The Oldie magazine - May issue (400)

A N WILSON ON PHILIP LARKIN May 2021

JILLY COOPER’S PIN-UPS

May 2021 | £4.95 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 400

400 th Issue

Our 400th issue!

Eric Morecambe, my Dad – Gary Morecambe My tragic heroine – Antonia Fraser RIP Prince Philip – Gyles Brandreth and Robert Hardman

Give The Oldie for 67p an issue See p11

Craxton captures the Greeks page 22

Features 9 My pin-ups Jilly Cooper 10 The incredible sulk, Angus Wilson Michael Barber 13 Depraved Simon Raven David Oldroyd-Bolt 14 What was Prince Philip like?

Robert Hardman 17 Philip’s joyful gaffes Harry Mount 18 Eric Morecambe, my dad Gary Morecambe 20 Working in a mental hospital Tom Petherick 22 John Craxton’s Greece Ian Collins 24 A return to parties Duchess of Beaufort 26 Larkin’s rude photos John Sutherland 30 Music hall’s last act Barry Humphries 33 Ogden Nash’s divine comedy Rev Peter Mullen 34 I bought a football club Charlie Methven 36 Visitors’ books, chronicles of history Eleanor Doughty 38 Antonia Fraser’s heroine, Caroline Norton Valerie Grove

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes

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

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

ABC circulation figure July-December 2020: 47,382

Monica Jones, Larkin and sex page 26

7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 11 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 12 Olden Life: What was the tobacconist? Joseph Connolly 12 Modern Life: What is cottagecore? Deborah Nash 29 Small World Jem Clarke 40 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 41 Country Mouse Giles Wood 43 Letter from America Edward Kosner 45 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 46 Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu 48 God Sister Teresa 48 Funeral Service: Violet, Lady Aitken James Hughes-Onslow 49 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 50 Readers’ Letters 52 I Once Met… Norman Stone Leslie Croxford 52 Memory Lane 53 School Days Sophia Waugh 53 Quite Interesting Things about ... May John Lloyd 67 Media Matters Stephen Glover 69 History David Horspool 71 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 71 Rant: OAPs in jeans Liz Hodgkinson 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

Skomer’s puffin kings page 90

103 Crossword 105 Bridge Andrew Robson 105 Competition Tessa Castro 114 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books 55 Malice in Wonderland: My Adventures in the World of Cecil Beaton, by Hugo Vickers Matthew Sturgis 57 Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her Life and Long Loves, by John Sutherland A N Wilson 59 The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19th-Century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women, by Antonia Fraser Frances Wilson 61 Letters to Camondo, by Edmund de Waal Hamish Robinson 61 How the Just So Stories Were Made, by John Batchelor Nicola Shulman 63 Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence, by Frances Wilson Maureen Freely 65 Lean Fall Stand, by Jon McGregor Sara Wheeler

Travel 90 Treasured island: Skomer, Pembrokeshire Harry Mount Oldie subscriptions ● To place a new order, please visit our website subscribe.theoldie.co.uk ● To renew a subscription, please visit myaccount.theoldie.co.uk ● If you have any queries, please email help@ subscribe.theoldie.co.uk, or write to: Oldie Subscriptions, Rockwood House, 9-16 Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH

93 My Italian motorbike tour of the Cotswolds Peter McKay 96 Overlooked Britain: Southside House Lucinda Lambton 99 Taking a Walk: Round Loch an Eilein Patrick Barkham 101 On the Road: Julian

Fellowes Louise Flind

Arts 73 Film: Raging Bull

Harry Mount 74 Radio Valerie Grove 74 Television Roger Lewis 75 Music Richard Osborne 76 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 77 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 79 Gardening David Wheeler 79 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 80 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 80 Restaurants James Pembroke 81 Drink Bill Knott 82 Sport Jim White 82 Motoring Alan Judd 84 Digital Life Matthew Webster 84 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 86 Bird of the Month: Fulmar John McEwen 89 Getting Dressed: Dr Irving Finkel Brigid Keenan Oldie book orders ● Please email bookorders@theoldie.co.uk Advertising For display, contact: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Melissa Arancio on 07305 010659 For classified, contact: Kami Jogee on 07983 097477 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover Quentin Blake illustration

The Oldie May 2021 3

Happy 400th issue!

Four hundred issues ago, Richard Ingrams launched The Oldie – and edited the first issue.

Richard said in his first editorial, ‘The Oldie began life as a joke. But, as soon as I announced it, I found that everyone was taking it seriously. Offers of help poured in. People rang up, wanting to invest.

‘Before I knew what was happening, I found I was leading a crusade.’

Deepest thanks to all readers, whether their first issue was the first ever or this, the 400th!

John McEwen, our Bird of the Month columnist, helped found The Oldie.

‘Thirty years ago,’ he remembers, ‘I awoke convinced there should be a new magazine called Sage, a rival to Saga.

‘Talk of the “grey pound” promised success. Gaga Saga readers might even buy Sage by mistake. I told Alexander Chancellor, editorial saviour of the Spectator, creator of the Independent Magazine.’

For the 400th issue, McEwen rang founding editor Richard Ingrams. Did he approach Alexander or was it vice versa, about starting an ‘oldie’ magazine?

He couldn’t remember, other than recalling that launching magazines was always a topic.

McEwen says, ‘Eventually, The Oldie (the title Sage smelt of onions) was born, with Richard as editor and the late Naim Attallah as publisher. Like-minded spirits – Stephen Glover, Patrick Marnham and Auberon Waugh – invested £12,000 each to lend Naim token support.

McEwen adds, ‘I too bought a place on the board. Among non-board contributors were Lord Lambton, Alexander’s mother and a Maltese banker friend of Richard’s, Godfrey Grima.’

The launch issue sold 100,000 copies, but soon The Oldie settled at a loss-making sub-20,000. Paul Getty proved its saviour, thanks, Richard thinks, to John Brown’s approach, prompted by James Pembroke.

Among this month’s contributors Jilly Cooper (p9) is one of Britain’s most popular writers. She is author of Riders, Rivals and Polo. Her latest book is Mount!

She appeared in the first issue of The Oldie in 1992.

Gary Morecambe (p18) is Eric Morecambe’s son. He is the author of You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone: The life and work of Eric Morecambe and Morecambe & Wise: 50 Years of Sunshine.

Charlie Methven (p34) edited the Daily Telegraph’s Peterborough column and founded the Sportsman newspaper. A part-owner of Sunderland AFC, he was in Sunderland ’Til I Die on Netflix.

Richard Ingrams, editor of The Oldie, 1992-2014

Peter McKay (p93) has worked for the Daily Mail since 1982. The author of Inside Private Eye, he lives in the Cotswolds. He has been riding motorbikes for over 50 years.

The young Oldie: the first issue, published in 1992

McEwen adds, ‘Richard also said Godfrey Grima is the only person he has known to die of COVID – in Malta, one of the few places currently deemed safe to visit.’

Oldie literary lunches began in 1995.

Since 2007, the Master of Ceremonies has been the immortal Barry Cryer, 86, a guest at lunches since 1998.

Barry doesn’t just tell the audience’s favourite parrot jokes. He also devotes a lot of time to writing poems to introduce each of the three speakers. The Oldie is deeply grateful to him.

‘I’m a peopleaholic,’ says Barry. ‘The Oldie chapter in my life is great for me.

‘I met people I would never otherwise have met.’

The Oldie May 2021 5

Important stories you may have missed Countdown to first cut silage Ulster Gazette Mysterious green substance spotted Stamford Mercury

Pig’s trotter among items thrown from Bridge Cornish Times £15 for published contributions

NEXT ISSUE The June issue is on sale on 2nd June 2021.

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6 The Oldie May 2021

Michael Palin and Barry Cryer at an Oldie lunch, 2020

Barry’s favourite Oldie lunch memory is from 2017, when David Cameron’s mother, Mary Cameron, was our Oldie Mother-Knows-Best of the Year. She won the award after fighting the closure of a Berkshire children’s centre, which had been shut after a spending review instituted by her son.

David Cameron had been invited to the ceremony to accompany his mother.

Barry says, ‘I tapped him on the shoulder, saying, “Keep the noise down. There’ve been complaints.” Mary Cameron laughed and he looked bewildered. That could only happen at an Oldie lunch.’

not least Ian Jack, who kindly looked after the magazine while Alexander was ill.

‘Alexander once said to Ian, after reading another evocation of the West Fife coalfield in 1955, “One of the good things about your stuff is that there’s never any danger of coming across the Mitfords.” ’

James Pembroke, The Oldie’s publisher, recalls the late, much-missed Alexander Chancellor (1940-2017): ‘Alexander and Richard came up with the idea for a “truly independent, freethinking, no-bullshit magazine” in 1991. He became the editor in June 2014, after Richard’s resignation a week earlier. Richard was startled by such dishonour among thieves, having resigned his TV column in the Spectator, in 1984, after Alexander was sacked as its editor.

‘Yet Alexander truly grabbed the baton, and gave the magazine the design we still have. He was the most visual of editors. His design for the Spectator has still not been tampered with.

‘As a former Guardian columnist, he was loved by journalists from right and left,

Alexander and Jeremy Lewis, Oldie deputy editor, 2016

Richard Osborne has been The Oldie’s music critic since the first issue.

‘No concert or opera reviews, Richard [Ingrams] suggested; more a series of essays on whatever might take my fancy,’ Osborne remembers. ‘The first column contained some thoughts about the perilous business of driving and listening to music.

‘It was inconceivable that an Ingrams publication would not have music deep in its DNA or that Richard’s own

musical interests would not provide a regular flow of ideas, modestly proffered on the back of one those trademark postcards we were always delighted to receive.’

The ‘no reviews’ idea was broken pretty well straight away, after Richard Ingrams mentioned the opera festival that his brother, Leonard, another Oldie investor, was operating from the terrace of Garsington Manor, his home near Oxford. Osborne’s book Garsington Opera: A Celebration has a chapter on the Ingrams family and its fine musical credentials.

Valerie Grove has been The Oldie’s radio correspondent since the first issue.

‘Richard wanted me to cover radio, which we agreed should be called Wireless, the word self-mockingly used by those wishing to vaunt their fogeyish tendencies,’ Valerie says. She was a mere 45 then.

Ingrams was only 54.

‘Few thought the new mag would survive, but I confessed anyway to Simon Jenkins, the editor who had just lured me to the Times, that I had also promised a fortnightly piece for Ingrams.’

Simon frowned and said to Valerie, ‘I don’t like to think of you writing for something called The Oldie.’

Valerie says, ‘I was pleased to find his byline in The Oldie’s recent Spring issue.’

The Oldie of the Year Awards began in 1993, the brainchild of Oldie publisher James Pembroke.

The late, great Terry Wogan compèred the ceremony at Simpson’s in the Strand. And Oldie columnist Gyles Brandreth has been our magnificent MC since 2014.

In 2011, the late Prince Philip was our Oldie of the Year. And what a kind letter he sent us: Sandringham House I much appreciate your invitation to receive an ‘Oldie of the Year’ award. There is

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

nothing like it for morale to be reminded that the years are passing – ever more quickly – and that bits are beginning to drop off the ancient frame. But it is nice to be remembered at all.

Philip

‘An attack in the rear’ – a WWII postcard. From Wish You Were Here – 151 Years of the British Postcard, at the Postal Museum, London (20th May 2021 to 2nd January 2022)

The second issue of The Oldie, in March 1992, had a prescient cover.

It shows two oldsters outside a multiplex cinema, wondering which film they might go in and see — Ectoplasmist II, Screaming Skulls, Disemboweller or Screwdriver Killer.

Have things improved, as cinemas reopen post-COVID? A London reader has just been leafing through the Observer’s arts pages: ‘I absolutely did not long to see Oldie of the Year 2011 Prince Philip’s letter

any of the films reviewed — Antebellum (“queasily superficial horror film”) or Synchronic (“paramedics attending a series of odd fatalities linked to a psychedelic designer drug”).’

As The Oldie has been pleading for 400 issues, please bring back entertaining, jolly films!

In our first issue, Mary Kenny, The Oldie’s Postcards from the Edge columnist, interviewed an aged priest called Monsignor Francis Bartlett – uncle to Jennifer Patterson, half of the Two Fat Ladies cooking duo.

Monsignor Bartlett recalled growing up in Edwardian London. He said modern life brings us great ‘gadgets’. But is there anything nicer than a kind servant who brings you tea in the morning? He bore his Edwardian views with perfect Christian charity.

‘My mother had died in 1991,’ Mary remembers. ‘An event when you begin to realise that you are now in the front-line generation. I was heading for 50, too, and I had started to think that older people – since I’d soon join them – were often very interesting. They were a

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Cooked white crab, mayonnaise, grated Parmesan, radish, gem lettuce and squeezed lemon on sliced rye

deposit of experiences that were receding: they were witnesses to history. It was a great idea when Richard Ingrams launched The Oldie and invited me to contribute.’

In other news...

‘How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?’ said Charles de Gaulle.

Well, Britain now has 750 cheese varieties. And quite a few of them will soon be on sale at the new Chiswick Cheese Market, which opens on 16th May. For Chiswick, it’s a lovely return to its origins. Chiswick was originally, in around 1000, called Ceswican, meaning Cheese Farm.

The Oldie is very sad to hear about the death of a much-loved contributor, Trader Faulkner, 93.

The Australian actor starred with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. A friend of Richard Ingrams since the 1950s, he wrote for The Oldie from 2004 until this year’s April issue, in an article about Peter Finch, whose biography he wrote.

Surf’s up! Trader Faulkner (1927-2021), Sydney, 1950

Until this year, Trader turned up in the Oldie offices, copy in hand, in pink beret and cowboy boots. He would often stamp out a flamenco in the office before leaving.

Olé – and farewell, dear Trader!

Free digital edition for overseas subscribers Throughout the duration of the pandemic, we are giving all overseas subscribers free access to the digital edition which normally costs £9 per year. To claim free digital access, simply write to help@subscribe.theoldie.co.uk with your subscriber ID number (beginning 0016) and/or your address.

The Oldie May 2021 7

Jilly Cooper’s pin-ups I

n our first issue, Jilly Cooper picked her seven pin-ups. They were the late Duke of Beaufort (‘a mega-giggler’); Anthony Powell (‘also terrific to giggle with’); the writer Godfrey Smith; Byron (‘ideal toyboy material’); Horatius who kept the bridge (‘Being Roman, he was probably gay’); the actor William Franklyn; and Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles (‘intensely glamorous’).

To celebrate our 400th issue, Jilly has stuck these gorgeous hunks on her bedroom wall.

My favourite pin-up remains Andrew Parker Bowles l, because he is a blue-eyed Brigadier like my father and not only did he ride in the Grand National, but he was incredibly brave in the Army and is a truly sweet man.

The sexiest man in the world is an actor called Grégory Fitoussi l, who starred in Mr Selfridge; he is like a great, purring puma.

John Reardon & Diesel the dog l – from Hudson & Rex (a Canadian TV police show) – are a divinely attractive couple. John is so handsome and so loving to Rex and it always attracts me more when a gorgeous man loves animals.

Also, Paul O’Grady l for the same reasons. He will go into Battersea Dogs Home or a children’s hospital and cheer everybody up.

I’ve always liked macho Scotsmen. So I must include the late Sean Connery l – who was a great and glamorous friend – and the former Liverpool and Scotland player and current TV pundit Graeme Souness l.

Virgil van Dijk l, of Liverpool and Holland, is the greatest defender and best-looking man in football, although sadly not playing at the moment as he recovers from an injury.

And finally, the best pin-ups make one laugh. So I must include National Hunt trainer Richard Phillips l who is the funniest man in racing.

Jilly Cooper starred in the first Oldie issue in 1992

9 The Oldie May 2021

The Oldie May 2021 9

The incredible sulk Angus Wilson was once a grand old man of letters. By the time of his death 30 years ago, his fame was in freefall. By Michael Barber

ALBUM/ALAMY

I

n Martin Amis’s latest book, Inside Story, there’s a passing reference to the shocking eclipse of Angus Wilson, once hailed as the natural successor to Evelyn Waugh. He died discredited, destitute and demented 30 years ago, on 31st May 1991, aged 77.

At Wilson’s 70th-birthday party in 1983, a huge bien-pensant jolly held at London Zoo, of which he was a Fellow, who could have predicted the fall to come?

For Sir Angus – sprightly, whitemaned, histrionic – was not just a distinguished novelist. Like Bernard Sands, the protagonist of his provocative first novel, Hemlock and After, he was a ‘Grand Old Man of Letters’, as at home on a rostrum as at his desk. He was knighted for his services to literature, which included presiding over the groundbreaking creative writing course at UEA. Wilson’s disorderly upbringing shaped his life and work, both of which had a restless quality. His father, from a landowning family in the Borders, was a wastrel who ran through his wife’s money and then lived on his wits. His mother, the daughter of a wealthy South African jeweller, wore herself out trying to keep up appearances.

Wilson, the youngest of their six sons, grew up in a succession of seedy residential hotels, from many of which the family decamped. Surrounded by adults who were putting on an act, Wilson inherited the family talent for mimicry (Booker Prize-winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald recalled his ‘painfully brilliant imitations’). This blossomed at Westminster School, where, despite his shrill voice and outré demeanour, he held his own.

Two of Wilson’s brothers were gay and, long before leaving Oxford, he had joined them ‘in the club’. He knew all too well the vicissitudes of being a male homosexual then – ‘Our latest nancy knight’ was how the Daily Express greeted his KBE in 1980. But unlike, say, E M Forster, he enjoyed the company of

10 The Oldie May 2021

Anglo-Saxon attitude: Sir Angus Wilson (1913-91) in 1974

women and wrote two novels, Late Call and The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot, with female protagonists.

He found the perfect partner in Tony Garrett, 16 years his junior, who dedicated himself to Wilson, becoming his secretary, driver, cook and lover.

Oddly, given the praise heaped on his early work, Wilson was 35 before he began to write. Highly strung, he emerged from a war spent breaking naval ciphers at Bletchley Park with his nerves shredded, and took up writing as a form of therapy.

Drawing a bead on the dispossessed rentier class from which he had sprung, who were now ‘suffering under the Socialists’, he produced a series of hard-boiled short stories that put him squarely on the map. One, Raspberry Jam, about two little old ladies who torture a bullfinch in front of a traumatised young boy, was described by the critic John Bayley as ‘one of the wickedest stories in the world’.

Wilson had, he admitted, a GrandGuignol side that emerged in his fiction.

Cue Mrs Curry, the bloated, doll-like procuress of under-age girls whose machinations turn the screw in Hemlock and After. She’s a deceptively nasty piece of work whom Wilson depicts with

malevolent gusto – to the surprise of many, she was drawn from life.

The success of his next novel, AngloSaxon Attitudes (1956), persuaded him to give up his demanding day job at the British Museum and write full time, despite having only £300 in the bank.

Wilson stopped writing short stories because he grew tired of trying to devise deft endings. By the late Sixties, he’d also come to believe that the ‘solid bourgeois novel’ had had its day. ‘Reality’ was no longer enough. ‘If you want to reach readers – even those who are not at all highbrow – you must confess that it’s a bit of a game,’ he explained.

Hence his ‘experimental’ novels, As If

By Magic and No Laughing Matter, which intrigued critics but exasperated readers who didn’t get the joke.

Insisting that he had ‘the right to appear in a totally different light each time’ and misled, perhaps, by the number of visiting professorships he clocked up, particularly in America, Wilson ignored the bottom line.

What he couldn’t ignore was the arrival of Mrs Thatcher and the threat she posed to his progressive, humanist beliefs. When his last novel, Setting the World on Fire, did nothing of the sort, he began a long sulk which culminated, in May 1985, with a ‘Good riddance to England’ speech on the steps of the Athenaeum.

He was going, he said, to France, where they took serious writers seriously.

But no sooner had Sir Angus and Tony Garrett settled into their fifth-floor flat in Provence than he was diagnosed with hydrocephalus, a brain disease which within a few years had robbed him of most of his faculties. When his partner could no longer nurse him, the couple returned to England.

Thanks to a grant from the Royal Literary Fund and friends’ donations, he was installed in a private nursing home in Suffolk, where he died.

Not a happy ending, it was one his readers would have recognised.

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Prince Philip – the naked truth

The night I watched the Full Monty with the Duke of Edinburgh I knew I was giving too many interviews about the Duke of Edinburgh when, towards the end of one of them, I heard myself enthusiastically retelling the very story I had told at the beginning of the selfsame interview – word for word.

‘It’s such a great story, it certainly bears repeating,’ said the interviewer from Radio Leeds, obligingly.

In retrospect, I realised I had told that story 17 times to 16 different radio stations in the space of just two hours.

It is a good story. It’s the one about the Duke at the Royal Variety Performance discovering that the Act One finale was going to be an excerpt from The Full Monty and assuming it would be a tribute to Field Marshal Montgomery and the Battle of El Alamein.

When 18 strapping lads took to the stage and began to strip off, he sighed, I blanched, but the Queen did not flinch.

The Duke then leant towards me and muttered, ‘You needn’t worry. She’s been to Papua New Guinea – she’s seen it all before.’

I told the story for the last time on The One Show on BBC1. I tried it out first at the rehearsal and it went down well, but I won’t be telling it again because, on transmission, there was a complaint.

A viewer found the story ‘culturally inappropriate’ because it implicitly makes fun of the dress and form of traditional dances among people of the islands of the South West Pacific.

I am happy to drop it from my repertoire, not only because I have rather overtold it, but principally because I know Prince Philip was much more sensitive to this kind of thing than people might imagine.

When representatives of the Kastom people from the villages of Yaohnanen and Yakel on the South Pacific island of Tanna, in Vanuatu, who worshipped the prince as a god, last came to London to meet him, he agreed to see them at Buckingham Palace, but only in private.

If the press took a picture of him with them, he felt it might make them open to mockery and he did not want that – for their sakes, not his.

Prince Philip was embarrassed to be revered as a deity by anyone. That said, I reckon he may have had a hotline to the Almighty.

Thanks to the pandemic, he got the no-fuss funeral he prayed for – and in weather that was truly heavenly. And the following morning, when I was appearing via Zoom on BBC Breakfast to talk about it, mid-anecdote the line went down. Twice.

‘Divine intervention,’ said my wife. It was the Duke, I’m sure: ‘For God’s sake, shut up, man. We’ve heard quite enough from you, Brandreth.’

As the Duke’s biographer, I was contracted to the BBC for ten days from ‘the moment of the announcement’.

Consequently, I did everything I was asked, from the two-hour local-radio stint to Songs of Praise, via A Week in Westminster where I found myself involving Prince Philip posthumously in the Cameron-Greensill lobbying debate.

I revealed that, in the 1990s, when I was an MP, I had taken the then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to Buckingham Palace, so the prince could pitch to him his ideas for curbing the worst excesses of press intrusion.

‘It belonged to my ex … it’s the closest he came to high fidelity’

As happened with Mr Cameron, the minister listened to the Duke’s proposal politely and then ignored it.

The upside of my commitment to the BBC was having a ringside seat inside Windsor Castle on the day of the funeral.

It was a moving and historic day and I felt both blessed and honoured to be there, as the Queen and her family bade farewell to our nation’s longest-everserving consort, a quite remarkable man who led a most extraordinary life.

Prince Philip’s first journey by car was on the island of Corfu nearly 100 years ago when he was taken to his christening at a Greek Orthodox church in an old Mercedes that had once belonged to the German Kaiser.

Almost a century on, he made his last journey to St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in a Land Rover hearse built to his own specification. The commanding officer of the Grenadier Guards, who was one of the eight pall-bearers escorting the hearse, told me it was ‘quite a grumpy vehicle, rather noisy and not built to travel at 2 mph’ – not a bad description of the Duke in certain moods.

Are you on a hearse or in a hearse, I wonder?

I ask because when I showed Prince Philip the first draft of my biography of him, he reprimanded me for writing that during the war he had served on HMS Ramillies. ‘But you did serve on HMS Ramillies, sir,’ I insisted. ‘You showed me the logbooks.’

‘I did not serve on HMS Ramillies,’ he said.

‘You did,’ I protested.

‘I didn’t. I served in HMS Ramillies, not on HMS Ramillies. You don’t live on your house, do you? You live in your house. Don’t you know anything?’

Philip: The Final Portrait by Gyles Brandreth is published by Coronet The Oldie May 2021 11

what was the tobacconist?

Of all the lovely and lost high-street shops, the tobacconist was possibly the noblest and most beautiful.

In a world where even the word ‘tobacconist’ is never spoken, only oldies will remember the understated opulence of their frontages, surmounted by fasciae of brass, or gilded lettering encased in glass.

Every town and city boasted a few, though today, even in London, I can conjure up the image of hardly half a dozen. While many were family concerns, most were part of either the Finlays chain (ubiquitous on railway concourses) or the rather grander House of Bewlay. One recalls with joy those cobalt-blue, ceramic tobacco jars in the window, emblazoned with the name on a golden swag.

One entered a tobacconist in a state of awe – the carved and gleaming mahogany fixtures crammed with wooden boxes of Havana cigars, tobacco tins, pipes and the more glamorous brands of cigarettes. The great cigar names still prevail – Partagas, Upmann, Montecristo, Romeo y Julieta – and the packaging has barely altered.

But so many cigarette brands have long ago fallen – Woodbine, Olivier (named after the actor), Capstan, Three Castles, Kensitas, du Maurier – in the elegant art-deco pack – and Passing Clouds (pink, and with a cavalier).

As for pipes, well – when did you last

what is... cottagecore?

Cottagecore celebrates a dreamy, folksy rural idyll. By day, you’ll be wearing a straw hat teamed with a Laura Ashley floral sprig dress, baking bread and foraging for wild mushrooms. By night, you’ll be stitching your patchwork and your embroidery.

If you gave it an adjective, it would be cosy. If you gave it a scent, it would be sweet pea. If you gave it a picture, it would be a thatched cottage in high summer, with a rambling rose at the door and a trug of cut blooms in the garden.

12 The Oldie May 2021

see anyone smoking a pipe? Probably in a Talking Pictures film. Dunhill was the pre-eminent make, with its discreet and famous white-spot trademark.

Within the hushed and panelled interiors, the true glories were revealed: that gorgeous aroma – the richness of Dundee cake, Christmas pudding, a touch of Earl Grey and even incense.

There was loose tobacco in jars, sunken into the counter, in addition to all the stunningly decorative tins: Baby’s Bottom remains in the mind, along with Gold Block, Bondman, Parsons’ Pleasure and Three Nuns (these last two quite possibly

The cottagecore phenomenon began five years ago. It gained an Instagram following in 2018: #cottagecore. During 2020, its popularity leapt, neatly dovetailing with our century’s embrace of growing environmentalism and nostalgic crafting.

The suffix ‘core’ is used to signal a trend, first appearing in the ‘hardcore’ music of the 1970s. Similar Instagram ‘cores’ out there include grandmacore, farmcore, bloomcore. Advertisers and glossies have picked up on this socialmedia hashtag and begun featuring well-known faces in cottagecore settings – the Beckhams, Taylor Swift et al.

Social commentators say cottagecore

connected). Snuff was an exotic mystery all of its own.

I remember a slim brass tube arching elegantly, a permanent blue flame at its tip: one leant towards it to light one’s cigar.

Most people would buy their fix from the trusty corner newsagent – a fabulous sight in itself, plastered in placards and enamel swing signs for such as Wills’s Gold Flake, Senior Service or Player’s (please).

When the shop was closed, there was always the cigarette machine outside – as there was on Tube and railway platforms, and in every bar and café: it was always something of a thrill to insert one’s coins, tug the drawer and wonder whether anything would be in it.

In this age of virtual prohibition, where a packet of 20 is alive with Stubbed out: shops in Chicago (left) and photographs of diseased organs Leamington Spa and costs about 13 quid, all the past beauty of signs, tins and packets is left to the collectors of vintage tobacciana.

As for the tobacconists themselves, well … they have, alas, just gone up in smoke.

Joseph Connolly

‘Fine! You plan the next holiday’

is nothing new; you can find it in the near and distant past. It is reminiscent of Marie Antoinette during her pastoral phase, when she abandoned her restrictive panniers and towering poufs, then de rigueur at Versailles, in favour of loose-fitting, muslin shifts and a sunhat for her rustic retreat in the palace grounds.

It is reminiscent of the 19th-century Art & Crafts movement championed by the designer socialist William Morris, who waged war on industrial ugliness with his hand-printed, nature-infused wallpapers and fabrics, inspired by walks in Epping Forest.

There is a whiff of cottagecore in the Cadbury’s Flake TV ad of the 1970s, as well as in the homesteading and selfsufficiency lifestyle of the time, gently satirised in The Good Life.

Encouraged to take daily outdoor exercise during the pandemic, we turned to the natural world for comfort. With predictions of shortages and disrupted supply chains, one manifestation of this

Rural idyll: Fragonard’s Happy Lovers, 1765

was home-baking, vegetable-growing, mending and making-do.

Cottagecore is a little too twee for my tastes. I’m drawn more to its dark twin,

‘cottagegore’, where the dress sense is more Goth than cheesecloth, and forests and flowers more eerie than cheery.

Deborah Nash

The depraved English gentleman Simon Raven died 20 years ago, on 12th May 2001, aged 73.

He was unique among postwar English writers for combining a prose style of near-angelic elegance with subject matter of thrilling depravity – not least in his ten-volume novel series, Alms for Oblivion.

Raven’s views were formed by school, university and the army. They all ended in disappointment.

After studying Greek for barely a year, he won the top classics scholarship to Charterhouse and was then advanced a year for his brilliance. There he discarded any remnants of Christianity in favour of the sexual and moral flexibility he believed antiquity to have encouraged.

He was expelled, in his final year, ‘for the usual reasons – in rather more than the usual number’.

King’s College, Cambridge, to which Raven also won a scholarship, was less puritanical and welcomed him warmly following National Service in India with the Parachute Regiment.

Academic ability ought to have gained Raven the First and automatic studentship he desired. But his inability to deal with money, drink and fidelity was already apparent.

At Cambridge, he enjoyed escapades with dons and fellow students of both sexes. That Raven gained a postgraduate

place despite taking only an upper Second shows the charm he could exert – when necessary.

Academic life wasn’t for him – ‘All those very, very, very boring books’. So he returned to the army, having had a son with the future journalist Susan Kilner, whom he left for good immediately after their shotgun wedding. Commissioned into the smart King’s Shropshire Light Infantry and sent to Kenya, Raven received a telegram from his wife begging for money to support herself and their baby. He replied, ‘Sorry no money suggest eat baby.’

Later he claimed it was apocryphal.

That he was made to resign his commission, in part for claiming and keeping to himself the family allowance, suggests it wasn’t.

In his life and work, Raven baited bourgeois morality gleefully. His most scornful condemnation was to call something ‘middle-class’.

Alms for Oblivion follows a cast that only occasionally lowers itself Simon Raven (1927-2001)

beneath the upper-middle from the Fifties to the Seventies. Many of the characters were based on him and his friends.

Plastic-faced Fielding Gray, the beautiful but dissolute classics scholar maimed by Greek Cypriot terrorists, was Raven. Somerset Lloyd-James, his slithering, spotty, scheming pseudonemesis, was William Rees-Mogg; Peter Morrison MP, the rubicund gentleman farmer, was the MP James Prior.

Others, such as Captain Detterling, Tom Llewellyn and Maisie Malcolm, the faithful prostitute, are drawn with such skill that it’s scarcely conceivable they didn’t exist. However despicable their actions, disappointing their morals and shattering their come-uppances, we cheer on this misanthropic lot like Millwall fans: nobody likes them but, gosh, we care.

Inevitably, for a man who drank brandy by the quart and gambled heroically, Raven’s final years were neither healthy nor luxurious.

They were, though, comfortable, thanks one final time to the old school tie. He ended his days a Brother of the London Charterhouse, where his school originated.

David Oldroyd-Bolt The Oldie May 2021 13

Man of action, champion of science, painter and jewellery designer…

Prince Philip defied pigeonholing, says Robert Hardman

A Prince among men

KEYSTONE PRESS/ALAMY

H

e used to call it ‘breaking the ice’.

It was his way of warming up a stiff formal situation. However, as the Duke of Edinburgh himself was the first to acknowledge, those who break the ice also run the risk of falling through it.

Though he himself would do so on a few celebrated occasions – when a jolly throwaway line suddenly found itself in the headlines – his was actually a life spent breaking the mould instead.

After four decades of public duties, the late Duke of Gloucester once remarked that if he ever got round to writing an autobiography, he would call it Forty years of Boredom. The Duke of Edinburgh might have called his own What Next?

A day was never, ever dull in the company of the Duke of Edinburgh, as the legion of devoted staff who worked for him over seven decades would testify.

So, too, would those of us who would report on his endeavours in any field, be they sporting or diplomatic or charitable or (as was most often the case) in support of the Queen.

On one state visit to South Africa, I attended a reception where the Duke was working the room and had found himself among a cluster of scientists. For some reason, the discussion had turned to the reluctance of captive pandas to breed.

One guest argued that pandas were simply shy and lazy. Another maintained that a panda in a zoo becomes too attached to its keeper.

Absorbing the meanderings of the debate, the President Emeritus of the World Wide Fund for Nature brought the discussion to a close by observing: ‘Well, then, the logical solution would be 14 The Oldie May 2021

to dress one of the pandas up as a zookeeper so that the other one fancies it.’ No doubt, the comment might have been construed as another ‘gaffe’ if anyone had taken the slightest offence. But everyone present was guffawing.

That we are living through one of the great reigns in the history of the British monarchy is, to a considerable degree, thanks to a man who was a royal consort for three times longer than his own great-great grandfather, Prince Albert, the Prince Consort.

The November 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten – the exiled grandson of an assassinated King of Greece – would lead to what has been the longest-lasting marriage in British royal history.

Not that Prince Philip liked comparisons. ‘He resisted the idea of being declared Prince Consort because he did not want it thought he was modelling himself on Prince Albert,’ one former Private Secretary told me. The Queen, for her part, was very happy for her husband to be for ever known as the Duke of Edinburgh.

She has always regarded her brief spell as HRH The Duchess of Edinburgh – from her wedding day to the death of her father in February 1952 – as one of the very happiest periods of her life.

