The Oldie magazine - October 2021 issue 405 by oldieproduction

32-PAGE OLDIE REVIEW OF BOOKS KIM PHILBY IN BEIRUT

October 2021 | £4.95 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 405

Brief encounter

I was the Kray twins’ lawyer – Nemone Lethbridge Hail, Caesars! Mary Beard on Rome’s first family Cricket heaven – Henry Blofeld’s dream team Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on the Rolling Stones

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The Don: Blofeld’s number one page 16

Features 11 Brian Glanville, king of football writers Michael Henderson 13 I hate sticky tables Charles Stewart 14 I was the Krays’ lawyer Nemone Lethbridge 16 My dream cricket team Henry Blofeld 18 Julius Caesar and family Mary Beard 20 I was scammed Ruth Webster 22 Kim Philby: a traitor and a gentleman James Hanning 24 Jagger and Richards on the Stones Anthony DeCurtis 27 How bankers lost their credit Martin Vander Weyer 28 My brush with the Grim Reaper Barry Humphries 30 Gothic style, from churches to Dracula Roger Luckhurst 36 Showbiz doesn’t pay Michael Simkins

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman

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Mary Beard’s sweet Caesars page 18

Mick and Keef reveal all page 24

12 Olden Life: Wh0 was Blackie the donkey? William Cook 12 Modern Life: What is a bookhotel? Hilary Macaskill 32 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 33 Country Mouse Giles Wood 34 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 37 Letter from America Roger Kimball 38 Small World Jem Clarke 41 School Days Sophia Waugh 41 Quite Interesting Things about ... October John Lloyd 42 God Sister Teresa 42 Funeral Service: John Charles Woodcock James Hughes-Onslow 43 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 44 Readers’ Letters 47 I Was Told a Joke by… Mother Teresa Veronica Whitty 47 Memory Lane 61 Media Matters Stephen Glover 62 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 62 Rant: Modern hotel rooms Colin Freeman

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

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor John Bowling Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

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Books 49 The Amur River: Between Russia and China, by Colin Thubron Nikhil Krishnan 51 This Much Is True, by Miriam Margolyes Tanya Gold 51 Mary Churchill’s War: The Wartime Diaries of Churchill’s Youngest Daughter, by Emma Soames Jane Ridley 53 The Magician, by Colm Tóibín Rupert Christiansen 55 Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain, by Jeremy Paxman Kate Hubbard 55 The Letters of John McGahern, edited by Frank Shovlin Alex Clark 59 Making Nice, by Ferdinand Mount Frances Wilson

Travel 82 I’m an old youth-hostel fan William Cook 84 Overlooked Britain: Edinburgh’s Café Royal Lucinda Lambton

86 On the Road: Giles Coren Louise Flind 87 Taking a Walk: The joy of Devon’s fake lake Patrick Barkham

Arts 64 Film: The Servant Harry Mount 65 Theatre: Mary Poppins William Cook 65 Radio Valerie Grove 66 Television Roger Lewis 67 Music Richard Osborne 68 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 69 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 71 Gardening David Wheeler 71 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 72 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 72 Restaurants James Pembroke 73 Drink Bill Knott 74 Sport Jim White 74 Motoring Alan Judd 76 Digital Life Matthew Webster 76 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 79 Getting Dressed: Catherine Llewelyn-Evans Brigid Keenan 81 Bird of the Month: Tufted duck John McEwen Oldie book orders ● Please email bookorders@theoldie.co.uk Advertising For display, contact: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Kami Jogee on 07983 097477 For classified, contact: Jamil Popat on 020 3859 7096 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover Bailey

The Oldie October 2021 3

The Old Un’s Notes

There’ll be Spitfires over the White Cliffs of Dover

Were you one of those schoolboys who in 1973 salivated about the new range of ‘pocket money’ model kits of tanks, warplanes and ships? The Matchbox kits were cheap and simple to make, with tremendous, nostalgic power for Second World War buffs. Fans will love The Golden Years of Matchbox Art, a new book by Roy Huxley, now in his eighties. Huxley painted the pictures for practically all the boxes over nearly 20 years. Here is his stirring picture of the Supermarine Spitfire Mk IX, Britain’s most famous short-range, high-performance Second World War aircraft, with its Merlin engine and its distinctive roar. More than 20,000 of them were built between 1938 and 1948. The Mk IX was the most-produced version after it entered service in 1942. Chocks away, chaps!

