also pulls off the trick of putting a dome on a square base by placing eight arches on eight columns. The arches are connected with pendentives (curved triangles) to produce a circle for the dome to sit on. Abracadabra!

He could really do anything. Wren could imitate pre-Fire Gothic – as at St Mary Aldermary, with its delightful, Perpendicular fan vaults; or in St Dunstan-in-the-East’s flying arches, topped with a cockerel weathervane.

No two churches – or spires – were the same. Look at the steeple of St Bride’s (below left), copied by an early 18th-century pastry chef, Thomas Rich, for his wedding cake – and a billion wedding cakes since. Then compare it with St Augustine Watling Street – another Hawksmoor collaboration, bombed in the Blitz, like so many Wren churches, and partially rebuilt.

The spire (pictured below) has pinnacles, each surrounded by four scary, shrieking gargoyles. Above them are four S-shaped scrolls, below elegant urns and what Angelo Hornak calls ‘an elongated shallot’, topped with an arrow-andpennant weathervane. Pure joy!

Wren also employed the finest craftsmen, such as Grinling Gibbons, who died 300 years ago, in 1721.

Look at the Gibbons font cover (below left) in All Hallows by the Tower, which, like the Tower of London itself, survived the Fire. Wheat, flowers, grapes and apples are plucked by cherubs – so pudgy you want to squeeze their ultra-lifelike, limewood flesh.

For stone-carving, Wren hired Caius Gabriel Cibber, who sculpted the relief at the foot of the Monument to the Fire, showing Charles II flying in, a deus ex machina, to save the burnt-out City.

Wren built the Monument (left) to the designs of another genius, Dr Robert Hooke (as in Hooke’s law of springs) – dubbed ‘England’s Leonardo’.

Cibber also carved the relief on St Paul’s of a phoenix rising from the flames, with the Latin RESURGAM (‘I will rise again’) inscribed beneath.

Here’s hoping that, if and when Britain and the world recover from the virus, a 21st-century Wren will rise again to lift our spirits.

Angelo Hornak is author of After the Fire: London Churches in the Age of Wren, Hooke, Hawksmoor and Gibbs The Oldie March 2021 17

Confessions of a QI elf How do TV quiz researchers come up with fiendish questions?

Genius elf Will Bowen reveals the rich seams he mines for nuggets

Y

ears ago, mulling over a large malt whisky with John Lloyd, the founder of QI, I listened as he explained to me what was wrong with our education system.

It was too linear. Subjects like maths and history started at the beginning and proceeded on outwards like the spokes of a wheel.

What wasn’t taught (but was so much more interesting) were the back-route, cross-connections between subjects. He had hoped a study of these might make his children want to learn. Once he opened the door, he realised there was this vast hinterland of offbeat human knowledge waiting to be tapped.

It was too big a job for one person. So he collected a team of so-called elves to mine these rich seams, before presenting the material in the form of a quiz show called QI. Initially I was reluctant to join. From my work as a stage designer it seemed quite a leap to become a QI elf – but no more than the leap from my training as a pure mathematician into the theatre.

QI facts are found in the footnotes to footnotes. Facts don’t need to be funny; if they’re odd, comedians will make them funny. That is really the core of the show.

Where to go to find such material? All elves are different – so we aren’t all falling over one another to get the same material. Some are already researchers in different fields and QI is a spillover.

Books, newspapers and magazines can all be good hunting grounds.

Some websites yield nuggets, but the internet is not good at serendipity. If you ask for ‘odd facts about navigation’, yes, you will quickly be aware of Polynesians and Vikings, but it will take some time to find that Polynesians used their testicles as a navigational aid and Iceland was found with the judicial use of caged ravens.

The internet has its uses in factchecking, but one has to beware of what the elves refer to as a ‘Newton’s catflap’.

This is an internet meme that goes viral

but has no solid foundation in fact (the origin being a spurious tale that Isaac Newton invented the catflap).

For me, books are key. On the whole, the material is trustworthy and they provide referenced footnotes to follow up. They can make for slow progress, though. I find that authors’ lectures often provide a pithy, succinct insight into a subject. I attend the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Academy, the Royal Institution, the British Museum, Gresham and Imperial Colleges and a few other learned societies. You can listen to Nobel Prize-winners, intrepid explorers, academics of all disciplines, TV presenters and weird oddballs.

Such lectures are a kind of educational theatre where you can hear why there is a bust of Lenin at the most remote spot in Antarctica, or that, in the First World War, Nobel laureate Lawrence Bragg invented an accurate technique for gun-ranging while sitting on a makeshift lavatory near the front line.

I also seek out ‘backstage tours’ of odd institutions, led by real experts who can deliver fascinating titbits. At Bletchley Park, I learnt that in a meeting to discuss the best medium for computer memory, Alan Turing quite correctly proposed gin – yes, gin, the stuff we usually drink to forget! At Dr Johnson’s house, I discovered why the great man was hoist

with his own petard when it came to accepting a pension.

Research doesn’t begin with a particular question in mind. It’s better to take a scattergun approach. At all times, I carry a small notebook. Books, lectures and tours fill these with facts, as well as the occasional item from conversations or newspapers. Collected over a year, they form the basis of a research programme – facts to be checked, probed and further explored. (All facts must be sound – we get letters!) After wheat has been sorted from chaff, ideas are written up as a short paragraph – raw data for consideration.

John’s image of the elves as dataminers is correct. It is a team effort and not a linear process. We heap up our spoils in themed piles, and the biggest piles are forensically examined to see whether a question might emerge. The point of the question is to stimulate (amusing) conversation and the bigger the pile of data, the more material the questioner has to keep that conversation going.

I helped to develop the on-screen demonstrations. My father and grandfather were both chemists and I remembered the joy of their demonstrations – like the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, where oxygen-filled foam shoots up from the top of a flask.

Stephen Fry was rather underwhelmed by the rehearsal we did, so for the actual show I upped the amount of catalyst – and the ejaculation nearly hit the roof, leaving Fry lost for words.

After 15 years as an elf, I’m glad I gave in and joined the team. It has given me an excuse to re-educate myself – to refill my store of knowledge at a time of life when it is often beginning to drift away.

John Lloyd’s insight was inspired – and there is material aplenty for many series to come.

Quite Interesting Things about March appear on page 44 The Oldie March 2021 19

When wrestling expert Marcus Trower killed himself, William Cook was heartbroken – and mystified

My friend wrestled with the world’s woes

W

hen Marcus Trower’s sister called me up, I knew it could be only to tell me some bad news about her brother. When she told me he’d died, I was shocked but not surprised.

Marcus was a fearless adventurer who’d travelled widely in West Africa and South America. I assumed he must have perished in an awful accident in one of those wild, untamed places. I was dumbfounded to hear he’d killed himself.

There have been some people in my life who I always feared would die by suicide (and several have done), but Marcus was never one of them. In fact, he was one of the last people I could have imagined doing such a thing.

I hadn’t seen him for a long time but, for a short while, we were very close.

During that time, he was my rock – a man who met good times and bad times with the same indifference, while I cried into my beer.

We met at the Mail on Sunday in 1995. He was working as a sub-editor. I was writing occasional features, about oddballs and eccentrics, though my main task was doing the TV listings – a job that could have been done far better by a computer, and probably is nowadays. I was deeply unhappy and hence I was awful company. Most of my colleagues avoided me. I didn’t blame them. I’d never felt more alone.

While I was loud and awkward in the office, Marcus was quiet and confident.

He seemed comfortable in his own skin.

He was popular with his peers, but he also always had time for me.

I’d written a piece for the paper about my German father. Marcus told me he was half-German, too. How was my 20 The Oldie March 2021

Marcus Trower (1967-2019), writer and friend. ‘He would have made a great dad’

German, he asked me. Pretty rudimentary, I replied. His German mother gave language lessons, he said.

Would I be interested? I would indeed.

And so I started travelling to Surrey every Saturday morning, to the tidy house in the commuter belt where Marcus used to live, to practise my German with his mother.

I left the Mail on Sunday and got an equally inconsequential job at the BBC. Marcus left the country to go travelling.

In his absence, I got to know his mother a lot better than I knew her only son.

Yet, as we chatted in German about our families and I learnt about his childhood, I felt increasingly closer to him. I realised we had a lot in common.

We shared the same star sign. We both came from broken homes.

Eventually Marcus returned to Britain and moved into a bedsit in North London. He’d always been interested in martial arts, wrestling in particular. He’d spent the last few years travelling to places where traditional wrestling is still practised – Hungary, Nigeria, Mongolia and Brazil.

TONY SIMPSON

Now he was going to write a book about his travels, but it wasn’t going to be just a travel book – it was going to be a book about masculinity.

I was also trying to write a book, about my German family. I wanted my German book, like Marcus’s wrestling book, to be more than just a travelogue. Talking to him, I realised my book was also about masculinity. It was about my absent father, and my absent fatherland.

Writing is a lot easier than many jobs, but it still requires a lot of stamina. It helped to know Marcus was in my corner.

We spurred each other on.

Other than our shared interest in book-writing, our lives were now very different. I was living in a smart apartment in Chiswick, married with two children. Marcus was single and childless, living in a rented room in Tufnell Park.

I liked being married and I was glad to be a dad. Yet, during our evenings together in Tufnell Park, I never stopped moaning – about how hard it was to raise a family; how hard it was to write that book. He should have told me to count my blessings, but he never lost his patience. He was a good listener. I felt I could confide in him about anything, anything at all.

Marcus came to my flat in Chiswick, and became friends with my son, Ed. He would have made a great dad. Ed liked him straight away. They played chess together. They talked about sport and travel. He had more in common with Ed than I did. Both of them were taciturn and athletic – unlike me.

Marcus got a book deal and I didn’t.

I’d have thought I’d feel disappointed but in fact I felt relieved. I knew my book wasn’t good enough and when I read his book, I realised why. My book was all about me – but curiously impersonal. His book was about other people, yet his personality shone through on every page.

To my surprise, I felt elated by his success. Why? Partly because he’d written a brilliant book whereas mine wasn’t worth publishing, but mainly because he never suffered from jealousy.

He didn’t care about wealth or status. It was all about the book – not about him.

The book got good reviews. It didn’t become a bestseller, as it could – and should – have done, but Marcus didn’t seem that bothered.

Marcus moved to Gozo with his girlfriend. He told me he was writing a thriller. I was planning to go out and see him, but I never got round to it.

Gradually, we lost touch. Finally he returned home, went to Brighton and started working as a freelance

editor. Aspiring writers loved working with him. His mother said I should visit him. That sounded like a great idea, but there was no hurry. Maybe next month…

Why did Marcus kill himself? Why does anyone? There’s never an adequate answer to this question.

Marcus was always very good at dealing with life’s travails. He appeared to treat misfortune the way a sailor treats bad weather – a temporary nuisance, to be borne with stoicism and good humour. He never seemed to feel sorry for himself – unlike me.

Who knows why? All I know is that men are bad at reaching out – and we get worse as we get older.

The suicide rate for men in England and Wales in 2019 (the year Marcus died) was

‘Men are bad at reaching out – and we get worse as we get older’

the highest since 2000, with 4,303 male deaths, compared with 1,388 suicides among women. The Office for National Statistics registered ‘higher rates of suicide among middle-aged men in recent years’. It said this group may be less likely to seek help.

After the funeral, I got talking to one of the members of the jujutsu club Marcus set up in Brighton. About 20 of them had come along, wearing the club T-shirts Marcus had designed. It seemed unfathomable to me that someone who inspired such loyalty chose to end it all.

When my son went away to university, I gave him a copy of Marcus’s The Last Wrestlers to take with him, but he said he didn’t fancy it. After what had happened, he seemed afraid to read it.

‘Fair enough,’ I said.

After I’d waved him off, I put the book on his bookshelf, in his empty bedroom. I hope he reads it one day. It’s an uplifting, life-enhancing read.

The Last Wrestlers (Ebury) by Marcus Trower. Call Samaritans free any time (116 123) or visit www.samaritans.org The Oldie March 2021 21

The woke wizard of Oz Sir Les Patterson – Australia’s finest diplomat, diversity watchdog and cultural icon – reveals his politically correct guide to modern life SIR LES’S HUGE TRIGGER WARNING Readers are advised that the following contribution may employ strong language and scenes of a distressing nature

L

es Patterson’s the name and culture is the game.

I’ve been knocking around the traps of international diplomacy, vis-à-vis Australia, for yonks but, to be honest with you, this is the first time a publication has let you have a close look at my column.

A lot of female editors have wanted to handle it, but it took Harry Mount of the provocatively titled Old Fella to persuade me to whip it into shape for a mature and broad-minded readership.

Owing to my experience in the world of hard knocks in particular respect of the Yartz, I can give you an overview of pretty much everything. Being a legend is a big responsibility, and most of you will be lucky enough to dodge it.

When I was born in the maternity ward of the Little Sisters of Perpetual Chastity, Sydney, Australia, the nurse presented me to my wonderful mother.

She was lying in bed in the antenatal ward, quietly smoking and perusing the Woman’s Weekly.

‘It’s a boy, Mrs Patterson,’ the nurse said.

‘And, one day, he’s going to be very big.’

Boy, did she hit the nail on the head!

Mother Nature in her wisdom has fashioned me with such generosity that these days I can commit intimacy in a standing position with a broad-minded air hostess or research assistant and still stay socially distant. Well, up to a point.

Are you with me?

The odd prude reading this composition could already be worried that I might drop the occasional double innuendo, but do you think the editor of a responsible publication like The Old Fella would pay top whack to a smutpeddler? No way, Jose.

In Australia, for my sins, I’m iconic.

Journos across the spectrum agree that I am Australia’s answer to Stephen Fry, David Attenborough and Sir Trevor McDonald.

But I stay out of politics and you might be surprised to learn I’m a stickler for 22 The Oldie March 2021

political correctness. A slip of the tongue can cause heartache – so I keep a firm rein on the old oral appendage unless the situation demands that I relax the rules.

Are you with me?

For my sins, I am openly heterosexual and I don’t care who knows it. But some of my best friends and colleagues bat for the other team, or don’t like it plain and simple, and I turn a blind eye.

A few stick-in-the-mud Old Fella readers have accused me of sexism. I’m a straight-talking International Diplomat and trouble-shooter with strong opinions – but I have been demonised.

A few critics have even painted me as homophobic and even – wait for this – lezzophobic!

I bid them, if they will, look at my tomboy daughter Karen and her evenmore-of-a-tomboy flatmate Renata ‘Bruno’ Miloscovič. I’m not suggesting these two lasses are card-carrying sausage-dodgers, but a few grub journos and misogynists have cast aspersions.

However, I yield to none in my abhorrence of sexual prejudice.

As for some courageous folk who claim that they were born in the body of the wrong sex, Les Patterson has this to say: ‘I’ve been there, guys. I know. I need to get into the body of the opposite sex on a regular basis.’

And, thanks to this bloody COVID, there’s a good supply of air hosties or in-flight non-binary hospitality executives at a loose end who will happily say, ‘Be my guest, Les,’ if and when I’m in the

mood for a bit of harmless transitioning.

No worries!

They reckon the new outbreak of this bloody virus in Sydney was started by a few careless in-flight hospitality executives getting off a long flight and going to a party. That’s bull, if you don’t mind me saying so. I gave the party in question as a part of my historic initiative to increase the morale of the beleaguered airline industry.

With my hand on the Bible, I swear I’ve never caught anything from a hostie worse than a dose of Pediculosis pubis.

It’s been a funny experience for me, staying at home for months on end. I’m such an international traveller at the expense of my old mate the Australian Taxpayer that it seems unnatural to be using the same toilet 24/7.

Lady Gwen Patterson and my good self have found a new intimacy watching the box every night on a beanbag together and, as an official diversity watchdog, I’m always on the lookout for any hint of discrimination in the media.

In closing, I want to say sorry if I’ve trodden on a few corns, but that’s my job. I’m the kiddie in the Bible story who points to the King and tells everybody, ‘Look! He’s starkers!’

That nipper was about as popular as a turd in a swimming pool, but he told it like it was, the poor little bastard.

I’d better shut up now, readers.

The PC is wearing off!

Keep well and get lucky.

With love from Les. Sir Les: legend in his own lunchtime

Two hundred years after Keats’s death, Sara Wheeler follows in his footsteps, from Hampstead to Rome

King of the ode J

ohn Keats, apostle of truth and beauty, died 200 years ago, on 23rd February 1821, in Rome, aged 25. A new biography by Lucasta Miller marks the bicentenary.

For two decades, I have looked down from my bedroom window into the garden of the white villa, now Keats House, where he wrote Ode to a Nightingale under a plum tree. Keats strode daily along the oak groves of Hampstead Heath, beside the ponds fed by the headwaters of the Fleet and through the ancient woods that look over to Highgate.

The villa I can see has, quite rightly, become a shrine. In Kentucky recently, I discovered that John’s brother George deserves a shrine of his own.

The surviving Keats siblings – three boys and a girl – lost their parents early during a rackety childhood. The boys moved to Hampstead in March 1817; they thought the air of the capital’s highest outpost would benefit the youngest, Tom, who had TB. The trio rented rooms next to the Hampstead Wells, a lively, spring-fed spa adjacent to a pond, now filled in; the Wells were demolished in 1882.

Early-19th-century maps show Hampstead surrounded by fields and the heath, with unbroken vistas in all directions; there would have been flocks of sheep in the streets.

John and George Keats, who were close,

24 The Oldie March 2021

regularly took the coach ‘to London’ from the Bird in Hand inn, diagonally opposite what is now Hampstead tube station.

Once there, they paid a shilling to visit Vauxhall Gardens, where they enjoyed potted pigeon and arrack punch after viewing the latest stunt: a cat arrived by parachute, poor thing, and a horse went up under a hot-air balloon, its hooves nailed to a wooden platform.

Before the move to Hampstead, John walked on the heath while visiting his early mentor Leigh Hunt in the Vale of Health, still the loveliest dell in NW3.

Keats had recently abandoned his training as an apothecary surgeon at Guy’s Hospital to pursue his calling as a poet. He met Shelley at Hunt’s in December 1816 and the pair took constitutionals together.

The Heath, managed in modern times by the City of London Corporation and graced with an upper-case H it never had in the Keats era, remains agreeably untamed but lacks the foraging potential then familiar to the poets.

Keats described ‘a stretch of wild natural country with marshes and bogs, animal life, wildflowers, wild cherries, pears, cabs and bullace plums in abundance’.

In the summer of 1818, George, balding at the front almost to the crown, emigrated to America to seek his fortune as the western frontier opened

to the enterprising pioneer. Just over a month before his departure, he married 16-year-old Georgiana Augusta Wylie.

John adored his sister-in-law and told her so in a sonnet: ‘Nymph of the downward smile and sidelong glance,/ In what diviner moments of the day/ Art thou most lovely?’

The newly-weds sailed from Liverpool to Philadelphia on the Telegraph and headed to Pittsburgh. They then floated down the clear blue waters of the Ohio on a flat-bottomed keelboat to Henderson, western Kentucky.

There they lodged with John James Audubon, not yet embarked on his titanic bird-painting endeavour. Audubon and George went into partnership ferrying merchandise up and down the Ohio by steamboat.

Fanny Trollope, mother of the novelist, arrived in nearby Cincinnati at about the same time, equally anxious to take advantage of the economic opportunities touted in the British press.

She failed; success had to wait till she came home and wrote her bestseller, Domestic Manners of the Americans.

George failed too, at first; his commercial venture with Audubon effectively bankrupted him. It was a rough life. In the gambling rooms on the Louisville wharf, fighting men deployed the popular practice of ‘gouging’ – scraping out one’s opponent’s eyeball till it dangled on his cheek or pulling the eyeball off to take home and display on the mantelpiece.

Keats’s gravestone, in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery. The epitaph reads, ‘Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water’

STEVE VIDLER/ALAMY

Left: Keats House, Hampstead. Above: Keats as a young man, engraved by an unknown artist c1815

On 1st December 1818, Tom died of TB. He was 19. John stumbled down Well Walk, across the fields ‘on the cold hill’s side’ and along muddy John Street with its brick water conduit. There he let himself in to Charles Brown’s house and woke his friend, saying Tom had died at 8 o’clock.

‘Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?’ Keats wrote later in a letter.

He could not bear to tell George. He asked another friend, William Haslam, to write with the wrenching news.

The raffish Brown invited Keats to move in, asking £5 a month, including board. The house was actually half a house. In 1815, Brown and his schoolfriend Charles Dilke had taken up residence in the recently-built, Regency-style Wentworth Place, a handsome property divided down the middle with tall ground-floor windows that looked onto mulberry trees and a laurustinus hedge. This is the villa on which I daily gaze.

Brown and Keats cohabited for 17 months. They played cards, drank claret and shot at blue tits in the front garden.

Keats wrote some of his best verses as he watched his beloved heath rotate through its ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, the cold months when

‘sedge is wither’d from the lake’, and on to the ‘full-throated ease’ of the nightingale’s summer.

In the summer of 1818, John met 18-year-old Fanny Brawne, who was even shorter than his own five-foot height. Her mother, a well-off widow, had rented the Dilke side of Wentworth Place.

Fanny and John spent Christmas Day together in Hampstead, striding across the heath with widow Brawne’s yapping dog, Carlo.

‘You have absorb’d me,’ he wrote to her. ‘I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.’

Tender was the night indeed.

When Keats went to the heath without Fanny, he told her, ‘I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.’

George and Georgiana, meanwhile, had settled in Louisville, then a river town of 7,000 people in the final decade of its frontier period before it was incorporated as a city.

George bought shares in a sawmill on First Street and, in a remarkable reversal of fortune, prospered in lumber and other mercantile trades.

He built a Greek Revival house on Walnut Street (with an extensive library), fathered eight children and rose to become a pillar of the

community, occupying positions of responsibility in important civic institutions. In Louisville, I saw his name engraved on several plaques. This was quite an achievement in those tumultuous American years.

But George lost everything in the financial panic of 1837 and died four years later, aged 44. He lies in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery, under a dignified stone memorial.

John had died two decades earlier, aged 25. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die,’ he had written while sitting under the plum tree. ‘To cease upon the midnight with no pain.’

He was so sure he’d be forgotten that he asked for the epitaph, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’

John’s presence resonates in Hampstead. John Street is now Keats Grove and Wentworth Place the Keats House museum. There used to be a Keats restaurant nearby; its successor, Byron’s, didn’t last long.

A triple-fronted wealth-management firm now occupies the site, a symbol of the trajectory of Hampstead from nest of Romantics to lair of the merely rich. As for John Keats, ‘I will clamber through the clouds and exist,’ he wrote in a letter.

And he did.

Lucasta Miller’s Keats is out now The Oldie March 2021 25

On the centenary of the K1 kiosk, barrister Justin Warshaw made a spectacular discovery about the beloved K6 model

Thinking outside the phone box K

is for kiosk.

The word is borrowed from the Ottomans for the ornate but functional covered stalls found nationwide by the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign, and has been adopted by the nascent telecoms industry to describe the housing for public telephones.

The red telephone box – or, more properly, kiosk – is among the most enduring and ubiquitous of British symbols. Over 70,000 were installed, of which some 8,000 remain.

Those left still have a significant impact on our urban spaces and rural landscapes, despite having no modern purpose: you are more likely to see a defibrillator, village library or mini coffee shop in a telephone kiosk than a millennial making a call.

The most common of the survivors is the K6, designed in celebration of George V’s Silver Jubilee on 6th May 1935, but rolled out with good old-fashioned GPO efficiency ten months late – and a few weeks after the king’s funeral. The ‘K’ in the name stands for kiosk.

Five kiosks predated the K6. The first in the series, the K1, was launched in 1921. This year is the centennial of the K series, mother of all our red phone boxes.

In 1896, state control of telecommunications was gradually

introduced. By 1913, the GPO had taken over all local telephone companies – except in Hull, which remained independent until the break-up of BT’s monopoly. Telephone kiosks came in many local shapes, colours and sizes, some even with their own attendant.

The GPO had plans for a uniform red kiosk, matching their red-liveried pillar boxes, but the First World War and Spanish flu delayed the process.

The first attempt at uniformity was a pretty drab affair. The K1 looked like a cheap sentry box – a cream-painted, concrete block with a red, wooden door and red window frames. It carried no government or royal logos. It was unpopular and considered crude and old-fashioned. Many London boroughs refused permission for installation on aesthetic grounds.

The K2 was born in 1924, as the result of a competition – between two Scotsmen and one Englishman, called Scott.

The Scottish architect Sir Robert Lorimer produced a fussy design with a Chinese-inspired double roof.

The architect of the King Edward VII wing at the back of the British Museum, Sir John Burnet, proposed a kiosk which looked like a big Beaux-Arts lampshade or huge birdcage. The clear winner was Giles Gilbert Scott, architect of the

Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool, grandson of George Gilbert Scott, designer of the Albert Memorial and St Pancras Station.

Scott’s K2 is a masterpiece of industrial design. Although inspired by Sir John Soane’s tomb in St Pancras Churchyard, it is by no means Soanean or even conventionally classical. It represents an adaptation of Classicism to an unprecedented purpose and outshines its inspiration.

The acme of its melding of utility with art is the perforated Tudor Crown, symbolising authority and modernity while providing ventilation. Scott recommended that his kiosk be painted silver. The GPO ignored Scott’s recommendation; the first K2s appeared on the streets of London in 1926, painted red like the pillar boxes.

They were an instant public hit but were considered too expensive to install outside London, except in grand municipal settings.

Following his success, Scott was commissioned to design a cheaper model for the rest of the country. In 1929, the K3 was launched, a modest concrete version of the K2, with a lowered dome and no room for a crown. The one surviving K3 is next to the Parrot House at London Zoo – a rare bird indeed.

The K4 arrived in 1930, without

Flatter K6 Tudor crown; fuller K6 Tudor crown; the K2 Tudor perforated crown; K6 Scottish crown; the K6 St Edward’s Crown.

Opposite: fuller Tudor crown on a K6; Sir John Soane’s tomb in St Pancras Old Churchyard inspired the famous design 26 The Oldie March 2021

was retained, the reeded fluting removed, the central glazing panels enlarged to improve lighting and the perforated crown replaced with a cast version.

The effect, although less monumental than the K2, is more striking and reflects the developing language of modernity in Scott’s contemporaneous designs, including Battersea Power Station and Cambridge University Library.

The K6 remained in production until 1968 with only two noticeable changes.

First, in 1953, the Tudor Crown, used as the kiosk’s regnal symbol by the four preceding kings, was replaced by a St Edward’s Crown to reflect the newly crowned queen’s reversion to the insignia used by Queen Victoria.

Secondly, in 1955, following a bomb attack on a Scottish pillar box by terrorists quaintly but violently protesting against the use of ‘the Second’ to describe their first Queen Elizabeth, modifications were made to allow installation of the Scottish Crown north of the border.

Scott’s K6 was the last proper red telephone box. The K7 was an aluminium horror without a speck of red paint. A dozen were installed in London in 1962.

Production went no further.

The last hurrah for the K series entered production in 1968. The K8 was cast iron and red, but there the similarities ended.

Some 11,000 of these eyesores were installed.

Fewer than 50 survive.

The year 2020 saw a marked increase in new hobbies and home improvement. For me,

it was spring-cleaning the dilapidated and heavily graffitied K6 outside my home in Maida Vale. As I jet-washed, I was struck by the integrity and beauty of Scott’s little masterpiece.

On my lockdown perambulations, I paused at every kiosk admiring this prince of street furniture. The crowns never failed to catch my eye.

That’s when I noticed two distinct styles of Tudor Crown on the K6, my favourite kiosk. One was more threedimensional than the other, which was altogether flatter.

I wanted an answer to explain the difference. The K6 was introduced in 1936, the year of three kings. Did the change in style of Tudor Crown reflect a change in monarch observable on the crowns of pillar boxes and military ranks?

To my unbridled excitement, the distinction had not been noticed in the literature or by the experts.

To answer the question, I embarked on a steep learning curve, full of surprises. Who would guess that the majority of kiosks in central London, including the most picturesque K2s in Parliament Square, were installed in the mid-1990s in BT’s response to John Major’s ‘county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs … and old maids’ nostalgia drive?

The reintroduction of these old red kiosks into the wild has left Scottish Crowns scattered randomly on the capital’s streets.