Yet, the parallels with Albert were numerous. Each was a champion of science and a man of action, entwined in

A discreet group of admirers even nominated him for the Nobel Prize

a genuine love match with a Queen regnant while also having to overcome the institutional xenophobia of the British establishment.

‘They were absolutely bloody to him,’ recalled the Duke’s old friend Lord Brabourne, married to his cousin, Countess Mountbatten. ‘They patronised him. They treated him as an outsider.’

Whereas female consorts of a reigning king have always had clearly defined roles within the Royal Household, there are no such rules for husbands of reigning queens. At the very start of her reign, the Queen put the 31-year-old Duke in charge of the private royal estates at Sandringham and Balmoral.

She also deferred to him when it came to everything involving the education of their children.

But the Duke found that any attempt to involve himself in the running of the royal machine was strictly off-limits.

Even his review of the arrangements for Palace footmen was ignored, at which point he decided to pursue his own programmes. Still, he found himself up against what his team called ‘the men with moustaches’.

In the early days of his Duke of Edinburgh Award, he encountered a whispering campaign that he was trying to destroy the Boy Scouts. He ploughed on regardless and, today, the ‘D of E’ award is one of the most admired youth award programmes on earth, having helped millions of young people in 144 countries.

The Duke also threw himself into organisations covering everything from road safety to playing fields. In 1961, he was one of the founders of a new type of global campaigning platform, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), paving the way for

The royal we: on honeymoon in 1947, Broadlands, Hampshire

the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

As the reign progressed, however, the Palace old guard gradually gave way to courtiers of a similar age and mindset to the Duke. If the early years had been a testing time, he found a happy modus vivendi as he entered middle age.

He could see that the new medium of television was going to become an inescapable part of modern life. Not only was he the first member of the family to be interviewed onscreen but he was the driving force behind the BBC’s landmark 1969 film Royal Family.

He defied pigeonholing, constantly frustrating those who sought to portray him as a ‘type’.

He had never made it to university – not for any want of academic ability but because of the Second World War – yet he spent decades as an energetic and popular chancellor of several universities (including Cambridge, an honour he shared with Prince Albert).

He adored sport but, when his playing days were over, he disliked being a spectator. Rather, he’d seek a new sport instead: having grown too old for polo, he not only embraced carriage driving but then wrote its international rulebook.

In public, the Duke might seem devoid of sentimentality, yet he

developed a keen eye as a painter (oils rather than the watercolours favoured by his eldest son) and even turned his hand to jewellery design. In later life, the inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, would reveal him to have been a tender and considerate paterfamilias during the breakdown of her marriage.

Though the Duke had been a rising star in the Royal Navy – he was one of the youngest of his generation to command a warship – he was equally devoted to his honorary Army and Royal Air Force units. In 2006, at the age of 85, he even flew out to join one of his regiments, the Queen’s Royal Hussars, on active service in Iraq.

The Oldie May 2021 15

He loved innovation, installing the first computer at the Palace and some of the first solar panels ever seen in the UK, at Wood Farm, Sandringham.

It was there that he also planted a truffle farm and designed a towable barbecue-cum-picnic contraption for family outings. At Windsor, where he was the longest-serving Ranger of the Great Park in its 1,000-year history, he recently installed a vineyard which now produces sparkling wine of such good quality that it is served at state banquets.

Drive through the Great Park and you will speed limit signs saying ‘38 mph’. I once asked him why he had not put up signs for, say, 40 mph?

‘You see!’ He replied triumphantly. ‘You noticed them!’

And, after Windsor Castle burned down in 1992, it was the Duke who supervised the entire five-year restoration programme, leaving the family seat not merely restored but greatly enhanced.

Those who came to know this shrewd,

PA IMAGES/ALAMY

Those gaffes...

The deep national grief at Prince Philip’s death doesn’t just show how loved he was by the British.

It also shows how little we cared about his so-called ‘gaffes’ – the times he was supposedly rude to people.

I was on the receiving end of a Prince Philip gaffe, of sorts, and I loved it. It was at a lunch in 2015 at the Cavalry and Guards Club for the Gallipoli Association – the charity that commemorates victims and veterans of that tragic, doomed campaign.

For 40 years, the Duke of Edinburgh has been the association’s patron. And so, in Gallipoli’s centenary year, he came to the association’s lunch. Before lunch, he roamed around the cavernous drawing room, chatting to association members.

As he approached me, he held his drink in his right hand, meaning I couldn’t shake it, and launched straight into conversation.

That meant I had little

Title in here

Dressed for dressage: at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, May 2000

witty, restless, questing soul could be exasperated by some of the lazy media portraits of him. A discreet group of admirers even nominated

opportunity to bow and call him ‘Your Royal Highness’ – as I would have done in an instant. I got the distinct impression he didn’t want much bowing and scraping.

‘Who roped you into this?’ the prince said. It was the first intimation of his purportedly brusque manner.

In fact, it was conspiratorial, teasing and jokey.

He knew I hadn’t been roped into lunch; I knew he knew. That faint blast of humour made it much easier to explain how I had in fact roped myself into the Gallipoli Association.

I told him how my greatgrandfather, Lord Longford (father of the prison reformer), had been killed at Gallipoli on 21st August 1915.

His last words to his second-in-command, crouching down to avoid the hail of shells overhead, were ‘Please don’t duck, Fred. It won’t help you and it’s no good for the men’s morale.’

Moments later, marching at the head of his Yeomanry Brigade troops, with a map in one hand and his walking

him for the Nobel Prize, in recognition of his work with conservation, the Commonwealth and the welfare of young people. And who would argue that his contribution to the greater good has been any less than that of, say, Al Gore or Henry Kissinger?

Few would call him bookish, yet he was a voracious reader, never leaving home without a book to fill his spare moments. I have often thought that the best insight into ‘the real Duke’ is to look at his library.

In the north wing of Buckingham Palace stands his collection of more than 13,000 books, spanning almost every subject and genre – from heavy science to cookery books and Bob Dylan’s Drawn Blank Series. There is just one notable omission. The Duke did not like fiction.

Within the gilded confines of the royal bubble, perhaps it was reality that offered the best form of escape.

Robert Hardman writes for the Daily Mail and is author of Queen of the World

stick in the other, Longford was cut down by heavy rifle fire. ‘Fred’ – Fred Cripps, brother of Sir Stafford, the future Chancellor – lived on for 60 years.

I told Prince Philip how I’d told the same story to Prince Harry a few weeks earlier, in April 2015 – when we were both at Gallipoli for the centenary commemorations of the Allied landings.

I had asked Prince Harry, ‘What’s the protocol on ducking these days in the Army?’

‘You’re allowed to duck,’ he replied, smiling. ‘But there’s a strict protocol against running away.’

I asked Prince Philip if he was allowed to duck in the Navy during the war.

‘What a silly thing to do!’ he said. ‘Not much point in ducking on a ship.’

And with that, he was off.

Afterwards, I could easily have presented the whole thing as a classic Prince Philip gaffe: an aggressive prince ticking off the descendant of a First World War soldier.

But he was right – it was a silly question. And his

answer wasn’t just honest; it was very funny. I cracked up; he kept a straight face.

But he certainly meant to get a laugh. Prince Philip was the Paul Merton of the royal family – the straight man with the funny lines.

I suddenly realised what all those supposed Prince Philip gaffes over the years were. Gaffe is the wrong word. They were jokes – jokes that followed almost precisely the same formula: a mixture of conspiratorial banter, mock teasing and stage rudeness.

They were a lot funnier because of who he was – a 99-year-old Greek prince, war hero and husband of the most famous woman in the world. You’re prepared for seriousness and diplomatic discretion from that sort of man; when you get the reverse, it’s that much funnier.

The Prince Philip ‘gaffe’ was the quick-fire short cut to a proper conversation – to talking on the same level.

It was the ultimate royal icebreaker.

Harry Mount

The Oldie May 2021 17

Eric Morecambe was a lovely father, says his son Gary Morecambe.

He found joy in making everyone laugh – including the postman

Dad brought us sunshine…

F

riday 14th May 2021 would have been my father’s 95th birthday. Sadly, he never made it beyond 58.

Tragic though that was for his family, friends and legion of fans, it is in some respects as if he never actually left us.

Morecambe and Wise are for ever in the nation’s psyche as middle-aged men in suits, exchanging barbed, surreal lines about a mutual upbringing that never really took place. Add to that the fantasy of the shared apartment and double bed, and that wonderful myth they created is now a part of British entertainment history.

As Eric Morecambe’s elder son, who has spent much of his life happily documenting his father’s magical legacy, it is simultaneously weird and wonderful that, although now in my mid-sixties, I still find myself inordinately enthusiastic for, and drawn to, Morecambe and Wise.

It seems astounding that my own journey with them began at the age of five, in primary school. On entering this little world of other people, I quickly came to realise it wasn’t just me and my family watching my dad and ‘Uncle’ Ernie on a television set. That moment of discovery changed everything for me.

For ever!

My father had funny bones. This is essential in a great comedian. It is something that cannot be faked. Most of us wake up each morning wondering what we might have for breakfast. He would wake up wondering what he would find funny in the day ahead.

This didn’t mean he went around the family home constantly cracking jokes, but it did mean everything he looked at or discussed had to, on some level,

18 The Oldie May 2021

From top: Gary at Morecambe FC; Gail, Joan, Eric and Gary at home in Harpenden, c 1963; close friend Roy Castle

contain humour. I honestly think he could find humour in everything.

Much of his humour was observational: people, situations and conversations. He would constantly jot down things that he came across, and occasionally some would make it on to a Morecambe and Wise show. I recall a pigeon-fancier sketch he and Ernie did for Thames Television – he based the character he was playing entirely on a neighbour from his youth in Lancashire.

Did he have a serious side? He possibly did, but it was always well suppressed. The entertainer Roy Castle, one of his closest friends, once told me that it was as if Eric would suddenly become aware of sounding serious – and at that point turn it into a gag.

Roy always found that slightly sad and frustrating. It was as if he had to keep the funnies going even for his best friends.

My sister, Gail, and brother, Stephen, know as well as I do that he could never leave a room without having the last word. It could range from something humorous – hopping out of the room on one leg while pretending to be Long John Silver – to his quietly calling out, ‘You’ll miss me when I’m gone!’

His father, George, was a chirpy character, full of amusing sayings and fanciful stories. His mother, Sadie, was inspirational, guiding him and Ernie through the fledgling years of their careers. It was Sadie, on a train journey between war-damaged Coventry and Birmingham, who suggested they stop their ‘malarkey’ and form a double act.

‘She felt we might as well get paid for messing around,’ my father said.

It’s fair to say my father’s life was geared almost entirely around comedy,

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY

and the joy he found in making people laugh. It was a kind of addiction, and he was an addictive personality.

He certainly wasn’t a practical man.

He never cooked for us, bathed us or read us bedtime stories. And homework was increasingly beyond his own limited formal education. But he always kept us entertained. He never allowed long faces around the home.

Anyone visiting the house – even the postman – was considered a fresh audience. He was a compulsive entertainer.

During my early years, he seemed to be absent much of the time. He was with Ernie either in panto or in summer seasons. Our mother, Joan, happily still with us, went beyond the call of duty to compensate. Yet whenever he was back with us, he was immediately attentive.

He had the great comic’s ability of being able to drop into a child’s world. He could get down to that level and interact with you without seeming to retain any vestige of being an adult. He would join in completely, even suggesting ideas on how to improve whatever game we were playing.

I vividly recall sitting at the wheel of his parked car, pretending I was flying a plane. Some time later, he appeared holding a portable tape machine. He switched it on and I found he’d recorded about five minutes of the vacuum cleaner, because it sounded a bit like the engines of an aircraft.

Ernie played a big part in our lives, and what made their relationship work so well was the decision made in the early days that they must keep their private lives separate. As my father once told me, ‘We see enough of each other through working together.’

And he was right, as it was near constant. Not just in theatres and TV studios, but at countless functions and events.

Ernie said, ‘We would literally bump into each other. “Oh! I didn’t know you were at this event,” we’d say. And we’d probably just spent the day with each other at the studios.’

People never expected to see Eric without Ernie by his side. People were always approaching my father and asking where Ernie was. He grew very accustomed to it, and would reply with various quips, such as ‘He’s in my pocket!’

Being at the top of the entertainment tree was something that never really sat well with my father. While his goal had always

He was quite stressed by nature – always on the go. Not one to sit and meditate been to make an honest career as an entertainer, becoming a living legend had not been on his agenda.

I don’t believe he was emotionally equipped with what goes with that elevated position. He had no coping mechanism. There was no blueprint from his childhood to prepare him for what was to come. He was quite stressed by nature – always on the go. Not one to sit and meditate.

Responsibility seemed genuinely to unsettle him. Also, he always felt the need to give to the public the Eric Morecambe he had created, and they expected to find. Add to that the enormous popularity and demands of

each successive Christmas show and you can start to appreciate how the pressure became a health risk.

Did comedy kill him? Purely in terms of his health, it clearly didn’t do him any favours. The irony is that he wouldn’t have had it any other way. I once asked him if he could relive his life, what he would alter. He answered, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘I’d do it all the same way … only quicker!’

Since my father’s untimely death in 1984, and Ernie’s in 1999, their remarkable story continues to delight.

From documentaries to films to repeats of shows, they are always with us.

A true part of British culture. What was a very successful way of life for them is a testament to the talent of arguably the greatest double act our country has ever seen.

I’ve been privileged to have played a minor supporting role, along with the rest of the family. Long may it last.

Long may Eric and Ernie continue to bring us sunshine.

Gary Morecambe is author of You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone: The Life and Work of Eric Morecambe (HarperCollins)

‘You’ll miss me when I’m gone!’

The Oldie May 2021 19

The Hell of losing your mind Care assistant Tom Petherick was emotionally drained by strong, young, insane patients who were unable to speak

TONY SIMPSON

T

he establishment in which I find myself working today is what we used to call a loony bin. Nowadays, it is a home for adult males with extreme learning difficulties and behavioural disorders.

It hardly matters what you call these things – because the facts remain the same.

This large, Edwardian house sits at the top of an out-of-the-way lane in a faceless south-coast seaside town, with distant views of the English Channel and some passable cornices in some of the rooms.

It is home to a number of seriously challenged men. Today, as a care assistant sent from the agency, I am here to help look after some of them.

I have worked in the care industry on and off for the past couple of years.

Nothing quite prepares you for what is coming. There is almost no guidance on offer from the existing carers or the agency itself as to what the work will consist of.

We agency workers are often referred to simply as ‘Agency’ by some of the staff, rather than by our names. ‘Agency’ are considered to be from a lower order.

Scum, really.

When I arrive, my temperature is taken – the final frontier after all the security checks and training. I sign in and am presented with a master key to get me into all the rooms. Each door must be shut behind me every time to prevent the ‘service users’ from getting up to mischief in, say, the kitchen, where there are kettles and sharp knives. But I am not told this. It is assumed I will know it.

I am then given a tour of the building

by Les the maintenance man. I’m shown the fire exits, and a million other points of the utmost importance which I immediately forget.

I am told I am to look after Ian for the rest of the morning. I am not told that Ian is doubly incontinent. What I can see, as he sits keening enthusiastically on his bed, is that he is incapable of looking after

20 The Oldie May 2021

himself and is wearing an incontinence pad under his tracksuit bottoms.

He is rocking back and forth in a semicontorted position while chewing avidly on a small rubber dummy. It is attached to his T-shirt by a string fed through a hole that he has surely gnawed himself.

The radio is on at an extreme volume because, I am told, Ian loves pop music.

That’s all I’m told. Now it’s just me and Ian for the morning. The room is warm and well decorated, with posters and family snaps on the walls. Ian looks healthy, well fed and, as far as it is possible to tell, happy. He is about 25, at a guess, and he has many treasured possessions close at hand. These include a fine array of plastic contraptions that play musical notes when pressed, as you might find in a three-year-old’s room.

After a while, the duty senior, a bonny, middle-aged blonde woman with a local accent who has been a carer all her life, pops in to see how Ian and I are faring.

She tells me I don’t have to stay with him all the time. I take her at her word and, because this is my first morning, I hover nervously between the passage outside his room and the lounge downstairs, where some of the other residents are gathered in various stages of looniness.

I change Ian’s pad at about 11am and give him a wash. Thus the morning passes until it is time for lunch. This I bring him in his room, where he wolfs it hungrily. Afterwards, we move into his afternoon routine, described on the board in the dining room as a ‘spa bath’ and ‘listening to music’.

I help give Ian his bath, which he enjoys very much. But I am nervous.

Although he is calm and all seems well, there is plenty of loud shouting outside the bathroom and doors slamming along the corridor, all afternoon. What does it all mean? It is hard to tell because none of the ‘service users’ can speak; they are that ill.

No disasters happen under my inexpert watch, thank God, but by the end of the day I am a nervous wreck. I have never looked after such people before. Those with dementia and the elderly, yes; but strong, young and very mad people, no. It is emotionally draining ­– yet in some strange way exhilarating. These are someone’s sons, brothers, nephews and uncles. All that matters is that they receive proper care.

I get in the car at 8pm and, not a heavy smoker, smoke heavily all the way home.

Ian Collins salutes the painter who captured the Greeks and the spirit of the Greek islands

John Craxton’s Greece U

ntil John Craxton (1922-2009) found himself in Greece in 1946, almost every Craxton portrait had been an emblematic – near to far distant – likeness of himself.

Now, as if by magic, he became a consummate portraitist of others.

Youthful self-absorption was blasted away by Aegean light and life.

Preferring to record specific portraits in swiftly made drawings, rather than within the more distilled, imaginary and gradually evolving elements of his paintings, he said: ‘I arrived in Greece knowing I couldn’t draw, but I would sit down in front of a man, say in a marketplace, surrounded by hordes of children, and somehow think myself into the man, allowing his image into my personality and then drawing almost unconsciously. I got amazing likenesses in 20 minutes. They thought it was uncanny. I’d made myself into a machine – a camera.’

On the island of Poros, Craxton began to relish some of the deepest satisfactions of Greece – what he termed ‘the persistence of myth in everyday existence’. Names seemed to confirm this, being handed down from grandparent to grandchild (such as Sophocles, Pericles and Electra).

Ordinary people in rural areas still eked out livings in confined landscapes; but in an expansive, storytelling culture, with a view of the cosmos recognisable to Homer.

22 The Oldie May 2021

The young Englishman had only to enter a simple, rustic church to glimpse the glories of Byzantium, while appreciating that old centres of Christian worship were likely to have been built on older temples – and that caves dedicated to St Anthony were sacred to Pan. In 1960, Craxton moved to Chania, Crete. He wrote to Joan Leigh Fermor, wife of the writer Paddy Leigh Fermor, ‘Here I am at last in my favourite town and in my favourite island…

‘Crete is a country in its own right and the landscape full of new ideas, forms – shapes and colours. The people of Chania are incredibly kind and helpful and I feel very happy here.’

In 1992, he described how his painting questions were resolved in the clear air of Crete: ‘There’s very little mist in the atmosphere of Greece. It’s very clear; one can see very far and very close with the same amount of clarity. One doesn’t get a tonal perspective; one gets a structural perspective.

‘The Byzantine painters were terribly clever at that. The good ones invented perspective – exactly what the Cubists thought they’d invented…

‘One of my objects in life is to try and find a way of expressing something real by unreal means. As Picasso says, art is a lie – but a lie that helps you make a truth.’

John Craxton – A Life of Gifts by Ian Collins is published on 11th May (Yale University Press)

Portrait of Lucian Freud, Poros, 1946.

Craxton and Freud became friends at 19

Above: Self-portrait, Poros, 1946-7. Left: Still Life with Three Sailors, Crete, 1985.

The anti-plate-smashing sign says, ‘NO BREAKAGE BY ORDER’. Craxton signed the cigarette packet. Below: With Paddy Leigh Fermor, Serifos, 1951

Below: Two Figures and Setting Sun, 1967. On Hydra, a fisherman, left, dashes an octopus on a stone while a sponge diver, right, recovers from plunging to the depths. Craxton often stayed at the Hydra villa belonging to artist Niko Ghika

The Oldie May 2021 23

It’s party time...

In lockdown, the Duchess of Beaufort enjoyed literary parties – held by the Great Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway. Will the real thing match up?

T

he last party I went to was on 4th March 2020.

It was a bustling and glamorous book launch for Julia Samuel’s This Too Shall Pass: Stories of Change, Crisis and Hopeful Beginnings. Talk of coronavirus hovered over proceedings but we were all unaware of the gravity of the situation and the extent of the disruption to our lives that lay ahead.

Nobody really knew how to behave.

Some were hugging; others were tentatively elbow bumping or blowing kisses across the room. A few had chosen not to come at all.

By the time my review of This Too Shall Pass was published in late March, we were heading into lockdown.

For much of 2020, I had no thought of parties at all. Addicted to the grim daily stats and permanently worried about family, friends and the future, I was grateful if I made it through lunch without experiencing social anxiety.

It wasn’t until earlier this year, when I received a save-the-date for a post-lockdown party, that I was hit with a lurching panic.

Would I have to learn again how to enjoy parties? Did I even miss them?

My earliest understanding of good parties came from children’s books. I would spend hours poring over Maurice Baring’s Forget-Me-Not and Lily of the Valley, where the Lizard holds a ball on the last night of spring so that the spring and summer flowers can meet: ‘All the Butterflies were there, of course, and the Primroses, the Cowslips, the Wallflowers whom nobody danced with ... the Sweet Peas, who enjoyed themselves wildly.’

Richmal Crompton’s William the Conqueror provided a robust method for dealing with unwanted party guests (‘But I don’t wanter do anything dignified. I wanter fight ’em’). In Asterix and the Banquet, I learnt that no effort should be spared in pursuit of the perfect menu.

The real parties I attended as a child were less exciting than those I read about 24 The Oldie May 2021

– although I remember gorging myself on a glorious buffet at a children’s birthday party held by David Dimbleby and his then wife, the cookery writer Josceline Dimbleby, after which I was sick all over my party dress on the way home.

At a party held for their children by the MPs Peter and Virginia Bottomley, all the guests (aged about seven) were subjected to a series of fiendishly difficult quizzes before tea. My great-uncle, Pascoe Grenfell, a retired soldier, held very enjoyable children’s parties that seemed to consist entirely of us standing at a dining-room table watching his large collection of clockwork tin toys dance, march and bang drums.

Aged 14, I read Anna Karenina.

Entranced by the description of Oblonsky’s ball, I found almost all subsequent teenage parties a deep disappointment in comparison. The average 1980s disco in somebody’s basement did not much resemble Tolstoy’s ‘gauzy, ribbony, lacy, colourful crowd of ladies waiting to be invited to dance’.

At university, there were plenty of parties, one or two of which were possibly quite memorable – although I subscribe to the view that if you can remember Oxford in the late 1980s, you weren’t really there.

Having read The Great Gatsby, I was always half-hoping to come across a party in ‘blue gardens’ where ‘men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars’. Sadly, those parties that were billed as a feast of glamour and hedonism were, in reality, more like an amateur dramatic society doing a lame version of The Rocky Horror Show.

In Mrs Dalloway, it is the preparations and not the party itself (‘They would come; they would stand; they would talk in mincing tones’) that feature most. After reading the book in my early twenties, I was struck by the thought that perhaps I preferred being the host and not the guest. Mrs Dalloway’s ruminative planning as she goes about her day is not just an expression of existential crisis; she also wants to give everyone a good time.

Over the years, it has been by giving parties that I have learnt to enjoy going to them. There is no magic formula. A bit of planning helps (even if it is not Clarissa Dalloway-style flowers and silver polishing) – and never run out of alcohol.

In the end, a good party is simply a joyful contract between host and guest (the Latin word hospes can mean both) to come together to give and receive pleasure. ‘How awfully good of you to come!’

Mrs Dalloway says to her guests as they come up the stairs. ‘And she meant it.’

In March, I attended the Zoom launch party for Simon Heffer’s edited diaries of that consummate chronicler of parties Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. Instead of squeezing into a crowded bookshop, the ‘guests’ watched Heffer being interviewed online by Michael Gove.

It was a fascinating discussion. But it definitely was not a party. I think I do miss them after all.

Georgia Beaufort co-edited Chin Up, Girls! A Book of Women’s Obituaries from the Daily Telegraph (John Murray)

John Sutherland defends his tutor Monica Jones, who indulged the poet’s fondness for photography and sex

Larkin’s bare cheek M

onica Jones, the woman Philip Larkin loved longest, has had a bad press.

Most recently in Martin Amis’s autofiction, Inside Story, where the kindest thing said about her is that she’s a ‘deafening windbag’. Martin’s father, Kingsley, called her a ‘grim old bag’ and, in their younger days, lampooned her as Margaret Peel, the desiccated femme fatale in Lucky Jim (1954). It was a cross she would bear all her life.

I’ve written a defensive biography [reviewed on page 57] of Monica for three reasons. First because I owe her. She was formative on me as a student. She asserted the achievement to Philip: Sutherland was, she said ‘her boy’.

She had ‘produced’ me.

Being produced by Monica Jones, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Leicester in the early 1960s, was no short cut to the university world’s glittering prizes. She never published and never, in a 40-year career, gained even minimal promotion at Leicester. Like Cordelia’s ‘Nothing, my Lord,’ it was defiance, not defeat. She despised careerism and thought it was destroying English studies.

As regards my academic prospects, she told Philip, back-handedly: ‘Sutherland is not a scholar. Sutherland is more our kind of thing.’ He most certainly didn’t think he and I were birds of a feather. ‘Sutherland,’ he once airily asked Monica, ‘does he exist?’

For him, although he was bloodchillingly courteous to me in company, Sutherland did not exist. I was one of a succession of Leicester ‘boys’ Monica hung out with while he had grown-up affairs with his staff as University 26 The Oldie May 2021

Librarian at Hull. Philip, incidentally, was the only man Monica slept with in her 78 years of life. He? More.

In her letters to Philip, Monica talked up ‘heavenly Sutherland’ and ‘smashing Sutherland’ outrageously. She gives detailed accounts of evenings she and I spent drinking together (both of us incipient alcoholics). He receives a blow-by-blow description of an

Edinburgh jaunt I took her on (Scotland was one of her three favourite holiday resorts with Philip).

Monica timed the trip, specifically, to be on Philip’s birthday – which, to her annual vexation, he routinely spent without her but with his mother. She remembered his card – but the gift bottle of Glenfiddich she sent broke in the post.

I was no rival to Philip. And few

THE ESTATE OF PHILIP LARKIN

women, alas, have found me smashing.

Monica was fond of me, as she was fond of a string of her Leicester boys. It pleased her, as she told Philip, that the ‘old bag’ (her phrase) could still ‘pull’ the young. It never led anywhere sexually.

I see clearly now what she was up to. I was the handiest stick to poke the man who really mattered into taking proper notice of her. All I knew at the time was that Monica saw qualities in me no one else had.

My second motive for writing Monica’s life was that she has been written unfairly out of the Larkin script.

Look at the indexes of the biographies.

And she has been unfairly slandered.

Read Lucky Jim. A third, prime incentive was being allowed access to her 54 boxes of unpublished letters to Philip. A large selection of his to her are already in print, expertly edited by Anthony Thwaite.

Biography can be a dirty business.

Fingering private ‘literary remains’, written for someone else’s eyes, makes you feel like a cross between a graverobber and a peeping Tom. I chose not to ‘use’ (hateful biographic term) the most personal elements in Monica’s correspondence. But, after thinking about it, I did include an example from 1966. Monica asks Philip if he remembers ‘the Playboy pose which you arranged; do you? Bra & sweater pushed up, just enough to show breasts. Does it rouse you? I bet not.’

My reason for including this was not prurient but for the light it throws on Philip Larkin, the women in his life, photography and his poetry. It’s a mysterious mix. He and Monica, as she recalled his Playboy shots, were now in their mid-forties. Monica no longer had pregnancy scares. The heyday in their blood was tamed but not extinguished.

They were taking up residence in what Martin Amis neatly calls middlesex.

What does Monica mean by ‘rouse’?

Both of them had been late in – as the phrase of their youth was – ‘going all the way’ with each other or anyone else. He was 21, she 23, before they got to that finishing post.

Over his sexually starved teenage years, Larkin had learned to enjoy himself with himself. As Philip told Kingsley, who after his friend’s death told the world, masturbation was often the best deal for him. It saved time, money, shameful fumbling and too frequent rejection. Most importantly, you have the whip hand (Larkin’s tastes in pornography tended towards noninjurious flagellophilia).

Monica knew that photographs of her

Opposite: Larkin plus Rolleiflex. Selfportrait in his bathroom, 1957. Above: Jones photographed by Larkin, 1947

could rouse Philip more than she herself did. He told her himself. He had recently, in 1963, acquired a Polaroid camera, which allows instant, totally secretive, prints. She suggested they might use it for intimate snaps.

‘In one sense,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing I’d like more than photographs of you in your private clothes, or in no clothes at all, but I can’t think it’s right when it seems more exciting than reality.’

His ethical objection strikes a false note. One suspects he was telling her, politely, that her Playboy days had passed.

Photography and sex led Larkin into odd places (it could in those moralistic times have led him into the dock). He was attracted to Kingsley’s new wife, Hilly. He asked if he could take some soft porn pictures of her. The couple assented. The session never came off but Martin Amis fantasises about it in Inside Story, imagining Larkin as his putative father.

Larkin arranged the sequence of poems in his volumes with scrupulous care. He chose to open his breakthrough collection, The Less Deceived, with Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album.

The poem was not inspired by Monica, who probably thought, as the volume’s dedicatee, that it was. Philip was having a secret affair with another – younger – woman and it is her album he pries into.

Larkin purchased his own albums of young ladies, an assortment of which he kept in his office cabinet. A woman friend

asked him what this porn cache was for?

‘To wank to, or with, or at,’ was the reply.

Also in his office, on the windowsill, Larkin had a small, tortoiseshell-plated telescope to look at passing female students. Kingsley couldn’t, for the life of him, see the point of the glassy grope. His moves were always to the point.

It would be possible, having got this far, simply to see that raincoat Philip’s wearing in his memorial statue at Hull’s Paragon railway station in a quite different light. But there’s more to it.

None of the Playboy pictures of Monica survives: they presumably went with the boxes of his porn hoard that, after his death, she, his executor, instructed to be burnt.

The Victorians called masturbation self-abuse and the solitary vice. Self and solitude were elemental in Larkin’s sexual practices and its photographic stimuli. They were also central to his poetry – his version of the egotistical sublime. Or the ‘mental masturbation’ Byron sneered about in Keats’s poetry.

Philip was a man, said Monica, who ‘cared a tenth as much about what happened around him as he did about what was happening inside him’.

The poet Larkin was in conflict with the man Larkin. The poet, with the aid of the photographer, won, for which literary-loving posterity can be grateful.

Monica lost – wifehood, notably – but, nobly as I think, saw it as less loss than sacrifice. She deserves a salute for that.

John Sutherland’s Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her Life and Long Loves The Oldie May 2021 27

Small World

My spirits sank on the waterfront Working on the docks is a lot less glamorous than in Marlon Brando’s day jem clarke

STEVE WAY

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

These are desperate times. I caught sight of my family’s reflection in the platecupboard door and we looked like the Waltons (Depression-era mountain dwellers, not the home-county sextuplets): all open-necked shirts, way too much flannel and little sign of belts or razors – even mother could do with a subtle Gillette intervention.

My father and I normally set about her chin if she slumps into an amaretto-fuelled siesta midway through Dickinson’s Real Deal (‘The soul of Bargain Hunt, trapped in a function room, in Scunthorpe,’ as my middle-brow father has it).

There is some respite from hairy matriarchs and doom-laden dads. I have my first new job in a while. They tend not to celebrate till I’m past the first four weeks.

They point to past false flags – as my father says, ‘Business-minded people find you an acquired taste, Jem.’ Mother is pithier – ‘They must be bloody desperate.’

Regarding this latest employer, my mother is spot-on.

Steven Dore, who actually works as a stevedore – talk about nominative predestination – phoned me to confirm

that the docks, post-Brexit, need 900 new call-centre clerks, ‘regardless of competence, experience or examinations – so I immediately thought of you’.

Steven, who has made driving factorynew cars off ships, with barely more than a couple of scratches per car, into a career, had often touted the docks as the home for the vocationally dispossessed.

After passing an over-phone assessment test in which I had to remember my name and address, I was told that a package would arrive at my house in the next 24 hours with details of my first ‘assignment’.

What had Steven Dore got me into?

Was I now a spook? Was Steven Dore (now so obviously a fake name) my handler?

Alas no, as I soon found a Surface Pro computer dumped in my porch with a Post-it note stuck on it reading, ‘Kyle will phone you on Monday, with your log-in details. You will be helping importers reset their passwords. Any probz, call us.’

As far as I know, there is no James Bond film where he goes to Immingham docks to find the third and seventh letter of his recovery word.

Monday morning came and went with no word from the enigmatic Kyle. So I phoned the number and explained, ‘I’m phoning for Kyle. I’m meant to be helping with password resets.’

‘Oh, thank God you’ve phoned,’ Kyle said. ‘I’ve got 900 new starters across five dock zones, and the passwords to get on their Surface Pros won’t work. Can you help?’

Practising skills I had learnt on a locally funded assertiveness course, I proudly said, ‘No. No, I can’t help.’

‘But you’re one of the password-reset team, aren’t you?’ Kyle said.

‘Yes, but I’m one of the 900 new starters. I was expecting a call from you,’ I explained.

‘Oh, right. Yeah, the master password won’t work, so I can’t get any of you logged in until you get your passwords reset. All I can suggest is that you phone the password-reset team.’ He mumbled some digits that I wrote (old-school style) on my palm.

‘But…’ I faltered, trying to process Kyle’s explanation. ‘Isn’t that your number … our number? Aren’t we the password-reset team?’

‘Yeah don’t expect us to answer quickly, ’cos we can’t get on to the computers,’ he said.

‘So, to summarise – you want me to phone ourselves on a line we can’t answer to tell ourselves about a problem we already know we’ve got, and that we already know we have no solution to?’

Kyle probably winced. ‘Yeah, I know it sounds mad when you put it like that, but it’s our best chance.’

After spending my first working day, feet up, phoning a number that neither Kyle nor I ever answered, I ‘commuted’ downstairs, greeting my parents as I made an ‘end-of-shift’ Horlicks – I’ve gone over to instant to cut down on ‘parent time’.