Fran Lebowitz, the New York writer, is only 70 but she’s long since established herself as an oldie deity – as the goddess of grumbling.

She’s been famous in New York for over half a century, since Andy Warhol hired her as a columnist on his Interview magazine. But she’s only just beginning to be appreciated this side of the pond, thanks to the series of interviews she gave to Martin Scorsese this year in the Netflix series Pretend It’s a City. Now oldies can luxuriate in her heavenly grumbles in The Fran Lebowitz Reader (Virago), published this September. Here is her golden advice to teenagers: ‘Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you

Among this month’s contributors David Bailey took our front-cover picture of the Kray twins in 1965. Bailey says, ‘I quite liked Reg even though, when he was 19, he slashed my father’s face with a razor. Ron was a basket full of rattlesnakes.’ Mary Beard (p18) is Professor of Classics at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Newnham College. Her latest book is Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern. Nemone Lethbridge (p14) is one of Britain’s earliest female barristers, called to the Bar in 1956. She is author of Nemone: A young woman barrister’s battle against prejudice, class and misogyny. Henry Blofeld (p16) began writing about cricket, for the Times, in 1962. In 1972, he first appeared on Test Match Special. His new book is Ten to Win ... and the Last Man In: My Pick of Test Match Cliffhangers.

something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself – a wise move at any age, but most especially at 17, when you are in danger

Queen of the grumblers: Fran Lebowitz

of coming to annoying conclusions.’ Another of her wise suggestions to the young is ‘Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy that the phone is for you.’ Best of all, though, is her eternal wisdom on why we all get annoyed but shouldn’t try to destroy the person who annoys us. She wrote it long before Cancel Culture became a thing, but it has never been so true: ‘I would be the very last to criticise the annoyed. I myself find many – even most – things objectionable. Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one’s home. I do not like aftershave lotion, adults who roller-skate, children who speak French or anyone who is unduly tan. I do not, however, go around The Oldie October 2021 5

most of his time bonking Petronella Wyatt on the seat of a car in the garage in Brownlow Mews’. Surely time for a blue plaque – but should it be over the garage or on the car seat?

Important stories you may have missed Fish found dead at beauty spot West Sussex Gazette Carnivorous plant being grown in secret location Congleton Chronicle

New landlords relaunch pub with three-course dog menu Eastern Daily Press £15 for published contributions

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‘As it turned out, dog heaven was also cat hell’

enacting legislation and putting up signs.’ Oh, and what’s more, the immaculately dressed Lebowitz loves Savile Row clothes and hates leisurewear with inane sentences printed all over it. You’re always welcome at Oldie Towers for a good old grumble with the Old Un, Fran! The architectural historian and herald John Martin Robinson proudly trumpets himself as an ‘Archetypal Young Fogey of the 1970s’ in his new memoir, Holland Blind Twilight. Robinson contributed to the Spectator in the 1980s when, as he puts it, the magazine rejoiced in ‘the dominance of fogeydom’. A N Wilson was the literary editor. Charles Moore was the editor and James Knox was the publisher – and biographer of Robinson’s fogey heroes Robert Byron and Osbert Lancaster. The Spectator cook was Jennifer Paterson (1928-99), later famous as one of the Two Fat Ladies in the cookery programme of that name. When Paterson died, she left her emerald ring – which so mesmerised hygiene-obsessed viewers when she was mixing dough – to Clare Asquith, deputy literary editor at the Spectator. She left Robinson a Victorian silver Stilton scoop. Robinson gives Paterson

his ultimate accolade – as ‘an honorary Young Fogey’. It sparks the question – can women be fogeys? Any suggestions for candidates gratefully received by the Old Un.