I was schooled in the five kiosk foundries: Lion, Saracen, Carron, McDowall Steven and Bratt Colbran.

There is just one McDowall Steven left in use and only four Bratt Colbrans, one of which I’d jet-washed at the start of my journey.

A kindly telecommunications professor warned me presciently about the perils of my new obsession. One cold December morning, I was caught red-handed inspecting foundry marks on a K6 in Covent Garden by a rival lawyer. I rather hope he thinks I was collecting massage cards.

The hard work paid off. I found the answer to the conundrum. The kiosks manufactured from 1936 to 1953 by the Saracen and McDowell Steven foundries all bear the flatter Tudor Crown.

The other foundries use the more three-D version in that same period.

What an exciting discovery – made in the nick of time for the celebration of the K-series centennial.

JANSOS/ALAMY

Scott’s input. It was a monstrosity: a modified, stretched version of the K2 – a call box and mini post office with stamp machines, post box and grotesque proportions. A handful remain scattered around the country, blocking thoroughfares and obscuring views.

In 1935, the K5, a pop-up, wooden version of the K3 – for temporary use – appeared. Its use was short-lived, and no examples survive.

That same year, Scott was commissioned to produce a kiosk. With the K6, he simplified and altered the design of the K2 to create a cheaper and less obstructive version. The Soanean dome

The Oldie March 2021 27

The inspirations for the writer’s hit novel – and a new BBC series – were her father and her faithless lover. By Selina Hastings

Nancy Mitford’s sad pursuit of love

T

he Pursuit of Love, published on 10th December 1945, was an instant and phenomenal success.

If ever there were a case of the right book at the right time, this was it. Funny, frivolous and sweepingly romantic, it was the perfect antidote to the long war years of hardship and austerity, providing an undernourished public with its favourite ingredients: love, childhood and the English upper classes.

Far more even than Nancy Mitford’s previous novels, The Pursuit of Love – adapted for a new BBC series this spring – is intensely autobiographical.

The heroine, Linda Radlett, is beautiful, feckless and sensitive, one of the seven children of Matthew Alconleigh, an eccentric backwoods peer known for his defiant philistinism and the terrible force of his temper.

The hero is Fabrice – a portrait of Gaston Palewski, Nancy Mitford’s lover, a French politician, known as Colonel, down to the smallest detail, from his demands to be entertained (‘Alors, racontez!’) to his habit of bursting into little snatches of song, and even the face he makes when knotting his tie.

But the character who dominates all the others, just as he dominates his own large family, is Lord Alconleigh, Uncle Matthew, a portrait of Nancy Mitford’s father, Lord Redesdale, in all his glory, drawn with that devastating combination of caricature and unerring psychological accuracy which is one of Nancy’s greatest gifts as a novelist.

Irascible, unreasonable and goodnatured, there he is cracking his stock whips on the lawn, up at dawn and roaring at the housemaids, his eyes flashing a

28 The Oldie March 2021

furious blue as he repeats his unshakable conviction that ‘abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends!’.

There is his favourite epithet ‘sewer’, his favourite records (‘Fearful the death of the diver must be/ Walking alone in the de-he-he-he-he-epths of the sea’) and his habit of falling asleep at the dinner table.

Although in middle age she became convinced that she had never been fond of either of her parents, Nancy’s depiction of her father as Uncle Matthew is deeply affectionate. Frightening and funny, he is also endearing. Nancy was speaking her own mind in these words of Fanny’s: ‘Much as we feared, much as we disapproved of, passionately as we sometimes hated Uncle Matthew, he still remained for us a sort of criterion of English manhood; there seemed something not quite right about any man who greatly differed from him.’

Nancy wrote the novel from beginning

Fabrice (Assaad Bouab) and Linda (Lily James) in The Pursuit of Love (BBC)

to end in three months. Never before had she found a book so effortless to write, and never would she again. It was as though falling in love had given her access to a creative source of which previously she had barely skimmed the surface.

Evelyn Waugh read the manuscript, and it was he who suggested the title.

Nancy’s publisher, Hamish Hamilton, had no hesitation in declaring his enthusiasm for Pursuit (‘the word brilliant has been used’). He recognised it as a winner from the first, asking for only a few, very minor, editorial changes: ‘p. 252 – re Dunkirk. I know exactly what Linda means and I think she would probably have said it, but I have a hunch that Miss Mitford ought to tone down line 6. There are just too many people who didn’t think it Heaven.’

His faith in Linda was amply repaid.

The critics praised it – ‘Highly diverting from the first to the last page’; ‘More truth, more sincerity, and more laughter than in a year’s output of novels’. The public bought it, read it and, it sometimes seemed, talked of little else.

It was the Book Society Choice for December, with 200,000 copies sold in the first 12 months. Hamilton had told her that in the end Linda might earn her as much as £750, but she made more than that (£798) in the first three weeks, and in six months over £7,000.

From all sides the congratulations poured in.

‘Clever, clever Nancy,’ wrote John Betjeman, ‘I am proud to know you.’

Uncle Matthew, whose opinion was awaited with some trepidation, ‘sat with his nose in the book & grunted out various corrections: “Never got the stock whips in Canada, a bloke from Australia

ULLSTEIN BILD/ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY

Love in a French climate: Nancy Mitford in Paris, 1956

gave them to me” & so on. He was delighted with it but cried at the end.’

The opinion that mattered most was that of the book’s begetter. Colonel was pleased with his portrait as Duc de Sauveterre, although constrained to point out that French dukes were not in life like that. ‘He then introduced me to one & indeed he can hardly have been more like the late Harrington & less like Fabrice. Still – fiction.’

He had been flattered, too, by Nancy’s dedication ‘To Gaston Palewski’ (‘Avec la dédicace, je dois entrer dans la gloire’).

But then, at the last moment, with the book already at the printer, he panicked,

frightened that the Communist opposition would scent a scandal in his association with la soeur d’Unity Mitford, l’amie de Hitler. There was a flurried exchange of telegrams between Nancy and her publisher – ‘DELETE DEDICATION SUBSTITUTE LORD BERNERS’, ‘LEAVE GASTON

‘The event she had been dreading for nearly 30 years: Colonel was married’

IGNORE INSERTION PRINT AWAY’ – before Colonel calmed himself and allowed the dedication to stand.

‘Please never let Gerald [Lord Berners] know,’ Nancy implored Hamilton. ‘I count on you to be like a doctor & never tell tho it’s almost more than I can expect.’

Much as Nancy had been gratified by Linda’s enormous success, she could not feel happy while the cruel grey English Channel separated her (in England) from all she loved best in Paris.

Her own idea was to get back to the Colonel as quickly as possible, for not only did she miss him but she knew very well that if she were away from him for long, she would lose him.

There was that terrible roving eye of his, and she had been badly frightened by how hard she had had to work to re-establish herself after their year’s absence from each other during the war.

The Colonel was out of power now, General de Gaulle having resigned in January, and his future was uncertain.

When he did write or telephone, it always gave her joy. ‘Your darling voice & your darling hand writing within an hour of each other is almost too much happiness. And I suppose the next best thing to having one’s sentiments returned is to have them appreciated.’

But when she did not hear, she was miserable. ‘Dear darling Colonel I think of you all the time – don’t leave me for ever without a word of what is happening to you.’

She continued to live in Paris and love the Colonel for the next 25 years, until one morning in March 1969, when a small announcement appeared in the Figaro: ‘Nous sommes heureux d’annoncer le mariage de M Gaston Palewski avec Violette de TalleyrandPérigord duchesse de Sagan.’

The event that Nancy had been dreading for nearly 30 years had finally taken place: Colonel was married. It was almost literally a death blow (she died in 1973, aged 68, of the cancer that first emerged in 1968), the bitterness of it exacerbated by the fact that Gaston’s wife was a divorced woman. For years, Nancy had accepted the face-saving excuse that he could never marry her because he dare not risk his political career by marrying a divorcée.

Now retired from politics, he could marry where he chose, and his choice was not Nancy.

Selina Hastings is the author of Nancy Mitford (Random House) The Oldie March 2021 29

Letter from America

Oh, the weather outside is frightful!

New England’s snow is crisp, even and much deeper than England’s dominic green It snowed over our Massachusetts house, as it always does.

A nor’easter came in the night, and left two feet of fresh snow by dawn. The road is impassable. We can’t use the car. Not because it, too, is covered in snow, which it is. But because there’s a barrier of ice and mud in front of the drive, left by the snow plough whose apocalyptic rumbling and beeping reverse-alert woke us up in the middle of the night. Its tracks have already disappeared under the fresh fall.

I’m up to my waist in the white stuff, flailing away with a plastic shovel to clear the sidewalk.

My daughters are watching through the window. Three little faces in a row, all pointing and laughing, one of them with furry ears in African camouflage.

The eldest is back from boarding school in England and wearing a giraffe sleepsuit. She says she finds it relaxing. I wouldn’t. If I wore a giraffe suit, I’d be afraid I was about to be jumped by someone in a lion suit. Perhaps not in this weather. It’ll be a snow leopard or an Arctic lynx that takes me down.

The girls let it be known that they preferred The Old House in Massachusetts.

It was positively ancient by American standards, built in 1893, and they passed their early childhoods there. It was built entirely of wood, with superglue additions by me. It smelt wonderful in the summer, like an old ship.

But when it rained, it smelt like a pile of old wood – which it was. At the weekends, I crawled around on all fours, looking for bits of mahogany trim to glue back to the banisters and fireplaces. For a bit of peace and variety, I crawled on all fours in the eaves, servicing the monster forced-air heat and air-conditioning units by banging them with a hammer or my forehead.

The Old House stood atop the last ridge before Boston. If you felt the draught in the living room, the wind was 30 The Oldie March 2021

in the south-east; if in the dining room, the south-west. If I woke up unable to feel my face and with my teeth chattering, a nor’easter was blowing in.

I laid out torches and storm lanterns, dragged in bags of firewood, stocked up on soup and gin, went to the garage and, after loudly clearing my throat and warning the raccoons that I intended to make ingress, checked the rake.

Arctic air, moistened by its passage over the Great Lakes, paused over The Old House and dumped drifts of snow on the roof, porch and back steps, blocking the road and taking down the power lines.

The previous inmates had replaced the basement boiler and the old radiators with the heating and cooling units and a ventilation system. The heat from the units melted the snow on the roof. The meltwater ran down to the guttering and froze in the colder air, creating ice dams.

These caused the meltwater to back up until eventually it found a chink in the roofing and flooded the house. An ice dam puts on weight during a storm faster than I do, and can eventually bend and even remove your gutters.

It was a rake against time. No ordinary rake, either. The dam-buster. A rake with a telescopic series of handles, each six

feet long. My frozen fingers screwed the tip of each one into the handle of the last.

On my knees again, this time in the snow up to my neck, I assembled a 48-footlong rake handle.

You have to pick it up in the middle and, like a pole vaulter, swing it to the vertical as you run forward, and then fling it so it lands against the house.

The first time I did this, I smashed one of the bedroom windows. Once the rake is vertical, you feed its length upwards through your numb hands, your face into the blizzard as if you’re rounding Cape Horn in winter. Once it clears the gutter, you take a few steps back. You are now ready to rake the roof.

‘Arctic air, moistened by its passage over the Great Lakes, dumped snow drifts ’ The snow is fresh and fluffy up there, and it comes off easily. The rake’s head is two feet wide, and each movement of your arms clears about four feet of snow.

Thus each movement precipitates at least 16 square feet of snow, plus ice dams, loose tiles and accidental avalanches.

You have to look up when you’re doing it. From down on the ground, all you can see is feather-light snow, falling softly, softly falling till it smashes you in the face and sends you flat on your back.

The last thing you see is the little laughing faces of your daughters. The last thing you hear is a sighing sound from on high, like the breath of angels, as a massive sheet of snow slides off the roof, floats downwards like a duvet in search of its cover and buries you alive.

I do not prefer The Old House.

Dominic Green is deputy editor of the Spectator (USA)

A great British scholar depended, professionally and romantically, on Michael Mallon, an American undergraduate 47 years his junior

The ‘Pope’ and his disciple I

n my new novel, The Disciple, about a young American who contrives to meet a British art historian, there is one very true-to-life figure.

The art historian in the book, Sir Christopher Noble-Nolan, bears many similarities to the scholar of Italian Renaissance art Sir John Pope-Hennessy.

I was professionally and romantically attached to him from 1982 till his death in 1994, at the age of 80.

I first saw the scholar with whom I had long been obsessed, and whose many books I had devoured, at a lecture – on Masaccio, in New York, in January 1982.

I immediately wrote to the object of my fascination to tell him how transported I had been by his delivery. I found his appearance and demeanour positively regal and the magisterial timbre of his voice all but intoxicating.

I quoted back to him his own words: ‘Art history is a vocation, not a profession in the conventional sense.’

My letter elicited a terse postcard, inviting me to lunch when I was next in New York. John Pope-Hennessy was then Consultative Chairman of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a post he had assumed in 1977, when he resigned the directorship of the British Museum. I was in my last year at Haverford College, outside Philadelphia.

I waited for what seemed a decent interval – so as not to appear too eager.

In March, he invited me to lunch in his art-filled apartment in Park Avenue.

A month later, he invited me to dine,

32 The Oldie March 2021

again at his apartment, where I wound up spending the weekend and going with him, that Sunday, to have our palms blessed at the Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola. A week later, he wrote to me, asking me to be his research assistant and proposing that I come to Florence with him for that summer of 1982.

I was 21 when we first met; he was 68.

The divergence in age did not seem – with the intrepidness of youth – in the least odd to me. I did not consider myself a gerontophile, per se. I felt my attachment to John Pope-Hennessy to be foreordained and was prepared to do anything to establish myself as his beloved ‘disciple’.

As to our relationship, he rarely employed the word ‘homosexual’; ‘gay’ never; ‘boyfriend’ was beyond the pale – and ‘husband’ was, in those days, simply UNimaginable.

But, far from feeling ashamed of his sexual identity, John Pope-Hennessy seemed to view it as a mark of special distinction, accorded to but the happy few. One just never spoke about it.

His mother, the redoubtable Dame Una Pope-Hennessy – perhaps, the only person he ever truly loved – actually wanted both her sons, John and his younger brother, James (the biographer

‘His mother actually wanted both her sons to be homosexual’

of Queen Mary), to be homosexual. And get her wish she did!

She thought the celibate state infinitely conducive to a writer’s life, and there was no question of either of her sons not being a writer. Such reasoning was as anathema to the middle, middleclass, unintellectual, Irish Catholic milieu in which I had been raised in Philadelphia as it was revelatory to me.

Still, I lived in constant fear of not measuring up to John Pope-Hennessy’s exigent intellectual standards. His profound knowledge of music, history, literature and, of course, works of art seemed, to my young self, encyclopaedic.

I felt under a constant strain. Did I know the Köchel numbers by heart? Had I memorised the Berenson lists? ‘And is it not extraordinary that Für Elise should not have an opus number?’ he asked me, as we waited for a bus to take us to the German Institute.

‘Quite,’ I timidly replied.

Perhaps surprisingly, he adored thrillers – ‘the trashier the better’ – and could spend hours watching the tennis on the television – ‘all that undiluted competition!’

He also had an alarming habit of abruptly changing the subject of conversation in a challenging fashion.

‘Do you like Bambaia?’ he suddenly asked me the first time we dined together in a restaurant – immediately after he had been discoursing, for quite some time, on Arnold Schoenberg’s dodecaphony.

I looked down at the menu, thinking Bambaia might be some recherché, north-Italian cheese of which I had

FRANCO ORIGLIA/GETTY

Sir John Pope-Hennessy (1913-94), the Italian Renaissance scholar, at Palazzo Canigiani, his Florence home, May 1991 The Oldie March 2021 33

never heard, only to realise, later in the evening, that he had been referring to an early-16th-century sculptor from Milan – which he pronounced ‘Mill-en’.

He haughtily dismissed any subject in which he was not interested: abstract philosophical ideas, civil rights or the cinema. ‘I do not,’ he often pronounced, ‘like pictures that move!’

His eye, which he consciously trained from the time he was a young schoolboy at Downside – in the way a singer trains his voice – was legendary. ‘When a document contradicts my eye,’ he was fond of saying, ‘I simply assume that the document is at fault.’

He took me back to Florence each summer for the following four years (1983-1986), while the interminable months of September to May were spent in New York, where I was infinitely less happy.

Graduate school, at the Institute of Fine Arts, bored me. AIDS rampaged all around. I saw John Pope-Hennessy only officially, at the Metropolitan, where I had a small desk at the end of a dank aisle. Technically, I was employed, part-time, as his research assistant.

Practically, I was at his beck and call, day and night – and, socially, at the weekends. During the week, he went out to dine every night with millionaire (preferably billionaire) collectors.

Happily for me, he retired from the Metropolitan in 1986 and asked me to move with him to Florence into a large apartment, with breathtaking views, in Palazzo Canigiani near the Bardini Gardens.

He would often accompany me on my afternoon forays – mornings were always devoted to writing, on a pink Olivetti manual typewriter. He would point out some unusual or little-noticed work of art. The young Verrocchio’s polychromed marble tomb-marker of Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’, at the foot of the chancel of San Lorenzo, looked, he said, ‘like a Frank Stella avant la lettre’.

He took me to see Palazzo Pandolfini in Via San Gallo, the only example of Raphael’s architecture in Tuscany. He observed that the pages of the bible in the Virgin’s hand, in Leonardo’s Annunciation in the Uffizi, looked as if they were made of silk.

He arranged for us to visit the mile-long Vasari Corridor, home to the greatest collection of self-portraits (from Andrea del Sarto to Chagall) in the world. He even managed for us to gain access to the Chiostro Grande of Santa Maria Novella – not an easy feat, as it is now a private police academy – to see the haunting fresco of The Veil of Saint Veronica by Pontormo (pictured).

Veiled beauty: Pontormo’s Veil of St Veronica now overlooks a police academy

‘I wonder,’ he asked, ‘if Shelley had this work of art in mind when he wrote the sonnet Lift Not the Painted Veil?’

Wisely, I refrained from replying.

As he aged, religion played an increasingly important role in John Pope-Hennessy’s Florentine life.

We attended a Latin Mass, celebrated according to the Tridentine rite, every Sunday and every holy day in a small, poetically decrepit chapel in Piazza Santissima Annunziata. He was humble

– not an adjective often associated with him – when it came to his faith.

He was happy to leave the mystery of the eternal verities to more abstract minds and to concentrate himself on ritual. He wrote that he ‘could believe in anything that happened in a predella panel’, and that he ‘would not be in the least surprised to see a saint come crashing through the ceiling of my drawing room’.

His Roman Catholic observance in no way compromised his unremittingly homosexual identification.

‘Those rules,’ he would pronounce with a dismissive flick of the wrist, ‘do not apply to one.’

John Pope-Hennessy could be generous, thoughtful and, at times, riotously funny. He could also be wildly impatient, woundingly contumelious and supremely egoistical: nothing, but nothing, was to get in the way of his work.

I suppose that I was always a little afraid of him. Ductile by nature, I longed to please him.

I was often frustrated by John Pope-Hennessy’s intransigence, overwhelmed by his demands and devastated by his seemingly unlimited emotional self-sufficiency. But I never ceased – which I hope shows in my fictional portrait – to love him.

John Pope-Hennessy and Michael Mallon at Rostellan Castle, County Cork, 1988

Michael Mallon’s The Disciple is published by Zuleika (£20) The Oldie March 2021 35

Town Mouse

Want to escape Silicon Valley? Recite Betjeman tom hodgkinson

I have found an excellent new way to annoy my family.

My teenage children found my old method, baroque ukulele, exquisitely irritating. Whenever I started plucking at a sweet air, something like Pastime and Good Company by Henry VIII or My Lord Willoughby’s Welcome Home by John Dowland, I would hear loud groans and the closing of doors.

The ukulele has gone back into its case. My new antisocial, room-clearing hobby is reading poetry aloud. I’ve been encouraged in this pursuit by my friend the actor Sir Timothy Ackroyd, Bt, who trod the boards alongside Peter O’Toole in the stage play of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell in the eighties. He now earns a crust by teaching Russians to speak good English.

Reading poetry aloud is an excellent lockdown distraction. It’s something I hadn’t done since school, when each pupil would read a few lines of the poem or play under discussion. What a lovely custom!

36 The Oldie March 2021

Sir Tim and I are starting with some family favourites. My first assignment was Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Sir Tim tries to get me to imagine the scene in my mind while I’m reading.

‘I want to feel the snow!’ he says.

Truth be told, I find the poem a little boring and pointless and can’t really understand why it’s considered to be so great. I prefer the jauntier Sea Fever by John Masefield, with its bouncing refrain, ‘I must go down to the seas again!’

While intoning these words, I try to keep a percussive beat and I bring to mind the wild shores of the Isle of Eigg where I spent many holidays in my teens and twenties.

‘Reading poetry aloud is an excellent lockdown distraction’

I read both poems out loud at home.

To me, it’s a win-win: I get to fulfil long-abandoned actor fantasies and to practise – and the smaller mice get educated, even if my readings evoke their howls of derision.

I pressed on and was glad when Sir Tim set me Diary of a Church Mouse by John Betjeman. Being a mouse myself, I identified with the protagonist, though he is a rather prim and judgemental mouse, who disapproves of visits to the church by heathen, fun-loving fieldmice.

My daughter was polite enough to say, ‘Ah, sweet!’ when I read it to her in the kitchen.

The two boys prefer playing computer games. This depresses me enormously.

They spent too much time staring at screens before lockdown. Now the evil geniuses of Silicon Valley are profiting from lockdowns by mediating education and play. Oh, for the old days, when all you needed was a book, a blackboard and a piece of chalk!

I would love to gather my children round me after dinner and read stories to them by the fire. And for them to appreciate it. As it is, we depend far too much on the slick offerings of Netflix for our evening entertainment.

Would it not be better to listen to Father reading aloud and make the images in your own mind? And indulge his submerged thespian tendencies?

Even if he is not particularly talented?

I’m now hunting for other mousethemed poems. There is To a Mouse, on Turning Up in Her Nest with the Plough

by Robert Burns. The accent might prove tricky.

I ought to get some tips from my pal the strolling player Dominic West. He has kindly written the preface for the new edition of an old book of mine about country living (see page 13).

He says he was so inspired by my praise of rural life that he sold up in Shepherd’s Bush and moved to Wiltshire.

This disappointed me as I had just moved back to Shepherd’s Bush from Devon, following 12 years of keeping hens and digging potatoes.

‘Hang on, Tom,’ he said at the time.

‘You told us to move to the country and now you’re back in town!’

Still, West’s move to the country does not appear to have slowed down his career and I’m very much looking forward to seeing him as Uncle Matthew in the new TV adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love this spring.

My children will be relieved to hear that I’ll be happy to put my own poetry book aside for a few evenings and see how the pros do it.

Country Mouse

Farewell, my lovely Leyland cypress giles wood

It reads like one of Sir Iain Duncan Smith’s ‘mission statements’, but this quote from Richard Jefferies has a particular resonance for me during these testing times.

‘Human beings must be kept taut or, like a rope, they will slacken.’

There may be reasons, but no excuses, for rising at 10am and retiring at 2am.

The reason is that, with no grown-up to turn off the telly, I drift mindlessly past midnight into programmes like Aussie Gold Hunters that have me glued to the screen while the village snores.

My father had the same tendency for finding almost anything on TV in the small hours to be absolutely fascinating.

In later life, he stayed in bed until 2pm each day. Thus, in evolutionary terms, I am a superior specimen since I have four extra hours of potential productivity per day.

Only potential productivity, mind.

Whatever else my side of the family has achieved, according to Mary, we are ‘certainly very well rested’.

Gold played a significant part in my father’s life. He tormented his stockbroker at Schroders by buying and selling tiny quantities of yen and Thorn Electrical shares. But he also bought Krugerrands.

Gold has exerted a mesmeric power over men since the dawn of civilisation.

What glued me to Aussie Gold Hunters was one old prospector. He was down on his luck and about to admit financial defeat when his wonky old detector bleeped and he started to wrestle a gold nugget the size of an ostrich egg out of the unyielding, red clay, whereupon he called his long-suffering Sheila on his mobile to share with her his finding of what he called a ‘retirement nugget’.

Television gold.

But this morning, well before ten, I leapt out of bed with all the motivation I can usually summon only when catching an early flight to the Mediterranean.

‘We’re living the life we want, as long as we don’t want much’

What galvanised me was the sound of arboricide. The same hellish machine whine that will, according to experts, inevitably turn the Amazon to scrubland by 2065 was being wielded further down the row by the landlord who, as he swung his chainsaw like a Texan, was revelling with one of our neighbours in the forthcoming destruction of a spectacular example of a rogue Leyland cypress that had, in local dialect, ‘got away’.

Eavesdropping is my favoured method of finding out what’s happening in the village, since direct communication rarely delivers results.

How many times have I tried to find common ground amongst the indigeni, only to be contradicted, even on

‘Eavesdropping is my favoured method of finding out what’s happening’

uncontroversial subjects such as the weather.

I therefore hesitated to come forward to defend this most unlikely of lost causes for me – the preservation of an alien tree species. Coming as I do from what my psychoanalyst unhelpfully described as ‘withering stock’, I cannot help but admire the Leyland’s luscious, green ‘hybrid vigour’.

Then again I may simply have been suffering from an extreme case of biophilia. The word, coined by E O Wilson and unlikely to gain traction in this country, describes the innate tendency in humans to respect other life forms.

There is another factor, which is overlooked by trigger-happy chainsaw operatives: time itself. It would take only three hours to dismantle with a chainsaw an organism that has taken 30 years to grow. It seemed to me that a stay of execution was in order.

We cannot really spare this hybrid evergreen. In the absence of other life forms, the ecological niches and the dry, intricate hidden world within created by this plasticky, evergreen and stillgrowing freak of nature would not easily be replaced. In the absence of any better perches, birds resort to it in numbers – notably pigeons, doves, wrens, goldcrests and pied wagtails.

And yet, by eavesdropping on rather than joining in the conversation, I have unwittingly disqualified myself from the debate – if debate is the right word: if there’s one thing I have learnt in this, my adopted county, it is that Wiltshire villagers on the whole do not actually like trees.

Trees harbour pigeons and rooks which attack seedlings and vegetables.

Trees are a pest species. They are competition. Therefore I just skulked and stayed silent as I eavesdropped on some other neighbours chortling, ‘It’s going,’ which is local parlance for ‘It’s getting the chop.’

Later, Mary confirmed with the cottager, in whose garden it has been expanding over 20 years, that she feels no attachment, sentimental or otherwise, to the tree for the following reasons. One: ‘No grass will grow near its roots.’ And two: ‘I don’t like pigeon poo.’

If there’s one other thing I have learnt as an outsider in this close-knit village, it’s that locals detest outsiders lecturing them on how to run their affairs. Only last year, I asked a local gardener what he would do if a visiting heron started to nest in the willow tree by the village pond – an event I devoutly wished for.

Without a second thought, he said, ‘I’d cut it down.’ And he wasn’t joking.

The Oldie March 2021 37

Postcards from the Edge

My catfight with the mother of clever women’s journalism

TOBY MORISON

A young, brattish Mary Kenny admired tricky Katharine Whitehorn I remember in 1963 sitting on a street bench on the Champs-Élysées – a Sunday off from skivvying au pair duties – and reading a column by Katharine Whitehorn.

I was 18 and what she wrote in that column shaped the direction of my life. It was better, she wrote, to be a good journalist than a bad novelist. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I doubted I could succeed as a novelist. I resolved to become a journalist.

Katharine, who died in January, aged 92, was hugely, uniquely influential in her time, not just because she was witty, clever and insightful, but because she was the first woman to write the kind of column she did. She confessed to failures in an era that urged perfection, extrapolating with disarming honesty from her own life to the female condition in general.

The social context of the time was crucial: it was funny and daring to write about being a slut in an era when everyone from Woman’s Hour to Woman’s Own was fussing about wearing white gloves to a garden party.

Whitehorn launched an entire genre of journalism – the intelligent woman’s personal column. She was followed by a phalanx of copycat voices – including mine – in a range of registers, from high-minded bluestocking to the amusing malice of the Glenda Slagg genre (‘Meghan Markle? Dontcha just hate her?’)