‘Day One of job 34 completed,’ I said to Mother. ‘Just like what that poster in the gym said: “LUCK is where OPPORTUNITY meets PREPARATION”.’

Mother snorted. ‘How have you prepared? Three months sat in your late uncle’s Parker Knoll, reading comics!’

I smiled to myself, thinking that might well have been just the right preparation.

The Oldie May 2021 29

Music hall’s last act Barry Humphries salutes the veteran stars he saw in Melbourne and London – and their influence on Sir Les Patterson and Dame Edna

W

hen I was knee-high to a grasshopper, my parents insisted on my having regular haircuts.

The nearest barber was Mr McGrath, whose shop was in walking distance of our Melbourne mansion. Mr McGrath’s tonsorial speciality was ‘short back and sides’. I remember that old feeling of dread as his electric clippers carved away at my hair, and those stooks of precious fibre tumbling on to the not-too-clean cotton tent in which I was swaddled.

Although my mother approved of Mr McGrath’s deracination of my scalp, she had her doubts about him.

‘Isn’t McGrath an Irish name, Barry?’ she once enquired.

I didn’t tell her that the barber provided questionable ‘reading matter’ for his customers, which included breakfast-stained copies of Smith’s Weekly, a raffish tabloid full of jokes and decorous ‘pin-ups’. Foolishly, one night over dinner, I asked if we might subscribe

30 The Oldie May 2021

to it. ‘Uncle Wilf reads it.’ I ingenuously pointed out.

‘For the racing!’ snapped my mother, in defence of her brother-in-law, who enjoyed the occasional sherry.

But my parents totally approved of my comics, Film Fun and Radio Fun, which came all the way from blitzed London, and were rolled up and pitched over our front fence by the local newsboy for an extra two and sixpence at Christmas.

What I loved about Smith’s Weekly and the English comics were the jokes.

Many were incomprehensible, but the thought of a whole publication devoted to laughter seemed miraculous.

The personages in the comics were strangers to me: Tommy ‘You lucky people!’

Trinder; Arthur ‘Hello playmates!’ Askey; Tommy ‘It’s that man again!’ Handley.

But I could tell that they were all famous somewhere, far away. And when, a few years later, they actually turned up at the Melbourne Tivoli, I implored my parents to take me there.

The ‘Tiv’ was a wonderful, shabby, old-fashioned theatre, plushed and gilded – but, to my dismay, when I saw them on the stage my Radio Fun heroes seemed much older than I had expected.

(It’s sobering to think the Crazy Gang first got together 90 years ago.)

‘They only come to Australia when they’re at the end of the road,’ my mother sagely observed.

But my God, they were funny! On the whole. In my experience, comedians are even funnier, the older they get. Well, that’s my story.

On the two occasions when we visited what my mother sapiently called ‘that theatre for common people’, Tommy or Arthur would say something and the whole audience would explode with laughter. It was a noise that only a tragedian might find objectionable. I felt my father’s chair shake. He was convulsed with silent laughter, which stopped only when he caught my mother’s basilisk eye.

I realised then that there was another kind of joke. A joke for grown-ups eliciting hilarity and something akin to shame and embarrassment, which only enhanced its effect. It has a prim name: ‘the off-colour joke’.

When I was about 11, I invented a comic magician for the entertainment of my sister’s friends. He was a magician whose tricks all failed – anticipating the routine of Tommy ‘Just like that’ Cooper, but without his genius. Halfway through my ‘act’ in the corner of the garden, my mother’s admonitory voice sounded from the terrace.

‘Don’t look at Barry, girls. He’s only drawing attention to himself.’

How right she was. And I’m still doing it. When, many years later, I had been conscripted into the theatre, I began to realise that drawing attention to myself would probably be my life’s work.

The wireless had regular programmes of funny recordings to cheer us up during the war. Most of the records we listened to had been made in the 1930s by old British comics and I listened in, enthralled by the voices of Max ‘The Cheeky Chappie’ Miller, Cyril ‘Pin back your lugholes!’ Fletcher, Horace Kenney and Cicely Courtneidge DBE (born in Sydney!).

They seemed to be wonderful people; always happy, always with a jest on their lips, and that most enviable quality of all: they were popular.

When I came to London, the first theatre I hurried to was the Old Metropolitan. It is hard to picture it today in Paddington, where the concrete bastions of the Westway spring across Edgware Road. Well, it’s long gone, but to enter the Met in 1959 was to visit the Past. It was still in its original juice.

You could sit up there in the gods and you were in a picture by Sickert. You could smoke, of course, and sip a pint of old and mild, and lean over the brass rail

These old jesters seemed to fling their whole lives across the footlights and there, way down there on the stage, was Hetty King in her mariner’s suit, smoking her pipe and singing All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor.

She was followed by G H Elliott, who called himself ‘the Chocolate-Coloured Coon’, who sang Lily of Laguna and, at the insistence of the audience, an encore – If You Were the Only Girl in the World – which brought the house down. This one moment was worth the entrance price of two and six and even the cost of the five-week voyage from Australia.

The audience at the Met was old. It was a pre-war audience. Some of the ladies brought knitting; one, next to me, shelled peas. All joined in the choruses.

Then, on to the stage, came Randolph Sutton.

He had no sooner sung the first phrase of On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep than everyone joined in. Dear Randy lifted his shining rouged face to include all of us in the cheap seats, and basked in the spotlight. I told John Betjeman about him, and he and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Cavendish, went down to Brighton every time Sutton performed there; they became devoted friends.

These old jesters had the knack of seeming to fling their whole lives across the footlights, crying out, ‘Catch!’ A bit like Edna and her ‘gladdies’, come to think of it. This is an old tradition chronicled with erudition and affection by that great anatomist of humour and friend of comedians Barry Cryer.

When, in the 1970s, Bruce Beresford and I made two films based on the Nicholas Garland/Humphries comic strip Barry McKenzie, I was able to cast a

few old vaudevillians in supporting or marginal roles. Thus ‘Monsewer’ Eddie Gray, Arthur English, John Le Mesurier, Tommy Trinder and my fellow Melbournian Dick Bentley made memorable appearances.

Bentley had become famous from his radio shows with Jimmy Edwards. In his flush years, he drove a big, cream Bentley motor car, and wore shoes by Lobb and suits by Kilgour & French of Savile Row. When I knew him, his celebrity, like his income, had receded. The car was sold, the lapels on his suits had been surgically narrowed to a fashionable mode and the bespoke shoes were polished to an unnatural lustre. A light maquillage emphasised, rather than concealed, the fine, red spider veins on his nose. He was loquacious, apologetically bawdy and still very funny.

I had realised, after my first visit to the Met, that I belonged in this motley company. People like Dame ‘Hello Possums!’ Edna, and Sir Les ‘You’re lookin’ good!’ Patterson derive from the long and disreputable tradition of the British music hall.

My paternal grandfather came from Manchester: when I first heard George Formby, I also heard the voice of John George Humphries – without Formby’s buck teeth and the banjo. My shows always do well up North – so I like to think of myself as a ‘northern comic’.

Surely better than being a Kentish clown, or a Dorset droll.

In closing, a vignette: I once stood in the wings at the Palladium watching Danny ‘Wotcha, mates’ La Rue doing his Royal Command act. He came off to huge applause, covered in sweat, but triumphant in his glittering, gold lamé fishtail dress. The audience was still clapping wildly as Danny La Rue, the last of the great drag acts, looked exultantly back at the stage.

‘They love their Dan,’ he said, thinking aloud.

From far left: Max Miller; Tommy Trinder; Hetty King; Arthur Askey; Cicely Courtneidge; Randolph Sutton; the Old Bedford Music Hall, Walter Sickert’s ‘old love’, 1890s

The Oldie May 2021 31

Fifty years after the poet’s death, Reverend Peter Mullen salutes a gifted prankster, trickster and boulevard performer

T

o turn your craziness into cash, Start to write like Ogden Nash In the 50 years since Nash died, aged 68, on 19th May 1971, so many lines from his light verses have become established in the language: Candy is dandy But liquor is quicker Or: God in his wisdom made the fly And then forgot to tell us why Oldie readers know only too well that: Senescence begins and middle age ends The day your descendants outnumber your friends Born in New York in 1902, Nash dropped out of Harvard after his first year and briefly became a bond dealer, boasting, ‘I sold only one – to my godmother.’ He followed F Scott Fitzgerald as a writer of advertising copy for Barron Collier and snappy, witty pieces for the New Yorker.

Nash shows a genius for verselets that are more than just folksy wisdom Then he married and retreated to Baltimore, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Nash said, ‘I’ve thought in rhyme since the age of six.’ Usually, children’s verses are charming, incompetent and silly.

His genius was to turn this silliness into an art form and practise it for the rest of his life. Early in his career, he had the insight that made his fortune. He always chased the rhyme, and if he couldn’t find a rhyming word, he had the audacity to make one up, such as: Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros I’ll stare at something less prepoceros

If called by a panther Don’t anther.

Nonsense verse and amusing, homemade neologisms fascinated and mystified children in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Every child loves a monster and, better still, a big beast bested by a little girl: Isabel met an enormous bear, Isabel, Isabel, didn’t care…

She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up, Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.

Best of all, children delight in hearing about a naughty boy: He stole the milk of hungry kittens, And walked through doors marked NO ADMITTANCE. So here it all is in a great boiling cauldron: fantasy, absurdity, play on words, made up words and sheer balderdash – the complete consort dancing together. Except not quite. What it needs is some music.

Nash incorporated that magical ingredient, too, when he wrote charming nonsense verses for Camille Saint-Saëns’s delicious pantomime, The Carnival of the Animals – yet another children’s favourite. Nash never lost his adman’s eye for a smash hit, as he showed when he persuaded Noël Coward to recite the verses and distributed the whole thing worldwide through Columbia Records.

Just when we think we have Ogden Nash bang to rights, he surprises us. This prankster, trickster and boulevard performer could turn serious and make observations that mine a deeper seam.

The boy from Baltimore – like his contemporary Dorothy Parker – shows a genius for verselets that are more than just folksy wisdom: You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

And even more succinctly: Too clever is dumb.

N W !

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

Ogden Nash’s divine comedy

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Charlie Methven went from Fleet Street diarist to the owner of Sunderland AFC. Fame, joy and misery followed

I bought a football club T

his time a year ago, I went to sleep a normal part of the population, and woke up eight hours later as a C-list celebrity.

On a gloriously sunny, early spring morning, I lay in bed and turned off flight mode, and my outdated, cracked Samsung exploded into life with a cacophony of beeps and vibrations. This day – the day my life changed – was a week into lockdown and, appropriately enough, April Fool’s Day. Just under two years previously, together with two friends, I had taken ownership of a vast, stricken, football club – Sunderland AFC. The grand old lady of north-east football, £180m in debt, and losing £35m a year – a club once so venerated that it was known as the Bank of England club – had just been relegated in consecutive seasons to the ignominy of third-tier football.

The previous owner, an American called Ellis Short, had been trying to sell up for two years or more, but could find no takers at any price. Administration and liquidation loomed.

It was into this maelstrom that we strode in May 2018. Having taken a detailed look at the total liabilities and assets, we felt that,

34 The Oldie

with a fair wind the lumbering behemoth could be turned round. But urgent, drastic, immediate surgery was required.

The nasty work was grim indeed. To start stemming the catastrophic losses, close to 200 people had to be fired – and quickly. Those who were shown the door included obvious candidates such as Sunderland’s small army of liveried chauffeurs and a consultant paid handsomely to move pot plants in the executive offices, but also many who had worked for the club as a labour of love for years, if not decades.

And the small, beleaguered team who remained needed somehow to be cajoled, or coerced if necessary, into working a fair bit harder than they were used to.

As these painful efforts proceeded, the cameras were rolling and my fate was being etched in stone. The preceding management, in an attempt to help market the club for sale, had agreed to be the subject of a Netflix fly-on-thewall documentary.

We inherited the contract and the work was so intense that it was no distraction: we quickly forgot that we were being recorded – which was a good and a bad thing from my point of view. Much to my regret, my management style owes more to 1990s Fleet Street than to the more sensitive times we now inhabit.

Charlie greets Sunderland fans May 2021

Just like those who were my first bosses, I find it ‘challenging’ (to use a 2020s word) to seek 360-degree feedback if I see something I don’t like. I never set out intentionally to swear, but profanity litters my speech, in good moments and bad.

The cameras also captured my often comically emotional reactions during moments of triumph – record-breaking attendances and the success of turning the business around – and abject despair: the loss of the season-defining play-off final against Charlton Athletic with the last kick of the game, in front of 90,000 people at Wembley.

This was catnip to Netflix chiefs and Marmite to the estimated 20 million-plus viewers who tuned in to watch Sunderland ’Til I Die in the opening weeks of the global pandemic.

The critical consensus held that I was, at least televisually, a success: ‘the unlikely cult star of lockdown Britain’

Fans at the Stadium of Light in the Netflix series Sunderland ’Til I Die

(the Daily Telegraph); ‘an incredible character … a pure PR force of nature’ (BBC); ‘a middle-aged, plummy-toned, foul-mouthed southerner with a penchant for burgundy trousers’ (the Guardian). Or, my favourite: ‘a mixture of Mike Bassett [a fictional football manager] and Bertie Wooster’ (the Independent).

So that was the ‘me’ that tens millions of people tuned in to see throughout April and May 2020. And I immediately became part of the flotsam and jetsam of the public life I had once acerbically chronicled in my days as a Fleet Street diarist on the Daily Telegraph.

Real fame usually comes gradually and is generally – obliquely – soughtafter. But as Sunderland ’Til I Die fought with Tiger King for ‘top trending’ status on Netflix for weeks, like Joe Exotic I went from being a nobody to being a somebody in 24 hours.

The results were dramatic. On my trips to the supermarket, I was noticed by

around a quarter of passers-by and stopped (for a chat or an autograph) by around half of those. I had been told in the past by ‘shelebbs’ I had interviewed that there is something de-humanising in the interest of people you have never met before. It was true.

The attention isn’t flattering, as such, but you can get used to it very quickly. The quick eye contact, followed by the look away, and then the slightly confused face as they wonder where they have seen you.

Then the ‘light-bulb’ moment, when they decide whether to approach you or not.

Meanwhile, what do you – as a newly minted, not really very celebrated person – actually do? Is it rude just to carry on with your business? Do you look friendly and approachable? When they ask you who you are, is it best to shrug it off with a modest ‘Ah, nobody’ or to answer the question?

Fortunately, I am social-media lite – not having a Twitter or an Instagram

account. My LinkedIn took a heavy beating, though. Suddenly, a great mass of people wanted to get to know me, to offer me gigs, or words of praise, or – occasionally – a tirade of abuse.

There were so many offers, from top showbiz agents in the UK and California, to appear in further reality TV shows and game shows that I eventually facetiously suggested a programme on ‘monkey tennis’, a mock invention of Alan Partridge’s. Puzzled silence ensued, as the executives seriously considered the idea. There were also more reputable offers to run other football clubs.

Is this what I have become? I thought.

This series came to define me so much that my only two realistic routes were football and/or the C list. My wife and I puzzled over the long-term implications: should we just bite the bullet and accept the invitations to move to LA? For good and bad reasons, real life intervened. First, in late April, our baby daughter appeared, which was simultaneously wonderful and grounding. Then, in late May, I was diagnosed with Stage II cancer.

The rest of the summer was spent in a maelstrom of anxiety and COVID-secure hospital wards as I submitted to the rather more prosaic life of a chemotherapy patient.

Meanwhile, having not exploited my moment in the limelight to move on to further celebrity gigs, I found my five seconds of fame fading even as my hitherto thick mane of hair fell out, rendering me far less recognisable in public. And by the time I made it out the other side, to a longed-for August family holiday in Cornwall, I was more or less restored to my previous anonymity.

As the hair has grown back since, so has some of the supermarket-aisle recognition. On a business trip to Latin America in November, I was hailed in the street multiple times, which was odd. But the reaction has faded. Having my bestknown lines shouted at me by passers-by has, thankfully, largely ceased.

The lasting impact of my brush with fame is a Google profile that will for ever mean every new business acquaintance turns up to the first meeting expecting a ‘strange mixture’ of J R Ewing, Del Boy and David Brent, as one review put it.

Still, as I discovered last summer, worse things happen at sea – and at least I avoided the depredations of the celebrity jungle.

Sunderland ’Til I Die is on Netflix now The Oldie May 2021 35

History’s best pen pals Visitors’ books go back to the 18th century – and they’re crucial for biographers, says Eleanor Doughty

GRANGER/ALAMY

‘D

on’t you dare THINK of leaving without signing the book!’

How often I’ve heard that. Some of us have even shouted it.

The visitors’ book has had a quiet year but, as restrictions loosen, it’s about to come off furlough.

No one seems to know when the first visitors’ book was opened but, in 1930, one from Lord Rodney’s Mayfair home was found dating from 1781.

You’d think the etiquette would be easy: it’s a book for names and dates, right? Increasingly, no, it isn’t.

What about comments? And photographs? And – gasp – drawings?

Most families I surveyed were adamant that one never writes a comment.

‘As everyone is inclined to say they had a nice time, comments become competitive and meaningless,’ says James Birch of Doddington Hall, near Lincoln.

The late Countess Mountbatten of Burma’s visitors’ book was strictly names and dates. ‘If she failed to get someone’s signature, she’d pencil in who it was, and take the book with her across the world, saying, “When you were staying, you didn’t sign the book. Would you mind?”’ her son the Hon Michael-John Knatchbull told me last year.

The Churchills’ book, which began in April 1924 when they moved into Chartwell, was similarly austere – though dazzling in its cast list.

After the 1945 general election, lost by Churchill, members of his Chequers house party all signed the book.

‘My father signed last of all,’ recalled his daughter, the late Lady Soames.

‘Beneath his signature he wrote, “Finis”.’

This record of history is why visitors’ books remain relevant. They uniquely capture the moment, says Trevor Pickett, founder of luxury leather-goods brand Pickett: ‘It’s a reference point – you can see who came, and when. You’re never going to get that from a mobile-phone diary.’

And authors will thank you. In the 36 The Oldie May 2021

1930s, when Unity Mitford visited Lucy Goldschmidt-Rothschild at Engleithen in Austria, she signed the visitors’ book.

David Pryce-Jones wrote in his 1977 biography: ‘With a flourish, she put a huge swastika opposite her name.’

Not all visitors’ books are so rigid. The Duchess of Fife responded to my questions with an extraordinary tale. In the 1890s at Mar Lodge, the Fifes’ former sporting lodge in Aberdeenshire, guests not only signed their names in the book alongside a description of how they were dressed, but ‘were weighed in on the scales, and weighed again at the end of their stay’.

At Sandringham, there was a similar custom, said to have been introduced by the Prince of Wales, brother of Louise, Duchess of Fife. When Queen Victoria visited Mar Lodge in 1891, she declined a weigh-in. The duchess notes that after Sir William Gordon-Cumming was blackballed, following a royal baccarat scandal, ‘His entries were crossed out but his dog’s remained in!’

Stranger still is the case of William Ward, 2nd Earl of Dudley, who arrived at Mar Lodge on 20th September 1892 and lost 5lb over his stay. His weight dropped 2lb ‘after [his] missing four stags’, and then another 3lb ‘after missing four more’.

Traditionally, when a peer signs, it is solely by his title. Evelyn Waugh tried this out when visiting the Lygon family at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire. As Jane Mulvagh wrote in Madresfield: The Real Brideshead, ‘On one occasion, Waugh, in imitation of the abbreviated entries made by two peers in the visitors’ book, signed himself simply “Waugh”.

“When were you ennobled?” waspish Sibell Lygon asked.’

Having once been made to pose for a surprise portrait in a visitors’ book, I remain in the ‘no comment’ camp, but the consensus is weakening. ‘I was brought up to do name and date but, as I get older, I become more eccentric and not bothered,’ says the Countess of Carnarvon.

The Duchess of Argyll is equally relaxed. ‘There is rather a British snobbery about visitors’ books,’ she says.

‘Personally, I can’t get too het up about it.’

Famous guests visiting her at Inveraray Castle are treated to a photograph ‘in a Duke or Duchess apron, as sold in our shop’, which she adds to the book.

At Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, Henry Lytton-Cobbold encourages comments. ‘We want some praise for our hospitality,’ he says. A highlight is Noel Gallagher’s. ‘After having had a bath in our four-poster bath during the Oasis concert weekend in August 1996, he wrote, “Noel Gallagher – clean,” and, underneath, his bodyguard wrote, “Rufus – dirty.” ’ The one thing everyone can agree on is that members of the royal family should get a fresh page to themselves. ‘Once, when a guest added himself to a royal page, the guest’s name had to be scratched out,’ remembers a country hostess. Though the Mar Lodge book does not permit Queen Victoria her own page, a reliable respondent explains that at Sandringham ‘they give you a particular pen to use, and draw a pencil line where you sign. The line is subsequently rubbed out.’

Most tales of visitors’ books come from grand families, but what’s to stop you having one in your own home?

Nothing, says Pickett. ‘What’s grand about you being remembered for being here?’

Evelyn Waugh: signing like a lord

Antonia Fraser tells Valerie Grove about Prince Philip, Harold Pinter and the most famous divorcée of the 19th century

Caroline Norton, my tragic heroine L

ady Antonia Fraser was pregnant with her sixth child when she wrote her first biography, Mary Queen of Scots. Five decades later, she is the complete matriarch: a grandmother 20 times over, who has just welcomed a fourth great-grandchild to her dynasty.

Nobody could be better suited to writing The Case of the Married Woman, a life of Caroline Norton, the 19th-century poet and novelist who got the law changed in favour of mothers’ rights to custody of their young children.

This was Lady Antonia’s plague-year project. ‘I like to wake in the morning, and know that I have a book to write,’ she says. ‘And Caroline was irresistible.’

We are in her Holland Park drawingroom, elegant and welcoming, fragrant with lilies, piled with the latest books. A large black and white cat named Ferdy shares her sofa. Yesterday, she had her second COVID jab.

‘In the queue at St Charles’s Hospital, I stood reading the Chips Channon diaries on my Kindle. An Anthony Powell [her uncle] moment, don’t you think?’

Before I leave, we are served icy Bollinger in generous silver goblets. I reflect: her parents, the Longfords, named their eldest daughter ‘the Wunderkind’ before she was born, and she has lived bounteously ever since. Her heroine Mrs Norton, née Sheridan (she was the playwright’s granddaughter), was also a beauty with a brain, whose riveting story was touched by romance and scandal.

At the Nortons’ house in Storey’s Gate, Westminster, convenient for her doltish MP husband, George (whom she’d married at 19, on the rebound after her 38 The Oldie May 2019

true love died), her drawing-room became a salon. From her sofa, frequently pregnant, the raven-haired Caroline was a magnet to bright young men, literary and political, drawn by ‘the pretty way her witticisms glided from her lips’. Her voice was ‘like her beautiful face set to music’.

She had dark eyes and an enchanting laugh, and prided herself on being the only ‘lady of fashion’ who joined the march for the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Once, she kicked the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne’s hat over her head at the French embassy.

The urbane Melbourne was captivated. He would stop by when walking home to Downing Street from the Commons and, in her salon, he first met the young Disraeli. ‘Well now, what do you want to be?’ Lord M asked. The 22-year-old Disraeli replied that he’d like

Lady Antonia Fraser, salonnière turned empathetic biographer par excellence

to be prime minister. (‘That’s très Boris, isn’t it? Lady Antonia says.)

‘Like Caroline,’ I prompt her, ‘you too have always been a salonnière.’ (In this room, her first husband, Sir Hugh Fraser MP, set up the Conservative Philosophy Group.) ‘To be accurate,’ she says, ‘I was – but only for 18 years, until 1975. For the next 33 years, which is nearly twice as long, Harold [Pinter] and I led a completely different life.’

Ah, but what about the June 20 Group? In 1988, the Pinters hosted the inaugural gathering of anti-Thatcherite writers (including Germaine Greer, Salman Rushdie, John Mortimer and Ian McEwan) in this same room. ‘But only once,’ she reminds me. ‘Later, when John Smith addressed us, we met in a small room at the Groucho.’

Melbourne’s frequent visits to Mrs Norton, often when she was alone, unsurprisingly became the subject of gossip.

‘Truthfully, do you think they had full sex?’ Lady Antonia asks me. From her book, I gather not, but she mentions the pervading behaviour of the Whigs in that era, and the possibility of ‘a bit of Bill Clinton here’. Either way, her bullying husband accused Melbourne of ‘criminal conversation’ with his wife (adultery, in 19th-century legalese).

In 1836, Norton v Melbourne became a sensational case, and a courtroom spectacle. Charles Dickens covered it as a reporter, and then satirised it (as a breach of promise case) in The Pickwick Papers. The innocuous notes Melbourne sent to Caroline (‘I will call about half-past four’) caused much laughter in the crowded court.

ART COLLECTION/ALAMY/ NEIL SPENCE (LEFT)

Scarlet woman: Caroline Norton (1808-77) was accused of having an affair with the Prime Minister Viscount Melbourne. Painting by Sir George Hayter, 1832

But the central tragedy of Caroline’s life was her being deprived of her three young sons. The ghastly George spirited them away – as was completely legal then – to Yorkshire, where poor Willie, the youngest, died aged nine.

He fell from his pony while out riding alone and contracted septicaemia, crying out for his mother as his life ebbed away.

Caroline rushed by train from Tunbridge Wells, but got there just too late. His little coffin haunted her for ever.

‘It was the greatest suffering anyone could imagine,’ Lady Antonia says. ‘All she could do was to start campaigning, which took real courage. The very idea of a mother having any right to “Infant Custody” shocked the Commons.

‘They said it would encourage women to commit adultery! And bear in mind that Caroline was still not allowed to keep a penny of the royalties she made from her prolific writings: everything went to George.’

Mrs Norton’s custody campaign succeeded. But when the young Queen

Victoria began to supplant her in Lord Melbourne’s fatherly attentions – ‘the Royal girl,’ Mrs Norton called her – Melbourne found her tiresome, as his biographers attest.

‘It’s true that Melbourne’s biographers – I have known all three: David Cecil, Philip Ziegler and Leslie Mitchell – don’t really care for Caroline.’

So it was time for an empathetic biographer. ‘She had only three months of happiness, at the very end, with her second husband,’ Lady Antonia reflects.

‘My first marriage was very happy; my second marriage even happier. Poor Caroline did not have 33 years with the great love of her life, as I had.’

‘It was the greatest suffering anyone could imagine,’ Lady Antonia says

This room was where I last saw Harold Pinter, seated in an armchair by the open French door on to the balcony.

It was the day of his friend Simon Gray’s funeral, in 2008. ‘That chair, I had to give it away. I could not bear to think of seeing anyone else sitting there.’

Both she and Victoria Gray reject the word widow: ‘We both feel we are still married.’ Together they are launching a Pleasure of Reading prize, for Victoria’s Give a Book charity. Lady Antonia’s own bookish pleasures range from Gibbon to Lee Child. Any diminution in her busy social life as her 89th birthday approaches in August is unthinkable.

Like her dear friend Edna O’Brien, 90, she will carry on writing. ‘Only two things will stop me: one is dementia – in which case, I won’t know about it – and the other is death.’

A couple of years ago, when she injured a foot and used a pretty, floral walking stick, I sat down with her and said, ‘Now where shall we put your stick?’

‘What stick?’ she said as she collapsed it, slipping it into her handbag.

She is a familiar vision at parties in her jackets with a fritillary design (Jean Muir originally; copied for her now by Annabel Shand). She was recently watching a livestream Mass from Farm Street Church – she thought devoutly – when she found to her dismay she was painting her nails in frosted pink.

She is keen to talk about Prince Philip.

Aged 15, she ran away from St Mary’s, Ascot, with her best friend to see the royal couple after their 1947 wedding.

‘We said we were off to the dentist. We rushed the gates at Buckingham Palace and got through.” ’ Fifty years later, at the palace, she sat next to Prince Philip, at a lunch for Václav Havel. The prince asked about her book The Six Wives of Henry VIII. ‘Why does everyone write about the wives,’ he said, ‘and not Henry VIII?’ ‘You’re so right,’ she said. ‘He was wonderful, a marvellous musician.’

‘He bashed the French!’ Prince Philip said three times for emphasis.

English Heritage has invited her to unveil a plaque on 3 Chesterfield Street, Mayfair, the house Caroline bought when George took her sons away.

‘Caroline bought that house with her own earnings, but in law she still did not exist; her brother had to sign the lease,’ Lady Antonia says. ‘I shall have plenty to say, in my short speech.’

Antonia Fraser’s The Case of the Married Woman (W&N) is published on 6th May and reviewed on page 59 The Oldie May 2019 39

Town Mouse

The agony and the ecstasy of a pop-star friend tom hodgkinson

This mouse was saddened to read of the death this year, at the age of 50, of an old school chum who became a pop star.

His name was Mark Keds and I remember him as a shy boy with a guitar and a cockney accent. He played Mote in our school production of Love’s Labour’s Lost and left at 16 to throw himself into the music business.

The Shakespearean influence apparently persisted: his band Senseless Things was named after a speech in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when the tribune Marullus abuses a mob of merrymaking artisans who have taken a day off: ‘You blocks, you stones, you senseless things,’ he says.

Senseless Things had two top-20 hits and gathered a respectable fan base.

They split in 1995 and I heard rumours of Mark’s heroin habit – which killed him. I saw him at a gig in the noughties: he’d made an alliance with Pete Doherty, the famously druggy lead singer of the Libertines, and had co-written one of their songs. On another occasion, I saw him wandering around Brick Lane looking deathly pale and thin. He may even have been barefoot.

I always wanted to be a pop star and for many of us the dream still lives on.

The other day, I was having a coffee with a very wealthy publisher in his sixties.

He’d just been showing off his new Porsche. He surprised me by saying, ‘I’d love to be a pop star!’

There’s something in the pop star’s unique combination of steely determination, courage and laziness that is very appealing. Pop stars will often say that they were motivated to succeed in the music industry because they simply couldn’t bear the idea of getting up in the morning, going to work and being told what to do.

Interviewer Lynn Barber is a fan of pop stars. ‘I love, love, love interviewing 40 The Oldie May 2021

pop stars… The ones I admire are those who started writing and composing in their teens, pouring their hearts out alone in their bedrooms, often with no encouragement at all. And who then had the guts to go out and expose themselves to the ridicule of their schoolmates by getting up on stage. So brave, so young! I think they’re heroic.’

I agree. I recently interviewed Jarvis Cocker and I’m full of admiration for him. (He was lovely, by the way. He seems to have managed to avoid the fame-related pitfalls of ego and grandness.) It’s not necessarily an easy path. There are sharks everywhere trying to steal your money. And that’s if you make any money in the first place, which is hardly guaranteed.

If you want to make money, you’d be far better off joining Goldman Sachs and

Senseless loss: Mark Keds (1970-2021), the late lead singer of Senseless Things

sitting in front of a screen for 100 hours a week doing precisely what you are told.

That, in a sense, is a far easier path than pop stardom, though it does involve getting up early – which counts it out for the pleasure-loving pop star, and indeed for Town Mouse, biggest sleepyhead of all time.

My own pop-star aspirations ended at 22 when I sold my bass guitar and amp in Record and Tape Exchange in Notting Hill. My band Chopper had played punk at high speed. The height of our career was our achieving the position of runner-up in the 1987 Cambridge Rock Competition, but I’m afraid it was downhill from there.

We just weren’t determined. As Jarvis told me, it’s all about plugging on. He was on the dole for nine years before Pulp started hitting the mainstream. ‘You have to feel compelled to do it,’ he said.

‘There’s no guarantee you’re ever going to make any money or make a decent life out of it.’

It’s also, as the fate of Mark Keds demonstrates, a dangerous life. I don’t know what the statistics are but it wouldn’t surprise me if pop stardom was more potentially fatal than Formula One. Many pop stars don’t make it out of their twenties: Marc Bolan, Amy Winehouse, Nick Drake, Brian Jones and many, many more. Others go mad or lose everything.

When Chris Difford of Squeeze – he wrote the lyrics to Up the Junction and other hits – told his parents he wanted to be a pop star, they said, ‘Don’t do that.

You’ll get divorced and become a penniless alcoholic.’

Chris now says, ‘They were absolutely right.’

For many pop stars, their fate will be similar to the 18th-century scholar’s life, as described by Dr Johnson. Like Grub Street hacks and authors, pop stars attempt to combine freedom with short hours and moneymaking, but can easily end up achieving none of these. To adapt Dr Johnson on the scholar’s life: There mark what ills the pop star’s life assail, Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail.

Pop stars will always be envious of some other pop star who is doing better. They will generally be under the control of a greedy record company, today’s equivalent of the patron. They’ll go through phases of poverty and find that 90 per cent of their efforts come to nothing. Some, like Pete Doherty, end up in prison.

RIP Mark Keds; we salute your bravery. You gave far more to the world than a Goldman Sachs employee.

Country Mouse

Slurry spreaders get on my nerves – and I get on Mary’s giles wood

Mary doesn’t share my appetite for Netflix ‘shockumentaries’ about imminent environmental catastrophe.

However, to her credit, she will honour her marital vows by sitting next to me while I watch; albeit with a pile of ‘mending’ – in case the content goes over her head.

A while back, she sat through Cowspiracy, showing how cows are ruining the planet. But it barely dented her appetite for red meat, cooked to the consistency of leather.

Fast-forward to its marine equivalent, Seaspiracy, which we watched in the face of warnings. While many viewers had been ‘moved to tears’, others had actually been ‘broken’ by the hard-hitting attack on overfishing, fish-farming and the deliberate fishing to extinction of blue-fin dolphin – so as to profit from the specimens already being hoarded in mega freezers, as the hoarders wait for their value to rise as a luxury food with the ultimate rarity value.

Following the viewing, we vowed never to eat fish again, other than the handful of sustainably and ethically sourced examples endorsed by environmentalist Charles Clover; namely, North Sea plaice and haddock, hake and mussels.

Seaspiracy assaulted our senses only a week ago. So when my Ulsterwoman wife went to London for the day for a doctor’s appointment, what did she bring back from a supermarket at Paddington Station but a pack of farmed salmon?

‘But didn’t we agree to never eat farmed salmon again?’ I ventured.