Fogey AGM: Martin Robinson and Jennifer Paterson after Mass

There is only a brief mention of a succeeding editor of the Spectator, one Boris Johnson. Robinson declares him to be ‘lazy, amoral, ambitious, selfcentred’. He adds that Johnson ‘seemed to spend

The story of the survival of St Melangell’s Shrine, hidden away for 400 years in the walls of an isolated church in the Berwyn Mountains of mid-Wales, is enough to make the most hardened cynic believe in miracles. It’s told in Peter Stanford’s If These Stones Could Talk: A History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland Told Through Twenty Buildings (Hodder). Pictured is a line drawing of the church by architect Stephen Tsang. The shrine’s richly carved casing was originally part of a Norman church that recalled a community of independentminded seventh-century holy women. Judged too ‘popish’ by Henry VIII’s reforming lieutenants, it was condemned to be smashed to smithereens. The locals, though, were no pushover and quietly resisted the central diktat by dismantling it section by section and hiding it in the thick north wall of the church until the madness passed. That took a while, and it was only in the 1980s when a new vicar, Paul Davies, and his wife, Evelyn, rescued it from eternal entombment in the walls and rebuilt it piece by piece. Today, standing on the

A welcome in the hillside: St Melangell’s Church, Pennant Melangell, by Stephen Tsang

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

altar of this remote church in a magical valley that seems to exist in a world of its own, it is revered by experts as the finest – and probably leastknown – Romanesque shrine structure in the whole of northern Europe.

EVERETT/ALAMY

Have you met Miss Jones? Leonard Rossiter as Rigsby

Who can forget the immortal Rupert Rigsby, as played to perfection by Leonard Rossiter in Rising Damp (1974-78) on ITV? And just as Eric Chappell was writing Rising Damp, he had another hit series in The Squirrels (1974-77), also on ITV. And now he’s releasing the scripts as a book, also called The Squirrels. The three series were about the office of an accounts department of a TV-rental company. Instead of working, the staff bunked off and had office romances. Chappell based the series on his 22 years of office life as an auditor for the East Midlands Electricity Board. Eric Chappell, happily still with us at 88, says of The Squirrels, ‘No one liked the title but I refused to change it,

showing all the arrogance of a beginner. ‘It was inspired by a poem by Alfred Noyes which dealt with the frustrated hopes and ambitions of a young clerk – my feelings at the time.’ The idea was accepted by ATV – ‘With great reluctance,’ Chappell diffidently says. Still, it rose to number one in the TV charts in the first series. In many ways, the series, starring Bernard Hepton and Ken Jones, pre-empted The Office by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant by nearly 30 years. Hysterectomies aren’t much fun – but Oldie reader Suzanne Peel managed to see the funny side in a consultation with her surgeon just before her own op. CONSULTANT: Good morning. SUZANNE: Good morning, Mr P. CONSULTANT (filling in a form): Now, let’s see, are you still at the same address? SUZANNE: Yes. CONSULTANT: And you have two children. SUZANNE: Yes.

Roasted squash (or pumpkin) with apple, pecan and fried sage leaves on toasted oat country loaf

CONSULTANT: And their ages are? SUZANNE: Both early twenties. CONSULTANT: So, you’re still at the same address, two children – and did you push them out yourself? SUZANNE: No, they are still both at home, but I hope they move out and get a flat eventually. CONSULTANT [slowly

looking up with quizzical look on his face]: No, I mean did you push them out yourself at birth? SUZANNE [with very stupid look on her face]: Oh, I’m sorry. No – one forceps and one natural. Consultant slowly looks down and carries on writing on his form, presumably adding, ‘Forget the womb – check the head!’.

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Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

The Great Royal Bake Off

I know why I’m so fat – I’ve been eating Camilla’s cakes I have put on three pounds this month and I know why. I have been going to a lot of tea parties and eating slice after slice of Victoria sponge. It’s all in a good cause, of course. I am the founder of a project called Poetry Together, which encourages schoolchildren and old people in care homes to learn a poem by heart and then get together to perform the poem and have tea and cake. Hundreds of schools and care homes across the country (and Commonwealth) take part and the poetry parties happen between National Poetry Day (7th October) and Christmas. You can find out more at the website www.poetrytogether.com. The website will also give you the recipe for the Victoria sponge, kindly supplied by the Duchess of Cornwall. (It’s a controversial recipe because Her Royal Highness suggests you can use Nutella as a filling if you fancy a change from strawberry jam.) Camilla is keen on cake – and poetry. At one of the tea parties, after some Chelsea Pensioners had recited a Siegfried Sassoon war poem with a group of teenage boys, the duchess performed Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda with a group of seven-year-olds. She has quite a few poems from her childhood still in her head. She can do most of W H Auden’s Night Mail without prompting. The Duchess has a special soft spot for Walter de la Mare. Thanks to a new edition of his poems from Faber (recommended in The Oldie), I am rediscovering him. He’s the best. And funny, too. In the 1920s, when he had been seriously ill and his daughter visited him in hospital, she asked as she was leaving, ‘Is there nothing I could get for you, father – fruit or flowers?’ ‘No, no, my dear,’ answered de la Mare in a thin voice from his sickbed. ‘Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.’ Una Stubbs, who died in August aged 84, was lovely: beautiful, gifted and funny.