I got to be a journalist – and to meet Katharine in person, when I was stepping out with her friend Bernard Levin. Alas, she didn’t take to me and it became obvious. She could be rather ‘Hampstead’ – with that de haut en bas air that the North London tribe does so well. But then I was a brattish 20-something, trying to be outrageous, and a completely unsuitable consort for her friend Bernard.

And, despite vaunted proclamations of ‘sisterhood’, women journalists didn’t always bond. Katharine couldn’t stand her Observer rival, my compatriot Mary Holland.

38 The Oldie March 2021

Yet I went on admiring La Whitehorn.

She was a feminist who liked men, and upheld monogamous marriage. She loved G K Chesterton. She really did have a well-furnished mind and a measured wisdom. Though I still wonder if I should have aimed at being a bad novelist.

I can see the lights of Calais from Deal – so it’s been frustrating not being able to hop across to France because of the lurgy.

But I’ve discovered a fabulous on-line French TV discussion channel called CNews: you just type the name into Google and up it pops.

At 6pm each day, there’s a scintillating sociopolitical discourse led by France’s most provocative conservative intellectual, Éric Zemmour, and moderated by the beautiful, serene presenter, Christine Kelly, originally from Guadeloupe.

The highfalutin conversation flows in the spirit of a brilliant and competitive Parisian dinner party, or an 18th-century literary salon. Yet everyone gets to talk at length, with no ‘Briefly, please – we’re running out of time’ curtailments. So stimulating! So French!

A fresh biography of the painter Francis Bacon, Revelations, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, highlights the excesses of that compelling artist given to painting screaming popes.

Bacon fans should plan to visit his reconstructed studio at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery (once COVID restrictions are lifted). His heir, John Edwards, bequeathed every paintbrush, sketchbook, catalogue and slashed canvas, and his cluttered mess of 7,000 items, to the Irish gallery.

The Francis Bacon Studio is the filthiest, untidiest and most chaotic space you could ever behold, crammed with dust and detritus. I love it. Just as the contestants on Jeremy Kyle confessional TV make one feel positively normal by contrast, the Bacon studio makes clutterbugs feel quite organised. It’s a wonderful antidote to the Marie Kondo nostrums of obsessive tidiness.

Bacon was born in 1909 in Dublin’s Baggot Street and grew up in a household that specialised, Edwardian-style, in 11-course meals. He left Ireland at 16 – but Ireland, along with Soho, co-claims him.

I mentioned recently that during COVID times our local shops had taken to using the adverb-less Americanisation ‘Shop safe’.

The Belfast-based academic and critic John Wilson Foster tells me that he came to realise, when teaching in the States, that Americans despise adverbs, which are seen as feminine: ‘The “-ly” ending is girly, weak and, well, British.’

This hostility to adverbs complements their dislike of the inactive: ‘Thus the British “birdwatching” had to become “birding”, by masculine analogy with hunting, shooting and fishing.’

I have no great objections to Americans’ using language according to their own cultural perceptions, but must the practice always cross the Atlantic? Do we consider adverbs ‘girly’?

By the way, I have a lovely addition to my collection of German portmanteau words: vergangenheitsbewältigung. It means ‘overcoming the past’. Or perhaps, as Katharine Whitehorn put it, in the title of her memoir, ‘selective memory’.

What do heralds do? Patric Dickinson, Clarenceux King of Arms, retiring after 52 years at the College of Arms, explains

Hark! The herald sings I

t’s not every teenager who gets to meet James Bond within three days of starting his first job, but that was my happy experience when I was taken on as a research assistant at the College of Arms in October 1968.

Preparations were under way for the film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in the course of which Bond impersonates a herald. The director of the film, along with the actor playing Bond (George Lazenby) and the actor playing a real herald (George Baker, better known for his later incarnation as Inspector Wexford), visited the College for a meeting with the then York Herald in the room in which I sat. An exciting moment for a geeky school-leaver.

At the time I had no idea that Rodney Dennys, the other herald for whom I initially worked, had himself been in MI6 for 20 years. Nor had I the faintest suspicion that my temporary employment at the College would last for more than half a century. After working there for 10 years, I eventually became a herald myself in 1978.

When asked what heralds actually do, I usually produce the rough and ready reply: ‘We design coats of arms, trace family trees and dress up as playing cards twice a year.’ And that in a nutshell is how my time at the College has been spent.

Heraldry itself dates from the 12th century, when the emblems appearing on shields in battles and tournaments came to symbolise not just the individuals concerned but also their families. Crests (worn on helmets) similarly became part of the heraldic trappings.

The word ‘crest’ is frequently misused to denote any heraldic motif, but properly speaking describes the device that is placed above a shield. As a colleague of mine put it in a letter to the Times in 40 The Oldie March 2021

1994, ‘to talk about the whole coat of arms as a crest is like calling a house a chimney’.

From early on, heralds monitored and recorded the use of coats of arms. They indeed gave their name to heraldry rather than the other way round. Medieval heralds had a range of duties, organising tournaments, acting as messengers and participating in royal ceremonies. Coats of arms were only one of their concerns but, after the royal heralds were first incorporated by Richard III in 1484, heraldry gradually became their principal raison d’être.

Since 1555, the English heralds have had their home in the City, just south of St Paul’s Cathedral. The mansion granted to them in that year by Mary I became known as the College of Arms, the name given both to the building and to the corporate body of 13 officers of arms. The original structure was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, and the present College was built on the same site between 1671 and 1688, a handsome red-brick building which provides a vivid contrast to the modernity that surrounds it.

The 13 officers are known generically as heralds but are split into ranks – three Kings of Arms, six Heralds and four Pursuivants.

I was appointed Rouge Dragon Pursuivant in 1978, being awarded the princely sum of £13.95 a year by the Queen. In my current – final – role as Clarenceux King of Arms, my remuneration has been rather more substantial, fully £20.25 a year.

These official stipends (last increased in James I’s reign and reduced to their present levels by William IV in the 1830s) are obviously not sufficient to keep body and soul together, and we derive our livelihoods from our professional earnings. What the College perhaps most resembles is a set of barristers’ chambers, each of us running his

own practice in heraldry and genealogy while at the same time having a shared responsibility for the fabric of the College building and its records and collections.

Much of the business arises from generally addressed enquiries, most of which arrive by email via the College website (www.college-of-arms.gov.uk). But the College still opens its doors to the public between 10am and 4pm, Monday to Friday, and during those hours the officer on duty is available to deal with personal callers (or will be, once COVID has been vanquished).

Every year, well over 100 new coats of arms are formally granted by the Kings of Arms, who act under royal authority. Most of the grants are made to individuals living in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (there is a separate heraldic establishment in Scotland), but arms are also granted to a wide range of corporate bodies.

The current cost of a personal grant of shield and crest is £6,700 (the grant fees

JOHN BOWLING

providing the bulk of the College’s income), the end result being a handsome illuminated document on vellum. Once granted, a coat of arms is borne in

Opposite: Patric at Diamond Jubilee service, St Paul’s, 2012. Top: College of Arms, 1688 (St Paul’s behind).

Above: George Lazenby, College interior and James Bond’s coat of arms. Left: Harry Secombe’s arms

perpetuity by the grantee’s descendants.

Not everyone is considered eligible for a grant. Some record of public service or professional attainment is normally required, but this is very broadly interpreted.

It should indeed be emphasised that heraldry is by no means the preserve of the titled and famous, although my own clients have included three celebrated knights of the realm – Harry Secombe, Cliff Richard and Elton John – and no less a personage than The Oldie’s January cover girl, Dame Edna Everage, whose shield displays a pair of gladioli and a depiction of Sydney Opera House and is supported by a shark and a possum wearing Dame Edna spectacles.

Dealing with Sir Harry Secombe, all-round entertainer and former Goon, was a particular delight. Secombe’s armorial achievement is full of the punning imagery that has long been a feature of heraldry. The shield contains wavy blue lines between two green flaunches, which suggest respectively the sea and a valley (or combe), thus providing a play on his name.

A similar service is performed by the mermaid in the upper part of the shield, drawing a comb through her hair. She is balanced by a triton, shown blowing a

conch, in allusion to Secombe’s singing skills. The swan in the crest adds a further musical reference; in association with the marine aspects of the shield, it also gives a nod to his birthplace, Swansea.

Rather more straightforward is the sword, indicative of his military service (he joined up as a regular soldier before the war) and his work for the Army Benevolent Fund, which helped earn him his knighthood. No explanation is needed for the mask of comedy tied to the sword. The motto, GO ON, is deliberately ambiguous.

Brief reference should be made to the royal ceremonies in which heralds take part, wearing their colourful tabards – sleeveless coats displaying the royal arms.

Almost every year they are on parade for the State Opening of Parliament and the Garter Service at Windsor. There are also a number of one-off events that they attend in full fig, most notably state funerals and coronations. This is probably the most glamorous and certainly the best-known activity of the heralds.

Now, some 52 years after my encounter with 007, I am finally hanging up my tabard. It has been a fairly offbeat career, I freely admit, but not an entirely disagreeable way of spending one’s life.

The Oldie March 2021 41

Mary Killen

STEVE WAY

I worship my older, wiser friends

In January, I googled ‘synonym for gerontophile’.

I was writing about the death of Butch Stewart, the Jamaican founder of the Sandals chain of Caribbean resorts, at the age of 79. He was a much-loved older friend. And I wondered whether there was a name for gerontophiles like me.

We don’t so much ‘target’ or ‘groom’ people from older age groups. But we find that, once a relationship with an older friend has been established, the friendship is particularly rewarding.

What, I wondered, is a cohort of fellow oldie-loving enthusiasts called?

Warning: don’t google ‘synonym for gerontophile’. The computer misunderstood and now I’m being bombarded with graphic images. I haven’t looked too hard at the bombardments – I’ve glimpsed naked crepiness and one link was tagged ‘find local older sex contacts’. That wasn’t what I wanted at all.

Perhaps I should call myself a maturity enthusiast as I pay homage to my 20-year friendship with Butch. As a grown-up playmate, he had multiple advantages – lovely houses and boats which he took delight in sharing. But it was his very oldness that appealed to me most.

As with vintages of wine, there are also vintages of people and it’s an 42 The Oldie March 2021

uncomfortable truth that some vintages are superior to others. Those friends who grew up when there was only organic food to eat and few screens to distract the brain and stunt the imagination are, I’m afraid, simply better value.

Twenty years ago, writer Paul Johnson observed, ‘We are becoming less intelligent, and the machines help us kid ourselves.’ Because we can now look everything up, we aren’t using large parts of our brain, specifically our memory.

As Paul said, ‘Huge stores of knowledge in the brain, on instant tap, make possible the creative connections which are one symptom of high intellectual performance.’

The later you came to screen life, the better your conversational abilities.

Conversation with oldies is more rewarding. You know they’re listening when you talk, not scrolling through their iPhone. They understand subtlety and nuance – they don’t need to add a smiling emoji to a text or write ‘haha!’.

And the word ‘speakeasy’ should be

‘You know oldies are listening when you talk, not scrolling through their iPhone’

repurposed to denote premises where you can go ungagged by the modern thought police.

Romance is another matter. I haven’t had an older boyfriend myself but I once wrote a double-pager in the Telegraph about five beautiful girls in their twenties. They were all going out with grumpy old men in their sixties and seventies. The men weren’t rich – what was the incentive?

The girls were unanimous. These older men had done things in life, overcome obstacles, and been cold, hungry and fearful. They had hinterlands and exquisite manners. In their company the girls felt feminine and Audrey Hepburn-like. Boys their own age saw them as competitors, rather than fragile flowers to be idolised and protected.

A new Mills & Boon book has been ‘written’ by Sarah, Duchess of York.

Mills & Boon publish, worldwide, 1,500 new titles a month, featuring manly, physically strong, gruff-voiced, older male leads and delicate, shrinkingviolet female leads. There’s clearly still a taste for this sort of thing.

I’ve had many vintage friends in my life, most of them now dead. It will be hard for me to recruit any more – the numbers of people older than me are diminishing. How I’ll miss my oldie friends.

Profitable Wonders

Monstrous cuckoo in the nest james le fanu

‘Is there anything more extraordinary in the natural world?’ asks Nick Davies, Professor of Behavioural Ecology at Cambridge.

Standing on a ditch bank in the Fens, he parts the reeds with his long hazel stick and recognises the neat, woven cup of a warbler’s nest.

‘Sprawled on top, its wings dangling over the rim on either side, sits an enormous cuckoo chick,’ he says.

Before long, its reed-warbler ‘foster mother’ arrives with a bright blue damselfly in her bill. Minuscule in size compared with the squatter in her nest, she responds to its frenzied calling, bending deep into its mouth, her head nearly engulfed, to deliver her offering.

‘Another twitch of the reeds, and she slips away in search of another meal,’ says Professor Davies.

This ‘monstrous outrage on maternal affection, against the dictates of nature’, as the Reverend Gilbert White of Selborne judged it, could scarcely be more extraordinary. The reed warbler is after all a most resourceful and intelligent creature – as it has to be in making its annual 5,000-mile journey from its African winter home, navigating by the stars and memorising the landmarks that guide it to its territorial breeding grounds in the Fens.

How almost inconceivable, then, to human understanding at least, that she should be deceived into so grotesque a parody of motherhood. Almost blithely, she tolerates the destruction of her own offspring, devoting all her energy instead to nurturing this alien intruder.

This is a complex, fascinating (if ultimately unfathomable) story, painstakingly unravelled by Professor Davies and others over the past 30 years.

Much was already known, thanks mainly to the efforts of Edgar Chance. A wealthy businessman and assiduous egg-collector, he filmed, for the first time, the cuckoo in flagrante delicto, as it were.

The silent, 12-minute, black-and-

white documentary, with captioned commentary, opens with Mr Chance in tweed cap and plus fours clambering into a specially constructed hide.

Then we see a cuckoo who, the caption tells us, had the previous year laid 25 eggs, all in different meadow-pipit nests. She swoops down, steals one of the pipit’s eggs, lays one of her own in its place, and departs – all in a matter of seconds.

Twelve days later, we see the recently hatched cuckoo chick, naked and still blind, manipulating one of the pipit’s eggs into a hollow in her back and pushing it over the nest rim. He then turns his attention to the two already hatched pipit chicks and disposes of them in a similar manner. His foster mother returns and settles down to keep him warm, oblivious of her own young writhing just an inch or so away. In the final sequences, he grows ever larger, dwarfing his hard-working foster parents who must stand on his back to feed him.

‘The cuckoo’s secret,’ notes Professor Davies ‘ranks as one of the greatest feats of ornithology.’ He has elaborated on his findings in a protracted series of experiments, superbly described in his book Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature.

The best-known of its many deceptive stratagems is in laying an egg coloured similarly to that of the host who will rear her young.

This presupposes the seemingly implausible necessity for there to be several different races of cuckoo – warbler-cuckoos with green speckled

‘The cuckoo’s secret ranks as one of the greatest feats of ornithology’

Natural cheat: the cuckoo

eggs, pipit-cuckoos (brown), wagtailcuckoos (greyish white) and so on.

Investigating this further, Professor Davies placed green, brown and white model eggs in reed-warbler nests. Sure enough, the reed warbler ejected any discordant egg, retaining only the green one.

The stealth and speed with which the cuckoo lays her egg would suggest the reed warblers’ awareness of her extended presence might alert them to the danger of being victimised. Professor Davies confirmed this by placing a taxidermist’s mount of a cuckoo in close proximity to a nest in which he had placed a mimic green egg. This too was rejected.

It is one thing for the reed warbler to be deceived by an egg similarly coloured to its own. It’s quite another for it to behave as if there is nothing amiss in nurturing the cuckoo chick for several weeks. Here the deception is not visual but vocal. The foster parents respond to the chick’s characteristic loud and demanding calls, but not to those of a blackbird temporarily substituted in their nest.

This brief account can only hint at the panoply of subtle ploys with which the cuckoo and her chick perpetrate their crime. One might reasonably wonder at how they synergistically arrived at so monstrous a confidence trick ‘against the dictates of nature’.

The Oldie March 2021 43

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Let us pray for an end to online lessons What makes a school a school?

It is a classic question to ask students you are trying to make think before they speak. Is it the buildings? The students?

The teachers?

If we swapped all our teachers with the teachers across the town, would we still be the same school?

Their unlined brows furrow and voices become shrill until someone says, ‘Miss, you’re making my brain hurt,’ and you know your job is done.

But now it’s my brow that’s furrowing.

What is a school, in fact? Because, today, it isn’t anything I’ve ever known before.

The car park is fuller than it was in the first lockdown, but no one is to be seen.

Those teachers who are in (and I prefer to do my online lessons from school rather than home – so I go in for at least half of every day) are lurking in their teaching rooms, talking to blank screens.

Unlike in private schools, where the teachers and students see one another’s faces, our students are allowed to see only the PowerPoint on the screen. A job that was more about human interaction than any other job I have had is now solitary enough for St Simeon Stylites to have considered it a useful career change.

Before Christmas, when the Government was threatening to sue any school that closed, we hoped for the best.

But, on the last day of term, the head

called an emergency meeting. He had not heard from the Government, he said, but the BBC was saying we couldn’t reopen after the holiday. Only Year 11 – the exam year – would be back in the first week.

The students would still be sitting their GCSEs, and they needed teaching.

He promised us that heads across Somerset were united in their determination that staff would not be asked to test students on their return.

We would take the first day of term to organise ourselves, and Year 11 would come back on the Tuesday, with the rest of the school the week after. We duly came back – only to be told that we were not reopening at all.

Not long after, we were told that exams were, after all, to be cancelled. It’s all a bit like the hokey cokey, but without the fun.

So what next? I am lucky in that my Year 11 is a top set, determined to do well.

They turn up to the online lessons, ask questions and submit work.

But I still had to read them the riot act as the work became more and more sketchy. I would be awarding them GCSE grades, I told them, but I would not be giving them exams to sit. There would be a difference. The pressure on them is almost more than when they were expecting to sit exams. Every single piece of work will be part of my evidence for their grades. They cannot afford to slip up.

And neither can I. I hadn’t realised how much of the energy of teaching comes from the students. How much you pick up from a silence, a shift in body language or a raised eyebrow. You know which students need help before they ask – when you can see them. At the moment we are studying poetry but, with most of them shy and mute on the end of the line, they are being taught by lecture.

I’ve never been one for visual aids – asking students to make a plasticine model of the trenches so that they can understand Wilfred Owen – but this is going to the other extreme.

Meanwhile, my Year 10s – a second set – are being taught Jekyll and Hyde. I haven’t even had time to get to know them.

The whole year-group was out as a result of a student with COVID. By the time they came back, we had changed the settings (away from mixed-ability classes).

They were barely back in school before we closed again. If it is hard to teach children you know at a distance. It is immeasurably harder to teach children whose trust you have not yet gained, who haven’t yet become used to your ways.

So where next in this hokey cokey? We are beginning to be threatened with an even longer closure. More than anything in the world, the children need school.

But all we can do, from the top of our Stylites pillars, is pray.

Quite Interesting Things about … March Sir Mo Farah, Sir Roger Bannister, Sir Chris Hoy and Sir Steve Redgrave were all born on 23rd March.

The best time to find money on the streets of New York City is 18th March: the day after St Patrick’s Day. Owing to heavy snow in 1891, the 3pm train service from Paddington to Plymouth left 44 The Oldie March 2021

on 9th March and arrived on 13th March.

In March 2014, a python in Australia swallowed a chihuahua and found

itself chained to a kennel.

In March 2003, the Ocean Journey aquarium in Denver, Colorado, was bought by a seafood restaurant.

On 16th March 1945, bombs dropped by the British on Würzburg, Germany, destroyed 90 per cent of the buildings in 20 minutes.

On 24th March 2015, the temperature in Antarctica was higher than in Madrid, Malta and Marrakesh.

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

Long live Henry VI His life was a disaster. But, on his 600th anniversary, Benedict King hails a holy king whose great achievements prosper today

T

his is quite a year for Henry VI. For 21st May marks the 550th anniversary of his death in the Tower of London, aged 49, in 1471. And 6th November will be the 600th anniversary of the birth, in 1421, of the most pitiful of English monarchs.

He came to the throne a baby and was, as Sellar and Yeatman noted in 1066 and All That, a ‘weak king’ but a ‘good man’.

Although his life was personally a tragedy and politically an unparalleled disaster, he achieved more than his father, Henry V – whose military conquests and the great monasteries he raised to commemorate them were rapidly sunk in the sands of time.

Aged ten, Henry VI was crowned Henri II of France in Notre-Dame. But, thanks to Joan of Arc and gunpowder, by 1452 all his French possessions were lost.

Henry never visited France after his coronation. If he’d had his way, he’d probably have made peace in the 1430s.

His apparent indifference to his French inheritance was his undoing, but it exhibited a realism wholly lacking among England’s bellicose baronage.

After Henry VI, English territorial claims in France were never seriously revived.

Henry’s interests were religious and cultural. As a teenager, he joined a monastic fraternity and later, visiting Bath, was shocked to see men and women bathing together naked. In his late teens, he conceived of the idea of building a school in the lee of Windsor Castle, where he had been born.

The College at Eton, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was to educate 70 poor scholars – twinned with a sister college, King’s College, Cambridge.

He used to visit Eton, encouraging the boys to be good, to work hard and not to visit his corrupt court at Windsor. At King’s, Henry took a keen interest in the building of the chapel – one of the world’s most beautiful buildings.

Henry’s other great achievement was dynastic. With the Yorkist jackals circling,

Modern monarch: Henry VI (1421-71)

he raised his Tudor half-brother, Edmund, to the Earldom of Richmond and married him off to the greatest heiress in the land, Lady Margaret Beaufort, on whom the Lancastrian claim to the throne ultimately devolved.

Their son, Henry VII, became the first Tudor monarch.

The Tudors were very conscious of their dynastic and cultural debt to Henry.

As well as King’s, Henry was closely involved in the founding of Christ’s College, Cambridge. His feisty wife, Margaret of Anjou, founded Queens’ College. Lady Margaret vowed to continue his pious projects. She further endowed Christ’s and founded St John’s College.

Henry VIII, as he finished building the chapel at King’s, liberally adorned it with the interlocking heraldic devices of Richmond, Tudor, Beaufort and Lancaster.

Henry subsequently founded Trinity College, Cambridge. This munificent royal patronage turned Cambridge from a relative backwater into an international centre for humanism, attracting the likes of Erasmus to study there.

Tudor England also emulated Henry VI in founding grammar schools, many of them, particularly under Edward VI, royal foundations. A popular cult of sainthood grew up around Henry VI after his murder in the Tower in 1471, with

many attested miracles. Henry was murdered in the Tower of London on the orders of his successor, Edward IV, possibly by Edward’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III. Under Henry VII and Henry VIII, strong, official representations were made to the papacy to canonise Henry VI. Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey was built to hold Henry VI’s remains and allow pilgrims to visit his shrine and pray for his assistance. The royal saint was to bind the Tudors, God and the English people in a triple lock.

But, as in life, so in death, Henry VI came close to the pinnacle of greatness only to have it snatched away by fate – this time in the shape of Henry VIII’s break with Rome. And he was buried not in Westminster Abbey, but in Chertsey Abbey before being moved to St George’s Chapel, Windsor.

Contemporary Britain should be proud of Henry VI. He was committed to educating the poor and building world-class universities. He was also good for the union: almost uniquely among medieval English monarchs, he never led an army against Ireland, Scotland or Wales.

He is also the model post-Brexit prince. He married a French princess and never attacked France. He welcomed foreign knights into the Order of the Garter – constructive friendship without joint institutions.

Culturally, he can appeal to us all. He was a religious and moral conservative, but a peacemaker. In the early 1450s, under huge political strain, he lost his mind. He never completely recovered, spending much of his last decade a lonely and confused prisoner in the Tower.

And he’s a monarch for the House of Windsor. Like them, he reigned without ruling. Perhaps the Duke of Sussex, his Old Etonian namesake, with his interest in mental health and difficulties with the crushing burdens of royal duty, could lead this year’s anniversaries of his birth and death.

The Oldie March 2021 45

sister teresa

Death shall have no dominion on earth ‘He will wipe away all tears from their eyes’ (Revelation 21:5).

This assurance of comfort is for me one of the most inspiring lines in the Bible. It first appears, worded slightly differently, in Isaiah 25:8: ‘The Lord will wipe away the tears from every cheek.’

The prophet aims to convince us of God’s conquering of mourning, and looks forward to the breakthrough that is Christ’s resurrection.

I tend to shy away from the Book of Revelation because it is so impenetrable and so very strange. It is full of a sulphurous anger which, even with the help of a perceptive commentary, never takes me anywhere I want to be.

But this statement in the book’s penultimate chapter could not be simpler or more supportive. In spite of all the terrible things that happen to us, and all the ghastly surprises that come our way

with their deplorable timing, there is a guarantee that, at the last, there will be a complete reversal of all that has hurt us.

We shall find life and love and be what we are supposed to be, and have what we were always supposed to have – and that is total and unclouded happiness.

This is impossible to take in with the mind, but somewhere, in the peculiar depths of our being, something, sometimes, stirs.

We all experience a cold and bottomless helplessness when faced with the devastating grief of a friend, and we know that it can be best to say nothing.

If we do say or write something, we should ask ourselves why we are doing this. It is more complicated than our wanting to express affection and sympathy. I think we want something for ourselves: to feel good, kind and sensitive.

But are we entitled to any self-

satisfaction when faced with the terrible pain someone else is suffering? This is one of the mysteries of God at his most incomprehensible, and somehow we have to learn to endure it.

The Book of Revelation tells us of a ‘new heaven and a new earth’. There is no suggestion here that heaven is first-class and earth rather shoddy, uninteresting and second-rate.

Earth is neither destroyed nor lost but, like us, will become its very best – a best that is at present impossible for us to imagine or to fathom, but ‘where there will be no more mourning or sadness’.

‘Death was never of God’s fashioning; not for his pleasure does life cease to be; what means his creation, but that all created things should have being? Think not that mortality bears sway on earth; no end nor term is fixed to a life well lived’ (Book of Wisdom 1:13-14).

Funeral Service

Lady Tebbit (1934-2020) The Dean of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, the Very Rev Joe Dawes, conducted a beautifully moving service for Margaret Tebbit, wife of former Tory Cabinet Minister Norman Tebbit.

He was assisted at the cathedral in Bury St Edmunds by James Knowles, a lay preacher who often visited Lord and Lady Tebbit in the long years following the 1984 IRA Brighton bomb, when they were both badly injured.

Knowles led the prayers.

The Rev Jonathan Aitken gave the first reading from 1 Corinthians: ‘If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels…’ He also gave a eulogy for Lady Tebbit.

As a young Tory backbencher in the 1970s, Aitken used to help Norman Tebbit when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister. Aitken later set up a trust fund for Lady Tebbit when the Brighton bomb left her in a wheelchair.

46 The Oldie March 2021

Socially distancing, the cathedral choir sang The Lord’s My Shepherd, I'll Not Want, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, Abide with Me and I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes Unto the Hills.

The Tebbits’ younger son, William, gave the second reading, from Paul Simon’s 1970 song Bridge over Troubled Water.

Their older son, John Tebbit, said his generation all knew his mother longer post-Brighton than pre-Brighton.

He said his mother had to be tough; a remarkable lady she was, he said, an amazing mother who taught them how to cook, to garden – and never to judge a book by its cover.

She treated them all as individuals. As

an ex-nurse, she was gifted in the art of rough sympathy.

‘A golden thread running through Margaret’s life was the spirit of the words she used in her acclaimed 1995 broadcast on Desert Island Discs,’ said Aitken. ‘“Whatever happens, you just have to get on with it!”’

In its understated way, ‘just getting on with it’ was Margaret’s mantra of courage.

‘It symbolised the remarkable resilience which she used to cope with the challenges of her life, especially after the Brighton bombing,’ said Aitken.

‘So today let us take some grateful glimpses of the way Margaret “just got on with it”. Always remembering that her strengths were built on the rock of her marriage to Norman and their family life together with John, Alison and William plus their five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.’

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Florence Nightingale’s view on the virus More people are dying – thanks to COVID and delayed operations theodore dalrymple

When you are ill, any delay in medical attention, even if you suspect that it might be of little avail, is experienced as worse than an inconvenience. It is an insult. It confronts you with the fact that you are not as important to others as you are to yourself.

The COVID epidemic has so concentrated medical endeavour that all else, including surgical treatment, seems to have gone by the wayside.