‘OK. So you won’t mind my giving your portion to the dog, then?’

Like many married couples, we have been getting on each other’s nerves.

Undeterred, I made Mary watch another shockumentary, Kiss the Ground. It explains the thinking behind

‘To be honest, usually both members of the couple are alive’

the fashionable regenerative-farming system which promises not only to save the world by reversing global heating but also to feed it in the process. There is even room for cattle in this brave new world.

The central message, not unfamiliar to organic gardeners like me, is to feed the soil, not the plant, and never to leave ground bare because nature never does.

The polemic made things crystal clear. If we carry on with conventional farming, we will have 60 harvests left.

But there is a price to pay for watching shockumentaries – the toll taken on our nervous systems by the constant triggering of the fight-or-flight mechanism, when there is no outlet for this adrenalised state.

Correction – there is an outlet: my wife. I often find her cringing in

I often find Mary cringing in anticipation when I merely enter the room

anticipation when I merely enter the upstairs room where she works from dawn till dusk, even when I am only kindly delivering a cup of tea.

The other day, while quietly going about my no-dig gardening, I glimpsed on the horizon a satanic machine the size of the Ever Given mega tanker in the Suez Canal. I had to run upstairs to get a better look at it spreading slurry over a distant prairie. The fact that Mary did not find this grounds for hysteria suggests we may be incompatible.

To describe our cottage as a tinderbox would be an understatement. But how much of the tension is attributable to shockumentary-watching and how much to COVID mental-health issues?

Nature doctor H Vogel can always be relied upon to restore perspective. He reminded me that those suffering from ‘nerves’ can benefit enormously from the berries of the wild barberry bush, chewing them slowly before swallowing.

I am one of the few Englishmen to boast a cluster of barberry bushes on their land. Having successfully used the berries to revive my liver following incidents of schnapps and schnitzels overindulgence during a house party in Austria, I planted some specimens as soon as I got back.

How right I am in according myself the honour of being 20 years ahead of my time or, as one wag named me, ‘the David Bowie of horticulture’.

Sadly, barberry bushes, once prevalent in this country, are also endangered. The bush even has its associated rare moth, the barberry carpet moth – so rare that you need a licence to survey for it.

The moth and its host are victims of collateral damage. Common barberry is affected by a species of stem rust that in the past went on to infect cereal crops.

Farmers have extirpated it from hedgerows where it had grown merrily since the neolithic age.

Surely the time has come to do a shockumentary on wheat. Most wheat currently grown in this country is fit only for cattle fodder. It no longer even waves in the breeze, because farmers favour short-stemmed varieties developed to reduce the ‘problem’ of crop waste.

Wildflowers no longer co-exist with this type of wheat. Neither do birds or insects resort to it. Indeed, a walk in the wheat fields nowadays might induce Parkinson’s, lymphoma or, worse, a custodial sentence for trespassing.

Meanwhile, my own barberry bushes are now fine, unwieldy specimens – but we won’t be able to take advantage of their berries’ nerve-tonic properties until the autumn.

The Oldie May 2021 41

Letter from America

Magazine Heaven has gone to Hell

ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST

After 40 years on American magazines, I mourn the golden days edward kosner In my imagination, there’s a celestial realm called Magazine Heaven. No cerulean skies and puffy white cumulus – just clouds of cigarette smoke, old typewriters, desks that look like unmade beds and raffish souls having the time of their former lives.

There’s Henry Luce and Briton Haddon cobbling together the first issue of Time. There’s the New Yorker’s William Shawn worrying a comma in a J D Salinger story, and Frank Crowninshield and the beautiful young Clare Boothe (later Luce) putting out the original Vanity Fair. In his silk pyjamas, Hugh Hefner is picking the centrefold for Playboy. Over by the grimy window, Margaret Bourke-White and Alfred Eisenstaedt are fiddling with their lenses before going out on assignment for Life.

I conjure Magazine Heaven often these days. I don’t presume ever to ascend there – although I toiled in magazines for nearly four decades. For much of that time, I was the editor, first of Newsweek (founded in the 1930s to compete with Time), then of New York (created in the 1960s by the brilliant Clay Felker) and Esquire (where Harold Hayes worked his magic in the ’60s and ’70s). No, I think about the golden age of American magazines because the very survival of many of them now seems so fragile.

The fraught state of these slick periodicals is of a piece with the plight of the print press in general. Essentially national newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post thrived in the Age of Trump because he reliably produced a headlined outrage nearly every day he was in office.

Advertising and news-stand sales are nothing like they what used to be, but these papers are harvesting ever more digital subscriptions from readers who crave reliable information; this saves their publishers the trouble and

expense of actually putting an inky wad of newsprint in people’s hands each day.

But once-great newspapers across the United States, particularly in smaller cities, have been retrenching for years. They’ve cut editions, furloughed and culled staff, especially veterans with news savvy.

They’ve shuttered newsrooms – nearly empty these past months anyway, with staff working remotely because of the pandemic.

The magazine story is equally depressing. The successor to Luce’s original Time Inc sold off its fabled titles – Time magazine itself, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and more – to competitors and individual entrepreneurs. With their new owners, many of these magazines are melting like ice cubes on a hot stove.

My alma mater, Newsweek, has suffered even more. Once selling more than three million copies a week and plump with ads, the faltering magazine was handed off for a single dollar (and subscription liabilities) by Katharine Graham’s family company a decade ago.

Its new multi-millionaire owner promptly died, and Newsweek underwent a marriage of convenience with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast website.

That didn’t work either, and the husk of this once great news magazine is being put out by a fourth owner. It’s now a website with a print component less than five per cent of its peak circulation.

The once-luxuriant women’s fashion

magazines can look peaked, too. Their September issues – especially Vogue’s – were crammed with advertising. They could be so hefty that readers risked pulling a delicate muscle picking them up. Not much danger of that any more.

But the diminution goes beyond the commercial – it’s the influence that these publications once brandished that is an equal casualty of the age. Time magazine’s choice of its Man of the Year (in 2006, bowing to political correctness, the title morphed into Person of the Year) was once a big story. Just making the cover of any week’s Time or Newsweek was a real distinction in itself.

The twinned advent of cable TV news and the internet robbed the print press of ads and eyeballs. The news magazines were decimated. Their readers, especially in the heartland, were people who prided themselves on keeping up with the latest in politics, world affairs, science and culture. An hour or so spent with Newsweek or Time made them feel au courant. Now, these people get it all – unmediated – on their screens.

Still, like the big three national newspapers, some topical periodicals thrive on. The New Yorker, thinner now than in the flush ’50s, has held and even expanded its audience and sway. And the American edition of the UK’s Economist, recently redesigned, looks like another winner in the race for survival.

The encouraging lesson here is that readers will support newspapers and magazines that offer those most valuable of modern media commodities: accurate information and trustworthy analysis presented with confident verve. Time and Newsweek and some others may be overdue in Magazine Heaven but, as the Oldie’s 400th issue shows, there’s still life for smart magazines here on earth.

Edward Kosner is the author of It’s News to Me, a memoir of his journalism career The Oldie May 2021 43

Postcards from the Edge

My kind of town has a touch of real class

TOBY MORISON

Real diversity means a mixture of different classes – as well as different races, says Mary Kenny

Our little Channel town of Deal was voted, this spring, among the top ten places to live in south-east England.

It came in ahead of more gem-like locations such as Lewes and Winchester, but behind the picture-postcard Surrey Hills and the bucolic Amersham. Deal, reported the Sunday Times in their survey, is ‘a thriving seaside town that’s salty and sophisticated … cosy pubs and wine bars abound and dining options are plentiful’.

Deal certainly has delightful delicatessens, cafés, bars and restaurants. I’m especially fond of the genuinely Italian and modestly priced The Sicilian in the town’s Stanhope Street. But it also has something else that gives the town its flavour. It has class diversity.

When we speak of ‘diversity’ these days, we usually refer to an ethnic mix.

But there is another kind of diversity worth considering: posh people mixing with people of slender means; individuals doing smart techie or arty jobs alongside others with unpretentious occupations in retail, servicing or artisanal trades.

What makes Deal interesting is that it’s not a one-class town. There are, for sure, residents with beautiful homes and, evidently, plenty of spondulicks in the bank, but there’s also an element of old bohemianism.

Native Deal oldies recall that the town could be quite ‘rough’ back in the 1950s and ’60s: Middle Street, now dinkily restored to Jane Austen-like decorum, then featured drunken taverns and public brawls.

Call it nostalgie de la boue, but I am fond of a bit of chavviness in the social mix of any society. I wouldn’t want to dwell only among a refined middle class – I’d feel distinctly inadequate.

But getting the mix just right – a few swells, a steady addition of solid bourgeois, a bit of alternative artiness and an element of proletarian spiciness – is what makes for

not comply with our standards of gender equality. When asked what kind of woman should be most admired, he replied, ‘She who has had the most children.’

After the French Revolution witnessed female revolutionaries running amok in the streets, Bonaparte resolved to return women to the home, under the control of a male patriarch, and his constitution reflected that view. Yes – the epitome of ‘toxic masculinity’ indeed!

diversity, it seems to me: what Duchess Meghan might call ‘authenticity’.

How we’ll appreciate restaurants, pubs and cafés this summer – after such long deprivation. The huge improvements in the standards of British food in recent decades are surely linked to the blossoming of foreign travel by, yes, the masses, via budget airlines and cheapo travel packages. Can’t wait to be in a security queue at Gatwick once again!

‘Staycations’ are all very well, but if we were consigned to stay on home soil for a prolonged period, we would, I fear, become more narrow-minded and insular. Travel does broaden the mind and enhance cultural experience: the Costa tourists all came to know the meaning of the tapas bar.

When we get back to normal, Francophiles can enjoy many bicentenary events throughout this year, marking the death of Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte 200 years ago on 5th May 1821. At the stunning Musée de l’Armée in Paris, Fontainebleau and Rueil-Malmaison, among other locations, old Boney will be celebrated and honoured in a variety of tasteful ways.

(See ‘2021 Année Napoléon’ online.)

Was he a great man, a genius or a tyrant? Opinions still differ, even in France. But one thing is sure: he would

A hundred years after the partition of Ireland, there’s now much talk about Irish reunification, under the more tactful concept of ‘a shared island’. The border problems arising from Brexit, as well as possible looming Scottish independence, have prompted a ‘reconfiguration’ of what some call the North Atlantic Isles (formerly known as the British Isles).

But if Ireland were to be reunited, where would the new capital be situated – Dublin or Belfast? Or possibly Cork?

All three are suggested.

My personal preference is the Hill of Tara, in County Meath, somewhere between Dublin and Belfast. It was the ceremonial burial grounds of the High Kings of Ireland (the Irish monarchy died out in the 11th century), and has some compelling Neolithic to Iron Age archaeology. It’s full of prehistorical legend, and when it comes to political disputes prehistory always seems a safer place to go. (Even if Tara probably gained more renown from its association with Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.)

Partition in Ireland wasn’t really a satisfactory solution in the 1920s, but it was then the only practical one. Today, when the political landscape has changed, why not seek to review the situation?

Mind you, André Maurois said that being an oldie was like watching a film from halfway through, and then seeing it start again until it got to the bit where you say, ‘This is where I came in.’ Ditto with so many ‘new’ political initiatives!

The Oldie May 2021 45

Profitable Wonders

The song and dance of mating birds james le fanu

St James’s Park in early springtime could not have been lovelier.

Diverse pairs of ducks swam contentedly side by side, with a handsome Egyptian goose ushering her newborn chicks to the water’s edge.

Then, thrillingly, two swans – a snowy, white male and a smaller, jet-black, red-billed female – turned towards each other and launched into a balletic courtship waltz.

Round and round they twirled, their long necks intertwined, black draped over white, white over black and then black over white again, for minutes on end. Suddenly, she disappeared, submerged by her more powerful partner at the moment of union.

Resurfacing some yards away, she stood up out of the water, flapped her outstretched wings and sailed away without a backward glance.

‘The courtship rituals of animals are altogether puzzling,’ observed the ethnologist Niko Tinbergen after a professional life spent studying them.

It is certainly difficult to fathom why nature should deploy so extravagant a range of ‘ways’ – performances and posturings, vivid colorations and vocalisations – to achieve the same ‘end’ of sexual reproduction. Though fascinating to observe, those ‘ways’ might be judged unnecessarily over-elaborate – often bizarrely so.

The peacock’s display of its cumbersome, lengthy train is a case in point. The final swirl around is certainly dramatic, confronting the peahen, in all his splendour, with that vibrating arc of iridescent, blue and green feathers. But to what effect?

‘She usually appears to be utterly indifferent, walking away or continuing her quest for food as if her ardent suitor were a hundred miles away,’ writes zoologist William Pycraft in his classic work The Courtship of Animals.

The courtship ritual of the sage grouse is more puzzling still. Every 46 The Oldie May 2021

year, both genders congregate at the same place on the windy plateaus of the Rocky Mountains.

Initially, it is only the males, up to 50 of them, who attend. Arriving at first light, they strut up and down for several hours, making a popping sound (‘like a cork being pulled from a bottle’), caused by the inflation and then compression of a large, air-filled sac around the neck.

They then disperse, returning again the following morning. This goes on for a month until, in April, they are joined by females in large numbers who congregate in a dense pack at the centre of the communal display ground.

It’s some glorified ‘coming-out’ ball, you might suppose; an opportunity for the female to select a desirable mate with whom to rear their offspring.

Far from it. Just a handful of unaccountably privileged males get a look-in. Strutting through the female congregation, they have their way with as many as is feasible.

The same performance is repeated every morning for a fortnight, though for 90 per cent of the males their only role is as spectators. As for the females, once ‘serviced’, each one flies off to build a nest where she will lay and incubate her eggs and rear her chicks alone.

The vivid coloration of some, if Cock of the walk: a peacock’s display

certainly not all, birds is perhaps more readily explicable. But ‘altogether puzzling’ again is its – at times – exquisite beauty.

‘Picture a bird no bigger than a thrush but of a wonderful cinnabar red, with a gloss as of spun glass,’ writes William Pycraft of the king bird-of-paradise.

He draws attention to the panoply of coloration – an orange-hued head, a white breast crossed by a band of metallic blue, an ivory-yellow beak and legs of cobalt blue.

‘Closer examination reveals yet further points of wonderment,’ he adds.

There are green-tipped, fan-like plumes on either shoulder and a pair of tail feathers modified to form slender, ten-inch stalks, ‘coiled like a watch spring and bearing at their ends a disc of emerald green’.

Similar considerations apply to the extravagances of birdsong. Each of the 6,000 species of songbird has its own distinctive melody, of which the musicality’s complexity can verge on the miraculous.

The Australian lyrebird’s astonishing repertoire of 90 different songs incorporates those of many others. In a recital lasting 43 minutes, an ornithologist identified at least 20 that he recognised. The flute-like duets of the East African shrike can be antiphonal (started by one, completed by the other) or polyphonic, including phrases sung in unison or overlapping.

What are we to make of this?

Scientists, when discussing the nature and origins of the rituals of courtship, talk confidently of ‘reproductive strategies’, ‘inclusive fitness’ or ‘sexual selection’.

But how little, pace Niko Tinbergen, we really know.

sister teresa

Crime and punishment in British prisons A popular piece of modern equipment, designed to build up health and make the body beautiful, is named after a cruel, 19th-century punishment amounting to torture. I have a young keep-fit acquaintance who had no idea of the origins of his apparatus.

The treadmill was invented by the distinguished civil engineer and prison reformer Sir William Cubitt in 1818. Worried by seeing prisoners lounging around, idle, he thought they would benefit from some strenuous work to toughen them up, and so he designed a machine that would keep them moving.

A sentence to hard labour in the 19th century meant at least three months on a treadmill: six hours a day, every day, the equivalent of climbing 14,000 vertical feet each time.

It was punishment at its purest and worst. Sometimes a treadmill would drive grinding machinery or hydraulics but, more often than not, it was simply pointless and very bad for your health.

Oscar Wilde was one of its many victims.

It is not we who should be imposing retribution, but God: ‘Vengeance is mine, and recompense…’ Deuteronomy 32:35, quoted by St Paul in Romans.

Societies, not unnaturally, take a dim view of those who interrupt their smooth running, but to add vindictiveness to judgement is dark indeed.

Punishment is a necessity, but never a pleasant one. I find it shocking that the treadmill was abolished only in 1902, less than 50 years before I was born, and am thankful that a sea change has since taken

‘He just discovered his reflection’

place in our prisons. Reforms have been brought in to help prisoners towards better and happier lives after their release.

Alas, a vast amount of work still has to be done before crucial improvement and, above all, forgiveness, become a reality.

Thank heavens for the New Testament: ‘Love will come to its perfection in us when we can face the day of Judgement without fear… In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love: because to fear is to expect punishment…’ 1 John 4:17-18.

This is the grammar of Christianity and should be part of any penal system.

It is cheering to find punishment stood on its head. A very nice elderly bishop, many years ago when a novice, didn’t always see eye to eye with his novice master, for reasons unknown.

Insubordination may have played a part.

The prescribed punishment was the (in theory) demeaning task of keeping the bathrooms clean. The future bishop did so with due obedience. He thoroughly enjoyed making the taps shine – but he never let on.

Funeral Service

Violet, Lady Aitken (1926-2021) Lady Aitken and her husband, Sir Max Aitken Bt, Chairman of Beaverbrook Newspapers, were keen powerboat competitors. Sir Max bought her a boat which they named Ultra Violet. She was soon competing with her husband and she took part in the Round Britain Race.

Lady Aitken’s funeral took place with COVID restrictions at the South Berkshire Crematorium, with a full house of 30 friends and relatives.

The funeral was led by local Catholic priest Father David O’Sullivan.

Grandson Rory Aitken, son of the 3rd Lord Beaverbrook, delivered a charming address: ‘How was it possible, we wondered, that someone in her 60s could compete in a five-hour powerboat race, revelling 48 The Oldie May 2021

in the salt and grit of the endeavour, and yet always emerging immaculate with no complaints?

‘I loved seeing these weathered Italian powerboat racers in Cowes, quite weak at the knees as they talked with bowed respect about “Lady Vi”.

‘It was pretty cool to have a powerboat-racing granny, and to be able to tell schoolfriends stories of a granny who’d been drinking at Sandown Races with Jimmy White – the famous snooker world champion known as the Whirlwind.

‘It’s worth noting that letters of condolence were received both by a

retired Chief of the Air Staff and by an RAF driver who drove her only once.

‘They said of her in the papers that they don’t make them like that any more.

I’m not sure they made many like that before either, to be honest.’

There were readings from Max Aitken (grandson) and Charlotte Bellasi (née Aitken). The Rev Jonathan Aitken, a cousin-in-law, read a prayer. A cousin of Sir Max, Jonathan Aitken, adds, ‘I was fond of my Aunt Vi (as I erroneously called her). She rode the tiger of her tempestuous marriage to my cousin Max and ended her days peacefully as the Aitken family matriarch, living among her beloved racing community near Lambourn.’

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Loneliness can break your heart Studies show the lonely do suffer physically from stress theodore dalrymple

Hell, no doubt, is other people, but it is also, for many of us, the absence of other people. Loneliness is a wretched state, but one to which many of us are condemned by either temperament or circumstance.

I’ve often noticed when I wander in cemeteries that the wife (less often the husband) of the above did not long survive the above. Was this coincidence, or did the demise of the one bear a causal relation to the demise of the other?

On the other hand, there are those widows – rarely widowers – who the tombstones testify long survived their spouse. Were they merry widows or grieving Miss Havishams? Is there, in fact, a bimodal distribution of survival after spousal death: those who experience it as a liberation and those who regard it as but a purgatorial trial before their own death?

It has long been known that loneliness is not good for health or, at any rate, the lonely are not healthy. But is the relationship between loneliness and ill-health causative and, if so, in which direction? After all, abandonment of the ill is far from unknown: as every hospital visitor knows, the ill are not much fun and chronic complaining is rarely attractive.

A study in the journal Heart, which

followed up several thousand people, aged on average 64, examined whether those who reported themselves to be lonely or socially isolated suffered more from cardiovascular disease (heart attacks, strokes and so on) than those who felt themselves to be neither lonely nor socially isolated.

I had supposed that loneliness and social isolation were more less coterminous, but they are not. Any person who, like me, detests parties and has nothing to say at them, knows very well what it is to be lonely in the midst of a crowd, while a walk on a moor gives rise to no feeling of loneliness. Social isolation, on the other hand, is an ascertainable fact. Loneliness is subjective – a question of ‘my truth’, as Ms Markle might put it.

The authors found, perhaps surprisingly, that feelings of loneliness, but not social isolation, were associated with an increased likelihood of cardiovascular disease. For those who felt lonely, the risk of a cardiovascular illness was raised by as much as 30 per cent, comparing the least lonely with the most lonely.

Needless to say, such a statistical relationship does not mean causation, even when the authors have done their best to control for other factors.

Human life is composed of a nearinfinitude of factors. In any case, the study would have to be replicated – which almost certainly it never will be, at least not exactly – before its findings can be accepted as definitive.

But when authors have gone to immense pains to find a statistical association, they almost invariably proceed to explain why the association that they have found is causative.

In this case, the answer is the indispensable concept, stress. The lonely are peculiarly susceptible to it, and stress means illness.

I confess that these results were not altogether congenial to me, suggesting as they did that a feeling, objectively justified or not, had more effect on health than an objectively real situation.

Of course, the study was conducted on a generation who had not yet been fully socialised into a culture that regards self-pity as the highest form of compassion. But it bodes ill for years to come, when people will delight, if that is quite the word, in using their misery as a bottomless well – and also as an excuse for their failures and failings, and possibly as a source of income into the bargain.

‘I realise the lads have got to celebrate after winning, but not on the tapestry’ The Oldie May 2021 49

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

My debt to Mr Banks SIR: I much enjoyed Craig Brown’s piece on David Tomlinson (Spring issue). As a fledgling character comedian, one would mix stand-up with appearances on TV chat shows.

Before the giddy heights of The Fast Show, I would tour my music-hall veteran Tommy Cockles all around anywhere anyone would have me.

After being set up to appear on Wogan at the old Beeb studios, I was extremely excited to hear that David Tomlinson was going to be on the couch before me. He represented me to what Charles Bukowski termed ‘old Hollywood’ and was part of the very fabric I was attempting to pull around my shoulders.

Terry tried to bait him, and the gaggle of old ducks in the studio audience loved Tomlinson; he was so charming and bright. I even looked down to see if he was wearing spats.

As Terry interviewed me, Tomlinson began to roar with laughter, wiping tears from his eyes – and I knew then I had done it: if David Tomlinson got it, I was halfway there.

I never forgot that afternoon. He represented everything good about English show business, everything we have in some ways lost. He didn’t disappoint.

As I left, he stood in a fur coat alongside his peak-capped chauffeur and bade me farewell. And then, perhaps, went off to a house by the river where he might doze after a couple of pink gins.

Regards, Simon Day, Cricklewood, London

‘I haven’t slept for 100 years, worrying about lockdown’ 50 The Oldie May 2021

‘It’s the tomb of the Boy King all right!’

Yesterday’s weather

Getting our vicars in a twist

SIR: John Lloyd’s fascinating QI item on the weather (April issue) caught my eye: the world’s first weather report in 1875 giving the weather for the previous day!

How refreshing it would be if news reports today followed the same example, telling us what actually happened the previous day, rather than what might have happened or what the media think might happen in the future. Rather than News at Ten, we have Conjecture, Guesswork and Immodest Opinion at Ten! Yours, David Shipley, Morpeth, Northumberland

SIR: We might and do expect better from The Oldie in the matter of ecclesiastical terms and titles. But there it is in The Old Un’s Notes (Spring issue): ‘The Reverend Jonathan Aitken, vicar…’

A vicar has charge of a parish, and despite being an ordained C of E cleric, Mr Aitken does not enjoy such a responsibility.

Britain’s youngest doctor SIR: Matthew Norman’s description of his doctor as ‘angelic’ (April issue) may well be more reliable than the claim that he was, at 21 years and 305 days, the youngest ever to have qualified in Britain.

Dr John Rae, the great Arctic explorer, who went on to discover and chart the final link in the Northwest Passage, studied medicine in Edinburgh for four years up to 1833 and, on graduation, transferred to the Royal College of Surgeons simply because they were willing to grant his diploma before he turned 20, he being then 19.

Respectfully, Douglas A Hill, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex

‘It feels more like living at work than working from home’

So I continue my fight against the increasingly loose use of the title ‘vicar’, which too often either ignores the reverend gentleman’s/lady’s actual Anglican Church role – or (worse still) takes it as synonymous with ‘clergyman’ of any denomination.

Murray Hedgcock, London SW14

outside commonly showed either a white woman delivering a black baby, or a black baby being vigorously scrubbed in the hope of the colour being taken away.

Most Labour in Vains seem to have gone now, though some still linger on – with the name intact and no pictorial sign for future generations to understand or, indeed, misunderstand.

Dr Patrick Hoyte, Wootton Courtenay, Minehead, Somerset

Citizen Trump SIR: I’m surprised Harry Mount was unaware that Citizen Kane – ‘Lock ’em up!’; ‘Fraud at the polls!’ – was the favourite film of ex-President Trump.

Mike Bor, London W2

Did you know Jan Morris?

SIR: I am writing a biography of Jan Morris and would like to hear from any reader of The Oldie who may have corresponded with her, or who is willing to share documents, photographs or memories.

Paul Clements, 53 Ravenhill Park, Belfast BT6 ODG

A fistful of typos SIR: It’s a joy to read The Oldie again after a long gap – my dentist stopped having it in the waiting room when COVID struck – and I am now the grateful recipient of a gift subscription from a friend.

Two minor corrections: Morricone’s first name was Ennio, not Enrico (Golden Oldies, Spring issue). And surely Eddie Shah’s Today was the trailblazer for Murdoch’s move to Wapping?

Jonathan Pennington, London N19

Feminist Mr Men SIR: Ms Fine’s strident condemnation (Letters, Spring issue) of the Mr Men books made me wonder how her own children viewed their childhood.

I have a 38-year-old daughter, who is a strong, independent businesswoman with two children, and a 41-year-old son, a teacher. He has two small daughters.

Both my children and their partners share the roles of earner, child carer and all the domestic responsibilities that go with family life. They read Mr Men books, and they played with Barbie and Cabbage Patch dolls, Lego and Star Wars toys, respectively.

They grew up into fine, nonjudgemental individuals because our family valued equality, fairness, respect and love, which was demonstrated in abundance by us as parents. Children learn by example. So, despite the clearly insidious propaganda, they were being peddled by Mr Hargreaves, they came out just fine!

Judith Bretherton, West Wickham

Nicholas Owen stuffs Paxo SIR: Nicholas Owen needn’t worry on behalf of newsreaders. Which is harder?

Reading the news or reading out questions

Who invented champagne?

‘One day, son, all this will be your brother’s’

on University Challenge chosen by others who have also provided the answers?

Stephen Halliday, Cambridge

Cinzano vs Campari SIR: I heartily agree with Martyn Hurst’s sentiments (Spring issue) about the sad decline in today’s creative advertisements, in comparison with those of the ‘golden era’ of the ’70s and ’80s. I am particularly pleased that he highlighted the various ads featuring Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins – though the drink in question that inevitably landed on Ms Collins was a Cinzano, and not a Campari.

Perhaps Mr Hurst was too distracted

by Ms Collins’s soaked blouse to notice!

Roger Davies, Witney, Oxfordshire

It’s grim down south SIR: I read with some weariness Stephen Glover’s remarks (Spring issue) about ‘left-leaning, fashionable’ views at the BBC. They are certainly not fashionable at The Oldie. There was I, a new subscriber, craving the brilliance of Craig Brown, Barry Cryer et al, but getting quite a lot of the stuff that makes one run screaming from the Telegraph.

Not all ‘oldies’ are posh, Tory and southern, you know…

With all best wishes, Stuart Maconie, Cumbria/Salford/ Birmingham

SIR: It was fascinating to read about bottle-making in ‘The knight who invented champagne’ (Spring issue).

Stephen Skelton, who is a Master of Wine (MW), claims that Sir Kenelm Digby is ‘the knight who invented champagne’.

However, may I respectfully point out that other MWs and also wine experts, including Jane MacQuitty, MBE, the wine critic for the Times, claim that Christopher Merrett invented champagne. On 17th December 1662, he presented a paper to the newly formed Royal Society, describing the traditional method of making sparkling wine.

It would seem that the experts cannot agree about who invented champagne.

Yours faithfully, Alan Boyd, Bromley, Kent

Kodak’s organ-grinders SIR: The Old Un’s Notes on cinema organs (Spring issue) reminded me that in 1957, in our small department at Kodak Wealdstone, we had two semi-pro organists on the staff. Jack Wicks was in residence at the Odeon, Kingston, while Sid Bodger played at a cinema in north Middlesex.

In his day job, Mr Bodger dealt with customer queries on lost films. Tiring of sarcastic references regarding his name, he decided to sign himself ‘Mr Sidney’.

Ian Powell, Andover, Hampshire

The Coach and Two Bigots SIR: David Horspool (‘Cheers, it’s opening time at the pub’, Spring issue) is right to draw attention to politically-incorrect pub names. The Black Boy and, worse, the Blackamoor are today pretty obviously racist; as in fact they were even back when the relevant pubs were established.

Worse still, perhaps, are the various pubs called the Labour in Vain: the signs

‘It was your idea to domesticate it – you walk it!’

The Oldie May 2021 51

I Once Met

GL PORTRAIT/ALAMY

Norman Stone I first met the historian Norman Stone in Istanbul on 2nd November 2007.

It was not the first time I had seen him. I missed being supervised by him at Cambridge by just a few years.

Yet we sometimes nodded in greeting when he wheeled his bicycle into Gonville & Caius College, smart in a blazer as the studious young research fellow finishing The Eastern Front 1914-1917, the book that was to win him the Wolfson Prize.

Years later, when Oxford made him professor of modern history, I saw him again, in a Chinese restaurant off Leicester Square. He was lunching with loud journalists. Bored, he turned a pasty face with a baleful eye in my direction, but without recognition.

By the time I asked to meet Stone in Istanbul, Oxford was well behind him.

He was working at Bilkent University in Ankara. He came to his house in the Galata neighbourhood of Istanbul for weekends.

I was writing a book about Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, whom Stone had dined with and interviewed for the BBC the day before Speer died in 1981.

Stone agreed to meet me at the Hilton.

He arrived mid-morning in an old green

sports jacket, complaining of the previous night’s bus ride. He immediately dispensed with coffee.

I began asking what he knew about the young German woman, married to a British Army officer, with whom Speer had been conducting an affair at the time he died in London.

It was his first erotic relationship, Speer boasted to his publisher, Wolf Jobst Siedler – much to the distress of Speer’s long-suffering wife.

Remembering his dinner with Speer at Brown’s Hotel in Albemarle Street, Stone spoke of his good company, despite the Teutonic gravitas. The women on the set of the BBC interview were bowled over by his bearing and his looks, even at the age of 76.

Stone walked out of the hotel with me, talking as he did so. Only after a third of a mile, replete with excoriating attacks on historians, publishers and Oxford, did Stone realise he was going the wrong way.

But before he turned, I managed to say that I was

writing a novel about Speer. Would he read it? ‘Yes,’ he said.

Norman Stone turned. I never saw him again.

In 2017, I wrote to him, finally asking him to read my novel once I’d finished it.

He replied: ‘I am sorry not to have come back to you. Was on holiday in France and have come back to a tidal wave of things to do.’

I had almost completed it when I read his 2017 article in The Oldie: ‘Albert Speer’s last night in Brown’s Hotel, Mayfair – with Norman Stone’. It ends with the words: ‘It is not clear that we need another book on Speer, or perhaps even on anything else to do with Nazi Germany, unless it’s a really good novel or film.’

Norman Stone died in 2019, before I could send him my book. The moral: don’t sport with death.

I do regret not hearing what he thought of it. I just hope he would have considered it worth the gamble.

Leslie Croxford

Professor Stone (1941-2019)

Another Man by Leslie Croxford is out now

RIP Donald Campbell, dear friend

In the mid to late 1950s, I was a member of the design team of the famous vehicles Bluebird K7 (for water travel) and CN7 (on land), at Norris Brothers Ltd in Sussex. I was project co-ordinator for the latter model.

In that capacity, I spent a lot of time with Donald Campbell, born just over 100 years ago, on 23rd March 1921. I was his technical back-up, visiting companies that were supplying, or making, parts for the car.

Because of Donald’s back problems, I often had to take 52 The Oldie May 2021

over the driving. We were frequently delayed and had to try to make up time. Pushing a Bentley Continental over the speed limit was somewhat hair-raising.

A change of career in late 1966 took me to an office in Grosvenor Square, London.

On 4th January 1967, my secretary called to say, ‘There’s a man from the BBC wants to talk to you urgently.’

He asked if I was the Donald Stevens who had been involved with K7. He

asked me to get to Broadcasting House without delay. There had been an accident.

On arrival, I was swiftly rushed down to a studio and told that Donald had died in a horrific crash on Coniston Water in the K7. He was 45. A film of the crash had been flown down and was due to arrive at any moment.

I was very shaken and was offered a whisky that turned out to be exceedingly large, but did steady my nerves.

The film came up on screen and we watched it several times before I was asked for my opinion on what had happened. That was an impossible question to answer accurately as there were a number of possibilities requiring detailed investigation.

I considered it necessary to wait until the two chief designers had returned from Coniston Water with more detailed knowledge.

In any case, I was too upset to be interviewed.

By Donald Stevens, author of Bluebird CN7: The Inside Story, who receives £50

Watery grave: Bluebird K7’s fatal crash, Coniston Water, 1967

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Sophia Waugh: School Days

The sad case of Jekyll and Hyde The current educational tizzy is all about ‘lost learning’, but the very phrase troubles me.

We can discuss lost income, lost keys or even – channelling Lady Bracknell – lost parents, but lost learning is far too nebulous an idea to quantify. If you don’t have something, you can’t lose it. In a way, it takes us back to the never-ending argument about content/knowledge versus skills, an argument that was at the root of all our planning of teaching through lockdown.

In the first lockdown – which came out of the blue and which no one believed would last as long as it did – we focused on what is called ‘consolidation’. In other words, we went over and over past learning to din it in to the most unwilling of heads.