She started out as a teenage cover girl for Rowntree’s Dairy Box and ended up, internationally acclaimed, as Mrs Hudson to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes on TV. In between, she performed everything from Shakespeare to Shaw to Aunt Sally in Worzel Gummidge. I got to know her playing charades on Give Us a Clue with Lionel Blair in the 1980s. I first saw her on stage in 1972, in Cowardy Custard at the Mermaid Theatre. I remember Cliff Richard was there that night. We all thought that Cliff and Una were an item. For a while, I think Una thought they were, too. I last saw her a year or so ago, at her second ex-husband’s funeral. She wasn’t always lucky in love. About 20 years ago, interviewing her on a radio chat show, I asked her, ‘How’s the love life?’ ‘Funny you should ask,’ she replied, beaming. ‘I’ve got a new man and he’s rather special. He’s an architect, unattached, tall, slim, super-intelligent, a bit younger than me, doesn’t smoke, great sense of humour. We’re having fun. It’s early days, but I’m hopeful.’ After the broadcast, when I was showing her into her taxi and saying goodbye, I said, ‘Congratulations on the new man.’ ‘What new man?’ she said, looking at me blankly. Queen of Victoria sponges: Duchess of Cornwall

‘The architect,’ I said. ‘Your new fellow.’ ‘There’s no architect, stupid. I just invented him. I wasn’t going to have your listeners thinking I couldn’t get a man.’ Classy lady, Una. Sir Ian McKellen is currently marking his 60 years as a professional actor by taking the title role in Hamlet at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. It’s a dazzling, bravura performance in a clean, clear, swift production. I am glad I went to see it. A good number of Sir Ian’s contemporaries and friends wouldn’t. They simply refused, even though he telephoned them, hoping they might. One of them said to me, ‘Playing Hamlet at 82 – it’s ridiculous.’ Another said, ‘It’s obscene.’ It’s neither. ‘The play’s the thing’ and, in this instance, the age-, colour- and genderblind casting all work. I hear you harrumphing sceptically but, believe me, they really do. McKellen, of course, knows his Shakespeare. In Stratford a few years ago I hosted a Shakespeare quiz and, unsurprisingly, the McKellen team (which included the late Donald Sinden and the great Judi Dench) won hands down. As captain, Ian proved sharp as well as knowledgeable. When Donald Sinden got the question right about how much older Anne Hathaway was than Shakespeare (eight years), Ian said, ‘Of course, Donald had the advantage of knowing them both personally.’ Judi Dench told a story that day about being in a play with McKellen when they were both quite young and so nervous on the first night that she said to him, ‘I’m just going to concentrate on the front row, Ian – focus on the three seats in the centre of the front row and think that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are sitting there.’ Said Ian, ‘They’d be sitting in the one seat, surely?’ Gyles’s childhood memoir, Odd Boy Out, has just been published by Michael Joseph The Oldie October 2021 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Don’t stop all the clocks – my dad’s died On his deathbed, he was still fixing antique timepieces matthew norman

Doubts persist as to whether my father’s last words will join those of Oscar Wilde (that wallpaper) and Bognor-buggerer George V among the most memorable yet uttered. For one thing, my dad’s last words weren’t uttered. For another, they were not, in fact, his last words. Nonetheless, he was absolutely convinced that the words he committed to paper one early-July afternoon, some seven weeks before he did die, would be his last. And they deserve, I feel, to be remembered. My son Louis and I didn’t realise this at the time, when we were stricken by disbelief at their apparent incongruity in the context. On reflection, I realise how remarkably perfect they were. My dad was a most unusual man with a most unusual working history meandering over six and a half decades. He started out as a solicitor, when his clients included the Rolling Stones. He had to drop them when less exotic customers recoiled from the scent of weed in his office. Soon enough, he dropped the law itself, going off to run the family firm when it completed its classical Jewish-immigrant odyssey from East End barrow to public company. But talented as he was at both, neither the law nor commerce consumed him. He had too many consuming passions for that. One was learning for the joy of learning. Close to his 80th birthday, he began an Open University philosophy degree. The only one of his myriad achievements of which he seemed genuinely proud was achieving the outlandish mark of 100 per cent in a pair of essays on the Enlightenment. Another passion was horology. He adored all manner of timepieces all his life, and mixed business and pleasure by pioneering the manufacture of 10 The Oldie October 2021