The scale of the devastation is captured by a comparison of the number of appointments for operations in England and Wales in April 2019 with the figures for April 2020 (when the first wave was at its height).

In April 2019, there were 2,302,314 operations scheduled, of which 2.7 per cent were cancelled. In April 2020, there were 868,711 operations scheduled, of which 13.7 per cent were cancelled.

Does this translate into deaths? Look at the Nightingale diagram of total deaths (www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19florence-nightingales-diagrams-fordeaths). That’s the brilliant graphic

method devised by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War. The diagram allows you to see at a glance the mortal effects of an epidemic.

It shows a large excess of deaths from 29th March to 7th June 2020 compared with the previous five years. The number of deaths began to rise again, though not yet to the same extent, on 18th October.

It has not yet fallen to normal – and seems unlikely to for some little while.

The Nightingale diagram, which includes all deaths, does not tell you the cause of excess deaths, of course, nor the age of the people who died in excess of the usual numbers. But generally it is assumed that the excess was caused both mainly and directly by the viral infection.

Delay in treatment of other conditions may have contributed – though, as yet, it is impossible to say to what degree.

People with potentially fatal but treatable diseases may have hesitated to go to hospital for fear of catching COVID. Then there is the possibility that delays to surgery, particularly cancer surgery, and additional treatments for

cancer (radiotherapy, chemotherapy etc), will have added to the overall mortality.

A recent meta-analysis of the effect of delay in treating seven types of cancer (44 per cent of all cancers worldwide), published in the British Medical Journal, suggested that even quite short delays in the treatment of cancer led to an increased death rate.

For example, a 12-week delay in the treatment of breast cancer would lead, according to the authors’ estimates, to an additional 1,400 deaths a year in Britain – where, incidentally, rates of survival from cancer are already notoriously lower than those in most ‘advanced’ countries.

It is a delay not only in operations but also in subsequent additional treatments that leads to increased death rates. Of course, a correlation of delay with death rates does not prove causation, but it does seem that the longer the delay, the higher the death rates.

The overall figures of delays to operations do not tell us what proportion were to treatment for cancer rather than for non-fatal conditions such as osteoarthritis of the hip.

The swift return of death rates to normal when the first wave of the epidemic was over suggests that the great majority of the excess deaths were from COVID, rather than from delayed operations or other treatments. The number of operations did not return to normal between the two waves of COVID. One small lesson is that while the NHS proposes, it is circumstance that disposes. The handbook to the NHS constitution says: ‘All patients who have an operation cancelled … for non-clinical reasons [are] to be offered another binding date within 28 days, or the patient’s treatment [will be] funded at the time and hospital of the patient’s choice.’

This is bureaucratic hubris at its purest.

The Oldie March 2021 47

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

Pont’s last picture SIR: The Oldie article about Graham Laidler, aka Pont (December issue), mentioned his friendship with my father, John, dating back to their schooldays together.

I thought you might be interested to see some photographs of their motoring holidays through the years.

Unfortunately, there’s only one of him in action, sketching.

The 1940 photo (top left) would be the last one before he died at 32; ironically, perhaps, I think this was the holiday when my father met my mother, Sheila.

I don’t think I ever appreciated how influential Pont was – so your article was illuminating in that regard.

James Fenwick, Terrington, York

Le Carré’s cheeky mistake SIR: I just cannot resist joining in the pleasant memories of a favourite thriller-writer and a charming man.

While reading Our Kind of Traitor in 2013 I noticed an understandable and amusing error. He described two of the protagonists engaging in a traditional Russian hug – their cheeks meeting ‘left to right, then right to left’.

I wrote to David Cornwell via his publisher and pointed out (after congratulating him on another wonderful story) that the manoeuvre he had described was impossible for two people face to face. It should have been ‘left to left, then right to right’ or vice versa. I

‘Sure, it’s been a frustrating year. But the scary thing is that, in a few years, it will be the good old days’ 48 The Oldie March 2021

Clockwise from top left: Pont, Sheila Fenwick and her sister, Joyce, 1940.

John Fenwick and Pont, 1927. Pont sketching on Loch Tay, 1927

suggested rather naughtily that he might like to check the truth of this with his secretary.

Back came a very charming reply from his assistant, Vicki Phillips, with thanks on the author’s part and an assurance that future versions, both here and overseas, would be corrected accordingly. ‘(No demonstration necessary)’, she added.

Have I bought a later printing to check? I have not. A gentleman wouldn’t dream of such a thing!

Bill Holloway, Shurdington, Gloucestershire

Bogarde, the good soldier SIR: Roger Lewis (February issue) must have nodded off if he took from my biography of Dirk Bogarde that the latter’s ‘actual military career amounted to his guarding an empty hotel on the front at Worthing’. I allotted 57 pages to the five years Bogarde spent in the Army from 1941.

Admittedly Derek Van den Bogaerde, as he then was, never engaged in combat, but as an Intelligence Officer he was with Monty’s 2nd Army as it liberated Europe; he then went on to India and finally to Java as ADC to Maj-Gen Douglas Hawthorn, commanding officer of 23rd Indian

Division, while it tried to sort out the unholy mess that followed the surrender of the Japanese forces.

Mr Lewis is, however, quite justified in citing the conclusion I drew – from persuasive sources – that Bogarde had not seen at first hand the horrors of Bergen-Belsen.

Given the prominence of the Holocaust in his later career as a writer, this mattered.

A few years after the book was published in 2004, I was contacted by a Canadian author who had discovered a piece of testimony suggesting that Bogarde had indeed ventured inside the gates of the camp, albeit only briefly and not on official duty, but, with two colleagues, out of curiosity.

I duly revised my opinion in an article for the Bogarde estate’s elaborate website, www.dirkbogarde.co.uk. It was gratifying to do so in time for the centenary of a uniquely accomplished actor and writer whom I am proud to remember as a friend.

John Coldstream, London NW8

Hugh Johnson’s hot toddy SIR: Mulled wine needn’t be red. I’ve drunk hot Moselle and sugar from a kettle in a Bernkastel vineyard at six on a

frosty morning, picking frozen grapes for Eiswein. To little effect, I’m afraid.

I just love your mag.

Hugh Johnson, London W8

the theme of the programme, although, to be fair, the title The Avengers doesn’t convey much either.

Yours, Alan Mordey, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire

Back to school, Valerie!

SIR: Great mag – terrible howler from Valerie Grove. I suppose it’s the Old Un’s ageing shoogly brain (February issue) that’s responsible but it struck me, when I said it to myself, that 85p is actually 17/- and not 16/6.

I’ve checked it by long division and also on my newfangled pocket calculator and can confirm the result. It’s still outrageous, mind you. If it was intended, please continue inserting these bloopers as it keeps me on my rickety toes.

Kind regards, Gordon Wemyss, Leswalt, Stranraer Valerie Grove replies: I confess: not only did I fail to get O-level maths, but my school did not even allow me to sit the exam! Mea culpa.

Betjeman’s schooldays

‘And I’m doing that bloody online assertiveness-training course – OK?’

go inside the gate – so had to be content with a less adequate view from outside the railings. As you can see from the vans, the premises are now used by the Cambridge library service and the original sliding classroom ‘walls’ have been replaced with windows.

Margaret Pearson, Reading, Berkshire

SIR: Mary Kenny remembers (February issue) her husband’s time at Marlborough College in 1942 when younger masters had gone off to the war and been replaced by older men who had come out of retirement.

She has probably heard how, in an even earlier generation, one of John Betjeman’s contemporaries addressed an older master thus: ‘Do you tickle your arse with a feather, Mr Purdick?’

‘What?’

‘Particularly nasty weather, Mr Purdick.’

‘Oh.’ Yours faithfully, Charles Halliday, Burghill, Hereford

Wilfrid Hyde-White’s wife

The rich wives’ club

SIR: I very much enjoyed Simon Williams’s recollections of Wilfrid HydeWhite (February issue). My erstwhile cabaret partner, Sheridan Morley, used to recall, as part of our show together, that he once asked Wilfrid, then living in Palm Springs, California, ‘Why have you, the most English of men, retired abroad?’

Wilfrid replied, ‘Two reasons: couldn’t bear my wife; couldn’t bear the Inland Revenue.’

He added, ‘I fear I have just made a rather caddish remark … [perfectly timed pause] … about the Inland Revenue.’

Yours, Michael Law, Brighton, East Sussex

SIR: I was interested to read Margaret Dibben’s Money Matters (February issue).

She illustrated the ‘Married women’s pension rip-off’, due to women’s not claiming additional pension income based on their husbands’ full basic pensions payments.

She failed to mention the men who may have been in my position – where my wife earned a great deal more than me.

We were also not informed that the pension could be enhanced by my claiming additional pension based on her payments.

This enhanced payment would still be valid after divorce and would in no way affect the state pension.

Yours faithfully, Peter Burgess, Eastbourne, East Sussex

Back to Open Air School SIR: I was most interested to read Doris Thompson’s Memory Lane letter (November issue) about her Open Air School.

I grew up in Cambridge and lived opposite the Open Air School in Ascham Road. Each day, the children would arrive, either on double-decker buses or in taxis. The more mobile children, also with their legs in irons, would help to push the wheelchairs of the children who could not walk.

The classrooms certainly were distinctive, with their roll-up sides.

Having read Doris Thompson’s letter, I decided to go back to Cambridge and take a photo of the school [above right].

Owing to present-day security, I couldn’t

The Open Air School, Cambridge

Officers and gentlemen SIR: The recent article (January issue) regarding a new officer’s experiences brought back to mind my father’s account of his first day at Shrivenham OCTU, when the cadre were greeted by their sergeant instructor with: ‘As I am your teacher, you will call me Sir. As you gentlemen are officers, I will call you Sir. The only difference is that you will mean it.’

Kind regards, Duncan Hume, Bournemouth, Dorset

The Avengers’ fruity past SIR: The 60th anniversary of The Avengers (February issue) brought back a memory. In 1969, I spent two months in Switzerland as an exchange student, between the end of my degree course and starting work proper.

The Avengers was on Swiss television, but under its German title of Mit Charme, Schirm und Melone, or With Charm, Umbrella and Bowler Hat. That doesn’t really convey much about

‘I’ll need to run some tests, but you have all the symptoms of being a day older’ The Oldie March 2021 49

I Once Met

Tommy Docherty I once interviewed Tommy Docherty, ‘the Doc’, who died on New Year’s Eve, at 92.

It wasn’t because of his illustrious career as a player (Scotland captain, Celtic, Preston, Arsenal, Chelsea) and manager (Scotland, Chelsea, Aston Villa, Oporto, Manchester United etc).

I was after his banter: ‘Some of my players are so stupid they think “manual labour” is the Spanish president.’

When we met at his house in the Peak District, his career was after-dinner speaking. He’d agreed to be interviewed with great affability, and cracked a bottle of champagne. His second wife Mary’s art collection adorned the sitting room; evidence of his career was absent.

Before the jokes, there was his Catholic Glaswegian childhood, making him a lifelong Celtic fan. ‘There was no money – so if you wanted a pair of shoes, you nicked them at the public baths.’

His father died young and his mother kept things together until National Service ‘made a man of him’. He was posted to Palestine – but did not mention being on guard when the King David Hotel, British Armed Forces HQ, was

blown up by the Zionist Irgun group; nor that he was offered officer training.

Having played for the British Army, he was signed by Celtic, but soon transferred to Preston North End, where Tom Finney was left wing: ‘The best player I’ve seen, as good with his right as with his left foot.’

I later read that Finney praised the Doc’s fierce tackling and pinpoint-accurate passing from right half. The Doc said, ‘Lionel Messi is an immature Tom Finney.’

The Doc played for Scotland in two World Cups. In 1954, Scotland were thrashed 7-0 by Uruguay, on a scorching day: ‘Our shirts might as well have been Crombie overcoats. We were knackered before the end of their national anthem!’ His Scotland career was over by the 1961 9-3 disaster at Wembley, when keeper Frank Haffey couldn’t handle crosses: ‘He was like a crocus.

He only came out once a year!’

With his managerial

career, the jokes speeded up: ‘Some of the strikers I had couldn’t have scored in a brothel.’ On Jimmy Hill: ‘He said, “I’m good in the air.” I said, “So was Douglas Bader.” Of George Best: ‘He was always going missing: Miss America, Miss Canada, Miss Great Britain.’

As back-up, I went to hear the Doc at a Park Lane hotel charity dinner. ‘I was lying in bed this morning with the wife – I was lying to her, she was lying to me,’ he opened, proceeding to recite the names of his all-blue (his innovation) ‘swinging London’ Chelsea team, his favourite managing job. Each name (Charlie Cooke, ‘Chopper’ Harris et al) was cheered to the rafters by the nostalgic fans present.

The Doc laid the foundations of the best World Cup Scotland team (1974), giving Kenny Dalglish the first of his record 102 caps, and did the same for post-Charlton, -Law, -Best Manchester United. The first duty was to entertain the crowd; if that meant scoring three goals to two, so much the better.

John McEwen Glasgow smile: the Doc

MARK LONGLEY/ALAMY/POPPERFOTO/GETTY

The tragic day the earth shook

Ten years ago, on 22nd February 2011, a huge earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand.

When I think back to the months surrounding that date, my stomach gives a slight lurch at the memory of living there, in a seemingly never-ending state of fear and uncertainty.

As difficult as it was, for me 4th September 2010 – the year before the famous earthquake – was really when it all started.

At 4.35 that frosty September morning, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake seemed to roar through my 50 The Oldie March 2021

bedroom and everything crashed to the floor. I staggered from the bed to the door frame and tried to absorb what was happening, my heart pumping and my body rigid as if with a rod pushed down through the top of my head.

It was the start of many weeks of sleeping downstairs on a mattress and many nights, in the months that followed, of being woken, sometimes several times a night, with the house shaking from an aftershock.

Christ Church Cathedral

Waiting for it to strengthen into another ‘big one’, and trying to decide whether to stay in bed or run for it, was exhausting, very frightening and often overwhelming. My adrenal system was to stay on high alert for months.

The constant disruption to daily life was at times difficult to cope with. One evening, my house felt as though it was being continually lifted and dropped from a great height. My legs became like jelly, I sank to the floor and for several weeks after that I spent nights with my parents.

In the weeks before Christmas, all was quiet until the early hours of Boxing Day, when the city was again jolted awake with the start of 32 shallow aftershocks that continued throughout the day. I went into work in a department store, but the

city centre closed over concerns about potential damage and injury.

It was a very surreal time, as people tried to continue with normal routines while coping with such uncertainty.

Hard as it was, I also remember much laughter, the camaraderie and a natural instinct to get through it.

Of course this was just the dress rehearsal for something much, more frightening – the devastating February earthquake.

But it was after September that I learned to react differently, which helped me to keep calm and carry on.

By Christina Joseph, New Zealand, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Books The Great Gutsby PETER MCKAY Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell

By John Preston

GARY WING

Viking £18.99 This account of the extraordinary life and mysterious death at sea of publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, in November 1991, opens with Jazz Age novelist F Scott Fitzgerald’s elegiac description of his social-climbing anti-hero Jay Gatsby: ‘He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.’

Born on 10th June 1923 in Solotvino, Ruthenia, in what was then Czechoslovakia, ‘Robert Maxwell’ was actually called Ján Ludvík by his parents, Mebel and Chanca Hoch, Jewish peasants who occupied an earthenfloored, two-room wooden shack with their nine children. Teenager Jan escaped to France after the Nazis closed in. Most of his family died in Auschwitz.

Having changed his name four times by the time he was 23, he denied he was Jewish until close to the end. Wife Betty, a French Protestant with whom he had nine children – two of them died – believed that a visit they both made to Solotvino altered his feelings for ever.

‘He was convinced that, had he stayed at home, he could have saved the lives of his parents and younger siblings.

Nothing he had achieved in life would ever compensate for what he had not been able to accomplish – the rescue of his family.’

Near the end of his life, Maxwell visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust

Memorial in Jerusalem. Tearfully, the ‘billionaire’ said there, ‘We were very poor. We didn’t have the things that other people had. They had shoes and food and we didn’t. At the end of the war, I discovered the fate of my parents and my sisters and brothers, relatives and neighbours. I don’t know what went through their minds as they realised they had been tricked into a gas chamber.’

He had once told his sensitive eldest son, Philip, ‘Unlike you, I keep the door to my haunted inner chamber firmly closed.’

Preston is unsparing in his account of Maxwell’s megalomania, greed, commercial duplicity and general grossness. We are told that he once ate half of his family’s 40-pound Christmas turkey, drove a car at 90mph while shaving and was described by Clive James as looking like ‘a ton and a half of half-cured ham wrapped in a white tuxedo’.

The Savoy’s chief barber dyed his hair and eyebrows coal-black once a week and

on one occasion he sent a lackey to London on Concorde to pick up medals he wanted to wear at a New York dinner.

He ritually ‘peed over the side of the building’ before departing the Mirror’s Holborn HQ by private helicopter, disallowed the paper’s prize-winners for being ‘too middle class’ and, after being put in charge of House of Commons catering, shipped the best wines to the cellar of his rented Oxford mansion.

The bigger sins seem greatly to overwhelm his virtues. He won a Military Cross for bravery under fire in the Second World War, but he was known as ‘Killer Maxwell’ for the alleged pleasure he took in murdering captured Germans. He was praised for revolutionising academic publishing with his Pergamon Press.

It is suggested this was based on texts he looted from postwar Germany, with the connivance of our own MI6, with whom he was in cahoots. Hailed after his death as ‘The Man Who Saved the Mirror’, he had in fact used it

The Oldie March 2021 53

egregiously to promote himself, prior to looting its pension fund in a doomed attempt to prop up his by then tottering business empire.

In 1971, the Department of Trade, reporting on his sale of Pergamon to Leasco, said he was not ‘a person who can be relied upon to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company’.

On 5th November 1991, accompanied by his son Kevin, he was due to meet the Governor of the Bank of England, Eddie George, to discuss the solvency of their business empire. Kevin told his father – cruising on his yacht, Lady Ghislaine, on the way to Santa Cruz, in northern Tenerife – that he must come back to the UK so they could face the music together.

Maxwell refused after ‘a shouting match’.

After docking at Santa Cruz, Maxwell dined alone at five-star Hotel Mencey, where he appeared ‘out of breath’. Returning to Lady Ghislaine after 10pm, he told the captain, Rankin, to ‘cruise all night’.

At 11.15pm, Ian Maxwell called by satellite phone and found his father ‘in a good mood’. Reminding his father that they were due to meet the following day, Ian signed off with ‘See you tomorrow, then.’ Maxwell replied, ‘You bet.’

When a member of the crew, Graham Leonard, came on watch at 4.10am, he saw Maxwell by the stern rail, wearing a white dressing gown, gazing at the lights of Gran Canaria. He said his bedroom was too hot. So Leonard turned on the air-conditioning. He left Maxwell standing at the stern rail at 4.15am.

At 4.45am, Maxwell called the bridge to say his bedroom was now too cold.

The air-conditioning was turned off. At 6am, Kevin Maxwell phoned his father.

No reply. At 9.45am, Lady Ghislaine docked at Santa Cruz. A banker from Rothschild in New York called. No reply from Maxwell’s stateroom. ‘Mr Maxwell is still asleep,’ he was told. Half an hour later, another urgent business call from New York. Again no reply. Rankin tried other internal phones. No dice.

The main door of his stateroom was locked. They had searched the boat from top to bottom three times – ‘we were even opening drawers’ – and now they were in his stateroom.

At 12.02pm, Rankin called the Gulfstream’s ops manager Brian Hull, who asked, ‘How are things?’ Rankin said, ‘We’ve lost Mr Maxwell.’

When they found his body floating belly up, a large nylon harness, used to rescue cattle and horses from flood areas, was needed to lift the 22-stone carcass from the sea.

Did he fall in accidentally, or jump, or

was he murdered? Preston is unable to solve this mystery. But Rupert Murdoch, whom Maxwell called ‘a moth-eaten kangaroo’, had no doubts. ‘He jumped.’

Peter McKay has worked for the Daily Mail since 1982

The lying Dutchman RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES The Happy Traitor: Spies, Lies and Exile in Russia: The Extraordinary Story of George Blake

By Simon Kuper Profile Books £14.99 George Blake had a favourite joke about his branch of the Secret Intelligence Service: ‘We used to call our office the Wimbledon Club, because it was all balls and rackets.’

He started work for SIS, or MI6, in 1944, and was employed as a full-time officer from 1947. He stole its secrets for his Soviet spymasters with devastating effect from the mid-1950s, was convicted of espionage in 1961, and sentenced to 42 years. Five years into his sentence he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison.

On Boxing Day last year, he died in Moscow, aged 98.

Blake was born and initially educated in Rotterdam, had a Dutch mother and a Levantine father with a British passport, spent his adolescence in Cairo with a Francophone uncle and aunt who held Italian nationality, worked in Berlin, and spent half a century as a KGB pensioner.

Kuper persuaded Blake to submit himself to interviews by promising to speak in Dutch, which was a rare luxury during the old man’s 40 years in Russia.

Although there are quick flashes of naïveté in Kuper’s first book about espionage, he is a fresh, honest, even bracing appraiser of his wily interviewee.

He has drawn on sources from five countries, notably the archive in Berlin of the Stasi (German secret police).

‘Have you tried turning it off and on again?’

Blake was a prim, pious, smug and friendless, Calvinist child. He was on a visit to his mother in Rotterdam when Germany invaded in 1940. Instead of returning to Cairo, he joined the Dutch resistance movement, which had a strong Communist presence.

When, some years ago, I was researching a book on Communist penetration agents, I suspected that Blake had been enlisted in the Communist cause by fellow resistance workers, and that his subsequent move to England and involvement with SIS were under Communist auspices.

I received tacit encouragement in this suspicion by one of the few people still alive who was likely to have indirect knowledge of it.

Kuper does not hold this view. He believes that Blake, although a thorough traitor, was not much of a liar. He broadly follows Blake’s set narrative. By this account, the 19-year-old freelance journeyed from the Netherlands, crossed Nazi-occupied Belgium and France and, after an illegal crossing of the Pyrenees, was interned in Spain. Then he was released to Gibraltar, from where he travelled by sea to England.

Arriving in 1943, he anglicised his surname of Behar to Blake. Soon he had been recruited to P8, SIS’s Dutch section.

In 1947, at Downing College, Cambridge, he started learning Russian, which he always spoke with a Dutch accent (although he spoke English with convincing upper-crust pronunciation).

He was given a permanent job within SIS, despite smiling too much at breakfast for English tastes, and being too bustling, conceited and voluble.

In 1948, Blake was appointed head of SIS station in South Korea. Together with other members of the British legation in Seoul, he was taken prisoner by North Korean troops in 1950. By his account, he had already been attracted to Communism by reading an SIS handbook on the enemy creed.

Further Marxist texts read in Korean captivity converted him. American saturation bombing, which was indeed murderous, and the vulgarities of American consumerism further turned him against Western democracy.

Blake was a fusspot, but also, like many spies, superabundantly vain. He venerated monarchical dynasties, especially the House of Orange, and in other circumstances would have been the perfect equerry in a royal household.

He told Kuper that his three historical heroes were William the Silent, Wilhelmina (the Dutch queen who spent the Second World War exiled in The Oldie March 2021 55

Bayswater) and Catherine the Great.

His clandestine eavesdropping makes him sound like a lethal Polonius.

Many SIS agents were betrayed by him, tortured and killed. Elaborate and costly operations in Berlin were ruined. He did great damage to SIS, and abetted postStalinist Russia in its international crimes.

Sprung from Wormwood Scrubs by a boozy Irish scamp in 1966, he was driven to Berlin hidden in a false compartment of a Dormobile. In Moscow, he was no longer trusted by Soviet spymasters, who wondered if he’d been turned and sprung by the British.

The Happy Traitor is informative, lively and enjoyable. It goes wrong in some facts and interpretations. But it gives the most reasonable and convincing account of George Blake’s motives, activities, repercussions and character we are likely to have for a generation.

Richard Davenport-Hines wrote Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain

Sublime and slimy FRANCES WILSON Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith

By Richard Bradford Bloomsbury £20 When it was pointed out to Patricia Highsmith that her characters lacked basic humanity, she reflected on whether it might be ‘because I don’t like anyone’.

A stalker, sadist and nymphomaniacal lesbian, she was soused in gin from dawn to dusk. Her hatreds, which consisted of groups rather than individuals, included Catholics, Latinos, black people, the French, the Portuguese, Koreans, South Asians, Arabs and Native Americans.

She liked the Palestinians, but only because they shared a common enemy in the Jews; she thought the Holocaust should be called the ‘Semicaust’ because the Nazis succeeded in exterminating only half the globe’s Jewish population.

She also liked animals which, she believed, should be fed aborted foetuses as a sign ‘of respect’, and her handbag contained hundreds of snails which she would release at peoples’ houses. Her admiration for snails was born of watching them copulate, a process which involved no emotion or engagement whatsoever.

Flaws aside, there is no denying that Highsmith was, like her most famous invention Tom Ripley, very, very talented.

Her debut novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), was filmed by Hitchcock. Her

‘It’s long and wooden and got a sharp, pointy, metal bit at the end’

second novel, a lesbian romance called The Price of Salt (1952), was filmed in 2015 as Carol, starring Cate Blanchett.

Her third novel, The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), consolidated her genius. Four further Ripley novels followed.

Tom Ripley, described by Richard Bradford as ‘one of the most fascinating exercises in autobiographical fiction ever produced’, is a fraudster, psychopath and murderer who remains remote from the suffering he causes and gets no evident pleasure from his achievements.

The Ripliad, as the series is known, makes bleak and compulsive reading, and so too does Bradford’s biography.

‘Highsmith has done more than anyone,’ Bradford argues, ‘to erode the boundaries between crime-writing as a recreational sub-genre and literature as high art.’ And Highsmith has done more than anyone to show how character traits that are repellent in the author herself become glamorous and appealing in her fictional counterparts.

Born in Texas in 1921, Patricia was a botched abortion. Highsmith was thrilled to learn her mother had tried to end her pregnancy by injecting turpentine into her own womb. Her parents divorced when she was a baby. When Patricia was three, her mother married Stanley Highsmith. By the time she was eight, murderous hatred of her parents had become a default position.

We know about Highsmith’s inner life because she recorded it all in her diary and in a thrilling set of notebooks she called her cahiers, which provide the main source of this biography. We must not, however, as Bradford reminds us, take these sources at face value.

Highsmith’s private writings contain large doses of fantasy, proving that from an early age she was unable to distinguish reality from fiction.

‘Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary,’ she explained to herself, ‘like any story I am writing. This way no harm can come to me or any person.’

Her interest in deviant characters began in childhood, and by the time she enrolled at New York’s Barnard College in 1938, Highsmith had cultivated a deviant persona of her own. In a white shirt and tailored suit, with a fag dangling from the side of her mouth, she now embarked on the career as ‘an emotional vandal’ that fuelled her success as a crime writer.

There are so many lovers in these pages that the reader loses both count and interest. Suffice to say that the pattern is largely the same: an instant seduction is followed by a period of infatuation leading to a sadistic psychodrama.

Highsmith had no idea how to love or to be loved, or how to be basically civil, and her enjoyment of breaking up relationships extended to her sleeping with the girlfriend of her agent.

The wonder is that so many women, and a good number of men, were drawn to her. The strangest of her relationships was with Ronald Blythe, the mildmannered celibate and lay reader for the Church of England, now 98, whose most famous book, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969), was a study of the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh.

Blythe, Bradford brilliantly concludes, was a ‘human version of one of her snails’. By the time she died in 1995, leaving behind her a trail of slime, she had also become more snail than human.

Bradford is less concerned with making sense of Highsmith than with making sense of her novels, and in this he succeeds handsomely. Her fiction, we come to see, is much more complex, multi-layered and disturbing than we had previously thought.

As one traumatised lover put it, ‘If she hadn’t had her work, she would have been sent to an insane asylum or an alcoholics’ home… She was her writing.’

Grilling Bacon MATTHEW STURGIS Francis Bacon: Revelations

By Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan William Collins £30 ‘The job of the artist,’ Francis Bacon claimed, ‘is always to deepen the mystery.’