At the beginning, most of it was done through online packages, involving lessons followed by quizzes to check understanding. This was all very well, especially for those who actually engaged, but we soon became aware that many children skipped straight to the quizzes, ignoring all the lessons aspects.

Little did they know that we could track exactly how long they spent on each lesson – even if we hadn’t worked it out through their plummeting results. Only towards the end of the first lockdown did we begin to look at new content.

I did hope, though, that my Year 10s, a

second set at the beginning of their GSCE ‘journey’, would realise the importance of working as we went along. So I set off merrily to teach Jekyll and Hyde, their 19th-century set text. And it all seemed to go swimmingly. They were in the classes and answered questions. Some even delivered work regularly. By the time school reopened, we had finished the book and I was looking forward to spending the next two weeks teaching them how to write literary criticism.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘How many of you have honestly not read the book?’

After a silence, a few tentatively started to raise their hands. A few minutes later, all but about three of the class had a hand in the air. And then their charming spokesperson ventured, ‘If you don’t mind, Miss, perhaps we could start it again.’

To what extent had they lost their learning in those months? You could argue that the few who had done

‘I was getting bored with sitting around at home doing nothing – so that’s why I decided to take up meditation’

everything they were asked to do and then had to do it all over again have gained learning by repetition, but you could also argue that they are the ones who have lost the learning they would have done when we moved on. You could also argue that the majority had not ‘lost’ learning but had wilfully ignored the opportunity to learn.

So what are we to do to repair this loss, not so much of learning, as of knowledge? Start over, of course. We must absolutely not see this as a reason or an excuse to downgrade the quality of our content or teaching. We have to take a deep breath and aim to mend the damage done. We have to adapt our lessons (yet again) in such a way as to lure the students back into the habits of work – because that is what has really been lost, which is much more dangerous for them than their having missed a chunk of work.

On my last lesson before the Easter holidays, I set this class an extract from Jekyll and Hyde to analyse. At the end of the half-hour given for the work, they set their pens down wearily, but triumphantly. ‘That’s the most I’ve written for months,’ the spokesman said, ‘and it was really satisfying’.

Maybe the lesson he has learned from losing learning is how much he actually enjoys it. Maybe.

Quite Interesting Things about … May May is the only month that neither begins nor ends on the same day of the week as any other month in the same year.

In May in the Faroe Islands, summer nights are so well illuminated that the lighthouses are turned off for three months.

No US president has ever died in May.

The first Friday in May is International Tuba Day. Nobody goes ‘gathering nuts in May’ as there aren’t any then. The original phrase was ‘knots of May’ after the custom of gathering May blossom to celebrate the end of winter on May Day. But since the switch to the Gregorian

calendar in 1752, hawthorn trees don’t blossom on May Day any more, but 11 days later.

4th May is International Star Wars Day, so fans can say, ‘May the Fourth be with you.’

Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister on 4th May 1979. At Downing Street she quoted the four-line Prayer of St Francis, which contains four mays.

Until AD 837, Halloween was on 12th May. In Bermuda, the last Friday in May is the first day of the year on which Bermuda shorts may be worn as formal wear.

JOHN LLOYD

The Oldie May 2021 53

Books Diary of a somebody MATTHEW STURGIS Malice in Wonderland: My Adventures in the World of Cecil Beaton

By Hugo Vickers

GARY WING

Hodder & Stoughton £25 ‘I hope it isn’t going to be one of those gossipy books.’

This was the admonition of Cecil Beaton’s sister, Lady Smiley, when she encountered the young Hugo Vickers, at the start of his ‘quest’ to write the biography of the great photographerdesigner-diarist and snob.

Vickers’s biography of Beaton, published in 1985, was certainly more than that – a richly textured account of the man that recognised and fixed his many and real achievements.

It took Vickers six years to research and write. During those years, he kept his own diary, recording his travels and meetings among Beaton’s dwindling band of friends, rivals, models and associates. (Beaton himself died, aged 76, in 1980, weeks after anointing Vickers as his official biographer.)

And now – four decades on – Vickers has put it together for publication. I am happy to report that it is very much one of those ‘gossipy books’. It is a quite brilliant record of a fading social and artistic milieu: the world of the once Bright Young Things, now Dim and Old, but twinkling still. If it is funny (very funny), it achieves its humour by treating its subjects with unaffected seriousness – and unforced affection. And the humour is always framed by the sense of human drama, and tinged with the elegiac note.

The Aristocratic-cum-Bohemian world it chronicles may seem frivolous, privileged and even faintly absurd to

stern observers. But it is a world to which Vickers is an unrivalled cicerone. Though he was not out of his twenties when the diary starts, his understanding of the nuances of his subject matter and his belief in its importance make it live.

Perhaps you don’t know who Ali Forbes is, or can’t remember what Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, did, or why we should be interested in Daphne Fielding.

But you are soon swept into their orbit, hurried happily into the round of lunch parties, intimate dinners, memorial services and confidential telephone calls.

There are wonderful vignettes – a gin-and-grapefruit-juice-fuelled lunch for the Queen Mother chez Lady Diana Cooper (the heroine of the book); a summer holiday at Lord Lambton’s villa in Tuscany; a trip down to Brighton to see the nonagenarian – and, possibly, morphine-addicted – Enid Bagnold in

her rambling home. The scene shifts from Wiltshire to Los Angeles, from Little Venice to real Venice, from Tangier to New York; all the travel a tangential reminder of how Beaton’s career carried him beyond the narrow confines of English ‘Society’ into the brasher meritocracies of New York and Hollywood.

Indeed the cast that Vickers assembles crowds with such international luminaries as Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, Julie Andrews, Grace Kelly and Truman Capote. After receiving a phone call from Audrey Hepburn, Vickers feels that his London flat is quite transformed, overwhelmed with a strange atmosphere of powerful calm.

There are any number of piquant details scattered along the wayside: how Lord Weidenfeld’s eyeballs were liable to pop out of his head (literally) during

The Oldie May 2021 55

moments of ‘sexual frenzy’; how Diana Vreeland remarked of David Bailey, ‘The queer side of Bailey is that he likes women’; or how Noël Coward advised the young Bruce Chatwin, ‘Never let anything artistic stand in your way.’

Although Vickers has added necessary – and illuminating – footnotes, and short linking passages in italic, he has resisted the temptation to edit his younger self.

We are left with his charmingly ingenuous rapture over a – very – brief encounter with ‘THE PRINCESS OF WALES’: ‘It was as though one had met the girl of one’s dreams, never believing such a thing possible.’ (An editorial aside tersely remarks that these ‘sparklingly original words’ show ‘the pulverising effect that royalty has on so many mortals’.)

The revelation of personal feeling is rare. Vickers’s brilliance as a diarist is in his sympathetic objectivity. There is something Firbankian in the dabs of impressionist detail, the snatches of waspish dialogue and the telegraphic concision, to say nothing of the plethora of titled ladies and ‘lesbianic’ lapdogs.

And, to rival even the eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, there is the arresting (and wonderfully described) figure of Stephen Tennant, the rouged recluse of Wilsford Manor. He is one of the constants in the book – a source of fascination to almost all of Vickers’s interviewees.

Indeed, amid the coruscation of anecdote and gossip, the diary builds up a vivid picture of the biographer’s craft, as we witness the author carefully assembling his information about Beaton, asking the same questions of different people – with often wildly different results.

There are conflicting estimates of Beaton’s achievements – ranging from genius to a ‘middle-class’ capacity for hard work. Lady Juliet Duff thought that he had ‘flair but absolutely no taste’. She taught him that every room in a country house must have a trowel by the grate ‘to give the impression of gardening, etc’.

There were differing views about his sex life – his gay loves, heterosexual liaisons and relationship with Greta Garbo. The one thing on which everyone seemed able to agree, though, was the excellence of his exemplary manservant, Mr Grant. Beaton claimed not to know his first name.

By the end of this book, the reader will be left with a no less profound admiration for the excellence of the exemplary Mr Vickers.

Matthew Sturgis is author of Oscar: A Life

Larkin’s tragic muse

REVIEW BY A N WILSON Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her Life and Long Loves

By John Sutherland Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £20 One of the best chapters in this gallant – I would say, actually heroic – book describes Monica Jones lecturing at what she persisted in calling the College and others were by then calling the University of Leicester.

She was clearly a gifted, histrionic lecturer, who dressed to match her themes. If her beloved Sir Walter Scott was the subject, tartan would be worn.

Swinging pearls if Cleopatra was the matter of her discourse. On this occasion, she was swathed in the deep black of the Oxford MA gown, of which she was so proud that she sported a black cashmere jumper and black tights to match the funerary garb of the Prince of Denmark.

Her lecture was a diatribe against the ‘lilac establishment’ – Gielgud and co.

There was nothing admirable about Hamlet. He was a lout. He robbed Ophelia of her virginity and her dignity.

He shamed her reputation at court, making oafish jokes about ‘country matters’. ‘I loved thee not,’ he brutally tells her. ‘I was the more deceived,’ says Ophelia in reply to … to whom? To Hamlet, or to the author of a volume called The Less Deceived, one P A Larkin, then rising in fame and, after giving Monica to understand she was The One, having skedaddled, first to Belfast, then to Hull.

Already Miss Jones was a byword on the campus of Leicester, known as the original of Margaret Peel, the awful girlfriend of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. (She was in the lonely position of being the only person in the world not to have found that book funny.) It was well

‘He insists he can’t leave until he has a full-time job’

known that Jim Dixon was inspired partly by Kingsley himself, partly by his chum former Leicester librarian P A Larkin, who had lived at Dixon Road, Leicester.

Larkin had supplied Amis with all the real malice about ‘Margaret’. Yet she stayed with him, as this remarkable book shows – stayed until the end, eventually moving into his bleak house in Hull and helping him drink himself silly, while they egged one another on to further extremes of racism, misanthropy, misogyny and hate.

Monica Jones never got academic preferment, because she would not write a book; not even an article for a learned journal. Plenty of great people, from Christ and Socrates to most of our favourite teachers, have never published. And this book is written in part as a tribute to his old Leicester teacher by the distinguished literary professor John Sutherland, who remained a grateful admirer and fellow boozer until Monica’s alcoholism made her a housebound hermit.

There is a paradox at the heart of the book, however, as there is in the very title. He wants to give us Monica in her own right. He proudly says that she is the only Leicester lecturer to have made it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But, of course, he would not have written the book unless she had been the decades-long neglected, belittled, betrayed attachment of a famous poet.

Larkin’s best prose-writing is to be found in the volume entitled Letters to Monica, and when we heard that she had bequeathed her own letters to him to the Bodleian Library, we hoped she might prove to be one of those writers – like Jane Welsh Carlyle, to whom she sometimes compared herself – whose independent existence sprang to life posthumously on the page, through letters.

Her prolixity made it impossible for Sutherland simply to reproduce the letters. That and their defying every current law of wokery. The Senior Common Room at Leicester seen through Jones’s Edna Everage specs is ‘a glittering mob of foreigners, Papists, pansies, Scotchmen, local historians, Jews’. Her letters, Sutherland says, are ‘a long cry of pain’, with emphasis on the word long.

In one letter – ‘Do you realise that in this January I shall have been IN THIS PLACE FOR TEN YEARS’ – we are told that the ‘self-laceration’ that follows – dwelling on the fact that the poet no longer finds her ‘sexually inflaming’ – continues for 16 pages. When her cottage in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, was burgled, Larkin got a 15-pager. When he failed to turn up for her birthday, after she had The Oldie May 2021 57

cooked him dinner – what a shit he was! – she drank half a bottle of gin and penned a 23-pager, while turning back to marking exam papers. ‘I am almost weeping at the badness of the finalists’ scripts.’

When the poet’s monumental selfishness – getting one of the girlfriends pregnant (there was a miscarriage, perhaps mercifully), lying about keeping two others on the go in Hull – overcame her, she hit the bottle, and on these occasions the reader is reminded less of the acerbic Mrs Carlyle and more of hysterical Fanny Squeers – ‘I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather.’

The only child of working-class parents, Monica did not have a brother – or any close friends to help her through the bad times. ‘I blame you for destroying my confidence,’ she railed, rightly, at Larkin. (In the same letter, while hating him for going off with ‘bloody Patsy’, a married woman in Northern Ireland, she changes gear abruptly and recommends that he paint his awful Hull flat with Dulux.)

‘I dread the whole of the rest of my life,’ she wrote, not only truthfully but rationally, on the last day of 1960, when she was a mere 38. To judge from these letters, her life was awful, and her having a truly awful temperament, washed down with gin, did not make it happier. She went on loving her old pupil Sutherland, and he has done her proud – or as proud as possible in this attempt to keep the Jones flame burning.

The trouble is, the loathing of the human race, and of herself, into which she slithered, is not redeemed, as Larkin’s was, by any immortal poem. Sutherland gives us delicious lines, but they tend to be his own – as when he sees that ‘malice isolated her’ or when, mentioning how much she liked another of her pupils, Tom Craik, he observes that ‘she forgave his being anti-Oswald Mosley’.

That is a brilliant sentence, in a brilliant book.

‘Remember – no snacking between snacks’

Trial of the century FRANCES WILSON The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19th-Century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women

By Antonia Fraser Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25 Crim Con – or criminal conversation – was a euphemism for adultery. And Crim Con trials, in which a cuckolded husband sued his rival for damages to his property were, in the days before The Jeremy Kyle Show, a source of popular entertainment.

The most sensational Crim Con case of the 19th century took place in the Palace of Westminster during the summer of 1836, when George Norton, Tory MP for Guildford, sued Lord Melbourne, the Whig Prime Minister, for £10,000.

The damaged property was his wife, the black-eyed Caroline Norton. Those, including Charles Dickens, who attended the nine-day hearing learned that Norton was a violent husband, that Melbourne spent his afternoons giggling with Mrs Norton in her sitting room, and that a married woman had no legal existence.

With Norton written off as a noodle and Melbourne as a Regency relic, it was Caroline’s beauty, brains and rackety breeding that became the focus of interest. Her grandfather was the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author, appropriately enough, of The School for Scandal; her father, Tom Sheridan, had died a penniless playboy.

Caroline was married off to Norton aged 19, and her friendship with Melbourne began soon afterwards. While she claimed that their afternoons were spent talking politics, the servants reported that she did so splayed at his Lordship’s feet, her skirts around her waist.

But, as Antonia Fraser points out, it is unlikely that Caroline would ring for a servant while lying on the floor with her legs apart. As evidence, Melbourne’s love letters failed to convince: ‘How are you?’ he asked her in one. ‘I will call at halfpast four, Yours,’ he wrote in another.

It was their very flatness, argued the prosecution, that proved his guilt.

Pickwick Papers, then being serialised, contained Dickens’s parody of the supposed encryptions of the now famous billetsdoux: ‘Dear Mrs B,’ reads out Sergeant Buzfuz, counsel for Mrs Bardell, ‘Chops and Tomata sauce. Yours, PICKWICK.’ Mr Norton lost the case, but Mrs Norton lost everything else. Regardless of a wife’s innocence, the law was on the

side of the husband. The custody of her three young sons went to their father, and the youngest died in his care: it was with the loss of her children that her life as a writer began. Caroline Norton looked on her pen, she said, as a soldier looked on his sword.

Her poetry and fiction showed strength, but her pamphleteering had steel. Her arguments for the natural rights of mothers led to the Custody of Infants Act 1839, which allowed women who had not been found guilty of Crim Con to have custody of their children over the age of seven. Her pamphlets on the Divorce Bill led to the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 and the Married Women’s Property Act 1870, which granted women, for the first time, a legal identity separate from their husbands. So we wives and mothers have Caroline Norton to thank for those rights that we now take for granted. Caroline Norton deserves the same fame as Florence Nightingale.

Caroline also lost her friendship with Melbourne. ‘I hear nothing of you, as I used to do,’ she pleaded after the trial, ‘and feel much the same dreariness of heart that one does when watching by a sickbed.’

Melbourne had a new admirer in the form of the young Queen Victoria, whose mentor he now became. While he was flirting with the monarch, Caroline pointed out, she was considered unfit to associate with ladies of the court. The only thing she did not lose in 1836 was her ghastly husband, to whom she remained married until his death 40 years later.

Once she was widowed, Caroline married again – this time for love. She was 69, and died three months later.

It is Norton’s life as a campaigner that interests Antonia Fraser, who will be 89 this year. The Case of the Married Woman, Fraser suggests in her introduction, is a biography and also the third in a trilogy of books about 19th-century reforms, coming after Perilous Question and The King and the Catholics.

Unlike Norton’s previous biographer, Fraser believes that her subject was innocent of adultery: Caroline and Melbourne doubtless canoodled but full ‘conversation’ did not take place, not least because Melbourne was keen on flagellation and Caroline, having been beaten by her husband, lacked the same taste for it.

The argument is convincing, but then everything Fraser says about Caroline and her world is convincing, steeped as she is in the lives and politics of the 19th century.

Any biography in which the author and subject are well matched contains a certain magic, and the sympathy that Fraser feels for her heroine is what ignites this remarkable study.

The Oldie May 2021 59

Museum of murder HAMISH ROBINSON Letters to Camondo

By Edmund de Waal Chatto & Windus £14.99 In 1924, Count Moïse de Camondo made a will bequeathing his hôtel particulier at 63 rue de Monceau and all its contents to the French state, namely the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

In 1932, he added a codicil stipulating that none of the contents was ever to be lent or otherwise removed. He had already determined that nothing, bar future numbers of the Gazette des BeauxArts, was to be added to the collection. It was to remain fixed and unchanging, itself a work of art. Even the placing of individual pieces was not to be altered.

What did the collection comprise?

One biographer has described Camondo as afflicted with the ‘virus du XVIIIe siècle’ – ‘18th-century disease’.

The house itself was built from scratch to a design by René Sergent. It combined the exacting proportions of the Petit Trianon with all the comforts and technical ingenuity of the early-20th century. In 1910, Camondo inherited the hôtel his father had built on the same site as part of the original development of the Plaine de Monceau as a rival to the aristocratic faubourgs Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré. He demolished it and sold off or distributed all its furnishings, except for one or two family pieces.

In its intricacy and elegance, the new house resembled the elaborately contrived artworks it was built to contain. These included Savonnerie carpets, Gobelin tapestries, Sèvres porcelain, panel paintings by JeanBaptiste Huet, engravings after Chardin and, above all, superb examples of 18th-century French furniture, often of distinguished provenance. The Musée Nissim de Camondo, named in memory of both his father and his only son of the same name, remains unchanged today.

Readers of Letters to Camondo might at first suspect that Edmund de Waal had produced a whimsical version of a museum guide in the form of personal letters to its long-dead founder.

However, in the piecemeal manner of letters, it soon becomes apparent that the book is a meditative annexe to The Hare with Amber Eyes, de Waal’s unravelling of his own family history through objets d’art and the vagaries of inheritance.

Charles Ephrussi, the forebear who had originally assembled the collection of netsuke that form the centrepiece of the

earlier book, had not only been a neighbour and fellow connoisseur – he was the owner-editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts – but belonged to the same milieu, that of the great Jewish banking families who established themselves in Paris in the 19th century. Ephrussi’s niece was married to Théodore Reinach, the father-in-law of Camondo’s daughter, Béatrice, and Ephrussi himself was the devoted lover of Camondo’s mother-inlaw, Louise Cahen d’Anvers. Likewise, all these names, conspicuous because of the wealth attached to them, peppered the thriving antisemitic literature of the period.

But the letters do not merely luxuriate in the riches of a bygone era.

Remembering for de Waal is never far from grief. The museum had always been, in part, a mausoleum. Camondo had turned to the construction of the new building and the sweeping away of the past in the wake of his wounding divorce from Irène Cahen d’Anvers, who left him to marry an Italian equestrian, Count Sampieri. His children remained with him, but his son, Nissim, was shot down in his aircraft over the German lines in 1917. In 1919, his daughter, Béatrice, married Léon Reinach and left to bring up children of her own. The last of the Camondo patriarchs resigned himself to enhancing his collection.

In 1936, following Moïse’s death, the museum was received into the patrimoine français. When the war came, Béatrice believed her father’s bequest, her brother’s service, her conversion to Catholicism and her involvement with an aristocratic set that entertained German officers would protect her from detention. She was wrong. She, her children and her by now ex-husband Léon were interned by French police at Drancy in 1942 and, in 1944, were shipped east under German supervision to Auschwitz and other camps, where they were murdered.

Irène Sampieri survived the war,

passing as an Italian, and inherited the remainder of the Camondo fortune from her daughter. De Waal compares these events with the fate of his own family.

He asks if there can be ‘closure’. No, he thinks. ‘You remember one thing and then you are lost. You pick up one thread and it starts to lead you to places you do not want to go.’

Exceedingly good NICOLA SHULMAN How the Just So Stories Were Made

By John Batchelor Yale University Press £18.99 In 2018, the authorities at Manchester University decided to adorn their new Students’ Union building with verses from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem If. A cloth-eared selection if ever there was one. Sure enough, within days, the students had painted it out and replaced it with another by, inevitably, the AfricanAmerican writer Maya Angelou. Speaking to the Times Educational Supplement, Sara Khan, the Manchester SU’s Liberation and Access Officer, said that Kipling was ‘well known as the author of the racist poem The White Man’s Burden and … other work that sought to legitimise the British Empire’s presence in India and dehumanise people of color [sic]’.

Pressed to respond, Kipling’s biographers duly issued a countersqueak, saying ‘there was no evidence that the students have read anything that Kipling wrote’.

That is probably correct. In the event that any student be moved by curiosity to redress that lack, they could do a lot worse than start here, with this intelligent, balanced, finely-written book that pretends to be about children’s stories: a safe-seeming pool into which one might dip one’s toe; but which run, by means of underground channels, into the open restless waters of Kipling’s life.

Batchelor draws you in with tales of whales and leopards. Before you know it, you have learned, almost by accident, that Kipling spoke Hindi as a first language; that he began married life as a settler in Vermont; that his best-beloved uncle was the painter Edward BurneJones; that his wife, Carrie, was his self-appointed Rottweiler whom he allowed his friends to dislike; that two of his children died, leaving him in a half-life of grief; that in India, the term ‘elephant-gaited’ expressed the rolling walk of a beautiful woman. Try it, it’s true.

Equally imperceptibly, you are obliged to acknowledge the boggling range of Kipling’s talent, the many voices and genres in which he speaks.

The Oldie May 2021 61

How is this done? Recognising how the rind of Kipling is signally unappealing, John Batchelor, an academic whose own head teems with Edwardian history and books, opens him up like a splayed tangerine, each segment of which is tagged to a Just So story.

Each story proposes a theme, or passage, from Kipling’s career, and each animal reflects a version of this evasive, paradoxical man for whom the word most commonly used is ‘protean’. Thus the Camel with his hump leads naturally to Kipling’s own depressive episodes, his breakdown of 1890 and an explanation of how his own schoolmasterly prescription – ‘Dig till you gently perspire’ – never worked for him. The Ethiopian and the Leopard, whose protagonists change their skins to vanish into the landscape, opens onto matters of race and self-concealment.

Batchelor has devised a light-footed, non-chronological, meandering progress around the stations of Kipling’s life that complements its restiveness and enables him to revert to certain motifs, confronting them from another direction.

The theme of punishment and revenge, for instance, runs under a number of these stories to feed Batchelor’s roaming investigations. The Elephant’s Child suffers from both ‘’satiable curtiosity’ and relatives whose principal diversion is spanking him for it.

For Kipling, it was important to distinguish a considered and rational chastisement from the ungoverned sadism he suffered as a small child far from home, at the hands of Mrs Holloway in Southsea. This leads to a consideration of the other ‘fostered aliens’ of his work, such as Kim and Mowgli, both of whom achieve a resolution of identity which continued to evade their creator. Riven with splits like an old barn door, he preached what he could not practise.

Take his friendship with another creature of the veldt, Cecil Rhodes, who had him to stay each winter in return for words, which the ‘largely inarticulate’ Rhodes couldn’t find. ‘What am I trying to express?’ he would ask his guest. ‘Say it, say it.’ Kipling’s admiration for Rhodes’s wealth and power was helplessly at odds with his declaimed contempt for those trinkets.

Batchelor does deal with Kipling as a ‘reprehensible and problematic’ political figure, an enthusiastic imperialist and sometimes outright racist. But he is careful to place those concerns towards the end. By this time, he has placed in the balance the heavy element of art, which, as Boris Pasternak says, ‘outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence … of the work’.

A 1630 ‘horse-box’ pew (left) at Rycote, Oxfordshire. From The Treasures of English Churches, by Matthew Byrne, Shire Publications, £20

DHL delivers MAUREEN FREELY Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence

By Frances Wilson Bloomsbury £25 Who turned D H Lawrence into a must-not-read?

Some say it was the writer Kate Millett, who did a hatchet job on him in Sexual Politics back in 1971. Others point out that Ken Russell didn’t help. No one who’s seen his 1969 adaptation of Women in Love can hope ever to forget Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestling naked, dongs dangling, in front of that raging fire – or argue that Millett had no

cause to call Lawrence phallocentric. At least, not with a straight face.

In her very unusual biography, Frances Wilson offers up another culprit: F R Leavis, the very man who proclaimed Lawrence ‘the great genius of our time’.

He placed two Lawrence novels on the list of Great Books that several generations of students had to read and revere, or else. But he paid little attention to Lawrence’s short stories, essays, poetry, travel writing, letters or literary criticism.

It is in these writings, Wilson tells us, that Lawrence the genius can be found.

There is no getting away, though, from Lawrence the rebel, Lawrence the seer, Lawrence the walking, ranting mass of contradictions. This was, after all, the man who invented autofiction. Impossible, says Wilson, to draw a line between his The Oldie May 2021 63

writings and his life. His ‘letters are stories, his stories are poems, his poems are dramas, his dramas are memoirs, his memoirs are travel books, his travel books are novels, his novels are sermons, his sermons are manifestos for the novel, and his manifestos for the novel, like all his writings on history, his literary criticism, and the tales in this book, are accounts of what it was like to be D H Lawrence.’

Her ambition here is to write in that same spirit. This she most certainly does, in leaps of imagination that are bound to confound some traditionally minded readers but that I found enthralling, perplexing and inspiring in equal measure. In place of the usual passage from cradle to fame to grave, she presents us with what she calls a triptych – three stories that take us through his maddest and most productive decade – using Dante as her guide.

Although Lawrence knew Dante’s Italy and could quote him at will, his poet gods were Shelley and Whitman. Dante figured more as a ghost in his library’s far shadows. It was Rebecca West, writing just after his death, who first suggested Dante as the key to Lawrence’s strange mind and ways. Whatever his subject, she said, he was always writing about the state of his own soul. In this, he was like Dante, ‘who made a new Heaven and Hell and Purgatory as a symbol for the geography within his own breast’.

This, then, is Wilson’s bold wager – that by mapping Lawrence’s mad wanderings against Dante’s ascent from Inferno to Purgatory to Paradise, she can cast some light on his tortured, if also divinely comic, soul.

We begin in the Inferno that was Cornwall 1915 to 1919. He’s just been prosecuted for The Rainbow. He’s made himself doubly unpopular by speaking out against the war. The local police are spying on him, convinced that he and his German wife Frieda are sending secret messages to the enemy. And then there is the stream of famous and infamous writers drifting through, to drink whatever they can lay their hands on while throwing lapis-lazuli paperweights at each other’s heads. There are more badly behaved literati in the Purgatory of Italy from 1919 to 1922, with plenty of room for monks, seductive spongers and monied friends who fall over themselves to put the Lawrences up for free.

It is yet another heiress who calls them to Taos in the mountains of New Mexico. Here they find Paradise but the serpent is already in residence, for their bossy, preening hostess is secretly syphilitic. An unkind reader might find in this a long-overdue lesson for Lawrence,

who was secretly tubercular all his adult life, never once admitting it even to himself. For all his passionate words about the primacy of sex, he may also have been infertile, or even impotent.

Open as he was about loving his mother like a lover, frank as he was in his fascination for male bodies, he couldn’t bear anyone – male or female – touching his own.

But every day, he sat down at his desk to do battle with his contradictions, and on his good days he found his way through to a clearing; an open window; a cliff with a view. The words he used to describe what he saw before him might be his own soul writ large, but it is impossible to read them without sharing his awe for the natural world, as well as his fear for it. In this, as in his writings about politics, war and the age of the machine, he speaks to the present moment.

Wilson would therefore like us to put aside the pillow talk for which he is best remembered, to consider why, 50 years after being removed from the canon, he is still on trial. This book is her case for acquittal. She offers it up in prose that rivals Lawrence in its fervour and precision, mixing her own voice and imagination in with his.

Though she never lets him off the hook or strays, as he so often did, from the written record, the fare will still be too rich – too Lawrentian – for some palates.

But, for the rest of us, it will be a book to save and reread, puzzle over and cherish.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Lost in Antarctica SARA WHEELER Lean Fall Stand

By Jon McGregor 4th Estate £14.99 In the opening pages of Jon McGregor’s sensitive novel, set partly in the Antarctic, dialogue splutters from a crackly radio. The episode, sustained over several pages, foreshadows the protagonist’s actual loss of speech. Lean Fall Stand is at its heart a story of the challenges and misunderstandings intrinsic to human relations.

McGregor structures his book around the tripartite model suggested by the title.

Part One unfolds in a polar field camp in which an accident engulfs three men, one of whom, Robert ‘Doc’ Wright, a veteran technical assistant, has a stroke. Part Two concerns Doc’s rehabilitation, first in Santiago in Chile, and then at home in England. Part Three centres on his aphasia rehabilitation group.

Anna, an oceanographic modeller and Doc’s sympathetic wife, struggles to understand and accept both her damaged husband and her new role.

Much of the novel’s action is seen from her point of view.

In the third part, group activities in the rehabilitation class include a ‘show’ in which aphasia sufferers ‘use movement to communicate story’. The event functions as a partial, redemptive denouement, though, overall, Lean Fall Stand gropes for what McGregor insists is fundamentally inexpressible: the drama of every human heart in dialogue with itself. It is a measure of his skill that he makes any headway at all.

Some years ago, McGregor travelled to the Antarctic on a writers’ programme.

Heavy sea ice prevented him from landing, but he obviously absorbed the spirit of that remorselessly beckoning continent. Over the course of seven months travelling on the ice, as a writer on the same programme, I visited many small science camps; the author gets it right: the rituals, the vocabulary (‘manfood’ is a throwback to an era when imported huskies required dogfood) and the understandable obsession with weather, itself quantified in its own language. ‘Drear mank’, which is cited, is the term for one of the bitter white-outs that descend for days.

Above all, the Antarctic in these pages represents man’s overwhelming sense of smallness in the universe. The Big White, as chopper pilots call it, is an unowned region not subject to the complexities of life.

An element of mystery oils the narrative drive: why did the accident occur, and was Doc culpable, as his son fears? By the halfway mark, the reader knows that only Doc and the survivor from that stormy day hold the key.

Appropriately for a book about the frailty of human communication, the truth never emerges.

Doc and Anna’s unlikeable adult children, Frank and Sara, function as ciphers for the occluded lack of understanding that leaves people frustrated and hurt. McGregor’s decision not to narrate from the children’s point of view fosters a sense of alienation.

Similarly, Anna finds herself adrift. ‘I don’t want to be a carer,’ she says. ‘I never even really wanted to be a wife.’

Lean Fall Stand will speak to the carers of men and women battling to regain their use of words, or learning to accept that words have melted for ever like an iceberg. ‘It’s hard to talk about things, Robert,’ says the kindly aphasia-group facilitator.

He replies, ‘Fu**ing is it is.’

The Oldie May 2021 65

Media Matters

BBC’s right royal failure

Coverage of Prince Philip’s funeral was depressingly dumbed-down stephen glover Jeremy Paxman is almost certainly wrong. Not any fool can read the news with moderate competence, as he claims.

But equally not every newsreader can provide an instructive and historically grounded commentary on a Royal funeral.

Never have I felt the retirement of David Dimbleby from our national life so painfully as when his replacement, Huw Edwards, blundered his way through the Duke of Edinburgh’s obsequies on BBC1.

Because Mr Edwards is a perfectly good newsreader, he and his employers seem to believe that it is the most natural thing in the world for him to step into Mr Dimbleby’s shoes. But why? There were painful silences when one hoped he might offer a little useful information with some historical perspective, and when one wanted him to say nothing he nattered on. Empty words such as ‘splendour’ and ‘magnificent’ tumbled from his lips. He mixed up his Ecclesiastes and his Ecclesiasticus.

Meanwhile, his newsreader colleague Sophie Raworth was given a bit-part role, prowling the outer reaches of Windsor Castle, providing commentary that could hardly be described as illuminating.

The rise of newsreaders to fill ancient offices of the BBC traditionally occupied by the likes of the Dimblebys is part of a wider phenomenon. By and large, over the past few years, heavyweight figures leaving the Beeb have been replaced by slighter and less authoritative people.

Instead of the sometimes infuriating but always substantial Jeremy Paxman on BBC2’s Newsnight, we now have the less commanding figure of Emily Maitlis. (All the regular presenters on the programme are now female, as is its editor.)

John Humphrys has left Radio 4’s Today programme without having any obvious heirs in terms of gravitas, while on the same station’s Any Questions the comparatively lightweight Chris Mason

is struggling to assume the mantle of Jonathan Dimbleby.

Where the solid if possibly occasionally pompous Roy Plomley once reigned on Desert Island Discs, we now have Lauren Laverne, a DJ and singer.

David Dimbleby’s old job on BBC1’s Question Time has been filled by the agreeable, but much less politically astute, Fiona Bruce.

We’ll have to wait and see whether Clive Myrie (another newsreader) is an adequate replacement for John Humphrys on BBC1’s Mastermind; I have my doubts. Andrew Neil, Auntie’s most formidable interviewer of recent years, has jumped ship for GB News, leaving a great void at the Corporation.

Now it could be my imagination, but I think I hear an ungenerous voice suggesting that what I really want are Oxbridge-educated, middle-class males ruling the roost. This is not true.

John Humphrys left school at 15.

Andrew Neil was born into a workingclass family in Paisley. Roy Plomley did not go to university. All of them became substantial figures on television and radio through merit and hard work. The important point is that none of them dumbed down.