reproduction carriage clocks in the mid-1970s. Auden’s Funeral Blues is the most frequently recited of all interment verse, thanks to its cameo in that Richard Curtis film. But for no one in sepulchral history would ‘Stop all the clocks’ have been more wilfully inappropriate. If there was one thing my father hated, it was a stopped clock. Last Christmas, at 87 and a half, he was still running his clock-repair business, schlapping all over town in his Jag to fetch the broken and return the restored. When his illness progressed in the New Year, robbing him of his balance until he could no longer walk, those 65 unbroken years of work gave way to the final months of virtual paralysis that were excruciating to so active and naturally athletic a man (he broke schoolboy mile records, and might have been a professional cricketer but for a teenage bout of polio) – but about which not once did he complain. He was a sweetly deafening echo of that lost English paradigm – the strong and silent type. Pincered by two worldranked hypochondriacs in my mother and me, he was so insouciant about his health that he never mentioned the polio (or several painful decades of psoriatic arthritis) until a few years ago. Where most would have raged and sobbed and howled against the horrors of a brutal terminal illness, the most melodramatic my dad became, when things were at their monstrous worst and I asked how he was doing, was ‘I’m a

An echo of that lost English paradigm – the strong and silent type

bit pissed off, chap.’ Never for a moment did he lose his dignity or grace. He died utterly, unimaginably undiminished. He also died later than he expected. That July afternoon, a throat infection burst through his weakened immune system with startling suddenness, until he was choking on sips of water and unable to speak. I was in the kitchen hanging on for the GP when Louis walked in, looking grave. ‘You’d better come now, Dad,’ he said. ‘Grandpa’s mimed a summons for pen and paper.’ In that wickedly ominous hospital bed, my brave and beautiful dad was painstakingly writing in his antiquely elaborate hand. Alarmed and fearful as we were, I can’t deny a frisson of intrigue as to what was occupying his mind in what he believed was his end. The details of a secret second family in Jakarta, Toronto or Willesden Green he wanted informed? Better still, the number of a secret bank account on Grand Cayman? A deathbed confession to an even worse crime than the forgery he committed long ago in Portugal, when he doctored my temporary passport (google it, young ’uns) to make me 18, and so eligible to gamble in the casino? ‘Dear Mrs Franklin,’ read those supposedly final words, written in my voice. ‘My father, Brian Norman, has asked me to write to you about your aunt’s clock. ‘My father is seriously ill and ceased trading some time ago, but wants you to know it is here and in good order. I would be grateful if you would arrange to collect it…’ In death, my dad was as always in life. Kind and conscientious beyond compare. Thinking of another, rather than himself. Waging that timeless war of his against the anathema of a stopped clock.

Top of the league At 90, novelist Brian Glanville remains the king of football writers. By Michael Henderson

here has never been a football writer quite like Brian Glanville and, given the game’s enslavement by television, there never will be another. Glanville, who turns 90 on 24th September, in his glory days at the Sunday Times bestrode the press boxes of England like a monarch. In his autumnal years, younger journalists continue to make the pilgrimage to his home in Holland Park to share gossip and, if they’re lucky, receive a kingly blessing. Glanville is much more than a sportswriter. He has published novels and short stories, and contributed to That Was The Week That Was when satire meant more than spewing four-letter words. But it was his writing on football that set him apart. As Patrick Barclay, one of his most gifted successors, noted, ‘There are two kinds of football writer: those who have been influenced by Brian Glanville and those who should have been.’ Educated at Charterhouse, Glanville took himself off to Italy at the age of 19. By then he was already an author, having ghosted the autobiography of his childhood hero, Cliff ‘Boy’ Bastin, whose goals helped to win five First Division championships and two FA Cups for Arsenal. In Italy, Glanville established his reputation writing for Corriere della Sera, and it was his knowledge of Italian (and European) football that defined his identity when he returned to England, and the Sunday Times. There had been some fine writers on football, but Glanville enjoyed unmatched authority. For two generations of readers, an England fixture on Wednesday could not be said to be over until Glanville had pronounced judgement in his Sunday column. ‘Callaghan, me no Callaghan,’ he wrote in 1977 when Ron Greenwood, picking his first team as England manager, selected Ian Callaghan, the journeyman Liverpool player, instead of Trevor Brooking, whom he had nurtured at West Ham. ‘Brooking towers above him in sheer class.’ A majestic rebuke! Two years later, when the dithering Greenwood dropped midfielder Glenn Hoddle, after the Spurs man had scored a wonderful goal on his England debut,