It was certainly something he worked at. From their first appearance, in the 1940s, his paintings of distorted, barely-human forms – twisted, shrieking, bereft – provoked alarm and bemusement. Their power, though, was undeniable. If they were clearly personal, they were also oddly resonant – suggestive of the anxieties and neuroses of the unfolding century.

It was a combination that grew The Oldie March 2021 57

more powerful, though no less mysterious, with the decades. By the time of his death in 1992, at 82, Bacon had won a position as one of the great figures of the contemporary scene, not just in Britain but across the world: a unique voice, fêted as much by French intellectuals as by American museums.

He had created, too, a powerful personal legend, presenting himself as a dandy à rebours, a reckless habitué of an illicit netherworld of drinking clubs, gambling dens and homosexual encounters. He was a man familiar alike with the decadence of Weimar Berlin, the camp bitchery of Soho’s Colony Room Club and the tawdry glamour of Monte Carlo.

As an artist, he liked to suggest he had sprung forth, in his thirties, fully armed, an untutored genius escaping a philistine family background of Anglo-Irish horse-lovers.

These are fine ingredients for a biography, and they are well mixed by the American husband-and-wife duo Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. The great achievement of their impressively thorough and thoroughly impressive book is to tease away at the mysteries – or mystifications – in which Bacon wrapped himself, without diminishing either the art or the man.

We may lose some of the familiar highlights of his self-created myth: his rape by his father’s stable lads; the ease with which he acquired his painting technique; his first encounter with his lover, George Dyer, during Dyer’s attempted burglary of his flat. But we gain many richer perspectives.

A proper prominence is given to the early mentors who encouraged Bacon’s vision and career. There’s the Irish priest who introduced the largely unschooled boy to the classics. Then there’s a beloved female cousin who shared his voracious cultural enthusiasms. A sophisticated Frenchwoman picked him up in a Paris art gallery and took him home.

Along come the two more-or-less closeted Englishmen (Eric Allden and Eric Hall) who, in succession, provided avuncular pederasty, along with a good deal of money, to establish Bacon, first as a designer of modernist furniture, and then as a painter of uncompromisingly modern pictures. Bacon barely sold a painting – except to friends – before he was 40.

The authors perceptively point up the violence that infused Bacon’s upbringing in rural Ireland – the ritualised violence of the hunt, the distant violence of the First World War and the simmering threat of the IRA in the years that followed.

It was part of the family legend that Bacon’s beloved maternal grandmother, sitting at home one night next to her husband – a senior officer in the Irish Constabulary – had narrowly escaped assassination. The IRA gunman, looking through the lighted window, had been unable to distinguish between the couple.

Granny Supple had taken off her wig for the evening, and he didn’t want to ‘take a chance and shoot the lady’.

Certainly violence held a prominent place in Bacon’s art and life. It suffused his vision, and his experience, of sex.

With occasional exceptions, both his casual encounters and his sustained relationships were fired by the sadomasochistic urge – until old age led him towards something more companionable.

The authors – who have previously written a life of the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning – are sure-footed guides to the art world in which Bacon moved. They trace the battles between his dealers: the formidable lesbian, Erica Brausen, and the impassioned, if devious, Harry Fischer at Marlborough Fine Art. They capture the admixture of admiration and rivalry in Bacon’s artistic friendships with Graham Sutherland and Lucian Freud.

There are deft pen-portraits of a rich supporting cast – from Reggie Kray and Lord Berners to Andy Warhol and Nanny Lightfoot – Bacon’s old nurse, who moved with him to London and helped him to arrange gambling parties in his Kensington flat.

What is oddly lacking, though, especially during the first half of the book, is Bacon’s own voice. Although we get a few of his later, deliberately misleading quips about his early life and career, almost nothing has been recovered from the time itself. We are told that he wrote ‘chatty letters’ to his mother – but they are not quoted. The first of the very few of his letters transcribed (written to Graham Sutherland) does not appear until page 199.

‘What about taxing the rich and giving the poor free healthcare and education?’

We are told, frequently, of Bacon’s extraordinary charm and intelligence as a young man – so it is frustrating that Stevens and Swan have been able to recover so little of it.

It must, it seems, remain a mystery.

And of that Bacon would surely approve.

A winter’s tale VALERIE GROVE Frostquake

By Juliet Nicolson Chatto & Windus £18.99 Juliet Nicolson was eight, staying at her grandparents’ house, Sissinghurst, when that first snow fell on Boxing Day, 1962.

That day, the scene outside changed utterly. ‘This was the most snow, the snowiest snow, we had ever seen,’ Juliet remembers. ‘Down by the moat, the naked statue of Dionysus was now clothed in a white fur coat. Snow muffled all sound and the silence felt dream-deep.’

The next day, she and her brother Adam tumbled about on home-made toboggans in Vita Sackville-West’s garden. The snow was soon three feet deep. Nobody imagined it would linger for ten weeks and disrupt the country, burying sheep, freezing the sea, closing schools and dividing families like a pandemic.

November’s sulphurous smogs were a portent. ‘Sir, will the world end today?’

I remember a classmate asking our history master the day the Cuban missile threat loomed.

De Gaulle still barred our way into Europe. On 9th December 1962, Harold Macmillan told his diary he’d never known ‘so many difficult problems to resolve and awkward decisions to be made’. Mac was the main target of Private Eye: and now we also had, every Saturday night, the hilarious TW3.

We also had sexual intercourse which began, as Larkin said in Annus Mirabilis, in 1963. Hence the Profumo scandal unfolding that year. Nicolson says that, 30 years later, John Profumo – former political colleague of her father, Nigel – came to Sissinghurst, where Juliet found herself alone with him in the garden, ‘when suddenly he pinched my bottom’.

JFK was equally incorrigible. When he and Mac met in December for their summit in the Bahamas, JFK was serviced daily by a 19-year-old intern named Mimi. On her fourth day in the White House, Mimi had been deflowered by the President – in Jackie’s bedroom.

Nicolson unfurls each of her The Oldie March 2021 59

vignettes at glancing speed, like a film camera panning backwards into a full-screen overview – the scattergun method so effectively used by Craig Brown in his Beatles book, One Two Three Four.

That winter, the Beatles, touring through blizzards, slept in a heap in their van, for warmth. At Chatsworth, Debo Devonshire asked her butler to wheel in the TV set so her guests could watch the Fab Four on Top of the Pops in their velvet-collared Burton suits singing Please Please Me, their first number-one hit. Their rivals, the Rolling Stones, had just played the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond on 17th January.

Bob Dylan too was in London that month, flown over by the BBC drama director Philip Saville, who had been alerted to Dylan by W H Auden. He proved a useless actor, but Saville heard him do Blowin’ in the Wind, which became the play’s theme tune. The times were definitely a-changin’.

In Primrose Hill, Sylvia Plath, having just published her novel The Bell Jar, wheeled her two infant children through streets of ice and slush, cast into a slough of despond by the absent and faithless Ted Hughes. On the night of 10th February, she gassed herself.

The legacy of that winter is a rattlebag of stories – many with long shelf lives.

The participants include Andrew Loog Oldham, Dr Beeching, campaigning Harry Evans, ‘Dandy Kim’ Waterfield, Joanna Lumley, Nureyev, Bailey and the Shrimp, John Bloom and Norman Josiffe (later Scott) – who, on 20th December 1962, went to the police to report ‘my homosexual relations with Jeremy Thorpe’. The son of the Nicolsons’ odd-job man, Gordon, aka ‘Dinky’, emigrated to America to become a pioneer case of gender reassignment.

The big thaw began on 6th March, when Nicolson lays down her binoculars, having successfully demonstrated that 1962-3 had loosened Britain’s hypocrisies and defined an epoch. ‘This interminable winter felt fearful, like the ending of a way of life, the loss of certainty,’ she writes, ‘of the old way of doing things.’

Perhaps political satire and youthful comic genius (kicked off by Beyond the Fringe in 1960) had more to do with this than the snow: only Private Eye could have published ‘The last days of Macmillan’ in April 1963.

But I vastly enjoyed this canter through my yesteryear, while living through another weird winter.

It has felt epoch-making too, but will not be so exhilarating to read about six decades hence.

The Benin ivory mask, a miniature sculptural portrait of Idia, the first Iyoba (Queen Mother) of 16th-century Benin. From Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes

by Barnaby Phillips, Oneworld Publications £20

Bond, Turkish Bond MAUREEN FREELY A Coup in Turkey: A Tale of Democracy, Despotism and Vengeance in a Divided Land

By Jeremy Seal Chatto & Windus £16.99 On a fogbound afternoon in February 1959, a Vickers Viscount crashed into the woods just short of Gatwick.

Margaret and Tony Bailey, whose farm was nearby, were the first to rush to the scene. They arrived to find three men whose silk ties and well-cut suits were covered in mud and blood. One of them was Adnan Menderes, the Prime Minister of Turkey.

To the many millions in Turkey who

had brought this man to power nine years earlier, it was not just a miracle that he survived the crash. It was proof of his divine status. On the day of his return to Ankara, thousands poured in from the countryside to greet him at the train station, bringing with them their sheep, goats and oxen.

As they set about sacrificing these animals in his name, Menderes gave every appearance of being deeply moved.

But for others, it was the last straw.

Ataturk’s secular republic, not yet 40 years old, was under threat, and it would fall to the army to save it.

The coup was 15 months in the making.

After a long, lurid trial, Menderes was found guilty of subverting the constitution and, along with his Foreign and Finance Ministers, sentenced to death. He was hanged on 17th September 1961 – a The Oldie March 2021 61

day I remember well. I was nine. It was a Sunday. I’d gone to see my best friend, whose father worked at the US Consulate in Istanbul. She was the one who told me.

And that was the last time I heard the name Menderes spoken out loud until I was well into my forties.

He is hardly the only figure to have been expunged from Turkey’s official history but he is certainly the most important. Before he came to power, the Turkish Republic was a one-party embodiment of Ataturk’s westernising vision. Menderes’s win in the nation’s first free election in 1950 was a testament to Islam’s abiding strength in the countryside.

Those sentiments were forced back underground in 1961. It took 30 years for Islamism to reclaim its populist base, and another decade for it to consolidate its power. But the Menderes miracle is now very much back in play, in the form of his most ardent admirer, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The road from Menderes to Erdoğan is a twisted one, full of shadows, ghouls and strange delights. And I cannot imagine a better guide to it than Jeremy Seal. As a travel writer specialising in Turkey, he found that work was drying up in the wake of the coup that Erdoğan foiled in 2016 and went on to use as a pretext to stamp out all dissent. So Seal decided he might as well explore a mystery that had been gnawing at him since he happened on his first portrait of Menderes in the back room of a shack in a remote Anatolian valley many years before.

Why did the shack’s humble owners speak of having to keep the portrait hidden? Why, even in second-hand shops in Istanbul’s back streets, was it still so hard to find a single photograph of the man? A journalist might have contented himself with the story as told in the newspapers of the day – it has enough drama in it for a James Bond film.

It even has a bit part for Bond’s creator. Ian Fleming was himself at the Istanbul Hilton – attending an Interpol conference, no less – when the Menderes government sent mobs into the city’s European quarter to kill and terrorise its mostly non-Muslim residents. Like so many of our contemporary demagogues, Menderes kept control by creating chaos.

A historian might have wished to hammer that point home. Seal prefers to mention the parallels in passing. When anti-Erdoğan protests erupt in nearby Gezi Park in 2013, the Hilton again becomes centre stage. When suicide bombers kill over 100 anti-Erdoğan demonstrators in 2015, they do so just outside Ankara’s train station.

Wherever Seal’s meanderings take us – be it to the mosque Menderes built in

Ankara to dwarf its secular monuments, or to the museum Erdoğan has just opened in Menderes’s memory on the island where his gallows still stand – Seal’s first interest is in the poetry of the human landscapes surrounding them.

He takes us on a journey into a history that still lives, in a land still worth loving.

May it be the first of many.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

London’s burning ALEX CLARK Light Perpetual

By Francis Spufford Faber & Faber £16.99 Francis Spufford’s first novel, Golden Hill (2016), was structured around the withholding of a secret until nearly the end.

His second gives us a searingly painful climax before we’ve got through the first dozen pages. Both books play loving, imaginative games with the idea of what fiction is and what it’s for. Both recreate, alongside intricate human dramas, dazzling portraits of cities – 18th-century New York and London from the Second World War onwards – and the passages of history that made and unmade them.

The opening of Light Perpetual is about unmaking of a particularly devastating kind. It is 1944 and, in a branch of Woolworths in the fictional south-London borough of Bexford, shoppers are jostling over a new delivery of saucepans. The V-2 that plunges through the store’s roof arrives so quickly that there’s no time for its image to travel from the retinas of its victims to their brains; the ten-thousandth of a second such a journey would take is too slow for the kind of death rockets bring.

And too slow for Spufford’s pointillist description, which blends terrifyingly dispassionate technical information – the 910 kilos of amatol, the air shock that also kills all the passengers on a nearby tram – with a meditation on the nature of time and its apprehension.

Among the dead are five schoolchildren: twin sisters Jo and Valerie, clever Alec, timid Ben and bullish Vernon. But, a few pages later, they are resurrected, their lives restarted and their stories – told in chunks that skip a few years each time, until we reach almost the present day – ready to begin.

For the reader, the question is: if one were to remove the novel’s opening salvo and allow oneself the immersive pleasure of following these characters’ lives without thought of their paradoxical premature deaths, what would be lost?

There is, perhaps most obviously, the

question of tension. It’s impossible to follow Vernon’s dubious progress as an unscrupulous property dealer, Jo’s musical career or Ben’s harrowing mental illness without the occasional jolt of remembering that they are dead – and that Spufford has invented not only their deaths, but their reprieves, too.

The sensation of repetitive undercutting creates a peculiar form of empathy, which we can guess is the point – especially when it comes to their suffering, painfully elaborated on so that we might speculate on whether, after all, a life might be happier unlived.

Nowhere is this starker than in the compelling episodes detailing Ben’s tortured inner life. One particular instance, when we follow the bus on which he is a conductor throughout its route, accompanied by his mental contortions to try to escape the terror that imprisons him, is one of the most extraordinary depictions of insanity I can recall reading.

Such minute attention to individual interior landscape is in contrast to the novel’s other predominant mode, the panoramic. Spufford takes us through episodes in postwar Britain – the rise of the skinhead movement or the revolutions in newspaper printing that saw compositors become, almost overnight, dinosaurs in our midst – with detached compassion.

The contemporary novelist he calls to mind most strongly is not an overt state-of-the-nation writer such as John Lanchester, but one with a miniaturist sensibility, Tessa Hadley.

There are moments when this can feel like an uncomfortable juxtaposition; the shove of time marching on, just as you’re becoming gripped by a specific psychological moment. But marching on is what time does, mercilessly, demanding that we view it at such close quarters that we can barely make out the pattern, and then from a blurry distance that makes us question what we’re seeing.

Spufford achieves something else. He imbues his stories with immanence: an apprehension of the profoundly spiritual that encompasses both the mundane and the timeless. The novel’s title evokes a Christian belief in eternal rest. As well as a brief allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins, there’s an unmentioned kinship with T S Eliot’s Four Quartets – an atmosphere of constant recirculation.

It is, in a way, a novel about faith; in the value of such a precarious life, its fissures, its connective tissue and our dispensability. And, in the midst of that fragility, it’s a restatement of the value of reimagining lives so that we might better understand them.

The Oldie March 2021 63

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Media Matters

A moment in the sun for scientists

When COVID declines, so will the careers of the celebrity professors stephen glover A lot of columnar space has been devoted to the effects of COVID on our mental well-being. So far as I am aware, no one has seriously considered the future state of mind of legions of epidemiologists.

For they – and we – must face the fact that the day will come when their usually gloomy prognostications and arrestingly certain predictions are no longer sought after by the Today programme or Newsnight. Readers may recall a time in the distant past when the services of epidemiologists were not required around the clock, and most of us had a pretty hazy idea of what they do.

We will never live in such a state of ignorance again, but the virus will eventually falter and epidemiologists will be forced to resume their normal tasks in lonely laboratories without a microphone in sight. Feelings of worthlessness are bound to ensue, and in extreme cases there may be suicidal thoughts.

My main worry is Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England. Advised by the boffins of SAGE – the previously unknown Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies – Mr Whitty must have delivered at least twice-weekly performances at No 10 since last March. Like the no less lugubrious Ian McDonald (1936-2019), who gave equally deadpan press briefings during the Falklands War, he has built up something of a cult following.

Of course, he is far more powerful, and is effectively running the country.

To be fair, he does occasionally defer to the Prime Minister, and is good enough to concede that some matter, invariably footling, is a ‘political decision’. What will happen to him when he can no longer make our flesh creep with his often indecipherable, though forbidding, graphs?

Almost as troubling is the outlook for one of his deputies, Jonathan Van-Tam. ‘JVT’, as he fondly known by such

powerful organs of public opinion as Mail Online, has used the pandemic to hone his skills as a stand-up comedian. He is said to try out his jokes on his wife at their home in Lincolnshire before going live in No 10.

These include: ‘Follow the guidance – don’t tear the pants out of it.’ And when an effective vaccination was in the offing: ‘Do I believe we are on the glide path to landing this plane? Yes, I think I do. Over.’

JVT’s future mental wellbeing should be of particular concern to us, and we should also spare a thought for his wife.

Hardly less disquieting are the prospects of epidemiologists accustomed to being telephoned every week for their opinions by the Today programme. Interviewers such as Nick Robinson, who are normally reluctant to let a politician (especially a Tory one) finish a sentence, listen reverentially while these scientists set out their demands for more lockdowns and further coercive measures.

Professor Andrew Hayward, a member of SAGE and an epidemiologist at University College London, is guaranteed to rattle the teacups.

Professor Calum Semple of Liverpool University is another doomsayer who always offers good value to broadcasters.

Sir Mark Walport, a former Government Chief Scientific Adviser, is similarly far from being a soft touch.

What will become of them when the early-morning summons no longer materialises? Another potential casualty of sidelining is Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh

‘It’s all right for you. You can work from home’

University. She is especially beloved of television news programmes on account of her attractive appearance, while she can be relied on to hand out prescriptions at least as robust as those of male epidemiologists of more advanced years.

Perhaps I will be allowed to mention two of my true favourites. One is Professor Paul Hunter of the University of East Anglia, who seems to have a clear sense of the human costs of lockdown.

The other is Professor Carl Heneghan, an expert in evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, who does not automatically advocate yet another lockdown, and perhaps for that reason has lately fallen out of favour at the BBC. Because both men seem so sane, I worry less for them in a post-pandemic world.

There is nonetheless real cause for concern about the general mental health of hundreds of scientists once their expertise is no longer needed. May I make a suggestion? It involves ‘Professor Lockdown’, aka Neil Ferguson, a darling of the BBC and teased by the tabloids.

He is a ‘modeller’ of diseases, who famously resigned as a government adviser after a woman with whom he was having an affair visited his home during the first lockdown – which he had championed, if not actually devised.

When COVID recedes – I don’t expect it will ever entirely go away – might Professor Lockdown undertake to keep us in touch with a forgotten army of epidemiologists? He might even model their mental health and produce occasional recommendations. From time to time, he could appear on the Today programme and be interviewed by Nick Robinson in respectful, sepulchral tones.

Being kept connected in this way would remind us of the old days when these people dominated our lives – and it might supply them with some sense of purpose in what could otherwise be a long and dark winter.

The Oldie March 2021 65

History

Triumph of the long-distance walker Heroic ramblers – from Wordsworth to the COVID tea-drinkers david horspool

Few activities are more innocent than walking – until recently, when stepping outside has meant checking whether you’re allowed to.

The fining of two walkers, with their herbal teas, in Derbyshire earlier this year caused such a stink because they were exercising a time-honoured, universal right: to walk where they pleased.

Walking is just something people do, like breathing. It would be reasonable to assume that it has no more of a history than breathing does.

Reasonable – but wrong. Foremark Reservoir, where Jessica Allen and Eliza Moore were arrested, is in the same county as Kinder Scout, the moorland plateau that saw an even more dramatic confrontation between walkers and the authorities in April 1932.

Here, at the highest point in the Peak District, around 400 walkers, led by Benny Rothman, a Communist car mechanic and keen rambler, deliberately trespassed on private land, owned by the Duke of Devonshire, to draw attention to their unfair treatment at the hands of the duke’s gamekeepers.

Six of the ramblers were jailed for four months. It wasn’t for the trespass itself – which, as any Oldie reader knows, isn’t a criminal offence in Britain – but for unlawful assembly before the walk.

Benny and co had, however, drawn attention to an injustice, and in court he expressed his case in the most persuasive terms. Sticking to the paths across moorland defeated the object of the walk because, ‘in wet weather, the footpaths are like quagmires and, in dry weather, are more often than not very much overcrowded’.

His boots were made for walking: Foster Powell (1734-93)

Like walkers today, he wanted a bit of room to roam.

Although Benny called what he did ‘rambling’, he was from the more radical end of the movement that went by that name, which emerged as the Ramblers Association in 1935. As with other great British campaigns for liberty, like the suffragists and suffragettes, the walkers divided into two camps.

Some thought their best hope for success lay in using the system. Others advocated ‘direct action’ to force the establishment to change. Not until the 21st century did either strand achieve victory, with the passing into law of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000), creating the right to roam.

Before the rise of the rambler in the 20th century, walking in Britain had rather different associations. First, it was for the poor. The prejudice can still be overheard in the milkman’s assertion to a cynical Billy Casper, kicking the tyres of his float in A Kestrel for a Knave (1968): ‘Third-class riding’s better than firstclass walking any day.’

But, as with so many strenuous activities in Britain, once the aristocracy had worked out that you could gamble on it, walking for competition – or ‘pedestrianism’ – became popular.

Its heyday was the late-18th and early-19th centuries, before athletics took over. One of its greatest stars was Foster Powell, a lawyer’s clerk from Yorkshire, who first came to prominence in 1773 when he bet that he could walk from London to York and back in less than six days.

He did it in five days and 18 hours, and on another later attempt knocked three hours off his time.

There are conflicting reports about how much good his feats did him. Though he was reported to have made £130 from the bet on his first

Yorkshire walk (£100 ‘given him by the supporters of the journey’), the Dictionary of National Biography says he ‘does not seem to have profited greatly from his walks’. Still, he did better than ‘a certain young baronet’, said to have lost ‘near £12,000’ in betting against Powell.

Money may not have been a motivating factor for another great pedestrian, Captain Barclay, although he made a fair amount from walking anyway.

Barclay’s greatest achievement was to walk a mile every hour for 1,000 consecutive hours, at Newmarket in 1809. Five days after finishing, the captain joined his regiment for the Walcheren Campaign in the Napoleonic Wars, which had a less happy result.

Some of Barclay’s most remarkable walking (and not sleeping) feats appear to have been completed almost by accident. He once rose at 5am, walked 30 miles before dinner and 60 miles after it, followed by a 16-mile stroll to a ball, returning the same night, and spending the next day partridge-shooting – having, according to Leslie Stephen, ‘travelled 130 miles and been without sleep for two nights and three days’.

You can see the same sort of athletic inclinations in the Munro baggers and Fell completists of today. But where do the walkers as nature-lovers originate?

Their patron saint is William Wordsworth, said by Thomas De Quincey to have walked 175,000 miles in his lifetime.

Another poetic walker was the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare, who railed against enclosure and the way it had put ‘each little tyrant with his little sign’ in the way of the ‘wandering scene’.

Poetry and strolling clearly go together. According to Jonathan Bate, biographer of Clare and Wordsworth, Wordsworth considered that ‘walking was conducive to creative thought’.

And what could be more natural than that?

The Oldie March 2021 67

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

Sovereignty – a right royal problem

TOM PLANT

Children’s questions are the hardest. ‘Is Mummy a woman?’ ‘Yes, of course, dear.’

‘What’s a woman?’ ‘Er, well…’

Don’t worry. We’re not pursuing that question; this is a gonad-free zone. But the conversation might be just as awkward, albeit in a different way, if the question were ‘What does “sovereignty” mean, Dad?’ ‘Well, dear child, the dictionary has several meanings for most words, and sovereignty is no exception.’

‘Don’t patronise me, Dad. I want to understand what I’ve just got back from the EU. I’m told it’s sovereignty.’

‘All right. This is what the Oxford English Dictionary says.’

‘Dad, let’s call it the OED. I wasn’t born yesterday.’

‘Very well, as its first meaning the OED gives “supremacy or pre-eminence in respect of excellence or efficacy”.’

‘Hm, that’s a bit abstract, Dad. And if we’re judging excellence or efficacy in government, isn’t it doubtful whether Britain has ever been pre-eminent, either in or out of the EU?’ ‘Yes, you’re right. But those who say Britain has regained its sovereignty may be using the OED’s second definition, “supremacy in respect of power … supreme dominion, authority or rule”.’

‘Come off it, Dad. No one believes Britain has had that kind of supremacy for ages, perhaps ever, and certainly not after Suez and in the 1970s when we joined the Common Market. What’s the third definition?’

‘Number three is “the position, rank or

Decimal dunces Fifty years after decimalisation on 15th February 1971, I still rant about writers who are old enough to know better than to follow any mention of a price in £sd with a modern decimal equivalent. So often, this ruins the author’s point.

power of a supreme ruler or monarch” and number four is “a territory under the rule of a sovereign, or existing as an independent state”. I think that’s what the Brexiteers wanted. The OED cites an example of this use in 1849: the “United States, with 30 governors, for 30 independent sovereignties”.’

‘That’s an interesting citation. A decade or two later, after Appomattox, 11 of those independent sovereignties learnt they weren’t free to secede. Or to have slaves.

So much for sovereign independence.’

‘You’re a remarkable child if you know all about the American Civil War. You’re as precocious as John Stuart Mill.’

‘Funny you should say that, Dad. Mill had strong views about sovereignty. He thought the power of the state should be limited: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign,” he said. But Brexiteers seem more interested in the power of the state.’

‘Yes, they take “sovereignty” to mean “supreme power”, usually of the state. The term comes from the French souveraineté.

‘It’s known as an illegal rave!’

This may happen in the bestconducted publications – even The Oldie, on occasion. A dire example was in a letter to the Times a couple of years ago.

The writer was telling us just how affluent he had felt, and how much he could buy, when his pre-war pocket money was raised to half a crown a week. As this was interpreted as 12½p, how younger readers must have pitied his poverty.

Who under the age of 30 knows what a ‘new ½p’ was?

For their benefit, it was a footling little coin: pretty, if not as pretty as its predecessor at the bottom

‘That came from the Latin superanus: super meaning ‘above’; anus, in this context, meaning not “fundament” or “old woman” but “of” or “pertaining to”. Most Brexiteers believe a country’s sovereignty is a matter of its ability to make its own laws.

But, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica says, the term’s “application in practice has often departed from this traditional meaning”.’

‘Oh. So meanings change?’

‘Yes. When enough people start using a word to mean something new, dictionaries take note. It’s a matter, one might say, of “herd conformity”. But realities change too.

Though North Korea may rejoice in its sovereignty, no democracy can now exist without membership of clubs such as the World Trade Organisation, whose rulings often infuriate its members, and NATO, which binds all its members to consider an armed attack on one of them as an armed attack on all.’

‘So what do politicians mean when they talk about sovereignty?’

‘Anything that suits them. When Scotland seizes its independence, the Nationalists will invoke Scotland’s sovereign rights. The Brexiteers could try to stop them in the UK Parliament, supposedly now sovereign again, but that wouldn’t work. Yet the fact that Britain has left the EU without resistance from the other members shows we never lost our independence.’

‘So all this sovereignty stuff is for the birds?’

‘Well, as Thomas Carlyle put it, “Whoso has sixpence is sovereign … to the length of sixpence.” ’

of the pocket, the farthing.

The new ½p was introduced solely so that the 6d (2½p) coin could remain in circulation for a few transitional years. It had little monetary use – prices were quickly rounded up after

SMALL DELIGHTS The joy of retrieving a lost sock hidden in a duvet cover.

DAPHNE LOVELACE, BATH Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

decimalisation – and was withdrawn in 1984.

My real point is that decimal equivalents, still trotted out in brackets, were accurate for only a few days after Decimal Day in 1971. Inflation continued on its merry way. A pound on that day is worth roughly £12.50 today and, of course, a very long way down on its pre-war value.

Decimalisation, by the way, was overseen by one Lord Fisk.

The press, which loves imposing its own ‘popular’ names on things, campaigned for the new penny to be given the pet name of ‘a fisk’. It didn’t catch on.