I am thoroughly in favour of greater diversity. Let’s have more female, working-class and non-white presenters on our screens and airwaves – provided that they have the depth and substance and knowledge of the figures whom they replace. Why not more oldies, too? They are the subject of appalling prejudice at the hands of the BBC.

Empty words such as ‘splendour’ tumbled from Huw Edwards’s lips

What is unfortunate is the BBC’s propensity to promote people for ticking the appropriate boxes. Just because Huw Edwards is an ambitious, Welsh newsreader, it doesn’t follow that he is qualified to commentate on State occasions.

The Corporation should be looking for the best person, regardless of class, ethnicity or gender, to fill such an important role. And if there is a younger David Dimbleby being forced to mark time, he should be given a fair crack of the whip.

The truth is that the BBC cares more about fulfilling what it regards as the dictates of political correctness than about meeting the expectations, and matching the intellectual level, of its audience. Lauren Laverne was conceivably not intended by her maker to introduce Desert Islands Discs, yet I dare say there are all kinds of things she can do far better than Roy Plomley ever could.

Why can’t we have the best horses on the right courses?

The circulation of all newspapers has been badly affected by the pandemic, partly because some shops selling them have been closed, and partly because some people have been reluctant to venture out for fear of catching COVID. Some magazines, particularly those with a large subscription base, have fared better. On the marvellous occasion of its 400th issue, I am happy to report that The Oldie is among them.

The magazine’s most recent monthly subscription sales are a record 42,176.

Add in news-stand and digital sales and the figure is nudging 50,000, an all-time high.

The BBC may have lost its way, and once-great organs of public opinion may be floundering, but The Oldie continues to prosper by striving to give its discerning readers what they want.

The Oldie May 2021 67

History

First stage of the Grand Tour

The Napoleonic Wars closed France – and opened Greece – to tourists david horspool Fingers crossed, we might be able to go abroad this summer. It’s a good time to contemplate earlier eager travellers.

And what could be more British than the Grand Tour? Wealthy, often titled, Brits, accompanied by someone who knows what they’re talking about and enough luggage to hobble a mule, visit beautiful, foreign places. They admire their ancient monuments and fine art, while ignoring the political corruption and social deprivation that form the backdrop to all that sun-dappled elegance.

The Grand Tour is, on this view, the British superiority complex on an away day, dealing with the natives by copying or hoovering up their art and failing to learn their languages.

Then again, what could be less British than the Grand Tour? If the British caricature abroad is of an ignoramus, posh or plebeian, the Grand Tourist’s thirst for knowledge contradicts it. Still, as Blackadder says of Byron, ‘Mrs Miggins, there is nothing intellectual about wandering round Italy in a big shirt trying to get laid.’

Although Italy was the locus classicus of the Grand Tour, it was not the only destination. You had to go through France to get there, of course. On the return journey, many travellers took in Germany, Holland and Flanders.

During the Napoleonic Wars, and at other times of continental crisis, much of this route was closed to English travellers, which gave rise to the British love affair with Greece, and in architecture to the late-18th-century Greek Revival.

But, at the Grand Tour’s inception, most roads led to Rome. The archive of 18th-century British and Irish travellers to Italy, compiled by the connoisseurscholar Sir Brinsley Ford (1908-99) – not to be confused with the founder member of the reggae band Aswad, Brinsley Forde – and made into a dictionary by John Ingamells, lists more than 5,000 visitors.

Ford’s work has provided more than

one group of scholars with a living. At Yale, the Paul Mellon Centre holds the 56 boxes of the original archive. Over on the west coast, at Stanford, the Grand Tour Project, with a staff of eight, is engaged in digitising the same material, discovering unsuspected connections and clusters in the mass of individual stories.

It is unclear when the idea of the Grand Tour, its preferred route or even its name was fixed. But, by 1670, when Richard Lassels published The Voyage of Italy, this veteran of five such journeys could write of ‘the Grand Tour of France, and the Giro of Italy’ as familiar terms.

To Lassels and his charges, travel didn’t just broaden the mind. It also taught humility – ‘Travelling takes my young nobleman four notches lower’ – and prepared him for a life of military or diplomatic service.

Lassels also gives the lie to those who assume that the Englishman abroad was stubbornly monolingual. On the contrary: ‘Travelling takes off … that Aboriginal curse … I mean, the confusion of languages … by making us learn many languages, and converse freely with people of other countries.’

What did they bring back? Lassels’s vision of rounded polyglot leaders of men was mostly wishful thinking. But there

British Grand Tourists at the Colosseum (1760) by Nathaniel Dance-Holland

was certainly one discipline that was changed utterly by its encounter with foreign models: architecture.

From Inigo Jones to John Soane, via Lord Burlington and the Adams, influential British architects toured Italy.

Christopher Wren never made it to Italy, but he steeped himself in Italian architectural models. When he made it to Paris, he had the good fortune to meet the Italian Baroque architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in 1665 – a year before the Great Fire of London gave Wren his opportunity to remake St Paul’s and the City churches in his version of Italianate Baroque.

The other thing Brits returned home with from their Grand Tours was stuff: paintings by Italian and French masters, statues and sculptures old and new, to fill their Palladian and neoclassical houses.

They also brought back the masters themselves. Canaletto had made a successful business selling his views of Venice to Grand Tourists. In 1746, during one of those periods when hostilities made the Grand Tour difficult, he came to London and painted pictures of the capital and rural England. Another Venetian, Giovanni Pellegrini, painted murals at Kimbolton Castle for his patron the Earl of Manchester and for the Howards at Castle Howard.

Pellegrini’s influence on British artistic taste was increased by his appointment as director of the portrait painter Godfrey Kneller’s academy in London.

If our own Grand Tour is further held up by today’s war on COVID, we can console ourselves with an immersion in the fruits of our predecessors’ travels.

Richard Lassels sagely advised each of his young men, ‘First to take a view of England before he enter into foreign countries… Having thus seen his own country in a summer’s space, and having got His Majesty’s licence to travel beyond the seas … I would have him depart England about the beginning of October.’

Not sure if I can wait that long.

The Oldie May 2021 69

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

Long live the 1,000-year-old hyphen

TOM PLANT

Interested in hyphens? No, I thought not.

Even so, I shall try to hold your attention for a few moments, which will, I hope, be long enough to persuade you that the unloved hyphen merits your attention.

Hyphens were created to serve several purposes. The first, in Europe, was to join the two parts of divided words. For centuries no gap separated written words, which were recorded in manuscripts or inscriptions as they were delivered in speech, in an unbroken flow. The place to stop the flow, briefly, was the right-hand margin of the page, which might be at the end of a word or in the middle.

But, by the eighth century, many would-be users of Latin – the learned language of western Christendom – could no longer pick it up by ear, since their own languages had evolved too much (in France) or were entirely unrelated (in England). They had, therefore, to learn the classics from grammars or glossaries, in which words, not phrases, were the basic components, and spaces were found useful to separate them.

In the 11th century, scribes began to join the broken words at the end of lines, employing a short line below the space.

Thus the hyphen was born. When, in 1455, Johannes Gutenberg printed a Bible with lines of uniform length, fractured end-of-line words proliferated.

His press could not cope with a line below the space, but could manage it in the middle. It has stayed there ever since.

OAPs in jeans Blue jeans were once considered rebellious clothes for the young.

Now you see people in their seventies and even eighties wearing them, not with an air of rebellion but an attitude of defeat, as if clapped-out jeans are all they can be bothered to put on in the morning.

Not to everyone’s delight. Proof-readers have long been wary of words that break ambiguously: ‘recover’, ‘resent’, ‘resort’, ‘predate’, ‘justice’, ‘unionised’, ‘expectoration’ and, notoriously, ‘therapist’.

Yet the problems solved by hyphens far outnumber the problems caused.

Take, for example, the phrase ‘many would-be users of Latin’ in the second paragraph above. Remove the hyphen and the sense is utterly changed. The same is true of ‘After finishing-school, Myrtle became a nuclear scientist’ and ‘I saw a man-eating lobster.’

However, if you insert a hyphen, be sure to put it in the right place. Is the ‘high school boy’ perched at the top of a tree, or merely in secondary education?

Just as tricky is a ‘fine tooth-comb’, useful for those who comb their teeth, but not for those seeking a ‘fine-tooth comb’.

A similar problem arises with ‘black cab driver’, ‘no smoking room’ and ‘seventy five year old bores’, which could be ‘75-year-old bores’, ‘70 five-year-old bores’ or ‘75 year-old bores’.

Although such awkwardness is rare, many poorly hyphenated phrases carry a hint of ambiguity that can make the reader pause. ‘Scotland’s longest married couple’, ‘unexplained wealth order’, ‘light drenched landscapes’, ‘virtual Conservative party conference’ and ‘senior figures were to undergo bullying and harassment training’ have all appeared in print recently. Even the endlessly repeated ‘No deal could be

As most older people look absolutely frightful in jeans, should there be an age cut-off point after which they are no longer acceptable? They are the least dignified garment ever invented – and if there’s something oldies should be aiming at when they’re out and about, it’s dignity.

You even see elderly politicians and others in the public eye in jeans, to show they are still ‘with it’. Even Tim Davie, director-general of the BBC, arrived for his first day at work wearing blue jeans.

Davie, at 54, is not at all ancient, but he is still too old to be wearing jeans in such an important job. Save them for gardening. The Duchess of

better than a bad deal’ gives rise to the thought that a bad Brexit deal was an unsurpassably wonderful prospect, like Granny’s apple pie in ‘No apple pie could be better than my granny’s apple pie.’

Perhaps the commonest cause of confusion, though, is the attempt to yoke together several words with a single hyphen.

In phrases such as ‘convent school-educated woman’, ‘pre-World War One rifle’, ‘antihome rule movement’, the intention is to gather all the adjectival words together, but the hyphen links only two, leaving the others unattached and the reader baffled.

The solution in nearly all these examples is more hyphens in the right places, but people are loath to use them. In 1926, H W Fowler opened a long essay on hyphens with the observation that ‘The chaos prevailing … regarding the use of hyphens is discreditable to English education.’ He then cited a dozen examples, one being ‘superfluous hair-remover’ (a hair-remover that no one wants).

In 1951, Sir Ernest Gowers, who had succeeded Fowler as the most influential source of sense about grammar, opened his section on hyphens in ABC of Plain Words with a reference to this durable if unwanted product, noting that, despite his efforts to put matters right, Fowler had admitted that ‘usage is so variable as to be better named caprice’.

And so it remains today. But that is no reason to give up the struggle for a desirable hair-remover.

Cornwall, 73, has also passed the age limit for appearing in blue jeans but she’s been photographed in them.

Oldies should not wear jeans because, mostly, they no longer have the right shape for them. Jeans don’t have a forgiving enough construction for older figures. Denim is stiff

SMALL DELIGHTS Tearing off a piece of clingfilm that doesn’t fold back in on itself.

DAVID EALEY, SEAFORD Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

and unwieldy, even with a little stretch in the fabric, and does not adapt to the body in the same way as, say, corduroy or fine tweed.

No man with even the merest hint of a paunch should ever wear jeans.

Women who have developed the dreaded ‘roll’ that tends to gather round the waist with age should also steer clear. For both sexes, jeans draw uncomfortable attention to a collapsed bum.

And then it’s hard to get the length right. They are either too long or too short. So do us a favour and leave blue jeans to the youngsters for whom they were intended in the first place.

LIZ HODGKINSON The Oldie May 2021 71

Arts

AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY

FILM HARRY MOUNT RAGING BULL (Amazon Prime) Forty years ago, Raging Bull won Oscars for Best Actor (Robert De Niro) and Best Film Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker).

The Academy should have given two more to the nominees, Joe Pesci and Martin Scorsese.

The film hasn’t dated. The violence is terrifyingly gripping; particularly outside the ring, where Jake LaMotta (De Niro) attacks his poor wife, Vicky (Cathy Moriarty), with a bored, slow determination – much more shocking, and less familiar, than bloody boxing matches.

It’s also a reminder of how funny De Niro – recently accused of doing rubbish new films to pay for his divorce – can be.

He’d already worked on his violent Italian-American in Mean Streets (1973), The Godfather Part II (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976). He perfects the part in the story of Jake LaMotta (1922-2017), world middleweight champion (1949-1951).

There isn’t much of a plot. LaMotta becomes pathologically jealous of his second wife, Vicky, beats her up and beats up his brother Joey (Joe Pesci). His personal life is cut with his fights – taking a dive for a mobster, becoming middleweight champion, losing his title to the great Sugar Ray Robinson and moving up to light heavyweight.

Throughout the film, there are flashforwards to old LaMotta in decline, telling jokes as a stand-up (pictured) and going to jail in 1958 for introducing men at his Miami club to an underage girl.

So far, so routine. But De Niro brings the film – and LaMotta – to glorious, horrific, funny life in his dual portrayal of the young, thin boxer and the middleaged fat one. Everything he does is watchable, down to the tiniest details. He

Gorging bull: Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) in his tubby stand-up phase

speaks and moves in a unique De Niro language. He repeats lines, swaggers and adjusts his waistband. But, miraculously, he isn’t hammy. While carrying out all this business, he’s understated, happily pausing for ages without it being the sort of stagey, ‘Aren’t I so still?’ pause that Mark Rylance specialises in.

The older LaMotta – De Niro fattened up on a gastronomic tour of Europe – doesn’t just look different from his younger self. He is different: he’s funny and newly relaxed, even if physically and psychologically ruined by the effects of fame. Despite the violence, he is poignant as he surveys the ruins.

Joe Pesci also specialises in funny repetition (perfected later by him in the Goodfellas ‘Funny how?’ scene) – and bouts of extreme violence. But, with his nasal, high-pitched, quickfire, whaddyawhaddya delivery, he is different from De Niro; a foil, not an imitation.

Scorsese holds all this together, making everything seem natural while being so innovative.

It could have looked pretentious, filmed in black and white – particularly when the thoroughly enjoyable Rocky films were then being made in full, blood-soaked Technicolor. But the De Niro-Pesci conversations are so natural, helped by the Paul Schrader/ Mardik Martin screenplay, that it never feels art-housey. Scorsese’s casting of old Italian men is perfect – including his father, Charles, as an Italian card-player.

The same goes for the slow-motion romantic interludes, the black-and-white stills and the colour home-movie shots of New York rooftops. These touches would have bombed if they’d looked contrived.

Instead, they chime perfectly with the film’s melancholy, bittersweet feel – deepened by Mascagni’s Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana.

Scorsese is the king of ItalianAmerican Manhattan nostalgia.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE From 1985 to 1994, there was a memorable series on Radio 4 called Never the Same Again.

In it, Jenni Mills talked to families who had coped with crises: from the worst – a murdered child; the police knocking on the door to say ‘I’m sorry to say we have found a body’ – to nowcommonplace events: financial distress; a son coming out as gay. They covered blows, setbacks, heartbreaks and fate striking out of a clear blue sky – things we hope will never happen to us, but are always ready to hear about from others.

How boldly affecting that series seemed.

Jane Garvey’s new series, Life Changing, opened with a catastrophe so unimaginable that its image lodged in my head, joining that frightful cluster of guilts, anxieties and regrets that can jostle in one’s wakeful mind in the The Oldie May 2021 73

‘You’d touch me more if I were a screen’

small hours. I kept thinking of Grace, the shining young woman, a champion climber, a medic with all life before her, who was walking through the Westfield shopping centre when a man jumped down on her from three floors above, fracturing her spine, leaving her paralysed. The positivity of her demeanour – looking forward to being the doctor in the wheelchair, never for a moment hating the jumping man – was admirable, but also baffling.

The programme’s subjects divide into saints who after a life-changing experience devote their lives to altruism (sunny-natured Harriet, who saw her two sisters die in an air crash when she was eight and now travels the world’s trouble spots, dispensing human rights) and those who for whatever reason brought their misfortune upon themselves: the online gambling addict who stole £1.7m and lost wife, job and home; he now counsels other addicts.

Jane Garvey’s much-praised downhome warmth and empathy are fine vehicles for drawing out these narratives.

But I ponder on our motives for listening: are we uplifted and inspired? Or made more anxious – more hedged about by doomy pessimism?

Now here was an online conversation worth recording for posterity: two uniquely distinctive voices, Glenda Jackson and Peter Brook. She is 84, and first auditioned for him in 1964. Brook spoke from Paris, his theatrical plans stalled by COVID. But, at 96, he is still directing – a word he hates; he prefers to be a guide, helping actors to avoid snakes in the terrain.

He also recoiled from Jackson’s telling him, ‘You are the greatest director in the world.’ It was like hearing her ‘throwing insults at my mother. Please, no praise.’

Jackson fielded the cantankerous responses with grace. A good mix: two unemotional, opinionated professionals, each of whose work will live on in memory.

Just one word to add about the Duke.

After all the complaints about coverage, the best way to experience the funeral 74 The Oldie May 2021

was via Radio 4, with occasional peeks at the TV screen. All the dignity came through words and sounds – hooves, trumpets, bagpipes, Nimrod, Ecclesiasticus and restrained commentators: Martha Kearney, Eleanor Oldroyd, Clare Balding and Allan Little.

A question: do Oldie readers listen to more podcasts than steam radio? I asked a wise friend of 82 whether she ever listened to podcasts, and she replied, ‘All the time.’ She sent me a list of 50 straight off, from Private Eye’s Page 94 to Paxo’s podcast: she was just off on a train to Bristol, taking the wonderful Marcovaldo on her phone. Have readers switched their habits, too?

Finally, welcome back to Alfie, our witty police sergeant friend from Humberside, and It’s a Fair Cop (Radio 4). First, we had to decide: dog theft has risen, but is a missing dog a police matter? The exciting denouement of the search for stolen Milly starred Alfie’s own retired police dog, Zeus.

‘We often call our dogs after Greek mythical heroes,’ he explained. ‘Which can sound a bit silly in training, when you shout “Achilles! Heel!” ’

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS Often the only person watching telly in the entire country is me.

I’m referring to the ‘teleshopping’ channels, which take over in the small hours.

Nattering like gypsies down the market, unseen presenters attempt to sell opal rings not made of opals, paint-rollers, foot cream, blackout curtains and feather pillows containing ‘breathable eco-cell foam’, guaranteed not to smother asthmatics.

As I’m usually too drunk at 3am to read my credit-card numbers, none or anyway little of the junk turns up here, but it is like experiencing time being killed.

Full, drab misery-guts mode: Emily Watson in Too Close

Yet evening telly can be equally enervating, as if the programme-makers don’t expect viewers to have their wits about them. Did you see Keeping Faith, for example, where Celia Imrie pulled a gun? The Carmarthenshire world depicted was nonsensical. A solicitor who’d been to prison for fraud and who couldn’t manage elementary conveyancing hadn’t been disbarred; everyone lived in castles and expensive barn conversions with subtropical gardens, even a jobbing builder; a boy who had terminal brain cancer, and a one-per-cent chance of recovery, recovered – there he was at a beach barbecue. In the entirety of west Wales, there was a single police officer, poor old Sergeant Williams, pottering about on her own in a copse in long shot, with no back-up or forensics.

Eve Myles, as Faith, shouted and stormed around, always boiling over – smashing her mobile phone, banging the steering wheel, thumping on windows and slamming doors, ripping up flowers.

Only a Welsh woman could be this excitable and vehement, as I know for a fact, having grown up with lots of them – but the twist was that, as Celia’s daughter, Faith was a Londoner, on the run from her gangster past.

Everyone has been irritated by the jargon in Line of Duty – a ‘chis’ is a ‘covert human intelligence source’, as if there are animal or Martian variants – yet what bugged me is the way female detectives dress badly, in ill-fitting trousers and black jackets, like unkempt lesbians deliberately refusing to make anything of themselves.

But then Emily Watson also remained in full, drab misery-guts mode in Too Close, the three-parter about a ‘forensic psychiatrist’ interrogating a bruised and battered ‘little lost posh girl’, who’d driven her car, containing two children, into the drink. Was Denise Gough mad and murderous, her amnesia faked, or mad and worthy of sympathy?

The idea that keeping up appearances requires monumental effort – the façade of yoga class, pony clubs and extra Mandarin; that screaming toddlers push a person to the limit; that each of us risks fracture: all this was promising. Also, the way patient and therapist began mirroring each other’s emotions had potential. Yet soon enough, Denise was setting fire to her cell with a purloined lighter and she and Emily were in the grounds climbing a tree and singing a duet.

In the documentary Grace Kelly’s Missing Millions, Grace’s millions weren’t missing at all. She’d formed a charitable trust, or else had given everything away

Ian Baker

‘This was more discreet when we still had phone boxes’

to her children. The only real mystery wasn’t addressed: why such a Hollywood beauty ended up in exile with billionaire Rainier, who had the sex appeal of a Cesar Romero wax figurine, with his podginess and his dress uniform covered with bogus-looking Ruritanian medals.

Another daft one was Queen Elizabeth and the Spy in the Palace, about Soviet double agent Anthony Blunt, who, despite having what was called here ‘a mania for betrayal’, helpfully looted Hesse castles, concealing and removing evidence of the Royal Family’s Nazi sympathies.

‘Could these secrets hurt the Royal Family today?’ it was wondered. Was there collusion between MI5 and everyone else? I had not known Blunt was the Queen Mother’s third cousin, but otherwise the ground was thoroughly covered decades ago in Alan Bennett’s play A Question of Attribution.

When an elderly sailor died in Windsor in April, unleashing a bonanza fortnight for royal-correspondent bores, such was the crassness and mawkishness of the television coverage, the BBC received 110,994 complaints at the latest count. The public didn’t want wall-towall Prince Philip tributes; they wanted Gregg Wallace eulogising beetroot pickled in Japanese seaweed.

What kept me from wanting to shoot

up a beech with Emily Watson was Country House Rescue, repeated on an obscure channel. A jolly Margaret Rutherford woman, Ruth Watson, visited Kentchurch Court, Herefordshire, a gloriously shabby Lucas-Scudamore pile filled with dog-gnawed carpets and chipped Grinling Gibbons wainscots.

The châtelaine, cash poor despite owning thousands of adjacent acres, was very reluctant to allow ordinary people into the gardens – daylight being let in upon magic, so to speak. Lurking in a ruined orangery in this time warp were the son and daughter, as slender and vague as Waugh’s Flytes. The red-haired Lucas-Scudamore daughter in particular might be compared to a summer’s day.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE SUMMER MUSIC FESTIVALS RAVEL’S L’HEURE ESPAGNOLE ‘It was a complicated and scattered scene, and one wasn’t one’s master.’

Henry James’s note to Sir Edward Elgar, apologising for his having missed the chance to speak with him at a fashionable London dinner party, came to mind as I pondered this year’s proposed festival season.

It’s one way of putting it – though, the more I look into the matter, the more I find myself in Rumsfeldian mode, muttering semi-coherently about known knowns, known unknowns and even unknown unknowns.

Current knowns include a number of festivals that have been either abandoned for a second successive year or, in the case of the likes of Chipping Campden, Newbury and Vale of Glamorgan, moved to September.

Aldeburgh in June is all but lost, and the York Early Music Festival (12th to 16th July) will be much reduced, despite being scheduled after the promised Day of National Liberation on 21st June.

By contrast, the Buxton Festival of Opera, Music and Literature (8th to 25th July) has a full programme ready to roll, once restrictions are removed. And even now, the Brighton Festival, the largest and most culturally diverse of all the English arts festivals, is soldiering on, with an elaborate programme being delivered alfresco and online from 1st to 16th May, and then personally distanced in the usual venues until 31st May. Frontline opera festivals such as Glyndebourne, Garsington and Grange Park Opera are currently rehearsing (under draconian government guidelines), in the belief that they will be allowed to open after 17th May, albeit with audiences reduced by around 50 per cent.

Let’s hope they bring it off. It helps if, like London’s Opera Holland Park, you have no walls to your auditorium.

Thinking along those lines, Longborough (1st June to 3rd August) has taken the precaution of erecting a well-ventilated circus tent in an adjacent field (no Pagliacci, alas, or revival of Peter Brook’s La Tragédie de Carmen) while Nevill Holt Opera (4th to 10th and 19th to 25th August) plans to raise a Le Corbusier-like, open-air pavilion deep in John Clare country.

Whatever happens to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the International Festival (6th to 29th August) will be returning, live and in person, in an array of specially created venues. The full programme of music, theatre and dance will released on 2nd June.

No festival, as far as I know, has announced that it’s moving online, a piece of PR-speak nicely translated by David Mitchell on Radio 4 as meaning ‘We’ve cancelled the festival and something else is happening online.’

Nonetheless, it’s curious how thoroughly the COVID crisis appears to have dispelled the old mistrust of filmed music-making, for all that it remains a problematic medium – the eye dethroning the ear The Oldie May 2021 75

Maurice Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole (1911) with (from left) Elgan Llŷr Thomas, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Catherine Backhouse and Ross Rambogin

when close-up cameras are at work, opera physically diminished and emotionally tamed when removed from the bear pit that is its natural habitat.

There are exceptions, or course, a couple of which Wasfi Kani’s Grange Park Opera has recently identified. Remaking Britten’s made-for-television opera Owen Wingrave was a nice idea. But it’s the company’s film of Maurice Ravel’s ribald and witty one-act jest L’Heure espagnole that’s the real joy (grangeparkopera.org − free to view; donations welcome).

The title refers to the hour each week when a much-cuckolded Catalan clockmaker sallies forth to regulate the municipal timepieces. A muleteer appears with an antique watch and is told to wait in the shop, much to the discomfiture of the clockmaker’s wife and the young poet and elderly banker with whom assignations have been made. A Feydeau-like game of hide-and-seek ensues, with the menfolk boxing and coxing backstairs, downstairs and in the bellies of longcase clocks.

Updated to 2021, with the sexually compliant muleteer recast as a wellappointed UPS delivery driver, the opera was filmed in Howard Walwyn’s Fine Antique Clocks in London’s Kensington Church Street, a stage set that even the most gifted of theatre designers could only dream of replicating.

Ravel set Franc-Nohain’s comédiebouffe pretty well as it stood, wiring up text and music much as a tiara-maker wires up his diamonds and precious stones. Franc-Nohain’s text is delivered with flair and immediacy by a mainly young cast, memorably led by Catherine Backhouse as the wife and Ross Ramgobin as the muleteer. Ravel mostly composed at (and for) the piano, which explains why the piano reduction of the 76 The Oldie May 2021

orchestral score, vividly realised here by Chris Hopkins, is so effective.

Stephen Medcalf’s direction, brilliantly filmed and edited for the small screen, is a delight, from the opening shots of Walwyn’s shop and its tintinnabulating clocks to the concluding quintet in which we’re advised, ‘Where lovers are concerned, it’s only the effective one who really counts.’

Game, set and match, then, to the man from UPS.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON GLASTONBURY FOR BEGINNERS Like many of you, I have never ‘done’ Glastonbury, beyond catching the TV highlights on enchanted summer evenings, suffused with a cosmic sense of wonder and relief that I am not there ‘in person’.

Top Boy Kano, aka Kane Brett Robinson, East Ham rapper and pioneer of grime

My approach to ‘Glasto’ has echoed my Somerset neighbour Robin’s attitude to our capital. ‘London, Rachel?’ he replied when I asked him when he was last there, as if he hadn’t heard me right.

‘Never been. Never seen the need.’

Weirdly, this was the one year I might have given it a go, and not just to say I’d done it.

I haven’t done much outside my ‘bubble’ (bleugh), let alone heard live music or gone to social events for 12 months, apart from Donovan in the Cadogan Hall, which I described here as a ‘thé dansant in a care home without the tea or indeed the dancing’.

The Eavis family cancelled Glasto 2021 for the second year running on the grounds that it couldn’t be made 100 per cent safe (don’t get me started).

But then they announced that a bunch of marquee names – including Coldplay and Blur – would be playing for one night only for a ‘ticketed virtual event’, called Live at Worthy Farm. The concert is to be broadcast in full over four time zones.

Everyone is invited and it’s only 20 quid to log on, zoom in and rock out.

Performers will play on stages at so-called ‘landmarks’ around the 900-acre site, including the Pyramid Field and the stone circle. ‘It’s going to be like the festival but without the people,’ Emily Eavis told BBC Radio 2.

Yay! Glasto is virtually back on, and the big question is – will you be washing your hair again that night on 22nd May? Well, let’s take a closer look at the line-up.

Apart from the aforementioned stadium-fillers, we have Michael Kiwanuka (best known for the Big Little Lies soundtrack), the duo Wolf Alice, the LA-based girl group Haim and plenty more, including spoken-word, which may or may not be a draw.

When I heard the news on a BBC bulletin, the announcer mentioned another act which my brain automatically transposed to ‘Caino’ – after all, stranger things have happened than Lee Cain doing a live set, especially as so many Downing Street ex-staffers have been singing like canaries.

Even though it’s a rapper called Kano, I am ‘going’ and will report back.

Eavis had me at the words ‘like the festival, but without the people’.

Everyone’s invited, tickets are unlimited and, unlike former Glastos, you don’t have to suck up to friends with houses in Somerset nearby to contemplate going if you, like me, can’t bear camping.

See you at the Stone Circle at dawn, groovers!

The Burghers of Calais by Auguste Rodin, 1889

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU THE MAKING OF RODIN

MUSÉE RODIN

Tate Modern, London, to 31st October Room 36 may be one of the smallest in the National Gallery but it is also one of my favourites.

In it hang just four paintings: two by Claude Lorrain and two by Turner, who had left his Dido building Carthage and Sun rising through Vapour to the Gallery, on the condition that they always hang between the older master’s Seaport and Mill. He passionately admired and learned much from Claude, but was determined to show that he could outdo him.

Rodin could be seen as the Turner of 19th-century sculpture, each building on their previous generation but outstripping them by far. As David Ekserdjian, the authority on bronze sculpture, has pointed out, there were other great and innovative 19th-century sculptors – Carpeaux and Dalou in France, Gemito in Italy and Gilbert in Britain – ‘but, even so, Rodin stands alone’.

Rodin’s Claude was Michelangelo, whose work he first encountered in Florence in 1876. Thirty years later, he wrote to Bourdelle, one of his many talented assistants, saying, ‘It was Michelangelo who liberated me from

academicism, and from whom I learned, by observation, rules that were diametrically opposed to the ones I had been taught.’

Another former assistant, Brancusi, thought Rodin’s work superior, and derided Michelangelo’s sculptures as ‘nothing but muscle, beefsteak − beefsteak run amok’.

Also like Turner, Rodin was determined that his work and fame should live on. Turner wished that the thousands of paintings and drawings he bequeathed to the nation be kept together. Similarly, a year before his death in 1917, Rodin gave the bulk of his works and collections to the French state.

In November 1914, he had presented 18 sculptures to the V&A as a memorial to

French and British troops already killed in the first months of the Great War. Rodin is very much a flavour of our time. In London in 2014, there was a fine show of privately owned works at Bowman Sculpture, followed in 2018 by the British Museum exhibition pairing him with Phidias, another of his heroes. Now this Ernst & Young Exhibition at Tate Modern, in partnership with the Musée Rodin, is showing over 200 works, many previously unseen in Britain.

To an extent, it recreates Rodin’s own 1900 show at the Pavillon de l’Alma, which consisted not of bronzes but of the original plaster models from which they were cast. It explores his methods and gives a sense of his workshop.

The Oldie May 2021 77

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER FAREWELL, MY LOVELY GARDEN In early April, I spent many hours selecting and then digging and potting up dozens of our finest-coloured hellebores.

I lifted a few rare hydrangeas from my collection of more than 250 different varieties, and these too were gently transferred to containers filled with ericaceous compost. One or two of our darker-blue pulmonarias (‘Blue Ensign’ and ‘Mawson’s Blue’ especially) were similarly uprooted and rehoused, as were a few young Japanese maples, planted less than 12 months ago and thus able to withstand careful disturbance.

From cracks between herringbone bricks on the sunny south terrace I have teased seedling stocks – the grey-leafed Matthiola incana, with its summer-long succession of fabulously scented white flowers. I’ve popped a few of its seedheads into a brown paper bag, too; belt-and-braces for a happy continuation of this hardy indispensable.

Our orchard full of pale blue Iris sibirica ‘Papillon’ – thousands of them – came into my life in the late 1980s, when I bought a few to mingle with an unknown, darker variety given to me in the early ’70s when I was gardening on the Hampshire-Surrey border.

They bulked up quickly and while the clumps should ideally be dug and divided every few years, I’ve been too lazy.

Neglect has not troubled them. But some have now been lifted and transferred to deep plastic pots, where the moisture in which they thrive is best retained. These procedures would best have been carried out last autumn when the plants had the optimum chance to settle into new – albeit temporary – housing while the soil remained damp and relatively warm.

Recovering from major back surgery two years ago, I went on a buying spree at several private nurseries. We have three within an hour’s drive, each worth a much longer journey.

All plants from these unique enterprises – the Walled Garden at Treberfyd in the Brecon Beacons National Park, Wildegoose Nursery and Mynd Hardy Plants in south Shropshire – have thrived, allowing me to chop off chunks and assign them to pots.

You may well ask why I’m doing this now, at quite the wrong time of year.

We’re moving.

Well, at the time of writing, we have put our house up for sale. Two bachelors no longer require ten bedrooms, and the maintenance of an eight-acre garden (set in 30 acres of pasture and arable) is taking its toll. We’ve had almost 30 years at Bryan’s Ground, arriving those decades ago on the Herefordshire-Radnorshire border with amounts of energy and ambition that today seem unbelievable.

We first tackled the three acres of unkempt formal gardens laid out when this Arts & Crafts house was built in 1913.

Within two months, we had planted an orchard, divided up the old tennis court into four separate garden rooms with yew hedges, built umpteen ponds, and planted, planted, planted.

Goodbye to all that: Iris sibirica ‘Papillon’

On 1st January 2000, I put in the first tree in a four-acre former donkey paddock, which now cradles some 2,000 ornamental trees and shrubs.

Our decision to move was taken jointly and amicably. The upkeep of a property such as this is expensive and demanding.

We are no longer young. We don’t want to see all our hard work degraded. Nor, heaven forefend, do we want to stop gardening.

An acre would be manageable and if/ when disabilities encroach, we could probably scrape together enough dosh to employ the kind of fitness and drive we once had ourselves.