Greenwood told reporters, ‘Glenn must learn that disappointment is part of football.’ Glanville pondered, ‘Yes, but whose disappointment?’ His prose was never flowery. Not for him the colourful diversions of the Observer’s Hugh McIlvanney, a brilliant writer who eventually lapsed into flatulent self-parody. There was no ‘thrilling relevance’ in any performance that Glanville witnessed, though midfield players could occasionally be considered ‘protean’. He preferred to write in clear, precise sentences, every word ticked off shortly after five o’clock on Saturday afternoons. Though never a confrontational man, he had strong likes and dislikes, and always made himself visible at press conferences. George Graham, the Arsenal manager, was once stung into making a pointed proclamation, ‘Quality will out,’ by Glanville’s notice the previous week. Graham received a swift answer: ‘Should we see any, George, we’ll let you know.’ After leaving the Sunday Times he continued to write for World Soccer as a kind of essayist emeritus. Not greatly enamoured of the modern game, which is rolling in the kind of money beyond the dreams of Boy Bastin, he has never lost his love for a game that he himself played into his seventh decade for Chelsea Casuals, a pick-up XI founded for his own amusement. Until a couple of years ago, he could regularly be found in a press box somewhere in London, hoping to see something memorable. Tom Stoppard said of Ken Tynan, the great drama critic, that you were keen to have his approval. Sportsmen, like actors, have the chance to write their own notices every time they step on stage. And when the approval comes from an observer like the great Glanville, the words can glow like coals. Back of the net! Glanville, 90 in September

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who was Blackie the donkey? Britain’s tabloid newspapers are a shadow of what they used to be, struggling to compete with online behemoths like Facebook and Twitter. Back in the 1980s it was a different story. Rupert Murdoch had tamed the print unions, new technology had cut printing costs, and so ‘red top’ papers such as the Sun and the Star could afford to splash their cash on spectacular stunts. And the greatest stunt of all was their dramatic rescue of Blackie the donkey. The Sunday Express broke the story, beneath the immortal headline ‘Poor El Condenado [Condemned One] Waits For His Fat Killer’. The story concerned a Shrove Tuesday festival, the Peropalo, in a Spanish village called Villanueva de la Vera, during which the fattest man in the village rode around on a donkey until the poor creature collapsed beneath him.

During the previous festival, reported the paper, the donkey had sadly died. Nowadays, our cash-strapped tabloids would have to make do with a why-ohwhy piece about wicked Spaniards by a deskbound hack stuck in Blighty, but back in 1987 Fleet Street’s finest could afford to go one better. Both the Sun and the Daily Star sent two of their top reporters to Spain, to save that year’s El Condenado – a blameless beast called El Negro, aka Blackie. The Sun’s Hugh Whittow got there first and bought El Negro from a Spanish farmer. ‘We Save Blackie,’ splashed their front page. ‘Savage peasants planned to crush the helpless animal to death – but we snatched Blackie to safety.’ Yet unfortunately for Whittow, and his fearsome editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, the Star’s Don Mackay paid off Blackie’s Spanish keeper and snaffled him from under their unsuspecting noses. ‘Gotcha!’ ran the Star’s headline. With the help of heroic RSPCA activist

Left: Elisabeth Svendsen and Blackie, Peropalo festival, 1987. Above: the Sun’s Blackie campaign

what is a bookhotel? Bookhotels cater for compulsive readers. They have libraries and literary attractions, from writers in residence to rooms dedicated to authors. For some hotels, it’s an appealing additional service; others were conceived from an idiosyncratic passion. Hotel Sonnenburg in the Austrian Alps has wooden boxes of selected titles in each room. Berlin’s Hotel Friedenau focuses on local writers. Le Pavillon des Lettres in Paris has 26 rooms, featuring authors from Andersen to Zola. 12 The Oldie October 2021