HUON MALLALIEU The Oldie March 2021 69

Theatrical tragedy

GERAINT LEWIS/ALAMY

In lockdown, Simon Russell Beale misses acting, longs for London – and is frightened for the future of theatre. By Louise Flind

How are you coping with lockdown?

I’m all right – to be honest, I’m a bit frightened.

Before I went to New York (to do The Lehman Trilogy), I sold my flat in Pimlico and bought a house in the country in Wiltshire near my family and started all the builder stuff.

Unusually I was earning a lot of money in the theatre but, after four shows, I came back. I’ve always spent a lot of time on my own but I miss going down to London, I miss going on the bus and the thing I’m frightened about is theatre.

I think probably it’s exacerbated by the amount of stuff I do badly on my iPhone in the garden, recording something for Radio 4, and there’s a sense that it’s all been cobbled together.

Funnily enough, I met somebody in Waitrose just after I got back – lovely lady. She asked what I was doing here and I said, ‘I’ve just moved here.’

We talked about Broadway. I said, ‘I know you, but I can’t put a name to your face. And she said, ‘I’m the arts editor of the Sunday Times … let me have a think.’

And, a couple of days later, she said, ‘Would you like to do an article and a recommendation every week of a poem?’

It’s a godsend – it keeps me mentally alive and also earns a bit of money.

How much did you miss acting in 2020?

Did you miss stage more than screen?

I’m more a stage actor and I missed it all, the intellectual excitement and the companionship. I missed my two brothers in The Lehman Trilogy – but we phoned regularly and had sad Zoom cocktails.

Was it hell going back for A Christmas Carol at the Bridge Theatre between lockdowns and then being taken off again?

We had such fun creating it and the audience were lovely – of course it was disappointing, but it wasn’t unexpected.

What’s your favourite touring story?

Hamlet in Elsinore Castle. Hamlet has a 70 The Oldie March 2021

period off during Act 4 and I used to go to the loos to have a pee and then walk back through the castle with the moon and the ravens and it was my castle – I was the prince…

What’s your favourite Shakespeare play?

Oh, you can’t ask me that. Every single one I’ve done I’ve fallen for. I think Lear is the greatest play every written.

Playing Hamlet changed my life, playing Beatrice and Benedict was glorious with Zoë [Wanamaker], and I enjoyed playing Timon.

Where did you film Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time?

Mostly in London and a couple of scenes in Venice.

Where did you film The Hollow Crown?

Ealing Studios for the tavern, a medieval village in Wales and Gloucester Cathedral.

What’s your favourite theatre?

All the National Theatres, and the ancient Greek theatre at Epidaurus in the Peloponnese.

What are your favourite filming locations?

Gloucester Cathedral for the Sacred Music BBC programmes. One of the great privileges was to see places by yourself – I had the National Gallery to myself once.

Passion for plays – Simon Russell Beale

Ever tempted by Hollywood?

Oh, I’m tempted…

Do you work on a plane/train – learn lines?

I learn my lines in a pub. I can point out pubs all the way through London where I’ve learnt particular parts.

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

My scratched iPod which has the whole Wagner Ring cycle and the Beethoven symphonies.

Is there something you really miss?

London – and I’m not a natural Londoner. I wasn’t born there; I wasn’t brought up there. I’m a latecomer.

Earliest childhood holiday memories?

Posted in Germany, we’d jump in our tiny caravan – four children – in Hanover or Münster and drive all the way down to Naples for two weeks on the beach and a week crawling back. We saw Vesuvius, Pompeii, Rome, Venice, Florence, Salzburg. I was 13, 14, 15, 16 – my first white-flesh peach, bread in the morning…

How come you were born in British Malaya?

My dad was a junior doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and he married Mum who was also a doctor.

When she was pregnant with me, they flew to Penang.

Did you have a wandering army childhood?

I don’t remember Penang or Hong Kong, which was our next post and where the twins were born, but I remember Libya at age five or six – the camels and the big amphitheatre. But clearest is Singapore.

Have you made friends when you’ve been away?

I’ve got some friends from The Tempest and Much Ado. Top travelling tip?

I used to drink on aeroplanes!

When lockdown ends, Simon Russell Beale is due to star in Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the Bridge Theatre, London

Arts NETFLIX HARRY MOUNT PRETEND IT’S A CITY For any misguided soul who thinks Americans can’t be funny, clever or self-deprecating, meet Fran Lebowitz.

She’s the 70-year-old New York writer whose mordant wit, colossal intelligence and ruthless self-deprecation reduce her friend – and the programme’s director – Martin Scorsese to helpless laughter.

This, her second collaboration with the director, is partly an extended interview with Lebowitz; partly a love letter to old New York.

Lebowitz is essentially a serial complainer to comic effect – like The Oldie’s rant column delivered at a million miles an hour.

She’s like Oscar Wilde on speed – literally quick-witted. When David Letterman asks, ‘Do you mind people who…’, she says, ‘Yes,’ before he can finish the question.

She’s a lesbian, Jewish atheist but her concerns are neither religious or sexual.

Instead, her anecdotes rise out of mock outrage at the little things in life that drive you nuts – like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

In a riff about the male obsession with sport, she says that, if women ran the

‘I’m in for identity fraud’

Funny girl: Martin Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz in the New York Public Library

world and were so obsessed, there’d be hopscotch championships on TV. The title of the series comes from another irritation: the time she yelled at tourists standing in the middle of the pavement, ‘Move! Pretend it’s a city!’

Lebowitz has been compared to Dorothy Parker. She shares Parker’s bittersweet, whip-smart humour and was once a prolific writer.

A high-school dropout, she was expelled from one school for ‘nonspecific surliness’. Still she became the gifted child of 1970s Manhattan, wowing America in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and her caustically funny books, Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981).

But then, after completing a 1994 children’s book, she suffered 25 years of writer’s block. She’s a perfectionist who hates writing. ‘Most people who love to write are horrible writers,’ she says.

Since then, she’s essentially become a professional talk-show guest. That doesn’t bother her – she has none of the arrogance of writers who feel the world needs to read them.

Lebowitz really just likes lying around

at home reading – but no one pays anyone for doing that, she says.

She’s dismissive of money but loves books. Thus the famous Franism, in an article giving advice to teenagers: ‘Think before you speak. Read before you think.

This will give you something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself – a wise move at any age, but most especially at 17, when you are in danger of coming to annoying conclusions.’

Scorsese films her in her New York haunts – including the Players Club, founded by actor Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. This produces a delightful riff: if you think your siblings are embarrassing, thank God you aren’t Edwin Booth.

Watching the programme is like being in the company of the wittiest person you know, uninterrupted by a dumbing-down scriptwriter or network.

Pretend It’s a City is the sort of the thing the BBC did brilliantly in the sixties: stick a camera in the face of a brilliant person and ask them questions.

It makes for great, cheap telly – but try telling that to the makers of Bargain Hunt.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE ‘You’ve said that dying will be “the next great adventure”. What exactly did you mean by that?’ Emma Barnett asked the venerable Dame Jane Goodall, 86.

Dame Jane was doubtless nonplussed that her famously sharp interrogator was unfamiliar with this Peter Pan quotation.

But ‘What did you mean by that?’ is one of Barnett’s two stock questions. The other is ‘How did that make you feel – losing your job/voice/baby?’ in a thrusting tone, sans warmth or genuine curiosity.

From day one of the Barnett regime, the companionable, good-humoured Woman’s Hour of Jenni and Jane was transformed into strident soapbox The Oldie March 2021 71

stuff. It seemed to assemble voices that most grated on the ear – an American woman on the #MeToo movement; Carol Ann Duffy mumbling a poem she’d written, in her usual morose monotone.

Respite came from the Radio 3 presenter and musician Clemency Burton-Hill, giving Woman’s Hour her first interview since her brain haemorrhage a year ago. Addressed as Clemmie, she tried to accommodate Barnett’s persistent ‘How did that FEEL?’s. She refrained from replying, ‘I was unconscious – how do you think that feels?’

Instead, she struggled to enunciate how she had set about getting her mind, speech and intelligence back: ‘You just start at the be-gin-ning. It is not a lin-e-ar pro-gress-ion. I hate the word “im-paired”. There is … surely … a better … word.’

She gave a graphic account of having been, in her coma, offered two choices of taking the easy way (death) or the hard way, which is what she is taking. She is learning to speak again, in tandem with her younger son, aged two, word by word. ‘My boys,’ she said, ‘are the premier reason.’

I fell on Fergal Keane’s three-part series, How the Irish Shaped Britain.

The soft brogues of Keane, Professor Roy Foster, novelist Colm Tóibín and others told tales of Irish migration and the progression from prejudice and caricature to total infiltration of the English establishment.

There were passages from Thomas Moore, Thackeray’s Pendennis, Sheridan, Wilde, Yeats, Shaw (recruited by the BBC to teach the English how to speak) and MacNeice. There were welcome musical interludes – even navvies’ terrible ballads. All documentary subjects should be leavened by music, as in Radio 3’s Words and Music slot.

Tim Harford’s invaluable More or Less gained further popularity with its producer Kate Lamble’s clever dig at Penny Mordaunt and Michael Gove and their slippery, false promises to the fishing industry. She wrote a brilliant parody of a sea shanty: ‘That’s not how numbers go! A fraction of a fraction is less, you know!’ sung by Jordan Dunbar.

Hard on the heels of In Our Time on The Great Gatsby came a documentary on Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s (and Hemingway’s) laudable editor.

‘The book belongs to the author,’ Perkins declared. But have you looked at the acknowledgements in a novel lately?

Novelists, like actors getting awards, now shower thanks. Not just on editors but also on informants, agents, researchers, helpful 72 The Oldie March 2021

first-draft readers, mums, chums etc.

Richard Osman in The Thursday Murder Club wrote, ‘A book is such a team effort’ – which made me hurl it aside with great force, as Dorothy Parker advised. Yes, his bestseller is amusing tosh – currently aired on Radio 4 – but he claims to have needed about 200 elves to help write it!

The bestseller list is chronically stuffed with self-help books with key phrases like ‘change your life/ life philosophy/ confidence/ mental-health advice/ lasting happiness/ principles for a responsible and meaningful life…’

I advise readers of such books to turn on Radio 4 on a Sunday morning whenever Canon Angela Tilby is speaking her habitual wise words. On Epiphany, acknowledging the ‘shock and dislocation’ of COVID, she said, ‘Our greatest contemporary heresy is to think it’s normal – or even a universal right – to live in a pain-free, stress-free zone where we are simply owed security, comfort, happiness.’

Lie back and learn.

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS About sex they were never wrong, the Old Masters: Barbara Windsor jiggling her booby-doos across the campsite, Robin Askwith dropping his bucket.

Today, however, everyone is stiffly conservative, as primly covered up as the leg on a Victorian footstool.

In The Great, an expensive-looking series about shenanigans in Imperial Russia, rutting was conducted fully clothed, which is to say the characters, trembling briefly, kept actual body parts safely

Winning habit: Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus (1947)

concealed under layers of brocade and bombazine. They might as well have been wearing steel armour on a battlefield.

What’s the purpose of Nicholas Hoult and Elle Fanning’s being young and beautiful if we can’t see more of them?

As for the sex scenes between a sixth-former and the young English mistress (every normal adolescent’s favourite fantasy, surely?) in A Teacher, again the participants kept their big woollen pants on. Kate Mara’s heavy-duty, brown bra was exceptionally off-putting, being the sort of garment pegged out on washing day by Ena Sharples.

In Uncle Vanya, more querulous Russians moaned and complained about how little sex they were getting – so I suppose the point of the play is that it is as boring as real life. But the cast – Richard Armitage as Astrov, Aimee Wood as Sonya, Peter Wight as Telegin, Roger Allam as Serebryakov – played these imponderable human beings with moving subtlety.

Above all, Toby Jones’s Vanya looked a genuine wreck, hungover, scratching himself, ready to explode. It’s a harsh lesson Chekhov teaches – that hesitation, cruelty and pathos are what make up an existence, and few people are capable of living finely and fully.

Nuns, who shut themselves away from earthly temptations, have a worse time than anybody, if novelist Rumer Godden is to be believed. In Black Narcissus, she described a bunch of wimple-clad do-gooders in the Himalayas who start simmering with lust when a handyman, Mr Dean, comes with his spanners to fix the lavatory.

In 1947, there was a classic film directed by Michael Powell. The atmosphere was hallucinatory, overheated – all this repressed sexuality and rage, with control breaking down.

Nepal was painted on glass, almost defiantly artificial. Jack Cardiff won the Oscar for the cinematography and special effects. Leonardslee Gardens, Horsham, in Sussex, was the location, with the suggestively dripping rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias.

The remake was a bit of a disaster. The computer-generated imagery – palaces on mountain tops; snow on distant peaks; orange skies – was one-dimensional, as was the acting. Gemma Arterton was no Deborah Kerr. Alessandro Nivola played Mr Dean as Lady Chatterley’s Mellors.

Instead of stripping off in the potting shed, however, he simply kept putting his hat on and taking it off. The rest of the nuns were the usual pervert flagellant paedophiles.

When I saw that steep stone staircase

‘Help me gather driftwood – together with these palm fronds, we can fashion a crude puppet theatre’

going up to the bell tower, I knew it was a deathtrap – no banister. Over several of the characters duly tumbled. The minute the camera showed us the horrible modern house in Finding Alice, and dwelt on the stairs with no banister, again it was obvious what would happen – someone would soon be in a puddle of blood on the parquet.

The series, about a widow uncovering unpleasant things to do with her late partner, starred Keeley Hawes.

Everything stars Keeley Hawes. Even Noele Gordon was on television only five times a week.

The makers of Victoria Wood: In Her Own Words and Victoria’s Secret List must be rebuked. The sketches were chopped up, ruined, her material marred, by all these interpolated talking heads – Mark Lawson, Russell T Davies, Abby Morgan, Chris Addison – who spouted nothing but banalities, demonstrating no knowledge of cultural history.

It’s the same on the Sky Arts documentaries about ‘discovering’ Charles Laughton, Robert Donat, Basil Rathbone and so on. Clips of the masters at work are spoilt by interruptions from experts and critics who are in fact total bores.

What was noticeable about The Pembrokeshire Murders, aside from

gym-honed Luke Evans in a succession of thin-knit sweaters, was the bleakness of the settings, the housing estates, flats, offices, of which the Welsh Tourist Board will strenuously want to deny all existence. Even the Pembrokeshire coastal paths looked sinister. Being Welsh myself, I recognised the authenticity of it all instantly.

It makes me proud that the Principality gave rise to the worst serial killer in history, who left balaclavas on hedgerows, wore around town the blood-splattered bathing trunks belonging to a victim, and generally never seemed to have heard about forensics.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE BEYOND PERFECTION: ARTURO BENEDETTI MICHELANGELI Beyond Perfection is the title of an absorbing new DVD about the great Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. Even in an age of unexamined hyperbole where the promotion of classical musicians is concerned, it seems a touch over the top.

Where language is concerned, I’m more an E M Forster kind of music-lover.

You recall the manner. ‘Well, yes, if you press me, Michelangeli might have been the greatest of them all, at least among those pianists whose art and craft have been electronically preserved. Mind you, I speak only of his particular mix of fine musicianship and flawless technique.

Nothing, you understand, to do with “interpretation”.’

Michelangeli abhorred that word, too.

‘He doesn’t “interpret” the music, he simply plays the notes; it’s a kind of black magic.’ Carlos Kleiber’s tribute to Herbert von Karajan might apply equally to Michelangeli.

Nor did he have any truck with the idea of perfection – ‘a closed circuit’, as he called it. A former seminarian, he believed that perfection means completion; that only God is perfect.

Michelangeli a seminarian? Indeed he was. It’s just one of many things he experienced or achieved before his 25th birthday in 1945.

These included graduating with high honours from the Milan Conservatory at the age of 13; a year in the Franciscan La Verna monastery (he never took his vows, but his training in the art of contemplation never left him); time as a medical student; and first prize at the 1939 Geneva Piano Competition, where comparisons were made to Liszt and Paderewski.

He began the Second World War as a pilot in the Italian air force and ended it an escaped partisan whose hands (so it’s said) had been beaten by the Germans.

His earliest recordings, made in Milan between 1939 and 1942, left (and still leave) connoisseurs slack-jawed with admiration. Miniatures by Spanish masters – Scarlatti, Albéniz, Granados and Mompou – were an early speciality.

There’s also memorable Bach and Beethoven from this time; and, after he resumed recording in London in 1948, a yet-to-be-surpassed account of Brahms’s hair-raisingly difficult Paganini Variations. All can be found on three expertly transferred, budget-priced Naxos CDs. The piano sound itself married the lyric beauty of a Stradivari violin with an organ’s commanding peal. It’s a phenomenon that explains the crucial role pianos and piano-tuners played in Michelangeli’s career.

The last of these was Angelo Fabbrini, a man famous for taking Hamburg-built Steinways and turning them into something closer to a pre-1910 Blüthner – a piano of fabulous range and subtlety, less brash, more The Oldie March 2021 73

Deutsche Grammophon versions of Debussy’s Préludes and Images – appears to have encouraged the belief that he had a small repertory and that he cancelled, casually and inconsiderately, more often than he played.

Not so! How else can we explain the vast number of live recordings that have circulated down the years? I especially prize a 1957 Royal Festival Hall recital of music by Schumann (both Faschingsschwank aus Wien and Carnaval in an epic first half), Debussy and Chopin, now on two Testament CDs. Not the least of the recital’s wonders is the deep sense of quiet that surrounds it.

Michelangeli’s very presence stilled audiences, as Orpheus stilled the beasts.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON

EVERETT /ALAMY

Michelangeli said a pianist’s sound came from his mind as much as from his hands

refined than the American-designed Steinway.

Fabbrini appears in this ‘hunt the legend’ documentary, marvelling at the fineness of the pianist’s ear. He recalls the occasion when he angrily rejected a seemingly pitch-perfect instrument in which was later found, buried deep within one of its felts, the tip of a needle with which Fabbrini had been prepping the hammers.

Michelangeli said a pianist’s sound came as much from his mind as from his fingers and wrists. For Fabbrini, however, the secret lay in Michelangeli’s astonishing control of the pressure he placed on every key as the hammer struck the string.

‘If only this piano was as reliable as my Ferrari!’ Michelangeli muses at one point. A Mille Miglia rally driver, he raced his Ferraris much as he played Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit or Liszt’s Totentanz. ‘The higher the stake, the greater the control’ was his reply to friends who marvelled that he hadn’t yet managed to kill himself.

He lived mostly in the borderlands of Italy, Switzerland and southern Austria.

There, his more sociable self gave lessons (free of charge), walked and skied. In the Alpine town of Trento, he became a good friend of the famous male-voice Coro della SAT, for which he created a host of exquisitely crafted folk-song arrangements. (You can find 19 of them on a charming Divox CD, Canti Popolari.)

There are many myths about Michelangeli. The legendary status of a handful of recordings – the 1957 RavelRachmaninov concerto disc; his 74 The Oldie March 2021

THE LAST BEE GEE Given the distinguished vintage of so many of our esteemed Golden Oldies – Tom Jones, 80, even boasted about getting his jab on live TV – it is no surprise that the killer combo of Anno Domini and COVID has reaped a grim harvest these past 12 months.

Farewell, then, Bill Withers, 81; Little Richard, 87; Trini Lopez, 83; Toots Hibbert, of Toots and the Maytals, 77; Juliette Gréco, 93; Helen Reddy, 78; and Gerry Marsden, of Gerry and the Pacemakers, 78 (I could insert a gag here about Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch but that would be in poor taste).

When a member of a legendary ensemble ‘passes’, it’s a death squared.

The relicts can’t get the band together again, not even to pay the taxman. You have to feel for them.

Many really will have to walk alone.

Which brings us to Barry Gibb, 74, the last man standing of the first – and probably last – supergroup ever to spring from the Isle of Man. ‘I’m the eldest, so it probably should have been me first,’ Barry told the Times. ‘I guess it’s a form of guilt. Survivor’s guilt.’

After the death of his last sibling, he was sitting feeling sorry for himself, and his wife, Linda, told him to ‘get off his arse’. This wifely kick in the pants led to a solo album in 2016. Barry then played the Legends stage at Glasto in 2017 to an audience of fans dressed in tribute wigs, false teeth and tight white satin – and now there’s a new album.

Greenfields was recorded in Nashville, and comprises 12 tracks of Barry duetting some of the band’s greatest hits with some of the starriest and campest names in country music. It’s a real lockdown treat, even though some of the songs are not quite as foot-tappin’ as the originals (Jive Talkin’ with Jay Buchanan and Adam Lambert is almost funereal).

He lets his guests shine through, even ham it up. Keith Urban and Dolly Parton both try to steal the show, but don’t manage it (Barry still stands alone, technically). Sheryl Crow and Brandi Carlile both make storming cameos.

Gibb’s ambition is to play Greenfields live, pandemic permitting, with as many of his album guests as he can. He wants and needs to be back on stage, he says, because that’s when he feels ‘the presence’ of his late brothers most.

Bring it on. Until then, we just have to carry on Stayin’ Alive if we can, wearing our gold lamé blouson jackets from the back of the cupboard, mourning all we have lost.

Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers’ Songbook Vol 1, EMI

And then there was one: Maurice, Barry and Robin – the Bee Gees in 1979

Albrecht Dürer’s Madonna and Child, oil on panel, c1496-99. In his lifetime, Dürer was the most famous artist in Europe

EXHIBITIONS

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON

HUON MALLALIEU Sadly, Dürer’s Journeys (planned for the National Gallery, from 6th March) has been postponed. At the time of writing, Epic Iran is still scheduled at the Victoria and Albert Museum (13th February to 12th September).

In the circumstances, I’ve resorted to wallows in the online publications for both shows. The poor organisers should have horoscopes cast in these grim times.

In fact, one of the stars of the Iranian show is the exquisite horoscope created for Tamerlane’s favourite grandson, Iskander Sultan, Governor of what is now southern Iran, in 1411. Naturally, given the 27-year-old prince’s status, his future was said to be long and bright but, three years later, a rebellion against the Shah put an abrupt stop to it.

In itself, the lavishly illustrated horoscope (from the Wellcome Collection) could symbolise the wealth of Persian-Iranian culture. Its 86 folios were created by superlative illuminators, gilders, calligraphers and paper-makers – not to mention astronomers.

The exhibition spans 5,000 years of history in about 500 objects from public and private collections. Persian civilisation refined outside cultural influences and absorbed them into its own.

In considering European art, past historians have sometimes tended to overemphasise the national and to overlook the contacts and exchange of influences between regions and schools.

It is no longer possible to consider the Italian Renaissance in isolation from Burgundy and the Netherlands.

‘My art speaks for itself’

Similarly, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) cannot be pigeonholed as ‘German School’, as if unmarked by his visits to Italy and the Low Countries. He was indeed the most famous artist in Europe.

This is the first exhibition to concentrate on his travels. Not a great deal is known about his four years in western Germany, Flanders and Basel between 1490 and 1494, but his two journeys to Italy, principally Venice, in 1494-95 and 1505-07, are better documented, partly by his letters.

Crossing the Alps, he was one of the first to demonstrate the value of watercolour to travelling artists. His journal of the second Netherlands tour in 1520-21 is known in contemporary copies, although only one original page survives – which is in the show. It includes his expenses and the prices of his paintings and prints.

Along with his own paintings, drawings and prints, many from major collections around the world and several not seen here before, there are important works by the artists with whom he consorted on his travels.

When they are finally put on, these shows should certainly not be missed.

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Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER FROST IN MARCH Our garden lies in a river valley 400 ft above sea level, on the border separating England from mid-Wales. Gently rising hills to the north reach a height of 1,000 ft, tumbling their cold air down on us, where it lingers. Yes, we’re in a frost pocket.

In a previous garden, in Surrey, I lived on the brow of a hill, smug to feel the chill slide away into the suburban gardens below. Altitude and location create unique microclimates and we have learned to live with ours for nigh on 30 years.

Cold weather in March is no serious problem. The crisis comes in April and May when much of the plant world’s dormancy has begun to break. Last year, unusually, we had two successive nights of severe frost in the third week of May, devastating hundreds of plants.

Robust late-bloomers such as roses shrugged off the devil, but less hardy mid-season plants – hydrangeas particularly, bearing vulnerable, well-developed flower-buds on the tips of exposed stems – were robbed of that year’s floral beauty.

For us, therefore, March is for revelling in plants whose flowers can withstand the month’s barometric vagaries. Hellebores are supreme at this. Gardeners in more favourable areas enjoy the oriental hybrids as early as January, climaxing in February before giving way to pasque flowers (Pulsatilla vulgaris), early primulas, trilliums and the numerous, lovely cultivars of Pulmonaria officinalis, the lungworts – some grown just for their spectacular, silver-patterned foliage.

True, our native hellebore, the so-called stinking hellebore, Helleborus foetidus, happily parades its tall heads of small, clustered apple-green cups around Christmas and New Year and they endure for many weeks. But the lower-growing

Lenten rose, H orientalis, and its kin are rarely seen in great number and in full flower in our garden until March. Their flowering stems can be knocked flat overnight by a hard frost, but the day’s rise in temperature quickly has them upstanding, undamaged once more.

This class of hellebore has one of the widest flower-colour ranges in all nature.

Their saucer-like faces are seen chalky or milky white, pale or lemon yellow, apple green or the softest pink, deepening to the wine-red hues of a costly Rioja.

Some are freckled and are feverishly collected by connoisseurs; others bear a picotee edge to the petals. Some have been bred to lift their heads from the more familiar, drooping stance – allowing one to dispense with the old trick of viewing them with an upturned mirror at the end of a stick, like gadgets used by security and customs officials to inspect a vehicle’s undercarriage.

We have bought countless, named varieties down the years, especially those raised by late hellebore queen Helen Ballard (her ‘Ballard’s Black’ is worth rubies to me) and, more recently, by Hugh and Liz Nunn in Worcestershire, whose daughter Penny Dawson at Twelve Nunns Nursery in Lincolnshire continues to promulgate her parents’ Harvington

Purple pays: Helleborus x hybridus

strain of Helleborus x hybridus.

Desirables include ‘Harvington Lime’ and ‘Harvington Shades of Night’.

Double-flowered kinds are available but the single-flowered varieties take my trophy. They seed around nicely, too.

Less agile gardeners could grow hellebores in moist, humus-rich compost in containers, enabling closer and more comfortable encounters. And the heads of these seemingly frail but tough-as-oldboots flowers can be floated upright in dishes of shallow water indoors, where they will last surprisingly well.

Finally, during lockdown, be generous.

Send a pot of floriferous hellebores to someone special who no longer has a garden. Their warm appreciation will melt your heart – and the fiercest frost.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD THYME Thyme is not only the most useful herb in the kitchen. It is also one of the easiest to grow. The seeds are available in packets of a thousand for less than £2, but it may be simpler to buy a small plant or take cuttings in spring from a friend’s plant.

Chalky soil is said to be best for thyme, but my plants grow happily enough on greensand.

Common thyme (Thymus vulgaris) is the hardiest variety, growing to about 12 inches with mauve flowers in summer.

The mature plants can be cut back in June to encourage new, bushy growth, and I have found that the harder they are cut, the more vigorously they will grow.

If the stems are to be cut for drying, this should be done just before the plants come into flower. Any that have become very straggly should be divided or replaced.

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Of the many varieties of thyme, a lemon- or orange-scented plant is not as hardy as the common thyme and may need protection with straw in winter.

Silver Posie has variegated leaves and pink flowers, while the creeping thymes are suitable for paths or for growing between paving stones.

One of these (Thymus serpyllum) may be the wild variety growing on a bank where Titania slept. Oberon speaks of it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Thyme grows well in containers, and will look attractive in a raised urn among other taller herbs. I have seen different varieties emerging from the holes of a strawberry pot; all of them are loved by bees, giving their honey a delicious flavour.

In addition to its culinary uses, thyme is a versatile herb. Thymol, or oil of thyme, has antiseptic properties. It has been used in surgical dressings, as a disinfectant and in toothpaste.

Simon and Garfunkel sang of ‘parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme’. In the television series Rosemary and Thyme, one of the gardening detectives had Thyme as her surname. Only recently, I have heard of a friend’s grandson who has been given Thyme as a first name.