Who knows? By the time you read this, we may have relocated – with all those special plants potted up in March tasting the delights of a new home.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD TARRAGON The distinguished gardening writer Christopher Lloyd wrote of the herb tarragon that it was ‘a mousy sort of plant, devoid of personality’.

He may not have liked the look of it, but the personality of tarragon is in its aroma and its status as one of the classic culinary herbs.

The simplest way to grow tarragon is by first buying a plant, making sure that it is the French, not Russian, variety.

Russian tarragon can be grown from seed, is hardier than French and will grow taller; but its aroma and flavour are inferior. French tarragon does not set seed, but the leaves have the fragrance and subtlety lacking in the Russian version, which is best left to the country beyond the Urals.

Tarragon needs well-drained soil in a dry position, and will not take The Oldie May 2021 79

kindly to being waterlogged. If possible, plant the herb on slightly sloping ground, which should not be enriched with compost. Tarragon is inclined to spread by means of underground runners, in the same way as mint. So it is suitable for growing in a large pot, where wandering roots can be confined.

My own plant, which is at least five years old, probably needs to be moved and its roots divided. The flavour of the leaves tends to deteriorate with age; rather than cut and replant a few of the rhizomes, I have just bought a young plant to grow a few feet away from the old one and will perhaps replace it next year.

Fresh tarragon can be harvested fairly continually from June to October, and if it is to be dried, the stems should be cut in midsummer when the flower buds appear. Be careful not to bruise the leaves, as they will turn brown and lose some of their essential oils.

Constance Spry, in a book about her kitchen garden published during the Second World War, advised blanching the leaves of tarragon briefly to preserve their flavour and aroma, and then storing them in jars with lightly salted water.

This must have brightened up a few meals during those dark days.

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD STRAWBERRY SEASON Strawberries, I think – don’t you?

Preferably home-grown, juicy, chubbycheeked berries fresh from the field.

Anticipate the joy by stocking up with the traditional accompaniments: shortbread (plain or almond), whitesugar meringues and vanilla ice cream.

In baking, proportions are key. Take shortbread: proportions of flour to butter to sugar are 6:4:2 (replace no more than a quarter of the flour with ground almonds).

Meringues: weigh the whites; allow twice their weight of sugar; whisk the whites well before whisking in the sugar (slowly).

To thicken a custard for a vanilla cream-ice, allow four egg yolks to a half-pint (300ml) milk or cream and freeze, beating regularly to soften the ice crystals.

While sun-ripened, homegrown berries need no embellishment (maybe a dollop of cream), the Italians like theirs with a shake of balsamic vinegar; in Spain, it’s a squeeze of orange-juice; and our friends across La Manche dip them in a glass of Bordeaux. And a pinch of chilli (flaked rather than powdered) or a turn of the peppermill enhances the flavour.

Swedish strawberry soup When herbalist Hilda Leyel published 80 The Oldie May 2021

granules have dissolved. Turn up the heat, and cook at a rolling boil for about 15 minutes, until setting point is reached.

To test for this, drop a little syrup on to a cold saucer, and draw your finger across it. If it wrinkles, it’s ready. Stir in the lemon juice. Pot up in sterilised jamjars, top with a round of greasepaper and tie down or lid when cold.

this elegant recipe in The Gentle Art of Cookery in 1925, summers were endless and the sky was always blue. I imagine she must have had a grand Swedish friend with a well-stocked cellar. Hilda’s version is quite sweet – good at the end of a meal with a dollop of vanilla ice. For a refreshing starter on a hot day, cut down the sugar and serve as a chilled soup with soured cream, as they do in Hungary. Serves 4 500g ripe strawberries, wiped and hulled About 175g sugar (depending on ripeness of fruit) 300ml wine (a light claret or a Sauternes) 1 tbsp lemon juice Set aside a few of the best fruits for decoration and purée the rest. Mrs Leyel instructs that the berries should be mashed – so leave the purée a little lumpy if you use a liquidiser.

Let the mixture stand for a couple of hours. Whizz in the wine, lemon juice and a couple of glasses of water. Set it in the fridge for three hours. Add the whole strawberries (quartered if large) and serve in pretty glasses, with almond biscuits or little squares of marzipan.

Easy strawberry jam Don’t overcook this delicate, freshflavoured jam: better runny than caramelised. The set will be firmer if you use preserving sugar (I like a runny strawberry jam). Lemon juice sharpens the flavour but won’t help the set.

Makes 5-6 jars 1.5kg small, perfectly ripe strawberries, hulled 1.4kg preserving sugar (or plain granulated) Juice of ½ lemon Cut the berries in half and mix with the sugar in a non-metal bowl. Leave overnight to make juice. Next day, tip the mixture into a roomy pan and stir gently over a low heat until all the sugar

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE The Wolseley, Piccadilly, London W1 Rathfinny Wine Estate, Alfriston, East Sussex Craig Brown once suggested an alternative to The Oldie’s long-lasting column ‘I Once Met…’, which was thought up by the late, great poet-luncher James Michie, in 1992.

Its appeal is that the ordinary reader remembers a chance encounter with someone absurdly famous but a little secretive. Craig’s idea was for a new column: ‘I’ve Never Met…’ in which sociable people write about ubiquitous celebrities whom they’ve never met, but who appear at every opening (first nights, private views etc).

The obvious venue for the launch of this new column is The Wolseley, London’s ultimate restaurant.

In this former car showroom, beautifully designed by William Curtis Green in 1921, such wholly non-secretive legends as Michael and Jack Whitehall squabble over the exact size of Whitehall junior’s Facebook following; Nicholas Coleridge woos another donor to the V&A, and Loyd Grossman and his lead singer wonder how they’ll perform at Glastonbury this year.

And, readers, they are in plain sight for all of us who have never met them, slap-bang in the original atrium. Not so far away, but in the restricted-vision seats, you can still spy former matinée idols such as The Oldie’s Roger Lewis.

And on 17th May, you’ll see me, up there in the gods, staring down, out of sight but not yet out of my mind. For there is no other place I would rather be for the Grand Reopening of Life when we can dine indoors.

In 2003, Jeremy King and Chris Corbin acquired the building from Barclays Bank, who took it over in 1927, six years after the eponymous car business went bust. These geniuses deserve statues: how do they supply so much glamour and élan while charging so little? For just £19.95, you can have a two-course lunch of French onion soup and seared pollock, with house wine at £27.50.

Last October, our new Sussex friends Kev and Lou took us for lunch at the neighbouring Rathfinny winery. I’m always suspicious of wine-producers who see a restaurant as an obvious sideline. It has all the hallmarks of a late-night vinous brainstorm: ‘I know! What goes best with wine?’

Put it the other way round: how many (sane) restaurateurs start a vineyard?

Yet autumn was kind to the South Downs that day: it was all brown vine leaves wilting under dappled sunlight.

Mark Driver, the owner, now has 400 acres of perfect slopes with the capacity to produce over 100,000 cases of sparkling wines a year, in addition to his Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

Mark is not just the acceptable face of capitalism but obsessed, as only hedge funders can afford to be, with making English wine. For our purposes, his food and his flint-built restaurant are the stars. It’s the perfect place for a bargain post-walk lunch. He has rooms, too.

I’ve still got my menu to remind me: Normandy fish soup with salt-cod toasts followed by plaice cooked over last year’s vines. ‘Nyum! Nyum!’ as the late Oldie editor Alexander Chancellor used to say.

If I were Prime Minister, I would ennoble both Mark Driver and Jeremy King, granting them a special badge for use in the chamber: ‘Does not have to sit next to Lord Botham.’

The Wolseley, 160 Piccadilly, London W1J 9EB; tel: 0207 499 6996; www. thewolseley.com; three courses £24 Rathfinny Wine Estate, Alfriston, East Sussex BN26 5TU; tel: 01323 874030; www.rathfinnyestate.com; three courses £22; bedrooms available

DRINK BILL KNOTT THIRST RESPONDERS The French, as ever, have a phrase for it.

A vin de soif is a thirst-quenching wine, invariably red, that can be enjoyed without a great deal of fuss or ceremony.

Its fruit will be more prominent than its tannin, it has probably seen very little oak and it certainly shouldn’t need decanting. It is the sort of wine that vignerons drink amongst themselves, and its various English translations – ‘easy quaffer’ is my particular bête noire – seem somewhat gauche by comparison.

Vins de soif often benefit from a slight chill that would leave chunkier, more serious reds tasting like cold, stewed tea.

In early April, all I would have had to do to chill a bottle would be to leave it

outside the back door for five minutes but warmer months are ahead, I trust, and vins de soif are just the ticket for summer drinking.

I remember when simple village burgundy hit the spot – light, strawberryscented pinot noir, served at cellar temperature – but, alas, prices have risen and my summer soif is too profound to afford it any more.

Gamay is a better choice. I am not sure how Tesco manage to sell their basic Beaujolais for £5, but the 2020 vintage has bags of ripe fruit and slips down a treat, either on its own or with charcuterie and cheese. Ribena for grown-ups.

More serious but no less approachable gamays can be found in the BeaujolaisVillages appellation – try Waitrose’s ownlabel version (£7.99) which has a whiff of spice amongst the fruit – and in the ten Beaujolais crus (Fleurie, Chiroubles, Moulin-à-Vent et al). Try the velvety Brouilly from Domaine des Côteaux de Font Curé (Wine Society, £9.95), which just cries out for a plate of saucisson sec and some crusty bread.

The favoured vins de soif in the bistros of Paris are from the Loire: SaumurChampigny in particular. Cabernet franc is the grape. Depending on the winemaker and the vintage, it can smell like a greenhouse full of tomatoes or a bowl of ripe cherries.

Lighter types cope well with half an hour in the fridge, and even weightier examples – the Wine Society’s Le Temps des Cerises 2019 from Domaine de la Noblaie, for instance (£11.95) – taste fresher with a slight chill.

Making a vin de soif, however, seems not to be simply about the grape variety, or the climate. It is more about the philosophy of the winemaker.

I have drunk them all over France, even – especially – in the sunny south, where, in the height of summer, a table in the shade and a chilled bottle of light red are de rigueur. It might even be made from Grenache or Syrah, but lightly extracted to favour fruit over tannin, like rosé with more oomph.

At the annual Fête des Vins organised in the Minervois village of La Livinière, at the winery owned by Trevor Gulliver and Fergus Henderson (of St John fame), dozens of winemakers from all over France sit down to a particularly splendid feast, and pass bottles of their own vins de soif freely amongst their confrères.

I complimented one of them on his Carignan, noting how well it partnered Fergus’s sublimely smoky quail grilled over vine wood. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but it goes especially well with friends.’

Wine Toast our new freedom with this month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines: a six-bottle mixed case of champagne, featuring two 75cl bottles each from three excellent producers at very keen prices. However, if you wish, you can buy six-bottle cases of the individual wines.

Champagne Veuve Fourny Blanc de Blancs 1er Cru, Vertus NV, offer price £32.50, case price £195.00 A favourite on the last Oldie tour of Champagne: crisp, aromatic premier-cru fizz that knocks spots off many grandes marques.

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The Oldie May 2021 81

SPORT JIM WHITE OLYMPIC SHAME During the London Olympics, an unlikely star emerged.

Spotting an exuberant spectator at the swimming pool, running up and down the aisles waving a South African flag, the BBC’s Clare Balding thought it might be worth talking to the man. And it sure was. Burt Le Clos is the extrovert father of Chad, the South African swimmer who had just beaten the champion Michael Phelps in the butterfly race to win gold.

To say Burt was excited by his son’s victory was an understatement. ‘Look at my boy, my beautiful boy,’ he blubbed.

It was an interview that struck a chord around the world. In that moment, he spoke for every parent of a sporty offspring; everyone who has ferried their children to events and watched from the sidelines; everyone whose life has been centred around polishing their child’s athletic potential. Here was vindication and reward for all that emotional investment.

There will be none of that this summer in Tokyo. With the banning of all foreign spectators, the mums and dads only of the Japanese can be there to unleash their inner Burt. And even that – at the time of writing – is not certain.

For so many of those who have been on the touchline, poolside or at the cycle track or gym throughout their child’s development, the news that they cannot attend the Games is a hammer blow. I have friends whose son is in the GB rowing team, going for gold in Tokyo. For the past ten years, their lives have been a heady mix of taxi service and cheerleader, standing on the towpath at countless regattas, willing their boy on.

Now, just as he is addressing the summit, they will be 6,000 miles away.

Before any of us had heard the term COVID, their plans to watch their boy in action were extensive. This was going to be special – the trip of a lifetime. Then came the pandemic and first the postponement, and then ultimately the realisation that they will be obliged to watch on television from their living room.

Should he win, the shrieks of joy when he crosses the finish line, the tears as the National Anthem plays, and the flurry of congratulatory messages from everyone they have ever met will still happen. But the intimacy of being there, hugging their child in victory or defeat and seizing the opportunity to communicate their pride in achievement through that immediate embrace has been taken from them.

For the athlete, too, not having their 82 The Oldie May 2021

folks in attendance will diminish things.

Here is the chance to give them tangible payback for their sacrifice. Sure, they will still know the family is behind them. But at a distance it is not the same.

Gail Emms, the badminton player, remembers walking out into the arena for the final of her competition in the Athens Games in 2004. The place was packed; the noise was like nothing she had ever encountered. But above the deafening cacophony, she heard a familiar voice yelling repeatedly the one line: ‘Go, Gail.’

She spotted her mother, up in the stands, waving a Union Flag, delighted to tell everyone around her that this was her girl.

Seventeen years on, that memory still plays on a loop in Emms’s mental cinema. But for her successors in Olympic competition, there won’t be that unique moment of shared pride and familial love.

In so many ways, the pandemic is diluting our sporting lives.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD SCREEN TIME IS BAD FOR YOU ‘When you’re driving, you should only be driving.’

So said Derek Bell, five times Le Mans winner – a man who has forgotten more about fast driving than I shall ever know.

He said it long ago while trying patiently to teach me how to handle a 2.5-ton Bentley on a skid pan.

In those days, cabin distractions from the road ahead included fiddling with the radio or heating controls, looking for the cigar/ cigarette lighter, reading a map, adjusting mirrors or, in my case, filling and lighting a pipe while steering with my forearms.

I no longer do that and, anyway, dashboards have changed greatly. Most new cars now have multi-function touch screens. And that, I think, is a problem.

Dashboard controls multiplied as cars became more sophisticated. My first, a 1955 Ford Popular, had just three knobs or switches, plus an ignition switch, one big dial and two small. My current 2010 Volvo V70 has two dials plus a cluster of steering-wheel buttons for cruise control,

BMW iDrive controller: the instructions seemed longer than War and Peace

satnav etc and around 50 dashboard and door switches of which I regularly use fewer than a dozen.

Once you’ve mastered these, muscle memory kicks in and you can switch everything on and off with single movements, without taking your eyes off the road.

Contemporary dashes, however, are less cluttered because most functions are accessed via the touch screen.

More elegant, maybe – but simpler?

Not to me. Instead of being able to switch something on and off by pressing a button you can feel for in the dark, you have to look at your screen, find the vehicle settings menu, swipe through to the correct page, confirm that you’ve read any backcovering warnings about what you’re about to do (eg switch off electronic stability or lane-keeping assistance) and only then can you switch off. Or on.

Obviously, you can’t do this safely while driving. So before setting off, you have to run though the whole menu of pre-flight checks, anticipating whatever you might want off or on for the whole journey. Except that if you stop for a snack, the system resets itself and you have to do it all again.

Of course, some more expensive cars offer head-up displays on the windscreens, as used by jet pilots, as well as voice-recognition controls.

These may help, but they don’t do away with the central problem, which is that you can’t operate a touch screen without looking at it.

Nor do touch screens and muscle memory go well together. It may be age – and doubtless the young do it better – but either I touch too tentatively and nothing happens or I press too hard and lots of things happen, none of which I wanted.

Although not a touch screen, the most notorious example of computer-focused rather than driver-focused controls was the iDrive system, first installed in the BMW 7 series about 20 years ago. With that, you had to move a single knob in eight different directions to access and control all ancillary operations. The instructions seemed longer than War and Peace and you needed a degree in computer science to understand them.

It doesn’t have to be like that – even now. Major functions in the Mazda MX5 are all operated by big, easy-to-feel switches, with minor operations accessed on screen by a simple control. Our late-lamented VW Up was a model of simplicity. No doubt there are others.

If my next car has a touch screen, it will have to be one where all major functions displayed are accessible off it.

Then when I’m driving, I shall only be driving.

Stay in touch with

phone

Easy-to-use mobiles that will help you stay close to family and friends We have teamed up with specialist phone company emporia to bring you these two great offers on easyto-use mobile phones.

If last year taught us anything at all, it taught us that, when the chips are down, it really, really helps if you can speak to someone, or, even better, see and hear them and not just when you need them.

For us oldies, whether we like it or not, mobile phones have become an important lifeline, so we might as well arm ourselves with the best that we can get, and which are geared to the needs of

a generation with failing eyesight, less than perfect hearing and fingers that don’t work so well as they used to.

These two Oldiephones will appeal to different ends of the market. Those of us who want to embrace the modern technological world – but in a simple, straightforward way – or those who just want to text or call.

The emporiaSMART.4 State of the art smartphone, with front facing camera for selfies and video calls, a great rear camera that works with the magnifying app for when you forget your glasses, secure contactless payments instead of using

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The emporiaONE This is an elegantly designed flip phone, with a large screen, big, well-spaced keys and good volume. This is the ideal phone for someone who needs to be connected, but doesn’t want to learn about videos or surf the internet. You can buy this phone, PLUS three months of discounted IQ Mobile credit* for just £65.

To order an Oldiephone, please visit: https://shop.emporiatelecom.co.uk/theoldie or call 01782 568342 *The Oldie and emporia have teamed up with specialist provider IQ Mobile, powered by the UK’s EE network, to provide great value mobile services. Existing phone numbers can be transferred, and ongoing monthly top ups will be required after the initial offer period. The service includes ‘roam like at home’ across EU countries, so when we can all get back to normal your service is ready for those trips to start again.

The Oldie May 2021 83

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Who’s guarding the internet guards?

A wise uncle once gave me this sound advice: ‘My boy, if you ever find yourself on to a good thing, don’t mess it up.’

Until very recently, the people who ran Nominet, the company that administers .uk websites (like theoldie.co.uk), were certainly onto a good thing, but they clearly never knew my uncle.

They did mess it up and, in March, almost half the board was brusquely ejected.

This ugly row lifts the lid on a part of the internet that most of us don’t even know exists. However, it’s an essential component and has been providing a few people with a comfortable living for years – until they messed it up.

The internet works only if we all obey some basic rules of the road. One of those

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Create a walking map www.plotaroute.com Helps you to plan long countryside walks, sticking to footpaths. I recommend the video tutorials The British National Bibliography tinyurl.com/webster400 A searchable list of books and journal titles published or distributed since 1950 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

is that all website addresses must be managed by a registry. Nominet is such a registry. The company’s job is to record website ownership, avoid duplication and manage some technical matters.

Only The Oldie can use www.theoldie. co.uk because Nominet prevents others from muscling in.

Website owners pay a little to Nominet each year to maintain ownership and, in return, Nominet manages everything for the public benefit. It’s a ‘not for profit’ company and any surplus income generated is supposed to be used for charitable purposes.

That’s all right and proper. Nominet should be a very boring company, providing a reliable but essential service that lubricates the internet.

Indeed, it’s a licence to print money, as it has a monopoly on the use of all those website addresses. Hence it has a structure that was designed to mitigate this monopoly by channelling profits into charitable purposes.

And so it did, for many years.

However, in 2015, a new CEO decided that this was all too boring and expanded the company far away from its core registry work. He invested in all sorts of fashionable things like driverless cars and cybersecurity.

Nominet’s users (known as ‘members’) became unhappy. These members are mostly web companies that have to pay Nominet its fees. But, in recent years, they saw these fees increase by 50 per cent as Nominet’s profits dwindled and its executives’ salaries soared (the CEO earned almost £600,000 last year).

They also saw millions of pounds lost on futile investments ­– and annual

charitable donations reduced from about £5m to less than £2m.

All the normal warning signs were there: board meeting minutes ceased to be published; the chairman’s and the CEO’s latest reports didn’t mention the losses; financial structures and reporting became opaque.

Members complained that they could not engage with the board and the last straw seems to have been the abrupt closing (in the middle of the AGM) of an online forum which had been a means of communication between the board and its members.

Anyway, the members rebelled and, in March, five of the 11-strong board were thrown out on their ears, including the CEO, who also resigned. New board members started work.

So where does this leave us? Nominet still trades, and websites won’t be affected; even if it failed, another registry would step in. However, there’s something about it all that leaves a sour taste in the mouth. The original charitable ambitions seem to have withered on the vine while a few people have made a lot of money.

Perhaps the palace coup will restore a benevolent and competent management.

However, I’m afraid that it’s more evidence that the internet has grown way beyond the cosy club it was 20 years ago, and its infrastructure needs more rigorous control. Registries like Nominet should probably be run more like the DVLA. The row will, I suspect, encourage those who want to see more regulation of the internet.

Reluctantly, I think I am one of them.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Don’t let sleeping assets lie No one likes losing money, or wasting it.

But overlooked bank accounts, pensions, investments and insurance policies can be difficult to track down, if you even remember once owning them. An enormous amount of money – possibly £5bn – is sitting unclaimed within numerous financial institutions.

84 The Oldie May 2021

Banks and building societies have for some time now been making it easier to trace lost accounts through the Dormant Assets Scheme. Then, earlier this year, insurance, pensions and investment companies were given the go-ahead to join the scheme.

All companies should do their utmost

to reconnect unclaimed pots of money with the rightful owners, but in the past they have not been as assiduous as they could. Tracking down missing customers is the first aim of the scheme. Its second is to transfer money than cannot be reunited with anyone into social and environmental causes. Since its launch in

2011, it has contributed £745m to charitable organisations, including £150 grants to help people in financial difficulties during the pandemic.

When banks or building societies fail to trace an owner and there have been no transactions in the account for 15 years, the scheme can send the money to the Reclaim Fund which looks after the dormant assets. Enough is kept back to reimburse any account holder who turns up later.

You will always be able to get back the money that’s yours. Until the scheme started, dormant assets simply swelled banks’ and building societies’ coffers indefinitely and some still choose to hold on to the money. Joining the scheme is voluntary.

In January, the government said it would introduce the legislation required to bring in the additional financial institutions. When they are up and running, they could contribute another £1.7bn to the Dormant Assets Scheme and release £880m for good causes.

We do not know how long it will be before the new firms join the scheme because nothing will start to happen until there is time in the parliamentary calendar.

While waiting, if you suspect you have neglected pots of money, you can try tracking them down yourself. There is no need to pay anyone to do it for you. First, ask any company whose name you remember to check their records. The

difficulty arises when you have no idea which one it is or you have forgotten that you ever opened an account.

Or perhaps you are handling the estate of someone who did not keep complete records of their savings – you can reclaim accounts and pensions owned by people who have died. Even without a company name, you can try these websites and all but one are free.

For dormant bank, building society and National Savings & Investments accounts, including Premium Bonds: My Lost Account at www.mylostaccount.org.uk.

For employer and personal pensions: the Pension Tracing Service at www.gov. uk/find-pension-contact-details.

For unit trusts: the Investment Association at www.theia.org.

For life and general insurance policies: Association of British Insurers at www.abi. org.uk/data-and-resources/tools-andresources/tracing-an-insurance-policy.

For any lost assets including insurance policies, pensions and shareholdings: the Unclaimed Assets Register at www.uar. co.uk. This costs £25 for each search.

For more information about the Dormant Assets Scheme: www.gov.uk/ government/publications/the-dormantaccounts-scheme.

‘Maybe it was a mistake to do this during a pandemic’ The Oldie May 2021 85

The Fulmar by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd I watch the fulmar hurl its breast To the wind’s unseen geometry; Spread wings on nothing, reckless of gravity, And ride that risk And rest On sheer uncertainty Choosing no choice.

I must learn to be like him, To follow the reach and search of air – Swoop, sink, stand, balance, soar on the invisible spiral stair – And not resist But trust, And be carried there.

Katrina Porteous, The Fulmar Katrina Porteous is from Northumbria, where the relentless, 150-year-long southern and eastern expansion of the fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis) means they have bred at Bamburgh Castle since 1934 and, as elsewhere in Britain, even inland.

The fulmar is an ocean-wanderer, but some use their native cliffs as a base all year round. May to July is the breeding season. They nest typically on slopes above cliffs; also on the cliffs themselves and elsewhere. The usual single chick is left, suitably fattened, by its parents, for up to ten days before it flies off to sea.

In his 1746 The History of St Kilda, the Rev Kenneth Macaulay wrote, ‘So exquisitely nice are his feelings and so strong his resentment, that he conceives an unconquerable aversion for his nest if one breathes over it and will never pay it any more visits.’ Adults and chicks protect themselves by projectile-vomiting a disgusting oil, impossible to cleanse from clothes and potentially fatal to predators, fouling their feathers – hence ‘fulmar’ from Old Norse fúll már (foul gull).

Until 1878, St Kilda, 40 miles west of the Outer Hebrides, was the only fulmar colony in the British Isles. From the 17th century, the bird replaced the gannet as the islanders’ mainstay, providing more palatable meat, feathers for bedding and 86 The Oldie May 2021

oil for lamps and healing wounds. The monopoly ensured a mainland income.

Charles Maclean, in Island on the Edge of the World: The Story of St Kilda, quotes an 18th-century islander – ‘Deprive us of the Fulmer, and St Kilda is no more’ – and from an old St Kildan love song: She: Thou art my handsome joy, thou art my sweetheart, Thou gavest me the first honeyed fulmar!

By 28th August 1930, the human population had declined from a 1697 high of 180 to an unsustainable 36 and St Kilda was abandoned. In 1929, the islanders had caught 4,000 fulmars.

Fulmars are not gulls but petrels (Tuberidae – ‘tubenoses’) – the bird family least tied to land. The tubes protect their nostrils from seawater and allow them to eject excess salt. Fulmars save energy by barely moving their wings in flight. This mastery distinguishes them from more flapping-inclined gulls. Their diet, chiefly krill (planktonic crustaceans), is the same as whales’. The birds acted as guides to the old whalers and would gorge themselves on the offal from a kill.

They can survive many years – 40 is the record. The British population is estimated at 680,000.

Getting Dressed

King of cuneiform’s uniform

The British Museum’s Irving Finkel loves suits and never shaves brigid keenan

DAFYDD JONES

Dr Irving Finkel, 69, is Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum.

That means he’s the custodian of thousands of cuneiform tablets in the museum. He is one of the few scholars in the world who can read cuneiform script.

It was a small clay tablet brought into the museum by an ordinary punter in the 1980s that, deciphered by Finkel, revealed the original story of Noah’s flood. The only previous version of the tale, apart from the one in the Old Testament, had been found on a 7th-century-BC tablet in the museum.

It shook Victorian Christian England because no one knew which had come first – the Flood Tablet (as it is known) or the story in the Bible.

Finkel’s version dates from a thousand years earlier and leaves no doubt. His tablet gave such precise measurements for building the ‘Ark’ – an enormous, round coracle – that he had a scale model made and floated – all related in his book, The Ark Before Noah. His new book, The First Ghosts, is a history of ghosts.

Finkel says Britain is full of unread cuneiform tablets: ‘Every British soldier who fought in Mesopotamia in the First World War brought one back as a souvenir.’

He is also an expert on board games, from the 2,500-year-old Royal Game of Ur to the present day. He has played guitar in a blues band and, with a colleague, Dr Polly North, looks after a collection of more than 11,000 diaries.

He needs Oldie help here. Any reader who has inherited a diary and doesn’t know what to do with it, please look at The Great Diary Project website. Only politicians’ Finkel’s favourite outfit: tweed suit from Walker Slater; shoes made in Poland, land of his in-laws

diaries are not accepted by the Project.

As a boy, Finkel was intrigued by different writing systems. He thought about studying Chinese but decided to go for Ancient Egyptian at Birmingham University. Fate intervened – after only one lesson, his teacher died and the only other option available was cuneiform, with the brilliant Professor Wilfred Lambert. ‘By the end of the very first session, I knew that this was going to be my whole life.’

After staying on to do a PhD (his thesis was on magic spells), Finkel went to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago – ‘a hotbed of genius brains’ – where he studied (and played in a band) for four years, before being offered a job by the British Museum.

The ancient tablets Finkel deciphers and lectures on are very often concerned with the early trade in textiles clothes and even fashion; they reveal a fad for the colour purple. But clothes have always been a bit of a bugbear for Finkel, since the time he was mortified to be the last boy to wear long trousers at school.

He grew up in north London, surrounded by women (his mother and three sisters). He later married Joanna, a Polish paper conservator he met at the Museum (Head of Paper Conservation now).

Shopping often involved being taken by one of them to a menswear shop where he would stand ‘like a two-year-old while she

A velvet hat for receiving his PhD, 1976

spoke over my head to the salespeople saying, “What he needs is…”.’

And then one day, on a break from the Museum, he found himself walking past a men’s tailors, Walker Slater, in Covent Garden. He had just been asked to go to the States on a fellowship and needed decent clothes for his lectures.

He went in on his own (his emphasis) and had himself measured for a suit. It was such a pleasurable experience that he ordered a second and is now thinking of ‘laying down a small cellar of them, so I always have one or two to hand’.

Finkel has NEVER shaved. At university, while fellow students had to razor away black stubble every day, Finkel’s facial hair refused to grow – something he found so unmanly and traumatic that, when it did, he decided never to cut it. He used to wear his black hair shoulder-length ‘like King Charles’ (as in Charles II). Since it went white, he prefers to put it in a ponytail, using one of his daughter’s ‘hair things’.

In early December, lorry drivers frequently slow down and yell, ‘WOTCHA, SANTA!’ at him, and children treat him with awe. At other times of the year, most people think he looks like the archetypical British Museum curator – which suits his plan. ‘My intention is never to leave the Museum,’ he says.

Irving Finkel’s The First Ghosts will be published on 28th October The Oldie May 2021 89

Travel Treasured island

Every spring, thousands of puffins, guillemots and Manx shearwaters cross the sea to Skomer. Harry Mount joins their annual migration

S

komer is the island that time forgot.

A turtle-shaped island, just over a square mile in size, it’s moored a couple of hundred yards off the Pembrokeshire coast. It’s that tiny gap, whipped up by a vigorous, ten-knot current, between Skomer and the mainland, that makes it one of the world’s greatest nature reserves – the Welsh answer to the Galápagos Islands.

Because there are no egg-eating rats on the island – or humans, apart from a resident warden and a handful of tourists in the hostel during the summer – Skomer is for the birds.

Some 350,000 pairs of Manx shearwaters, half the world’s population, nest on Skomer, with another 40,000 pairs on the neighbouring, smaller island of Skokholm. The Atlantic puffin colony on Skomer is the biggest in southern Britain and, thank God, it’s growing.

The number of puffins is up more than 40 per cent on 2019. On Skokholm, there are more puffins – 11,245 – than at any time since the war. There are 10 per cent more shearwaters on Skomer than 10 years ago. Razorbills and guillemots, too, are doing really well.

And now Mike Alexander, once Skomer’s warden for a decade, has

90 The Oldie May 2021

written the definitive book about the island, after 50 years’ study of the place.

Take a boat to Skomer in nesting season, and you feel you’re approaching a spot where seabirds really rule the roost.

As you chug into North Haven, you’re surrounded by rafts of puffins and razorbills drifting on the water. On the cliffs above, kittiwakes nest in a guanomarked line just above the dark rock where waves crash against the cliffs.

Sometimes, the spring waves knock their nests into the sea. It’s usually early enough in the season for the birds to rebuild them.

Also on the cliffs, guillemots tend to their green eggs, marked with Jackson Pollock scribbles – each egg with a different pattern so their parents can recognise them. The eggshells are thick, to prevent cracking if they tumble down the cliff edge. They’re also pear-shaped – meaning they’re less likely than rounder eggs to slide off the cliffs.

Overhead, great black-backed gulls, the biggest gulls in the world, quarter the island, on the lookout for lunch. The shearwaters fish out at sea, as far as Galloway and Dublin Bay, during the day, returning to their burrows at night. The slower ones are nabbed by the

gulls – their feathery skeletons dot the Skomer footpaths.

The island has been cut off from the mainland for so many millennia that a unique animal – the bracken-loving Skomer vole (Myodes glareolus skomerensis), a subspecies of the bank vole – has evolved here and only here.

Skomer voles are up to 50 per cent heavier than mainland voles – an example, Alexander says, of the ‘island rule’ that ‘small-bodied species tend to get bigger and more robust when they invade an island’. The reasons for the island rule, he says, are contentious.

In turn, the short-eared owl – which feeds off the voles – thrives on the island.

Never has the food chain – who eats whom – been so clear as on Skomer. The ‘apex predator’ on the island is that terrifying great black-backed gull.

I’ve been coming to Skomer ever since I was a boy, 40 years ago. Every time I return, I’m more astounded by the explosion of life between the birds’ arrival in March and their departure in August. It’s a sign of the natural world’s peak fertility. When the seabirds leave in August, it feels like a kind of dying of the land, as they head out to the fertile sea.

On Skomer, more than anywhere else

Kings of all they survey: Skomer’s Atlantic puffin colony is southern Britain’s biggest

every time, the three-hour walk round the island’s circumference is different.

Once I saw a porpoise, diving yards away from the boat as we reached the island. In the bays below the cliffs, I’ve looked down on grey seals, feeding off-white calves in blissful seclusion.

More take refuge, out of sight, in Skomer’s caves – rich with ‘the heavy, oily, fishy, musty smell of flatulent seals’, says Alexander. It helps that, since 1977, there’s been a marine reserve around the island, ensuring plentiful supplies of fish.

I’ve been there in spring, when the thrift is at its pinkest, the sea campion at its whitest, and Skomer is carpeted with bluebells. I’ve been there in howling gales – but, because it’s on the coast and warmed by the Gulf Stream, Skomer rarely gets properly cold.

The island is on the same latitude as the Saint Lawrence River in North America which, without the benefit of the Gulf Stream, freezes every winter.

Mike Alexander’s Skomer Island is published on 14th May (Y Lolfa). To book a boat trip or stay on Skomer, visit www.welshwildlife.org

PHPTOS: MIKE ALEXANDER

I’ve been, you get a feel for what life would be like on earth if we weren’t here – a place left to the animals, where they’re at the top of the food chain.