We first heard about bookhotels in Germany in 2018. Our friend Gerd had moved his second-hand bookshop, Mephisto, online and to a village where he hoped to turn the Schloss into a bookhotel furnished from his huge stock, following the example of others in Europe (and America) that began to blossom in the previous decade. We headed north to the pioneer, Gutshotel in Gross Breeson near Gustrow, opened in 1998. We arrived to find reception deserted, except for stacked boxes of books. In the subterranean restaurant (excellent food, we later discovered) was the waiter who showed us to our room. Its number was

Vicki Moore, Blackie was shipped back to Plymouth, where he was greeted on the quayside by a huge press pack, all clamouring for a photo. Renamed Blackie Star, as a tribute to his saviours, he ended up in a donkey sanctuary in Sidmouth, run by Elisabeth Svendsen (pictured), the animal-rights campaigner who’d brought the story to public attention. It was worthy of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. A few years later, as a young reporter I worked on a story with Don Mackay and was suitably impressed to discover he was the hard-bitten hack who’d pulled off this priceless coup. However, Mackay was reluctant to discuss it – and it was easy to see why. His campaigning journalism had helped to save a British citizen, Mirza Tahir Hussain, from death row in Pakistan. He was loath to be remembered for a silly story about a Spanish donkey. Mackay’s fears were justified. When he died, in 2017, it was Blackie, not Hussain, who dominated the obituaries. Yet that was really no bad thing. The Blackie-thedonkey saga was tabloid journalism at its very best: absurd, cheeky and irreverent – and all in a good cause. Even Whittow didn’t come out of it too badly – he ended up as editor of the Daily Express. Thanks to the rumbustious red tops, Blackie spent a peaceful retirement in Sidmouth, dying in 1993 of natural causes. Elisabeth Svendsen received the MBE for her valiant efforts. She died in 2011. Her donkey sanctuary is still going strong. Wiliam Cook

painted onto a real book, hanging outside (John Updike’s Couples). A crammed, comfy reading room also had a record-player with LPs – and occasional books in English: A Pictorial History of the Wild West, Industrial Archaeology of Dartmoor – and Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, where I discovered the first line ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ was not Snoopy’s literary invention. Theming was meticulous. The corridors were lined with bookshelves. The walls were hung with classic paintings of readers. The garden was full of statues clutching books, down to the gnome lying in the pond.

Owner Conny Brock was inspired by visits to Hay-on-Wye where she’d met Richard Booth (1938-2019), ‘the king of Hay-on-Wye’. Her hotel policy was ‘bring two books; take one’ – resolutely being followed by a man with a ponytail who brought a bagful and started rummaging through boxes. Conny has a loyal clientele, allowing regulars to read in her own Private Collection room. Other rooms celebrate Alice in Wonderland and Treasure Island. By the barn housing 250,000 books – and, now, the man with the ponytail, combing the stacks – there was a graffitiscrawled train carriage from Berlin. It was a present from a guest, being transformed into the ‘gateway to Land of Oz’ by a working party of the regulars. Oddly, the one thing missing was children. They’re not encouraged: ‘This is a place a place of respite and refuge,’ I was told. We also visited the delightful Literaturhotel Franzosenhohl, set in

Gladstone, the Grand Old Man of books: Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden

woodland outside Iserlohn in the Ruhr. Here the books were new, recently published and laid out on racks along the light-filled hall. Reading was part of the hotel’s ‘wellness’ programme. Home again, we felt deprived. Then we discovered Gladstone’s Library. Four-times Prime Minister William Gladstone, conscious of ‘readers who have no books and books who have no readers’, determined to open a library in his village, with a hostel for visitors. In his 80s, he trundled wheelbarrows of his books from Hawarden Castle. His largest bequest, for the library, was an astonishing £40,000. In 1906, eight years after his death, the current building opened, with a library at one end, bedrooms (no televisions – just Roberts radios) at the other. Residents can stay in the library until 10pm. This would do! In 2019, we went three times. This autumn, we’ll be back. Hilary Macaskill