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD USE YOUR LOAF If you’re not yet up to speed with last year’s lockdown baking craze, Anita Sumer’s Sourdough Mania will tell you all you need to know about starters, risings, kneadings, shapings and bakings.

To begin at the beginning, you need your very own mother-starter (you have to do this only once). Anita is Slovenian and she calls hers Rudl.

To prepare yours, mix 20g water with 20g organic rye flour (other bread flours are possible, but rye is the most reliable) in a clean glass jar. Cover loosely and leave at room temperature overnight, wrapped in a towel if the heating is off.

Next day, stir in 30g flour and 30g water. Repeat on the third day, when you should begin to see some bubble action (it may need another day or two).

Meanwhile, give it a gentle stir a couple of times of day to show you care.

As soon as the volume increases and the scent is a little sour (third or fourth day), remove half and use it to levitate something frivolous such as pancakes.

Carry on with the additions until day six, when it’s ready to use. Anita says the first batch might be a little flat – starters become more levitational with age.

Save at least 40g of your mother-starter 78 The Oldie March 2021

possible), bubble up, turn down the heat and simmer for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, toast a couple of thick slices of sourdough – your own or someone else’s. Ladle the soup into bowls, drop the toast on top, cover with a thick layer of grated hard cheese (Comté, Gruyère). Slip the bowls under the grill for the cheese to brown and bubble.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE THE CHARLES II DIET or you’ll have to go back to the beginning.

Store it in the fridge, lidded. When you’re ready to bake, feed it as before with any strong bread flour, and let it come up to room temperature for 6-12 hours.

For a simple sourdough loaf, knead together 100g of your starter with 300g bread flour, 200g water and 6g salt.

Leave it to rise at room temperature till it’s doubled in size. Shape into a doughball, leave to rise again and bake at 180°C/Gas 4 till the base sounds hollow when you tap it.

For further and better particulars – and a whole chapter on how to coddle your starter – this is the book you need.

Meanwhile, good bread deserves good soup. And good soup starts with a home-made stock.

Basic bone broth For 1½ litres of ready-to-use broth, enough for six, roast a couple of kilos of sawn-up beef bones, plus a chicken carcass (or 1kg chicken wing tips and necks), at 180°C /Gas 4 for 30 minutes till well browned.

Pack into a roomy stockpot with chunked carrot, leek, onion, celery, bay leaf, parsley stalks, ½ tsp peppercorns.

Add 3 litres cold water, bring gently to the boil, skim, turn down the heat and leave to simmer, uncovered, till the liquid is reduced by half – about an hour.

Strain and discard the solids, add salt, and leave it to cool so you can lift off the layer of creamy beef fat to save for fry-ups.

Classic soupe à l’oignon No sooner have we pulled up the drawbridge than nostalgia sets in. What follows is the traditional breakfast for market porters and late-night revellers (me, too) in Les Halles when the wholesale market was in the centre of Paris.

To serve two, finely slice 4 large onions and fry very gently in goose dripping or butter till soft and lightly caramelised – 20-30 minutes. Add 500ml of bone broth (plain water is

Jeremiahs everywhere are prophesying the demise of Britain’s restaurant culture.

Yet if the Restoration of Charles II after the Civil War is anything to go by, we are in for our greatest-ever boom.

In the 17th century, London became an urban Gargantua, demanding a constant supply of food. It has been suggested that ‘cockney’ is derived from the Latin coquina, meaning cookery, since London was the capital of cook shops.

Thus the idea of Cockaigne, a mythical place where eating and sex are on tap.

Novelty and variety returned after the Restoration. Pepys ate lobster at the Cock Tavern in the Strand. Charles II indulged in caviar and ice cream (for the first time in 1671), though not simultaneously. And the Duke of Bedford recorded drinking a sparkling wine in 1665, well before Dom Perignon started rotating his bottles.

Between 1660 and 1721, the area for market gardens around London increased from an estimated 10,000 acres to 120,000. And citrus fruit began to arrive from China, Portugal and Ceylon.

Among the eating places, there were ‘twelvepenny ordinaries’ and ‘threepenny ordinaries’, the price depending on comfort and quality. A London labourer needed just a shilling a week for his lodgings and five shillings a week for food. The daily wage exceeded the daily food bill.

Pepys, the ultimate ‘goodfellow’, earned £350 a year as Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board. He regularly refers to eating at places like Marsh’s in Whitehall and Wood’s in Pall Mall, where he could have a cut from the available joints, some vegetables, a roll and a pint for eightpence.

Parliament met every spring and autumn. Whereas the grander MPs had built large town houses of their own, the Bufton Tuftons from the shires moved their broods into rented lodgings and had to eat out.

The arrival of these country gents, combined with the get-rich-quick wide boys (yet to experience the South Sea Bubble), provided the perfect conditions

for ostentatious dining. Three exclusive ordinaries are referred to often: the Pontack’s Head in Abchurch Lane, Locket’s in the Strand and Chatelaine’s in Covent Garden.

Pontac was the son of the president of Bordeaux and, as John Evelyn reported in 1683, had ‘the choicest of our Bordeaux wines’, which was unsurprising for a family who owned Château Haut-Brion.

He started his ordinary in 1670, and the Royal Society held their anniversary dinner there from 1694 to 1746.

The menu was lavish and expensive at between one and two guineas a head: ‘Bird’s-nest soup from China; a ragout of fatted snails; bantam pig but one day old stuffed with hard row and ambergris; French peas stewed in gravy with cheese and garlick; an incomparable tart of frogs and forced meat; cod, with shrimp sauce; chickens en surprise, not two hours from the shell.’

Baby birds were the stuffed dormice of their day. Pope described having peachicks at the Bedford Head tavern.

Even miserly Swift conceded, ‘What wretch would nibble on a hanging shelf,/ When at Pontack’s he may regale himself?’ Locket’s exemplified nouvelle cuisine even better than the 1980s fad.

Here, ‘They shall compose you a dish no bigger than a saucer, and it shall come to fifty shillings.’

Needless to say, only the few indulged.

The majority stuck with what they knew.

When Jos Cooper published a satirical cookery pamphlet entitled The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth Cromwell, designed to mock the turgid fare of Oliver’s missus, it became so popular that it ran to many editions.

They loved the no-nonsense, homespun recipes; ’twas ever thus.

DRINK BILL KNOTT CORNISH PASTIS All this lockdown malarkey is playing havoc with my ability to speak French.

It has, like an old car, always been liable to spots of rust. Regular trips to France kept it in some kind of working order. In their absence, I realised the whole chassis was in danger of collapse.

And so, in my corner of Shepherd’s Bush (or Buisson de Berger, as I call it), I have created a small Quartier Français.

French films and box sets run constantly on the TV, Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel warble sonorously from the stereo, and the fridge bulges with home-made pâté de campagne, its aroma of herbs, liver and garlic the perfect foil for the glass of pastis that now precedes every meal.

Ah, pastis… P G Wodehouse described the plight of the young man outside the Hotel Magnifique in Cannes, into whose face ‘there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French’. Had the young man simply stiffened his sinews with a Ricard or two in the nearest bar, fluency would have been assured.

Pastis is one of a huge category of aniseed- and liquorice-flavoured drinks – including Greek ouzo, Turkish raki, Italian sambuca, Spanish anís – but it is unmistakably French. Unless it comes from Cornwall, that is: Tarquin’s, the North Cornish distillery famous for its gin, also produces the drolly named Cornish Pastis – and jolly good it is too, counting gorse, orange zest and candied black liquorice among its 13 botanicals.

In France, pastis has a chequered history. Banned during the Second World War as ‘contrary to the values of Vichy France’, it began to be produced again only in 1951. Marseille’s favourite tipple, Pastis 51, takes its name from the year.

Absinthe, its close and disreputable cousin, remained banned.

The remarkable, Marseille-born Paul Ricard was the man behind the commercialisation of pastis. Painter, industrialist, Tour de France sponsor and creator of the motor-racing circuit at Le Castellet that now bears his name, Ricard started marketing his new, sophisticated version of pastis in 1932. When he resumed production after the war, advertising was banned but merchandise was not. So Ricard’s ashtrays, mirrors, water jugs and cycling caps became as unmistakably French as a 2CV. The bottle sitting next to me now, however, is not Ricard, 51 or even Pernod (all three brands are now owned by Pernod-Ricard). It is the pastis made by Provençal distiller Henri Bardouin (Waitrose, £22.99), and it is delightful.

Very aromatic, with a distinctive whiff of cardamom, it is lighter in texture (but not alcohol) than Ricard and 51, and made with 65 or so herbs and spices.

Je le recommande.

I have come across many cocktail recipes using pastis, but I have yet to find one I like. Stick to the tried and tested: a slug of pastis, about four times the volume of water and an ice cube. The drink will become cloudy (the rather wonderfully named louche effect) but your French will become crystal clear.

At least that is my theory. My wife holds another view on the subject. ‘Your French is still terrible, even after a few drinks. You just think it’s got better.’

She may have a point.

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The Oldie March 2021 79

SPORT JIM WHITE FOOTBALL’S QUIET MAN One of the many privileges of writing about sport is that, even as the pandemic continues to grip, we lucky reporters can still gain access to live matches.

While thousands of fans remain locked out, at every Premier League game a few journalists are at the stadium to deliver news.

And how different it is without a crowd.

Most obvious is what you hear in the absence of 50,000 chanting, bellowing, chatting spectators. There’s the thrum of the ball when hit at pace, the squeal when a player is fouled, the chummy first-naming of some referees (‘That’s a foul, J, and you know it,’ I heard one tell the Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson). And then there is the coach’s constant yelling.

Control freaks to a man, football coaches have taken the opportunity of silence to try to impose order from the touchline. They deliver an unrelenting barrage of instruction. Sam Allardyce, at West Bromwich Albion, uses vocabulary lifted straight from the parade ground.

Others, like Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola, accompany their incessant verbal interventions with wildly complicated hand gestures, semaphoring away like Marcel Marceau.

How banal most of it is. I saw a game recently where Crystal Palace’s manager Roy Hodgson, dignified oldie that he is, maintained a restrained silence throughout and left the yelling to his assistant, Ray Lewington, who kept shrieking out the most basic instructions. When an opposition corner floated into his team’s penalty area, he would be on the touchline, yelling, ‘Away!’

– as if it had never occurred to his players that they should try and clear the ball from danger. At other times, he would shout, ‘Pass it!’ or ‘Get back!’ I even heard him utter the age-old standard of park football ‘Get rid.’

This was a coach being paid substantial fees to shout blindingly obvious orders. It made you wonder, given how pointlessly clichéd those orders were, whether any of the players were listening. Had his urgent direction simply become background noise?

In elite rugby or cricket, this doesn’t happen; coaches watch the game from a box. When England play, you see Eddie Jones sitting up high in the stands, headphones on, next to an analyst peering at a laptop. He doesn’t shout or scream.

If he wants to change personnel, he sends instruction down to an assistant at ground level who passes it on. From up there, he can see patterns of play, understand what he needs to change and restrict his words with the team to the half-time break.

80 The Oldie March 2021

But in football, the manager remains pitchside. Not, as has been evident in lockdown, because he can better influence things from there. But because, as in American sport, the antics of the coach have become part of the entertainment. The cameras seek him out when goals are scored or conceded, or when things on the pitch are a little dull. There is even the fourth official stationed between the two technical areas to excite the anger of both managers in the hope it might make good television.

I’ve realised, while the game has been behind closed doors, that standing on the touchline, ranting, serves absolutely no positive purpose for the football manager.

Judging by the way coaches are ignored, it is certainly of no benefit for the players.

Far better for coaches to follow the lead of rugby and cricket and watch from on high. You never know, from up there they might actually influence things.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD THE AMI, MY LITTLE FRIEND From the 1930s to the 1970s, Citroën innovated.

Whereas most new car models were refinements of their predecessors, Citroën strove to change the way cars moved, steered and stopped, earning French engineering a reputation for stylish design and original thinking.

Remember the Traction Avant (1934-1957), the car with a drive-on part in almost every film about the French Resistance and every episode of the original television Maigret series? Or its almost space-age successor, the frogeyed DS and the variants it spawned?

Although both were designed by the Italian Bertone, they were thought of as quintessentially and charmingly French.

And their beauty was more than skindeep: the revolutionary DS suspension system was adopted by Rolls-Royce.

Best-known, of course, was the little 2CV (1948-1990), Citroën’s answer to the VW Beetle. Designed to carry a family of four plus 50kg goods to market, as well as to get eggs across a ploughed field unbroken, it and its variants sold

Electric Citroën Ami: Europe’s cheapest car

3.8 million. One variant was the Ami, offered in four-door saloon and estate versions, the latter known as the Ami 8.

My father, a farmer, had an old one which he rated his best-ever car – reliable, simply maintained (replacing its little 602cc engine took the local garage less than a morning) and genuinely capable of crossing ploughed fields. Slow, noisy and tinny – yes, but that didn’t matter. It did everything he asked of it, in surprising comfort.

In 1976, Citroën was taken over by Peugeot, and new models, though often good and worthy, were no longer revolutionary. Until –perhaps – now.

There’s a new Ami. It looks like a car – four wheels, two doors, two seats and an enclosed body – but in France can be driven by 14-yearolds without a driving licence (unlikely here). It’s electric, powered by a small 5.5kWh battery with a range of 43 miles and a recharging time of three hours from an ordinary 230v household socket.

Unlike other electric vehicles, it offers no sensational 0-60mph acceleration time. That’s because it never reaches 60: its top speed is 28mph. But, with the average speed in town centres being under 10mph, that should be no worry.

You’ll be able to buy it outright for £5,500 or lease it for £20 a month with a £2,400 deposit. It’s Europe’s cheapest car and if it takes off – as it almost could, since it weighs less than half a ton – it could redefine the city car.

What you get for your money is a cute little runabout under eight feet long (about three-quarters of an old Mini), uncluttered by safety aids such as airbags, crumple zones and clever electronics.

That’s because it is officially a quadricycle rather than a car, built in Morocco with a steel frame and interchangeable plastic panels and doors; hence the passenger’s door is fronthinged and the driver’s rear-hinged. (All models are currently left-hand drive.) It may not be as safe as larger cars, but it’s a lot safer than anything on two wheels.

The minimalist cabin has a glass roof with good head height for tall people, a screen showing speed and range, a lever to engage drive or reverse, a cradle for your phone, a knob for hanging handbags and, reports say, plenty of storage. The seats are reckoned fine for short journeys.

It won’t be sold here for a while, but should be as cheap as chips to run and its environmental impact is about as light as can currently be designed. It won’t skip across ploughed fields like my father’s old Ami and you may notice pot-holes a little more but, at £20 a month, you can put up with that.

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The Oldie March 2021 81

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Whitehall’s secret weapon There is nothing like a crisis for focusing the mind and revealing who has laid in the resources to cope with the unexpected.

The past year has provided plenty of such opportunities. While the pandemic has, no doubt, hastened the unhappy demise of some businesses, it has allowed others to show what they can achieve. I imagine that board meetings at Pfizer and AstraZeneca might be fairly cheerful events at the moment, despite everything.

There has also been a huge rise in the need for online services and information.

A government department that does seem to have emerged smelling of roses is one

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

The world’s biggest digital library https://b-ok.cc/ Almost six million books that you can download to read on your computer, Kindle or similar.

The Old Bailey www.oldbaileyonline.org A searchable collection of texts detailing the criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court from 1674 to 1913. Look up the black sheep of your family.

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems.

Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

you may not have come across, but you’ve certainly seen their work: the slightly shadowy Government Digital Service (GDS). It’s a unit of the Cabinet Office, and oversees the government’s web presence, now consolidated (by the GDS) under the gov.uk web address.

I call them shadowy because the GDS seems shy, and I suspect that most Oldie readers don’t know that it exists. It was created by David Cameron in 2011, following his Digital by Default policy, which decreed that all government services that could be delivered online should be.

The GDS doesn’t seem to publish an annual report, and it’s only cursorily mentioned in the Cabinet Office’s report.

If the cost of the GDS is published somewhere, I can’t find it; nor can I find much on its staff or size. It does admit to having a Director General, but she is, curiously, described as ‘interim’. It must have quite a budget, because it seems to be able to step up when really needed.

For example, in the space of about five weeks, the GDS and HMRC created, from scratch, the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, the online means of providing support for furloughed workers. It was designed, built and launched in less than five weeks, and it worked. Frankly, in the online world, that’s spectacular. There may be some political disappointments associated with that scheme, but you really can’t fault the online systems.

Then there was their excellently named Project Unblock, which tackled the inclination of government departments to follow their own technological preferences. That insularity

meant that most departments used different video-conferencing systems, and prevented access to those systems they did not use. Ridiculous.

Project Unblock dealt with that parochialism, and now Microsoft Teams (which is better than Zoom) is available across all major departments. It’s extraordinary that it wasn’t already, and it took the GDS to unpick that knot.

It also rapidly created the online platform for disseminating coronavirus information and has trained thousands of civil servants in using their computers better.

In fact, they have done all this so well that that I imagine we take them for granted; their success during the pandemic has been, as one commentator put it, the dog that didn’t bark.

It’s not all sunshine and flowers. The muddle over developing a contact-tracing app was embarrassing, although it’s fair to say that there is no real evidence that any country has properly solved that one, despite what people might tell you about South Korea. Also, another GDS project, the Verify system for proving our identities online, doesn’t really work, and no replacement has yet been posited.

But credit where credit’s due; none of us is perfect. The efforts of the GDS mean that we all now assume that a government website will actually work. Sir Humphrey Appleby might see that as a rod for his own back: ‘Far better to keep expectations low, Minister.’ Ten years ago, public expectations of government websites were very low, and rightly. Now they are not.

So, GDS, please keep up the good work, whoever you are.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Taxman tips you for tip-offs Whistleblower or snitch. Responsible citizen or nosy neighbour. Deciding to tell tales about someone you believe is breaking the law is difficult.

HMRC is just one organisation that relies on tip-offs to uncover wrongdoing.

It wants to know about people who work for cash but do not put the money through their books, or do not give receipts. About anyone who hides money 82 The Oldie March 2021

offshore, or does not charge VAT when they should – or perhaps charges VAT but does not pass it on to the Revenue.

Now it is investigating thousands of cases of furlough fraud, possibly up to £4 billion of stolen taxpayers’ money, involving fraudsters impersonating claimants, and bosses who took furlough money even though they made staff carry on working.

To recover such substantial sums, HMRC might well pay a financial reward for information. Even before the pandemic, it was encouraging whistleblowing both from its own employees and from members of the public.

The Revenue’s aim is to reduce the tax gap – the difference between the total tax due and the amount actually paid. The losses to fraud, evasion and error are

diminishing year on year but still totalled £31 billion in 2018-19.

HMRC does not routinely pay for tip-offs, as most informants tell on tax-dodgers out of a sense of duty rather than for financial reward. But it will pay when it considers the information to have been ‘exceptionally helpful’, and hands out approaching £500,000 a year (tax-free) in rewards.

Most awards are below £5,000, though an award could run to £250,000 for outstanding knowledge that recovered an enormous amount of tax.

The question of whether anyone should be paid for information is debatable. The practice can encourage time-wasting tips from disgruntled employees and bitter ex-spouses seeking revenge.

Not all wrongdoing involves lost money – so should payments be made only when money is recovered?

Employees who blow the whistle can be risking their jobs or even whole careers, for which they should be compensated.

HMRC does not say how many tip-offs it receives, but accountancy firm UHY Hacker Young reckons there were about 73,000 in 2019-20, a 10-per-cent increase on the year before.

Tax collection has also improved because accountants and financial

‘How about this line?’

advisers must now report any suspected tax evasion they uncover.

Buy-to-let landlords have been given the opportunity to blow the whistle on themselves, as HMRC estimated around 1.5 million were paying no tax at all or at best underpaying tax on their rental income.

The Revenue is allowing any landlords who failed to pay up in past years the opportunity to come clean now in return for lighter penalties. If they still keep quiet, they face higher penalties when caught.

Passing on information to the taxman is easily done through a hotline on the website or by phone, and you can pass on information anonymously.

HMRC warns against trying to find out more about the fraud or letting anyone know you are reporting them.

Go to www.gov.uk and search ‘report fraud to HMRC’, or phone 0800 788 887 (from outside UK +44 (0)203 080 0871)

‘I just want my boy to take an active hand in the business if he wants to take over when I retire’ The Oldie March 2021 83

Getting Dressed

Dear Irma Kurtz

The American agony aunt knows all our secrets – now she reveals hers brigid keenan

DAFYDD JONES

As the most famous agony aunt in the world – on Cosmopolitan magazine for 43 years – she has heard it all – including a confession of murder.

Irma Kurtz, 85, was born in Noo Jersey, as she still refers to it, despite years in London. But, back in the Fifties, on a school trip, Kurtz fell in love with Paris and determined to escape her destiny in America – ‘Lawyer husband, house in Connecticut, two cars’ – and live a bohemian life in the boulevards.

After Columbia University in New York, she worked at various jobs to earn the money to return. By chance, one job was with a PR firm doing publicity for Givenchy. There, a sympathetic Francophile boss promised that if she could get herself to Paris, she would arrange a job with the great man, teaching him English and doing a bit of PR. ‘I was a hippy in beads and blue jeans with wild hair down to my waist – Monsieur Givenchy used to look at me with an air of puzzled amusement,’ she says.

‘Once he gave me a dress, hoping, I think, that I would wear it at work, but I wasn’t really cut out for that scene and moved on to languageteaching – and writing.’

After a couple of years, she fell out of love with Paris. Not wanting to go home, she ended up in London instead. ‘It was the mid-Sixties and I was broke – I’ve always been broke – and trying to get freelance work.’

She sent a piece to Dennis Hackett, editor of the brand-new magazine Nova. ‘It was about how men flirted in different capitals, and he bought not only it – he bought Cardigan from Peru; T-shirt from France; bag

by Bagman and Robin 84 The Oldie March 2021

ME, too. I wasn’t an agony aunt there. I did think pieces on love and emotions which is probably why, when I was interviewing Helen Gurley Brown, who was just setting up Cosmopolitan then, she asked me to become one, for her.

‘I had just become pregnant and thought that a stable job – for a couple of years – would be a better way of supporting my baby. I ended up staying for half a lifetime.’

Over the decades, Cosmo produced 64 local editions around the world. Kurtz flew to many of them – including Japan and Mexico – to help set up their problem pages.

Her base was always London, from where she wrote both the British and the American agony-aunt pages. When she had death threats in America, as she sometimes did, it helped that she lived in Britain.

Kurtz mourns the fact that, halfway through her career, emails replaced real letters. ‘You could tell a huge amount about people by their writing paper and how they wrote – I became a great graphologist. When everything went online, the job lost a lot of its intimacy and humanity.’

The other sea change during her time at Cosmo was women’s lib – as it was first known. ‘The world is a different place now. But the source of women’s problems continues to be men – though, sometimes now, it is other women, especially in the workplace. And it has always been lack of self-esteem – including in myself,’ she says, laughing. ‘I am always apologising.’

Her only other grumble is that

Kurtz in 1969, when she worked at Nova magazine, writing ‘think pieces’ on love

her name is always linked to her Cosmo job – ‘Irma-Kurtz-Agony-Aunt’ – when in fact the column took only some of her time.

She has written several travel books (her favourite is The Great American Bus Ride, about travelling round the US on Greyhound buses), a TV series (Mediterranean Tales, for BBC4), self-help books and two novels – she is currently working on a third. Her autobiography, My Life in Agony, was published in 2015, the year she retired.

True to her early bohemian ideals, Kurtz never married. She lives between tiny one-rooms flats in London and in Wimereux – she still loves France, if not Paris. She walks everywhere – and she is still broke, having sold her house in London to help out when her son had triplets.

One economy is easy: she doesn’t buy clothes. ‘I always loved shopping for bargains in markets and in the Portobello Road and now I have enough.’

She uses inexpensive Nivea skincare: Soothing Night Cream, Refreshing Day Cream and Q10 Eye Cream. But she has two extravagances: Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair for her face and mānuka honey, to which she is ‘completely addicted’, for her taste buds.

Kurtz cut her long hair ‘on a whim’ years ago and has never regretted it.

The Great Spotted Woodpecker by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd Nothing has altered general knowledge of the natural world more than the documentary nature film.

How magical Disney’s True-Life Adventures (1948-60) were. The revelation of movement when ducks skidded into one another on ice was as funny as Laurel and Hardy.

Technological advance has helped subsequent documentarists answer the public taste for sex, violence and impending doom, turning once-jolly Sir David Attenborough into a global Jeremiah. Nature’s copulation and killing, plus the garbageladen evidence of humanity’s laying waste the planet, mean innocent pleasure has been replaced by a Darwinian nightmare.

One of the unwanted revelations of the BBC’s Springwatch has been that the great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major) is a killer. Eggs and nestlings are to its taste, and daily inspection of a nesting box crammed with baby blue tits had a sinister, pre-planned edge. Any nestling of a suitable size, however well concealed, can be endangered, as was shown when a clutch of treecreepers was dispatched.

A century ago, Lord Grey and W H Hudson knew nothing of this blot on the bird’s character. For Hudson, its worst crime was to ‘steal cherries’. Even Mark Cocker in Birds Britannica (2005) wrote, ‘Sometimes its feeding habits take us completely by surprise,’ quoting Nick Richardson’s account of a great spotted killing other birds’ nestlings to feed its own.

That we know so much more about it is also due to its greater prominence.

From 1967 to 2010, numbers quadrupled.

It has even crossed the Irish Sea to breed in Northern Ireland (2006), the Republic of Ireland (2009) and the Isle of Man (2010). Only the barren reaches of the Highlands and Islands defy it.

Among explanations for this expansion are: the national decline of starling numbers – hence more vacant tree-hole nesting sites; the spread of conifer forestation – fir-cone seeds are a

helpful winter food; the availability of decayed wood through deciduous tree diseases; and urban bird-feeders.

Unpicky and adaptable, the great spotted can hang upside down on suet balls if its favourite peanuts are unavailable.

Flamboyant plumage – the red neck patch distinguishes the male; red caps, juveniles – always makes its visits a sensation. In 1951, the ornithologist Max Nicholson argued for the more accurate name ‘pied woodpecker’ – a campaign worth reviving.

Its sharp jick call and bouncy flight are immediately recognisable. It is the principal drumming woodpecker.

Drumming signals availability – the

noise is the most dramatic contribution of both genders to springtime. In 1943, Norman Pullen proved the drumming was made by beak on wood. Shockabsorbent tissue within the skull cushions impact. Sound volume depends on rapidity (5-20 per ½ second), not force.

The similarly plumaged but sparrowsized lesser spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos minor) has declined (some 1,000 survive) as dramatically as its bigger cousin has prospered (145,000). Landscape management has destroyed the lesser’s traditional woods and orchards. Fifty years ago, it was widespread up to Scotland.

The Oldie March 2021 87

Travel Fit for a Prime Minister’s brother Three hundred years after Robert Walpole became the first Prime Minister, Peter Sheppard and his partner bought his brother’s Norfolk house

I

have owned three homes belonging to government ministers from the 15th to the 20th century.

The earliest was Hales Hall in South Norfolk, which has the largest medieval brick barn in Britain, built by Sir James Hobart, Attorney General to Henry VII in 1475. In the 1990s, I bought Winston Churchill’s duplex apartment in a mansion block in Victoria, overlooking Westminster Cathedral, where he spent his ‘wilderness years’ in the 1930s – and which he left to go to 10 Downing Street.

But the one I now live in with my partner, Keith Day, Wolterton Hall, was built by Horatio Walpole in 1720-30.

He was the brother of Sir Robert Walpole, who, 300 years ago, on 3rd April 1721, became our first Prime Minister.

We hadn’t expected to move from Hales Hall as we had meticulously restored it, spending over a million pounds putting back Tudor chimneys, 88 The Oldie March 2021

reopening bricked-up windows and making it all very comfortable. The enormous barn was let out for weddings.

We won first prize for the restoration from the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England.

But then a call came from a property agent: ‘You remember you said you wanted an important house of architectural consequence? Well …

I’ve got it.’

Keith and I arranged to meet the owners of Wolterton Hall, Lord and Lady Walpole, in Norfolk one October afternoon.

When the previous Lord Walpole died, Sir Robert Walpole

by Rysbrack, 1738

in 1989, his son decided not to move into Wolterton but to remain in their pretty, smaller moated Tudor house just two miles away – so the house hadn’t been occupied for almost 30 years.