Because the birds have been so little disturbed since Skomer became a nature reserve 60 years ago, they’re innocent and trusting. At the Wick − a great cleft in the cliffs, the best spot for seabirds, in the south of the island − the puffins happily scurry past you, even between your legs, indifferent to your presence.

Their bright red beaks crammed with sand eels (Alexander has seen 20 in a single mouthful), the puffins make a camp, nasal, upwardly climbing ‘rouuunnnhh’ noise – the Kenneth Williams of the seabird world – as they strut off on their big, webbed, orange feet to feed their young.

Puffin chicks are jet-black above, white below, with pale grey and pink feet.

Only the adults have the lurid red and orange beaks and feet.

I’ve been to Skomer lots of times and,

As you skirt the island, everywhere you see signs of the days when it was cultivated and inhabited. You can still make out ancient field boundaries. The Harold Stone, on a prominent spot above North Haven, is probably Bronze Age. The name Skomer is thought to have been given by the Vikings, from skalm, Old Norse for ‘short sword’, which, with a good deal of imagination, is a bit like the shape of the island.

As John McEwen writes on page 86, the fulmars on Skomer also have a Viking name: fúll is Old Norse for ‘foul’ and már means ‘gull’. Alexander says they spit ‘extremely smelly, clinging oil at potential predators, birds of prey, sheep and incautious reserve wardens’.

It’s thought Skomer was first cultivated in around 3,500 BC. The island was farmed with vigour until 1905, when J J Neale, an enlightened naturelover, leased the island from the Kensington Estate. Lord Kensington owned much of Pembrokeshire and west London. That’s why Kensington is full of streets with Pembrokeshire names: including Nevern Square, Marloes Road and Pembroke Studios.

Skomer became a fully-fledged nature reserve, run by the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales, in 1959, when the last farm animals were taken off the island. It’s thanks to 5,500 years of cultivation and the howling winter winds that Skomer is practically treeless.

Who knows? Perhaps that treelessness makes the island more recognisable to those Manx shearwaters, which winter in South America and return every year.

The puffins, too, always come back to Skomer in spring after seven months at sea. What good taste they have.

Left to right: a guillemot on Skomer – the Jackson Pollock scribbles are unique to each egg; seal pup; little owl The Oldie May 2021 91

Dream machine: Peter McKay and his Moto Guzzi VIII Stone in Chipping Campden

My Italian stallion On the centenary of Moto Guzzi motorbikes, Peter McKay roared around the Cotswolds for a rural taste of la dolce vita

NEIL SPENCE

C

ots are ancient sheep enclosures; wolds rolling uplands.

The Cotswolds are spread across Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire – and, some claim, north-east Somerset.

At nearly 800 square miles, they’re our largest area of outstanding natural beauty, populated by celebs such as Anne Robinson, Jeremy Clarkson, Hugh Grant, Stella McCartney, Damien Hirst, Kate Moss, Joanna Trollope, Jilly Cooper, Liz Hurley, Lily Allen and Kate Winslet.

Even the Beckhams, Victoria and David, feel the need to live part-time in an old barn near the club for wannabe Cotswoldians, Soho Farmhouse, on

the Great Tew estate in Oxfordshire.

Poet J J Evendon wrote: I see a pigeon flying alongside trying to keep pace, and feel the early-morning sun kiss my face.

What better way to make you smile, than driving through the Cotswolds mile after mile?

Bravo! But motorcycling through the Cotswolds is a more intense experience, I’d say. Especially on my Moto Guzzi VIII Stone. Like the Cotswolds, it oozes character and class.

Spring, summer and autumn, bikers are drawn to the Cotswolds. We love

leaning our machines and bodies into bends. It’s almost the whole point of biking. Flying but still on the ground. It’s why our foot pegs are hinged to flip up safely when striking tarmac while the biker is leaning too far into a corner.

We also love undulating landscapes.

Merge them with bends and we’re happy.

Can there be a more curvaceous series of bends than those on Fish Hill, where the westbound dual carriageway of the A44 descends steeply towards ‘Jewel of the Cotswolds’ Broadway, Worcestershire?

This tempts bikers to touch their ears on the ground, let alone their foot pegs.

Broadway, a honey-stoned place of picture-postcard beauty, could have been specially constructed for a film The Oldie May 2021 93

NEIL SPENCE

about a perfect English township.

(Except for the SIX Porsches parked outside the Lygon Arms Hotel there on the day I rode in.)

‘You’ll be booking your next Cotswolds holiday as soon as you return home,’ claimed a website I consulted.

Actually I’d planned a trip to Italy’s Mandello del Lario, on Lake Como, to visit the HQ of Moto Guzzi motorbikes, where they are celebrating their centenary this year. This had to be cancelled, of course.

So was an alternative plan to ride North Coast 500, a challenging, circular Inverness-to-Inverness route devised by wily Caledonian tourist bigwigs to promote the wild, northern fringes of Scotland. But why annoy scary First Minister Nicola Sturgeon by visiting

The supposed home of the oftmentioned Chipping Norton set, which is said to include media/political grandees David Cameron and Times boss Rebekah Brooks, it’s a long-running joke in journalism. But I have often been asked what it’s all about – and if I am a member. I reply, ‘Not yet, but I’m on the waiting list.’

The ‘set’ I believe is the sardonic invention of The Oldie’s media commentator, Stephen Glover, a citizen of nearby Oxford, where the existence of such an elite-sounding body in bucolic Chipping Norton is a source of both envy and disparagement.

The richest locals are believed to include Lord Bamford, who builds yellow road-diggers; the aforementioned

Caledonia before she invites us to do so?

Living as I do in the north-east fringes of the Cotswolds, an area I’d never explored as a tourist, why not give my proud Italian steed a run closer to home?

In spring, summer and autumn, bikers convoy through. They park in the most scenic hamlets, posing in their leathers while smoking, drinking coffee and showing off their shiny steeds to notalways-impressed locals.

Six of them loitered outside the gates to Blenheim Palace in Woodstock when I passed the other day. The UNESCO World Heritage Site provided a disconcertingly dignified background for the Mad Max-like gang and their dangerous-looking machines.

Woodstock is as good a place as any to begin a Cotswolds tour but photographer Neil Spence and I met up in Chipping Norton, itself a destination for the two-wheel gentry. Through its centre rode a white-bearded, elderly gent on his black BMW, followed by an antisocial hooligan revving his designed-to-benoisy, knobbly-tired off-road machine.

Scenic route: Peter in Broadway, home of the Arts and Crafts movement

94 The Oldie May 2021

Anne Robinson, latest presenter of Countdown; the Prince of Wales; vacuum-cleaner tsar Sir James Dyson; and billionaire inventor Sir David McMurtry.

Jeremy Clarkson earns huge fees from TV, but squanders them hobby farming locally. Local business folk appreciate his efforts on their behalf publicising the area. In 2005, he drove a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow into Chippy’s swimming pool, watched by consenting council bigwigs, purportedly as a salute to The Who’s late rascally drummer, Keith Moon, but in reality a gesture to publicise his local residency.

They park in scenic hamlets, showing off their shiny steeds to locals

Cotswold towns of note on my tour included Burford, its steep main street crammed with interesting shops, and nearby Bibury – for some reason, a place of pilgrimage for Chinese visitors. A household name living here moved house after a couple visiting from Birmingham watched through her parlour window as she ate breakfast.

Gracious Chipping Campden is worth a visit, as is busy Stow-on-the-Wold, Bourton-on-the-Hill and Bourton-onthe-Water. Cirencester should not be avoided; neither should Painswick, or the Slaughters, Lower and Upper. Do not bypass lovely Castle Combe.

For those in need of sustenance, the Cotswolds is rich in gastropubs. Personal favourites are the Boxing Hare at Swerford, the Fox at Oddington, the Paxford at Churchill, the Swan at Swinbrook, The Crown at Enstone and the Horse and Groom at Bourton-on-the-Hill.

Although the area is fascinating to most visiting adults – particularly the Chinese, who also throng to nearby Bicester Village shopping malls – there’s plenty to interest children, and grandchildren.

My own were very impressed by the exotic beasts wandering around outdoors in the Cotswold Wildlife Park near Burford – especially the male lion who, as if by special request, roared in their direction.

The Cotswolds is the kind of place you can take foreign visitors if you want them to form a favourable impression of modern Britain – a place that has most modern conveniences but hasn’t allowed the best of the past to be obliterated.

For some visitors from city hellholes, it must seem like a modern-day Brigadoon – the enchanted Scottish village that in the 1954 Hollywood musical rose from the mist every 100 years. Any outsider who wanted to remain there had to accept the loss of everything he or she knew in the outside world. It’s possible that members of Soho Farmhouse at Great Tew hope to enjoy the Brigadoon effect of being close to the Cotswolds without renouncing their rat-race London lives.

After my Moto Guzzi mini-tour, I joined a friend at a bar called Bitter & Twisted in Chipping Norton’s square. We checked in (as you do) via the NHS app and shared a hot chilli pizza and beer served to our pavement table by a skinny, cheery young waitress with a Claudia Winkleman fringe.

The normal Chippy traffic – cars, vans, motorbikes, cyclists, lorries, towering farm tractors towing gigantic agricultural machines – trundled by. Heaven!

Overlooked Britain

A Wimbledon ace

lucinda lambton Tudor Southside House is brimming with treasures, from Lady Hamilton’s card table to Marie Antoinette’s pearls For sheer rarity, let alone charm, beauty, delight, oddity and distinction, the Powder Closet at Southside House on Wimbledon Common surely takes the biscuit.

As far as I know, it is the lone survivor of such an arrangement left in the country. In the hallway, hung heavy with canvas painted to look like tapestry, is an 18th-century hole in the wall, into which you poked your head for your wig to be set to rights.

A tiny ‘peruke powder page’ would have been there to do the honours, crouching behind the hole in a small, darkened room all day, forever at the ready, with curlers and combs, waiting for a dishevelled head to appear for coiffing.

There are many such remarkable survivals at Southside, a veritable treasury of British and European history.

Great has been my good fortune to have seen them, most particularly as Southside is about to be sold, with many of its contents being taken to a family house in Herefordshire.

It was built in 1687 around the core of a Tudor farmhouse. For the next 300 years, it was jam-packed with a magnitude of startling-you-out-ofyour-wits stories and their attendant souvenirs.

Take the pearl necklace wrenched from Marie Antoinette’s decapitated body on the scaffold. Piercing you through with its poignancy is the loop of loosely-strung pearls belonging to the imprisoned queen. She gave them as payment to the wardress to allow her a glimpse of her little son, the Dauphin Prince, exercising in Paris’s Temple Prison yard below.

These were given to a Monsieur Barras, who was at the queen’s execution as the representative of the revolutionary government. He later gave it to his mistress, Joséphine de Beauharnais. As the revolution raged, she abandoned her lover and struggled to save her family and friends from the guillotine. She sought 96 The Oldie May 2021

help from the British Embassy, when a 16-year-old youth, John Pennington – of Southside House – became the hero of the hour by smuggling out five separate groups of condemned aristocrats from France. Thus began the association with Southside.

Joséphine went on to marry Napoleon. Later, when Pennington was summoned to the Empress to be thanked for his valour, she presented him with this necklace. The Emperor, she said, would not have it in the house: ‘Ça – non! Ça – non!’ It was too grim a victor’s trophy for Napoleon; and so it still lies in Wimbledon today.

I was told all these stories by what most magically felt as if it was ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ – Malcolm Munthe, the great-great grandson of John Pennington. His mother, Hilda, got the story of the pearls from her grandmother, whom she could remember very well. There were therefore only three generations between Marie Antoinette and my companion in Wimbledon. He was the son of Axel Munthe (1857-1949), the famed Swedish physician and author of The Story of San Michele.

What a particularly delightful man Malcolm was: so full of stories – and

Southside House, built in 1687 around the core of a Tudor farmhouse

what stories! – spoken at a speed that rendered you quite faint with the tsunami of his words. His tales poured forth 19 to the dozen. When Henry James came to dinner – which he often did – Malcolm was warned by his father not to be surprised that James had to chew every morsel 12 times.

The result, in Malcolm’s words, was that ‘The time, the conversation, the silence became excruciating. We were fascinated, counting – one munch, two munches, three munches, four munches … 12 munches – then he swallowed it!’

His hands flew up at the excitement of the memory.

Malcolm also remembered the fear that Hilaire Belloc, the Catholic historian and polemicist, inspired in his mind when he was a child: ‘a giant bear of a man with a fierce face and a fur coat to the floor’.

Southside was left empty only once, in incredibly picturesque circumstances. In 1941, after the garden was bombed, Hilda Pennington was forced to leave, taking what valuables she could manage, to their house in Herefordshire.

She had no car. But, nothing daunted and with the aid of a local riding master, she hauled an 1830s coach out of the coach house where it had stood for over 100 years. With no brakes – other than a ‘slipper’ to be pushed by a (non-existent) footman down on to the road before the coach went down a hill – and lined with satin festooned with crimson hammercloth, the Berlin carriage swayed off, through London at the height of the Second World War, on a journey of over 120 miles to Herefordshire.

Southside is an architectural mix of 17th- and 18th-century rooms. In the Music Room, one end has its original fireplace dating from the 1680s, while, at the other, the fireplace dates from the mid-1700s. This is a huge room – two knocked into one – built for a one-day visit by Frederick, Prince of Wales.

A portrait of Lady Hamilton hangs proud on the walls. She used to come to

LUCY LAMBTON

Between canvases painted to look like tapestry, the hole in the wall was where you put your head to get your wig fixed

Southside when she and Lord Nelson lived at Merton House next door. She would perform her ‘attitudes’ – dressing in the Greek or Roman style, giving ‘a living spectacle of the masterpieces of the most celebrated artists of antiquity’. It was said, though, that she had ‘the ease of a barmaid’. Malcolm’s grandmother thought her ‘very vulgar’.

Goethe, however, praised her performances to the skies: ‘It is like nothing you ever saw before in your life.’

The platform on which she entranced her audience is still on the floor. So too is the table – the worse for wear and drink – on which Lady Hamilton

would endlessly play cards after Lord Nelson died.

What pleasure, too, to come upon a miniature of Charles II, alongside an emerald the King gave to his mistress Nell Gwyn.

The Prince of Wales’s bedroom shines most lustrously of all – an enclave of brocades, velvets and sequins created for the Prince of Wales’s one visit in 1750.

Here is the diamond ring Charles I took off his finger and gave to Nicholas Kemeys (an ancestor of Malcolm Munthe’s) after his bravery at the Battle of Naseby. Here is the exquisite, enamel, bejewelled brooch with a pendant death’s head and cross given to the family, again

by Charles I. Marie Antoinette’s necklace takes centre stage in this assembly, surrounded

by grass from the field at Culloden, along with a little silver box of congealed cough drops left by Edward VII when he rested here after reviewing manoeuvres on Wimbledon Common.

Then there’s the heart-stopping portrait of Philadelphia Carey, who accompanied Anne Boleyn to the scaffold. Philadelphia was the daughter of William Carey, married to Anne Boleyn’s sister. This portrait was sent to Elizabeth I, so that the Queen could judge her suitability as lady-in-waiting.

In her hand, Philadelphia is holding a comb – the very comb Anne Boleyn used to arrange her hair for the descending axe.

Unwashed since the scaffold, that very comb is still at Southside, along with Anne Boleyn’s ‘vanity box’ used on that same sorry day.

The Oldie May 2021 97

Taking a Walk

On the bonny banks of Loch an Eilein

GARY WING

patrick barkham

Each lungful of Highland air was unfathomably pure, as if it was richer in oxygen than the ordinary stuff. If it were bottled and sold, it would be marketed with pseudo-scientific claims that it boosted energy, alertness and vitality.

Then again, I concluded, any air would appear bounteously life-giving after ten hours of wearing a mask on a train. This, hopefully my last stroll under lockdown, was one of those necessary walks, urgently required to unwind after a day of travelling for work.

I’d got lucky: I had been booked into the only hotel open near Aviemore in the Cairngorms. One unadvertised feature was a convenient footpath into the woods. The rain stopped just as I arrived; there was an hour of light left. Gulping that air, I hungrily followed the path, which dived straight into forest.

At that moment, this became the most welcome assemblage of trees and shrubs I had ever encountered. Spread between rocks and tree roots, there was a duvet of hummocky heather and blaeberry. Above

them was prickly juniper, leafless birch and then handsome Scots pines, not in serried ranks as we’re used to seeing in southerly plantations but higgledypiggledy and of varied age.

Best of all, the whole place was festooned with lichen which resembled the fake cobwebs hung up for Halloween in rather tasteless pubs and shops. The grey-green lichen dripped from the trees, and the rain dripped from it. Fallen clumps, torn off by a recently passed storm, made ornamental hedgehogs on the ground.

A cold wind caused the tops of the trees to sigh, but beneath them there was stillness and the sharp call of tiny birds – goldcrests, coal tits and mice-withwings that I couldn’t identify. The chaffinches sang with a different lilt here.

I followed the Old Logging Way across a small lane, past sheep pasture and several small crofts, which were now summer residences only and still shut up.

To the east, the high bulk of the Cairngorms was still covered in snow.

Through the trees, my destination, Loch an Eilein, shone silver.

My goal was to circle the lake; there’s an excellent track through the woods and around its shore. In the near corner, there was a small island of trees containing unobtrusive ruins. I knew they constituted a castle only from the map. I chose clockwise, starting from six o’clock on the imaginary clockface, where the pines grew taller and in plantation formation. It was about 6pm in real time, too, and a glimmer of sun flared up for a minute or two before it disappeared over the westerly horizon.

Every colour in this Highland landscape was a kind of grey, and none the less beautiful for that: the rocks, the water and the sky, as well as the silvergrey trunks of birches and their purplegrey branches and twigs. Last year’s bracken was copper grey. Last season’s heather was umber grey.

During the long, slow, quiet northern twilight, each colour leeched imperceptibly from the greys. Then the greys deepened to charcoals. Still the silver loch snaked on, longer than it looked on the map.

I was only at ten o’clock on my circumnavigation of the imaginary clockface of the lake. It was now 7pm and virtually dark. I decided to admit defeat. I had no torch and no desire for a night walk on this occasion.

I turned back on this gentlest of Highland walks and enjoyed the forest of dripping lichen again before the greys turned completely black. I trust that an Oldie reader will complete my walk in the sunshine when we all stroll out of lockdown, and all savour that special, rejuvenating, free air.

It is a three-and-a-half-mile walk around Loch an Eilein on good tracks with no hill-climbing (and an extra three miles if you’re walking from Coylumbridge, as I was). Parking at Loch an Eilein – two miles south of Aviemore; grid ref: NH897085 The Oldie May 2021 99

On the Road

Downton revisited Julian Fellowes loves filming in great country houses. But his heart lies in his Dorset home and a Mykonos hideaway. By Louise Flind

How have you found lockdown?

We’re really lucky: in Dorset, we can go wandering out along our river and over our land – and then I think of families in high-rises with children. So I agree it’s a very tough time. But if you are in a lucky spot, I think being forced to stay at home is incredibly agreeable and having no social life is absolute paradise.

Is there something you can’t leave home without?

I almost blush to say this but I find I cannot go away without my computer.

Do you travel light?

I travel light compared with my wife, who travels as if the Empress of Russia were making a world tour.

Favourite destination?

Mykonos [the Felloweses have a house there], Venice and Paris.

Where did you grow up?

I was born in Cairo and came back as a baby. We lived in Hereford Square until I went to boarding school aged eight; then East Sussex.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

Caldey Island in Pembrokeshire for bucketand-spade holidays. My mother’s theory was that if the family went on holiday for two weeks in the summer, the fact that we’d hardly see our father [a diplomat] for the other 50 weeks of the year would be offset.

servants had gone, they couldn’t afford the heating, the main kitchen was empty except at the time of the fête. That changed under Mrs Thatcher – being able to create a private trust out of your own house meant it could become a business.

What’s your favourite building in Dorset?

The original rectory of the Reverend John White who lived in Dorchester in the early-17th century and planned the colony of Massachusetts.

Your favourite county?

I’ve discovered Dorset over the last 20 years [Lord Fellowes lives there] – and Yorkshire, where my grandmother’s family came from. Essex near Chelmsford is ravishing, Southwold perfect for unwinding.

Where did you go for your honeymoon?

The Gritti Palace in Venice.

Where else was Downton shot?

West Wycombe House and Alnwick Castle for country houses. In London, Bridgewater House as Grantham House; Lancaster House for Buckingham Palace.

In the film, we used Harewood House.

Where was Belgravia shot?

Everywhere. I think we had 102 locations, principally Moray Place in Edinburgh, because we couldn’t shoot in Belgravia – it’s all embassies.

And The English Game?

Saltaire and London.

And Gosford Park?

Wrotham Park – and Syon House for some bedrooms – and the kitchens and servants’ attics at Shepperton.

What’s your favourite room at Highclere?

The library is extraordinary – you can spend half an hour looking at the ceiling.

What was it like getting your Oscar in Hollywood?

It was very surreal. It never occurred to me that I might actually win. I arranged my face to ‘What a good choice’ mode – and my wife, Emma, said, ‘You’ve won.’

If you’re a glamorous movie star, you just go up. But if you’re a little fat writer, you get your Oscar with a movie star and I had Gwyneth Paltrow.

How have country houses changed since your youth – are they more comfortable?

Yes, as there was a sense of decline – the

What’s your favourite part of London?

Kensington, Chelsea and Belgravia, where I’ve lived most of my London life.

What is your favourite country house?

Brough Hall in the North Riding – I went there when I was at Ampleforth and it was a very beautiful gentleman’s house.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

I went to stay with an old girlfriend in Milan, who’d married. One day, she had to work and Mario and I had lunch – he couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Italian, so we spoke schoolboy French. He said he would order delicious Milanese food. The first thing was frog risotto followed by cow’s udder…

Best and worst experiences in restaurants when abroad?

The best: a balmy night at the Ritz in Paris eating in the courtyard with the fountains splashing and perfect food.

The worst was in Tangier when I was a child, and it took three and a half hours for lunch to come – my mother gave up, my father and I stayed doggedly on…

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away?

I was in Jane Eyre, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and the accommodation for the supporting cast was in a converted garage – the bed was under a shelf, so you had to post yourself in.

Top travelling tips?

Take English mustard and marmalade.

When I went away for a month, I tried taking one enormous suitcase and it was like travelling with a coffin – so I would take two to even out the weight.

Downton Abbey 2, the film sequel, will be released on December 22nd 2021 The Oldie May 2021 101

Genius crossword 400 el sereno 7 solutions share the definition of M Across 1 Baulk, as the girl’s hugging a politician (6) 4 State assistance rejected by firm employing a doctor (8) 10 Established right name to be changed in exercise books (9) 11 Answer sailor rejected for M (5) 12 Get wind of follower ultimately taking the lead for M (4) 13 He’s put off touring European capital for M (10) 15 Booming round and round - about time! (7) 16 Couple reportedly getting prison (bird) (6) 19 This enables you to see there’s no sulphur in Greek wine (6) 21 Mostly contact agent about head of operations - M (7) 23 Keeping fingers crossed about power - mother and daughter furious (7,3) 25 Food that gives son a turn? (4) 27 Taken in by top school, reportedly (5) 28 M’s evidence lad usefully keeps concealed (9) 29 Former diet revised after exercise to speed up progress (8) 30 Fighting to protect large American mammal (6)

Down 1 M may be over-excited with big cats uncaged (8) 2 A way of getting across Spooner’s crude manner? (5,4) 3 Style revealed by rise in personal expectations (4) 5 A lure will get a grip on top of this effort (7) 6 Cow eats fat so cooked with overt pride (10) 7 Day most of mischievous kids rummage (5) 8 Help fool with time to support kids regularly (6) 9 Experienced apprehension and approached, forgetting name for female (6) 14 Tried out financial check on one working with editor (10) 17 Person who cheers a prude upset about climbing mountain (9) 18 Company deficit oppressing American behemoth (8) 20 Increase production of nutmeg on area (7) 21 Opportunity of African party accepted by Argentinian revolutionary (6) 22 M lost hope with beer regularly not available (6) 24 Stay for the night, either way (3-2) 26 Request sees enjoyment cut by half (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: 2nd June 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 400 Across 1 The red planet (4) 4 Circular band (4) 8 Scream (4) 9 Unable to hear at all (5-4) 11 Waits in line (6) 13 Front room (7) 15 Sheepdog (6) 16 Morals (6) 18 Squabble (6) 20 Sumptuous (2,4) 22 Number (7) 23 Moisten (6) 25 Helpful types (2-7) 26 Whacky (4) 27 At a distance (4) 28 Discard (4) Down 2 Italian wine region (4)

Genius 398 solution 3 Open toed shoe (6) 4 Crowd closely together (6) 5 Clouded (6) 6 Attractive (9) 7 Regrettably (4) 10 Advance; more distant (7) 12 Blackleg (4) 13 The positioning (of) (9) 14 Matured (7) 17 Pace (4) 19 Leave hurriedly (6) 20 Eat greedily (6) 21 Came down to earth (6) 23 Nod off (4) 24 Prudish; proper (4)

The word was Blue (blue collar/ chip etc) in 1,12,16,25,27,8.

Winner: Alison Scollan, London E18 Runners-up: Philip Berridge, Gosberton, Lincolnshire; Julie Sanders, Bishop’s Waltham, Hampshire

Moron 398 solution Across: 1 Eye, 3 Fault, 6 Our (Eiffel Tower) 8 Idles, 9 Contend, 10 Incendiary, 12 Sad, 15 Lair, 17 Pine, 18 Cur, 22 Benefactor, 25 Tsunami, 26 Untie, 27 Mat, 28 Extol, 29 Rat. Down: 1 Eligible, 2 Eclectic, 3 Fusing, 4 Urchin, 5 Tenors, 6 Obey, 7 Rude, 11 Yap, 13 Dictator, 14 Weirdest, 16 Rub, 19 Rebate, 20 Resist, 21 Casual, 23 Stem, 24 Curt.

The Oldie May 2021 103

Competition TESSA CASTRO ‘My friend, I have a bet for you. Heads you win, tails I lose.’

That’s the sort of wager we all love, and the natural follow-up is ‘Where’s the catch?’

On this month’s deal, there wasn’t one.

Plan the play in Four Hearts on a passive heart lead (yes, pleased to have escaped the fatal diamond lead).

Dealer South Neither Vulnerable

West ♠ K542 ♥65 ♦ Q 10 6 ♣8 7 3 2

North ♠ J8 ♥ Q 10 8 7 4 3 ♦K73 ♣A J

South ♠ A Q 10 ♥AKJ2 ♦854 ♣K 6 4

East ♠ 9763 ♥9 ♦AJ93 ♣Q 10 9 5

The bidding South West North East 1♥ Pass 4♥ end You have nine top tricks – six hearts, the ace-king of clubs and the ace of spades. The key is not to lose the lead to West and have him switch to a (highish) diamond through dummy’s king-low-low. The correct line is to win the heart lead in hand and lead a club to the knave.

This puts you in a win-win position. If the knave of clubs wins (because West holds the queen), you have your tenth trick.

So say (as in the actual layout) the club finesse loses to East’s queen.

East cannot profitably attack diamonds from his side; say he switches to a spade.

You rise with the ace, cross to the ace of clubs, return to a high heart in hand and cash the king of clubs, discarding the knave of spades. You now lead the queen of spades for a ruffing finesse, a second finesse that you do not mind being either a winner or a loser.

On the actual layout, the ruffing-spade finesse succeeds. Say West covers the queen of spades with the king. You ruff, cross to a third high heart and cash the promoted ten of spades, discarding a diamond from dummy.

Say the queen of spades runs to East’s king – you discarding a diamond from dummy. You can win any return from East and soon cash the ten of spades, discarding another diamond from dummy.

Ten tricks and game made – a lovely win-win.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 266, you were invited to write a poem with the title Stones. Lots of excellent entries, as in all the recent, strange months. I laughed at Peter Wyton’s lines on megaliths: ‘How did they roll these great big stones up here/and put them into such precise position,/without sophisticated lifting gear/or evidence of government permission?’ Fay Dickinson, like others, celebrated the long-lived band, and gave us the couplet ‘I tell you, man, I’ve had spliffs that disappoint,/But my left hip’s a really cracking joint.’ John A Williams began with the enticing lines ‘All milkman’s stones are humble stones./ They sit on front doorsteps.’ Mike Morrison lamented gallstones, and John Prendergast’s Lament of the Torrey Canyon (beginning ‘I think I’ve broken my back’) put the blame on the Reef of the Seven Stones. Ted Lane found that ‘taking care of the pounds/The stones take care of themselves’. Peter Hollindale’s narrator, pondering the work of faith’s artisans, decides to ‘stretch my hand to them, and lift the latch’. Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Daphne Lester.

What does the wall know?

My lovely, eight-foot, limestone garden wall Facing due west into the sinking sun; Those autumn colours suit it best of all, But can it tell that day is nearly done?

Do rambler roses tickle it or scratch?

Can it feel heat against its patchwork face?

And when I garden in the plot below, Can it deduce this is my favourite place?

When baby wrens it shelters start their cheeping, And next door children, trampolining high, Bounce right above it, shouting me a greeting, Can it enjoy the same delight as I? What do I know?

My stone wall gives me strength But keeps its counsel.

Daphne Lester Stones huge as moons can yet strike any planet

That goes around the sun. Even a giant Like Jupiter’s at risk. So what of Earth, Our tiny water world, where there’s no dearth Of plants and ants and people, all reliant On Gaia’s bounty and on utter luck?

Our solar home, since gravity began it, Has lived through impacts thoroughly stupendous, Which made the Earth and Moon – yet still could end us.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 had struck A whopper world, witnessed by humankind.

July of ’94. A wake-up call.

A punch in the gut! Colossal comet bits The size of mountains gored that gassy ball Which gulped them in its atmospheric rind.

Let’s scan the skies round Earth before one hits!

Martin Elster Ripe cherries in a bowl, and I can still Recall those stones, and spitting as a sport: A test of pulmonary strength and skill, Those youthful contests, vigorously fought.

Across the garden’s space our missiles sped, Some cleared the patio, some reached the fence – The winner soundly hit the garden shed; The competition raged, the mood was tense…

Remembering the cherry-stone Grand Prix, I longed to visit our old stamping ground; Since many years have passed, I hoped to see An orchard full of blossom – yet I found No signs of germination or rebirth; For, like our childhood dreams and our ambition, The stones that landed on that fertile earth, Alas, had also failed to reach fruition.

Sylvia Fairley COMPETITION No 268 The civil war against graffiti continues, I find. Please write a poem, on any theme, with the title Writing on the Wall. Maximum 16 lines.

We still cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by email (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 268’, by 3rd June.

The Oldie May 2021 105

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside My wife’s a coronaphobe

Q

Despite the easing of the COVID restrictions, my wife has remained absolutely terrified of catching it. She has refused to go out for over a year now, and even if I’m allowed out, when I get back I have to leave my coat and shoes outside for three days on return so that they’re ‘decontaminated’.

Not to mention covering myself with anti-viral sprays etc. And she even demands that I garden and walk the dog in a mask! I have put up with this – partly because I thought it best to go along with the ‘rules’ – but like most people I’ve been really keen to get back to normal. Not so my wife. She just won’t be persuaded that death doesn’t lie round every corner. What can I do?

Jeremy D, by email I know so many people who suffer from coronaphobia, as it’s known. If one suffers from it, it can be extremely difficult to extricate oneself from it, let alone someone else.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) could help enormously – it’s a therapy based on reason rather than emotion – but if your wife refuses to go out of the house to get it, it will be hard, though there are online courses available. I feel your only hope is to keep modelling your own lack of anxiety. Refuse to accede to any of her extreme strictures. By going along with them, you’re only endorsing and underlining her fears, rather than confronting them daily, which should, very slowly, chip away at her terror.

A

Dad’s wartime love letters

Q

With reference to the letter about the disposal of Anna’s old love letters, when my sister and

The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

114 The Oldie May 2021

I were clearing out our late mother’s effects, we came across a pile of letters which my father had written to her when away during the war. We had no desire to read these extremely personal letters, obviously, and nor did we feel we could just throw them away.

So we asked the undertaker if he would place them with her in the beautiful wicker casket in which she was being buried. We felt this was very fitting, as it had been a long and happy marriage. Perhaps Anna could ask her children to do this for her when the time comes?

Ann Sutton, by email Before you go ahead, I’d get a friend to check through them to make sure there isn’t some hidden confession of some ghastly indiscretion hidden in the pages. I wouldn’t feel comfortable burying the letters without checking first, just in case I was including with my mother in the coffin evidence of some major rift (albeit healed). In another response to the same question, Philip Collings pointed out that it would surely be fascinating for others to read them to find out how a relationship can survive for very long periods on letters and very rare phone calls alone. After all, he adds, ‘Love finds a way so don’t throw out the maps.’

A

Our feckless son-in-law

Q

Our daughter is in her fifties with two children and married to a loving – if rather feckless – man. Since she quit work to look after the children and he embarked on a new career, they’ve been chronically short of money. We subsidise their holidays, children’s pocket money, household and

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other expenses. She likes a bottle of wine every night and chain-smokes. He uses marijuana daily but apparently they’re trying to kick these habits. And yet they’re still unable to curb the habit of buying stuff they cannot afford or need – classic shopaholics. They row constantly but on the other hand they’re marvellously loving parents. We are in our nineties, disabled in different ways. I worry what happens when we die, even though they’ll come into a considerable inheritance. My wife thinks I overreact and says we should leave things to run their course. Is she right?

Name and address supplied I think she is. Obviously you shouldn’t have started subsidising them in the first place but, now you’re doing it, you’d better continue for the moment. But, while encouraging them in their attempts to quit their destructive addictive habits, maintain a vague threat in the background that this can’t go on for ever. Could you perhaps agree to subsidise them only if you’re allowed to scrutinise their monthly budgets?

Have you discussed this with them seriously – perhaps talking to each one separately? And are you sure, by the way, that you have enough to provide for your even older age? It might be worth doing some accounts and showing them to your daughter and her husband, explaining that you really can’t subsidise them at the rate you are if you’re going to have enough to live on when you get frailer.

A

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