Typically we were late, and in the twilight the façade covered with grey lichen looked gloomy and depressing. We entered by a small door to the side of the hall, into a utilitarian little office. As we walked around the hall, shutters would be opened and then closed as we left each room. Indeed, the hall was permanently shuttered – but since that first visit the shutters have hardly been closed.

Lord and Lady Walpole led us up a wide cantilevered stone staircase to the piano nobile of eight double-height state rooms with pedimented classical door cases, deep and elaborate cornices and fabulously carved marble fireplaces attributed to Richard Fisher of York.

Enormous, 17th- and 18th-century Brussels and Antwerp tapestries, a few pieces of gilt furniture and Persian carpets furnished the rooms. Portraits of Walpoles peered down condescendingly

CHRISTOPHER HORWOOD

Palladio comes to Norfolk: Wolterton Hall, built by Horatio Walpole in 1730

everywhere. A green baize door opened into the East Wing with a further 15 rooms.

Another very long flight of stairs took us to the second floor, with another 24 rooms. Many bedrooms had single basins, while bathrooms had matching baths and loos in lemon yellow, baby pink, sky blue and moss green, installed in 1953 along with a new roof after a bad fire. The fire had led to the abandonment of the attic above.

We walked down the steps to the cavernous vaulted basement and into a former kitchen, whose ancient boiler Lord Walpole informed us dated back to 1947. It wasn’t on and the house was very chilly. In fact, it does work and when fired up sounds like a jet engine starting; it has kept us warm since we moved in.

Outside, the landscape designed by Charles Bridgeman in the 18th century with its ten-acre lake had become completely overgrown. The 500-acre estate was full of Victorian favourites such as laurels, rhododendrons and azaleas, which weren’t appropriate for a classical landscape.

Thousands of weed trees had pushed

their way between mature ones and completely taken over the horse pond and tennis court. The north and south ha-has were falling down; sheep were roaming round in the garden. The hall’s mile-long drive with mature beech trees was beautiful – but had been barbedwired up for cattle.

There was a beautiful but dilapidated coach house and clock tower, with original Victorian stables, cottages and a run-down estate yard where woodcutters, carpenters, glaziers and blacksmiths would have worked. There was the old dairy, piggeries, gamekeeper’s cottage, gatehouse and cottages. Keith and I looked at each other: ‘This is it.’

Horatio Walpole, known as Old Horace, used the experienced Thomas Ripley, Comptroller of the King’s Works, as his architect. The result was a Palladian house of which his nephew, Horace Walpole (of Strawberry Hill), said ‘Wolterton is charming. It is all woods and water.’ However, he also said, ‘Wolterton is a good house. If only my uncle had spent an extra 18d in every room, it would be a fine house.’

The grander of the two staircases leads up to the state rooms, with a sort of

cupola on the second floor. The other staircase is more modest, cantilevered in Portland stone which takes you up to bedrooms once lived in by the family and now serviced by a creaky old 1950s lift.

Horatio’s family didn’t use the grand Palladian steps on the north façade, which ascended to the Marble Hall and sadly were removed in the 19th century.

They seem hardly to have used the state rooms on the piano nobile; these were used only to receive royalty and archdukes.

In the saloon and boudoir are eight tapestries given to Horatio by a grateful Cardinal Fleury, Louis XV’s chief minister. When Fleury had fallen out of favour, Horatio continued to visit him – he had secret information that he would eventually be returned to power.

Their friendship flourished. The Walpoles were determined to keep the peace with France; Robert was more interested in building up Britain’s prosperity and reducing taxes than in fighting useless wars. This period of peace helped Britain’s economy to grow throughout the 18th century.

Robert gained the confidence of George I and George II and Queen Caroline. As George I spoke no The Oldie March 2021 89

CHRISTOPHER HORWOOD

English and Robert no German, they conversed in Latin.

Robert used the support he had at court to create an effective working relationship with Parliament, which he dominated for 40 years, the last 20 as Prime Minister – a role he created for himself though he disliked the title.

He knew how to make government work. He knew how to grant sinecures to achieve loyalty, and had the government and the House of Commons within his grip for two decades.

Robert was a peacemaker, a successful Chancellor, restoring Britain’s reputation for fiscal prudence after the South Sea Bubble fiasco, and a great patron of the arts with great taste himself.

Of course, all this had to be paid for, and Robert knew how to manipulate financial reward for himself and his brother.

In Norfolk in the 18th century, many aristocratic families built impressive houses on large estates to enhance their status. They wanted somewhere to entertain their political allies and impress their social superiors, particularly royalty and aristocracy.

Returning to Norfolk after the European Grand Tour, they built houses in the style of Greek temples and Roman state buildings. Robert and Horatio, from the gentry class, learned about Palladio second-hand.

There are four so-called Whig power houses in Norfolk, built by members of Sir Robert’s government at around the same time, using the most talented architects and designers, including William Kent, Colen Campbell and Lord Burlington.

Raynham Hall was started in 1620 and completed some 100 years later by the second Viscount Townshend.

Holkham Hall was built by the first Earl of Leicester while Robert built Houghton Hall, both huge houses to rival royal palaces.

Thomas Ripley was the overall project manager of Houghton Hall. His opportunity to design a house to his own specifications came when Horatio asked him to do so after the medieval house burnt down. Wolterton is his only country house and it is a joy to live in. It is large and well laid out; we use every room on every floor.

What is so wonderful about Wolterton is that all the architectural elements are intact: the cornices, the solid walnut doors given by Queen Caroline, the fabulous fireplaces, panelling and floors – all untouched.

After the fire in 1951, the configuration of the bedroom floor was managed so sensitively that we had no arguments

Above: Wolterton interior. Below: Sir Robert’s house, Houghton Hall (1720s)

about en-suite bathrooms with Historic England or the conservation officer.

We bought most of the contents of Wolterton – the furniture, tapestries and paintings, including a vast portrait of Horatio with his wife and eight children. On the main landing, visitors are confronted by Rysbrack’s marble bust portraying Sir Robert in a toga with Caesar’s curls, looking every bit a Roman emperor.

In the portrait room, we gathered together all 30 portraits – which now line the walls from dado to cornice and include a picture of Sir Robert in his Chancellor’s robes and garter, looking very satisfied with his achievements.

We have nearly completed the restoration of the hall; its 12 bedrooms with bathrooms include the dramatic state bedroom, bathroom and shower room. We’ve put in two kitchens, which we designed; one of them has just won Historic Houses’ Kitchen of the Year award.

The double-height state rooms are hung with 17th- and 18th-century tapestries (digital copies of which can be obtained from Watts of Westminster)

and feature Persian carpets, glittering chandeliers, richly framed oil paintings and gilt furniture.

Unlike Horatio, we feel it is important to dominate the house so we use pretty much every room: we often eat in a state room despite the inconvenience, guests pick and choose their favourite bedroom, and all the state rooms come into their own for parties and receptions.

We’ve restored many of the pretty lodges, cottages and houses around the hall; they were falling down but are now comfortably furnished with tapestries, oriental carpets and original artworks and have state-of-the-art kitchens and bathrooms. There’s a range of options for your stay, from the single-bedroom Treasury up to the seven-bedroom East Wing, with its magnificent view over the lake set in the park.

We have rebuilt the ha-has, put up miles of park fencing to keep the sheep at a distance and gradually planted hundreds of beech and oak trees in the wild and natural 500-acre park, which is for the exclusive use of our guests.

Our plan is to make the estate – which once depended on farming – capable of producing income through having people come to stay. We will even allow the main hall to be taken for a big event, so that for a week you can be the proud owner of your own stately home with up to 40 bedrooms.

Have we ever regretted taking on a project of this size? Not for one moment.

It has been the most fulfilling episode in our lives. I’m glad that we were inspired by the energy and passion for houses of Robert and Horatio, who continued to expand and embellish their houses until the day they died.

The Oldie March 2021 91

Overlooked Britain

God’s acre – just off the A3

lucinda lambton The Watts Cemetery Chapel in Surrey is a divine slice of Celtic, Romanesque and art nouveau, built by the inspired Mary Watts At Compton, just south of Guildford in Surrey, you are in for a shock – a rare and ravishing shock which, for its complex, decorative beauty, is surely unparalleled in the country.

Bewitchingly sombre yet vibrantly glowing, the Watts Cemetery Chapel, with its astonishing decorative schemes, has a heart-stopping-you-in-your-tracks sense of the extraordinary.

The chapel is whirled into a web of artnouveau decoration that smothers the walls throughout in rich and often deep relief. It was conceived and designed by a woman who had never embarked on any such architectural schemes before and would never do so again.

She was Mary Watts, the painter, sculpture and designer wife of the great Victorian artist George Frederic Watts.

Although he paid for it – painting a picture specially to finance the work – he played no part in its creation.

Always a keen philanthropist, she had started her artistic life by giving claymodelling classes to shoe-blacks in London’s East End and thereafter would immerse herself in teaching craft skills for the greater good.

She established evening classes in Compton, founding the Compton Potters’ Arts Guild and the Arts and Crafts Guild, with 74 local amateurs and enthusiasts from the village. They included the blacksmith, a local builder and an architect called George Redmayne, who supervised Mrs Watts supervising the labour force.

The renowned Scots writer and sculptor Louis Deuchars advised overall.

Many locals went on to apply themselves to the fantastically elaborate decoration under her guidance, with almost every resident of the place being involved in one way or another.

Today, the village is still intact and the chapel is to be restored. Still, it’s so close to the A3 that it seems to have fallen off the dual carriageway, thundering by in close proximity.

Starting in 1896, the work was finished by 1901. The chapel ended up as a brilliant red-brick beacon of a building in 92 The Oldie March 2021

Mary Watts by George Watts, 1887

most violent hues. Mrs Watts had hoped it would blend into the countryside. It most certainly does not, never will and is all the more glorious because of it.

There it stands, built in what was originally a picturesquely rural spot, a Greek cross standing proud, with the ground plan of a circle symbolising eternity and faith.

Dramatically engaging, every inch of its intricate, Celtic, art-nouveau and Romanesque decoration has a message from Mary Watts. The exterior, with friezes in deep relief, shows the spirits of love, hope, truth and light, with the tree of life rambling throughout.

The arches round the door give it all the appearance of a Norman doorway graced with a choir of angels – ear to ear, their wings entwined by a Celtic cord pierced through with peacocks’ eyes.

Step through the door and you are enfolded by the glow of rich, dark colours and by endlessly interweaving lines, woven, according to Mrs Watts, ‘as it were, into a mystical garment’.

The roots of the tree of life writhe again, beneath the sombrely beautiful ‘winged messengers’ – great, feathered giantesses ‘presenting the light and the dark side of things’.

Those of the light have their haunting faces gazing out and those of the dark have their backs turned: Night and Day, Growth and Decay, Ebb and Flow and

Joy and Sorrow, they stand two by two around the walls, all grasping a sharply raised Celtic Nouveau cord, entwined with symbolic cameos. This marvellous assembly is made of gesso – fibre soaked in plaster of Paris, fashioned into panels at Limnerslease, the Wattses’ house nearby (also under restoration).

A delightful-to-relate error is that the staircase from the first to the second floor was entirely forgotten. It was a major slip-up on the part of the artist and architect Sir Ernest George, whose London office was nicknamed the Eton for Architects and who counted Edwin Lutyens among his pupils.

As for the marvels painted in the house, the panels were attached to a metal framework. The panels were then fixed to the chapel walls, before being enriched ever more luxuriously for their final splendour.

A gilded message, reading ‘Their hope is full of immortality but the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God’, sweeps round the room, supporting thick vaulted ribs to the ceiling. These are embellished with strangely modern – I fear somewhat cutesy-faced – cherubs, which soar past crimson-clad seraphs to meet ‘the circle of the eternal’ in the apex on high.

Despite living only half a mile away, Watts saw his wife’s tour de force only once – and then by chance, when he followed her out for a walk. She wrote, ‘He had not before realised what I had aspired to in the matter of this glorified wallpaper and spoke with his usual generous appreciation.’

These sinuous architectural forms, to become known as the art-nouveau style, writhed their way through Europe at the turn of the 20th century, although their tendrils barely touched Britain’s shores.

It is thanks to Mrs Watts and, I fear, precious few others that we can delight in their riotous twists and turns. Three cheers for this supreme example in rural Surrey.

The last words should go to Mary Watts. She was determined that the chapel should ‘be an example of what God’s Acre might be’.

DAVID REED/ALAMY

Top: Watts Chapel. Below, from left: the angel-adorned doorway; art nouveau interior; Mary Watts and collaborators, c1902 The Oldie March 2021 93

Taking a Walk

A Roman holiday by Hadrian’s Wall

GARY WING

patrick barkham

Where better to begin and end a walk than in a place called Heavenfield?

Hadrian’s Wall is a military march across the northerly limit of the Roman Empire and, of course, arrow-straight.

Around Heavenfield, however, there are footpaths and lanes offering a circular walk, and the map bristles with intrigue, from Turret 25B to a place called Planetrees.

I pulled into a layby on the B6318, ‘the military road’, as locals call it. It is surely the best drive in England, a swooping, desolate Roman line which sweeps past fort after fort.

Beside the road stood a weathered, wooden cross, erected in the 1920s, commemorating one raised by Oswald and his men some 1,400 years ago.

It was around 634 when Oswald’s small band of men confronted mighty Cadwallon of Gwynedd, who had already defeated Oswald’s uncle and brother on the craggy edge of the Whin Sill, where Hadrian’s Wall still stood tall.

Oswald’s unlikely victory was attributed to his fighting under a wooden cross, which he erected after converting to Christianity during exile on Iona.

The cross Oswald raised became so popular for its healing powers that a church was built here. Bede recorded, ‘Even to this day, many cut off small chips from the wood of the Holy Cross which being put in water, men or cattle drinking thereof, or sprinkled with that water, are immediately restored to health.’

It was a bright, cold winter’s day, and every small sound travelled far in this vast, almost silent landscape. Before taking the footpath towards Planetrees, I visited the 18th-century iteration of St Oswald’s church, which stood on high ground surrounded by old sycamores from where rooks called.

To my surprise, the church was open.

Even more amazingly at a time when no one is welcome anywhere, it sang with friendly notices: ‘This church is always open’; ‘Come in, come in.’

I almost expected to be converted, sitting alone inside that beautiful, plain building with the morning sunlight streaming through the windows. There was no lightning bolt but there was immense peace, and that was enough.

As I walked west, the grassy fields were ridgy with diggings, mysterious

building works from past ages. I hadn’t realised that there was not much of Hadrian here. Wall aficionados might want to walk east from Cawfields, where the 2,000-year-old stonework makes modern walling look primitive.

Planetrees, I discovered, was a section of Hadrian’s Wall. It was named after a local farm saved by poet and historian William Hutton. He probably invented the idea of walking the length of Hadrian’s Wall, producing a book in 1801.

He discovered a local farmer removing the wall to build a farmhouse and argued, ‘If the Wall was of no estimation, he must have a mean opinion of me, who would travel 600 miles to see it.’

Despite a landscape scored by the exercise of power over the ages, everything about this morning walk was gentle and welcoming. At Planetrees, I passed an old boy in a small tractor ploughing by the footpath. The earth smelt delicious, and the farmer gave me the thumbs-up.

The most menacing encounter was with a sheep wearing a harness affixed with a kind of plastic medallion. This gave this stout animal the air of a vicious bull terrier. A sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Only later did I learn that the device was a raddle, which recorded which ewes a tup had mounted and, it was to be hoped, mated.

As I returned over the craggy Whin Sill, the wintry air was suddenly filled with a chur-chup-chup from a multitude of birds. Twenty fieldfares assembled on an ash which was yellow with lichen. Our friends from the north!

These handsome winter visitors had found a welcome here too, and they flashed dark and light as they flew in search of the last berries of winter.

Park on layby beside St Oswald’s Church (grid ref NY937694). Take St Oswald’s Way path west to Planetrees. Follow footpath south past Crag House. Return via quiet lane or footpaths from Fallowfield (for a longer round).

OS Map OL43 Hadrian’s Wall The Oldie March 2021 95

Genius crossword 397 el sereno Most clues are normal, but 6 lack any definition. They do have one thing in common, though, which is defined by an anagram (4,4) of an extra word in each of two clues.

Across 1 Country almost invaded by force twice for such food (6) 4 Stalin struggled to protect the outskirts of 26 (8) 9 Nature’s incredibly revealing plant extract (5) 10 Simple boxes or empty case for ceramic ware (9) 11 Manage to find people lacking time (4) 12 Shortly make something for breakfast (4) 13 A second place will be an advantage (5) 15 Answer found by nameless hunk, drunk in pub (7) 16 Had been importing diamonds for bundles of cash (4) 19 Dark character-forming vehicle officers cut by half (4) 20 Song about endless region or state (7) 23 Keen about Republican opening bars (5) 24 Best international sort of headgear (4) 25 Engage in daytime shenanigans (4) 27 Sort of paper binding a book (9) 28 Hospital department welcoming attempt to stand (5)

29 Coat bottom of boat to protect river and swimmer (8) 30 Cheap move needing thousands initially (6) Down 1 Soil part of hospital gown stored here? (8) 2 Ask chef, worried about international food (4,4) 3 Cat seen by golf course reportedly (4) 5 Psychiatrist fascinated in hearing will be securely covered (6-7) 6 Beer on Times, and atmosphere given a lift (10) 7 Book lift for cook (6) 8 Left then, excited about good feature of pool (6) 10 A man never wept uncontrollably for such a hairdo (9,4) 14 Source of help covers bill for runners here (10) 17 High temperature reducing, but not initially (8) 18 Remains understanding in case of theft (8) 21 Turn down amount of food from takeaway? (3,3) 22 A male in charge of weapons like this (6) 26 Black out having lost regulars (4)

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: 10th March 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 397 Across 1 High-ranking nobleman (4) 3 Tresses (4) 9 Blunder (5) 10 Seem familiar (4,1,4) 11 Silly; meaningless (5) 12 Mark with festivities (9) 15 Proprietors (6) 17 Consume greedily (6) 19 Ignorant (of something) (9) 21 Improvise (2-3) 23 Accord (9) 24 Type of duck (5) 25 Occupied (4) 26 Portent (4)

Genius 395 solution Down 1 Senior manager (8) 2 Tinder (8) 4 Performance stadiums (6) 5 Allay (7) 6 Opera solo (4) 7 Liberate (4) 8 Doorpost (4) 13 Roman amphitheatre (8) 14 Scare (8) 16 Fruit; codswallop (7) 18 Circumvents (6) 20 Abide by (4) 21 Highest point (4) 22 Mineral vein (4)

Winner: Andrew Atkinson, Ludlow, Shropshire Runners-up: Bryony Moore, Bewdley, Worcestershire; Neil Heywood, Royston, Hertfordshire

Moron 395 solution Across: 1 Squirm, 4 Aisle (Square mile), 8 Glues, 9 Arrears, 10 Alleges, 11 Heal, 12 End, 14 Byre, 15 Iffy, 18 Dab, 21 Earn, 23 Lectern, 25 Oration, 26 Anger, 27 Disco, 28 Smutty. Down: 1 Signal, 2 Usually, 3 Resigned, 4 Awry, 5 Scare, 6 Easily, 7 Raise, 13 Disclaim, 16 Freight, 17 Second, 19 Blunt, 20 Energy, 22 Roars, 24 Fino.

The Oldie March 2021 97

Competition TESSA CASTRO Do you know how often you pick up all four aces? It is one time in 378. In one of the most delightfully absurd wrinkles in our wonderful game, you get a 150 bonus in a No trump contract at Rubber Bridge (or Chicago) when you hold all the aces. This was Duplicate – no such bonuses.

Dealer North North-South Vulnerable

West ♠ 10 9 8 7 6 3 ♥2 ♦J96 ♣J 10 4

North ♠A ♥ A K Q 10 5 ♦A73 ♣A Q 7 5

South ♠ KQ52 ♥963 ♦KQ85 ♣3 2

East ♠ J4 ♥J874 ♦ 10 4 2 ♣K 9 8 6

The bidding South West North East

2♣ (1) Pass 2♦(2) Pass 2♥(3) Pass 3♥(4) Pass 4♣ (5) Pass 6NT(6) end (1) Showing 23+ points, or a hand worth 23.

(2) Negative or, as here, waiting. It is normally best to respond Two Diamonds,

so you do not get in partner’s way.

(3) Forcing to game with five+ hearts.

(4) Showing the fit and looking for slam (Four Hearts would be weaker).

(5) Naturalish second-suit bid, looking for slam.

(6) South was hungry for the extra ten points at Duplicate Pairs.

Six Hearts would have made despite the bad heart split, the 3-3 diamond split saving the day. Six No trumps would have made similarly had West led his longest suit, spades. However, he chose a diabolical knave of clubs.

With good chances of making all 13 tricks and not expecting West to have led from the king of clubs, declarer rose with the ace of clubs. He then cashed the ace-king of hearts and was disappointed to see West discard.

Abandoning hearts, declarer cashed the aces of spades and diamonds, then crossed to his king-queen of diamonds. The 3-3 split revealed, he enjoyed the 13th diamond and the king-queen of spades, reducing to three cards.

Dummy held the queen-ten of hearts and the queen of clubs. East could do no better than reduce to the knave-nine of hearts and the king of clubs. At trick 11, declarer exited with a club. East won the king but had to lead into dummy’s queen-ten of hearts.

Slam made.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 263, you were invited to write a poem called Open the Box. Joe Houlihan, with his beguiling refrain, ‘Do not open the box/ Professor Schrödinger’, was one of many who celebrated that mysterious creature. The next most celebrated boxes belonged to Michael Miles and to Pandora. David Harris explained that Pandora’s was really a jug, adding, in a PS, ‘The jug thing is true, for your information,/ Blame the box on Erasmus’s mistranslation.’

In a different world, Kenneth Wheatley sketched the work of getting locomotives’ fireboxes alight in the morning. Dorothy Pope’s narrator found more than she bargained for in a jewellery box full of safety pins.

Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of that box of delights The Chambers Dictionary going to Adrian Fry.

Cigarette stubs and spent matches from the ashtrays.

Used cigarette packets of Capstan, Player’s and Woodbines.

Tickets from visits with them to the village Regal Cinema.

Wrappers from rationed Rolo and KitKat. The tennis ball Used for cricket in the backyard. Every item they had touched Was to me part of them, so that through the anxious years I could go to the hall stand, open the box, and feel them near.

James Lancaster

I found it empty in the high, dark lobby; the glove box, That central feature of the hall stand, its hinged lid To hide my secrets, saved from when either of two Aircrew brothers, home on leave, filled the house with joy.

He gave to her a jewelled box; ‘Within it lie,’ said he, ‘The wonders of the world, the tokens of my love for thee.

A snowflake’s cell, an ocean’s drop, a first and final breath, Life-giving oxygen that buoys our path from birth to death, A single tear, a lover’s sigh, my fingerprint, my kiss, Emotions spanning human thought, from agony to bliss, Nitrogen and hydrogen and neon, and the spread Of light to dark through shadow, ultraviolet, infra-red; Dark matter, quantum particles and molecules and motes, Atoms, microbes, memories of music’s once-heard notes, Perseus in his helmet, emperor’s clothing rich and rare, And still a yet more wondrous thing – for God himself is there.

The glory in this box is such that none will ever see; The poor have it, the rich want it, and it compares to thee.’

She opened it; she cried, ‘My heart for ever sore will be!

False love, to trick a maiden thus, and Nothing give to me.’

Jane Bower

Far from facing death flying in wartime skies, The challenge now was to match our skills at darts.

Discarded items then became my souvenirs. Expended Bus and train tickets secretly stored in the glove box.

Empty matchboxes, tobacco tins of Four Square Yellow;

COMPETITION No 265 Time for the popular annual bouts-rimés. Write a poem, please, with these as the rhyming words in this order: where, why, air, sky, brink, white, drink, night, earth, words, mirth, birds. We still can’t accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – please include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 265’, by 11th March.

Prise its back off with a spanner, Do its screen in with an axe, Stem its colours and its clamour And its nightly News attacks.

Get it emptied, grey and broken, Spread its guts about the floor, Trash its zapper as a token: Does it want some? Give it more.

Break it down to each component As conspired to keep you dumb, Mesmerised by an opponent You thought you controlled by thumb.

Open up the box and picture All the nothing stored within; So long captive to its flicker Dare you let real life begin?

Adrian Fry

The Oldie March 2021 99

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‘I’m the man who invented Zoom’ 100 The Oldie March 2021

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The Oldie March 2021 105

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside Husband’s silent retreat

Q

My daughter has married a writer who works from home, and she’s confided in me that she’s getting fed up with being raged at because the children, who have been at home a lot recently, have been making a noise. It seems he needs complete quiet ‘to write’. Having just read a biography of Dickens, who apparently could write masterpieces in the same room as his friends who were in the middle of dinner, just getting up occasionally to grab a bite or make a joke, I find his behaviour is putting unnecessary pressure on my daughter, who has enough to contend with. Admittedly he’s successful, and makes a living wage, but he’s taking this being a writer and being so sensitive a bit far. What do you think?

Mrs R J, by email I’ve always thought like you and, having worked in a newspaper office, I know that one learns to work amid bustle and conversation.

However, it’s been pointed out to me that many writers are slightly ‘on the spectrum’ – this sensitivity is what makes them good writers – and such people can find noise a painful and intolerable distraction, particularly if it’s sporadic.

Suggest that your son-in-law build a shed at the bottom of the garden, if he has one, or that he find a room in a quiet house nearby, where he can bash out his novels, or whatever he’s writing, in peace.

A

Q

A doctor writes

My elderly mother-in-law went into hospital for a minor procedure and was kept in for a month, slowly getting more and more confused. Finally, the doctor asked us to

consider transferring her to a care home, because they thought her confusion might be some kind of dementia. Luckily, I’m a doctor and was able to suggest they test her for a UTI (urinary tract infection) before taking this drastic route. She tested positive and, within two days of being given an antibiotic, she was right as rain and sharp as a tack. She’s now back home. I thought readers should know this should always be considered before any drastic action is taken.

Name and address supplied UTIs can often cause mental confusion in older patients. My 92-year-old cousin was taken into hospital not knowing his own name and unable to recognise any of his family or friends. Luckily, a UTI was diagnosed and, like your mother-in-law, he recovered completely with a course of antibiotics. Apparently, care homes often have many older people with bladder infections that aren’t picked up.

A

Extinction Rebellion rebel

Q

At Christmas, some friends sent us an all-singing-and-dancing email card with rabbits and Christmas lights and so on. On the message, they announced that they were sending the money they’d saved, by doing this, to Extinction Rebellion. I am still fulminating because I’m not a fan of ER, to put it mildly. We’re meeting them soon and I don’t know how I shall be able to keep my mouth shut. They are lovely people and I don’t want to hurt them.

Caroline G, Norfolk Plan to send them a similar card next year, announcing that the money you’ve saved has been sent to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK or Laurence Fox’s Reform Party. Having

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ISSN 0965-2507. Printed in England by Walstead Group. Distributed by Seymour Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

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106 The Oldie March 2021

this time bomb up your sleeve, which you’ll deliver next year, should give you enough smug satisfaction to keep you quiet. Remember that revenge is a dish best served cold.

Q

Sleeping agents

I am 82 and seem to have lost the knack of getting to sleep at night. I lie in misery for several hours – and yes, I have tried reading and other ‘solutions’, but it is not till 4am at the earliest that I finally find sleep. If you or any of your readers can suggest what I might do, I shall be only too pleased to try out their ideas.

Name and address supplied We older people need far less sleep than we did in our youth because we don’t need the rest to grow, and we usually burn far less energy during the day than we used to. My own list of tips (not remotely comprehensive): do as much physical exercise as you can in the open air during the day and exhaust yourself; take a pill advised by the chemist – Night Nurse will knock you for six (so you mustn’t take it regularly); go to bed much, much later; get a lavender pillow; drink herbal teas; don’t have coffee, tea and cigarettes except in the morning, and don’t drink alcohol before turning in; have a hot bath before bed; keep your bedroom cool; try a weighted blanket (the new rage); turn in and rise at the same time every day. And, finally, get a sleep monitor – it could be that you’re sleeping a lot more than you think, while imagining you’re awake tossing and turning.

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