Raise a glass to non-stick bar tables There is nothing worse than sitting at a table in a pub or restaurant and finding one’s hands or arms sticking to the table surface. Waiting staff have always been helpful in wiping tables between guests, but the development of spray bottles of cleaning fluid has led to an accumulation of gunge on the surface. Long gone is the day when waitresses used a scrubbing brush with soap and water to leave a clean wooden surface. Pubs and restaurants increasingly have tables that are varnished or have plastic surfaces. The varnish or paint gradually softens. Along comes the next customer: not only do their fingers stick to the table top, but so too do any papers belonging to the unsuspecting individual. Cleaning of tables has become

even more of a ritual with the implementation of strict hygiene associated with COVID-19 rules. More and more bottles of spray fluid are being used in all businesses coming into contact with the public. What has happened to good old warm water, soap and a scrubbing brush? There is nothing more welcoming in a pub or café than a bleached wooden table that has been scrubbed clean. The surface is smooth to the touch. Hands and clothes slide cleanly across the surface. It is possible to place a newspaper beside you without the back page’s sticking to the table top. The sleeves of your jacket don’t require to be freed every time you try to raise your glass. The owner of the hostelry gains as French lesson: a spotless surface in The Bar by Toulouse-Lautrec

well. No more spray bottles to buy, just water from the tap, a bar of soap and a scrubbing brush with a bit of elbow grease. The restaurant looks brighter without the table top engrained with yesterday’s beer slops. The natural wood surface displays the cutlery and table decoration to great effect. Ban the spray bottle and bring back sensible practicalities! Charles Stewart The Oldie October 2021 13

The grateful twins gave their helpful lawyer Nemone Lethbridge tea, cake – and a bribe

My cuppa with the Krays I

n 1958, I had recently obtained my first tenancy at 3 Hare Court, a modest set of prosecution chambers at the top of Middle Temple Lane. The Crown Prosecution Service was still a twinkle in the eye of the legislature, and all London prosecutions were in the gift of the Scotland Yard solicitor. And he didn’t like women. This put me in a difficult position. Chambers relied heavily on prosecution work. I was barred from it – even from humble traffic offences. The only work open to me was the lowly ‘dock brief’. Here unemployed barristers would present themselves at the sessions to be inspected by the unrepresented prisoners who would select someone to represent them, purely on the basis of their looks. One Friday evening, my luck changed. Jean, who doubled up as a junior clerk and secretary, typed up my instructions. The case, in the Arbour Square Magistrates Court, east London, was against the defendants Mr R Kray and Mr R Kray. ‘But what are the clients charged with?’ I asked Jean. ‘Oh, don’t you worry about that,’ replied Charles, the senior clerk. ‘You’ll find out as soon as you arrive at court what it is they haven’t done.’ Saturday morning, half-past nine. Although the court would not sit for another hour, the court’s entrance hall was already heaving with activity. A little woman approached me. She was wearing a floral pinafore, headscarf and curlers and pulling a basket on wheels full of dirty laundry. 14 The Oldie October 2021

‘I’m their mum,’ said Violet Kray. ‘They’re innocent.’ ‘I’m brother Charles,’ said the young man escorting her. ‘Yeah. They’re definitely innocent.’ The jailer handed us the charge sheet as he ushered us into a cell. Paddy Pakenham, the solicitors’ managing clerk, shook his grizzled head as he read the document. ‘Sad, really – a bit unworthy. Being suspected persons loitering with intent. Some copper must be a bit desperate. Or ambitious.’ The jailer said, ‘Let me introduce your clients, Sir and Madam. You will treat them with the utmost respect – Mr Ronald and Mr Reggie Kray.’ The brothers sat, side by side, on the low, concrete shelf that served as a bed at the end of the cell. Identical twins, silent and solemn as owls. They did not look like men who had spent the night in custody. Their long, pale faces were freshly shaved, their thick black hair Brylcreemed to glossy perfection. Their dark suits were without a crease, their freshly laundered shirts white and dazzling. The cell was filled with the musky aroma of expensive aftershave. Paddy said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m sorry to see you in this situation.’ ‘It’s a fix-up,’ answered Ronnie. ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’ answered Paddy. ‘Mr Lincoln [the senior lawyer] sends his salutations but, as you know, he can’t come to court on a Saturday. Has to do his religious duty [he was Jewish]. But he’s sent you this lovely young lady in whom he has the utmost confidence. [In

fact, I’d never met Mr Lincoln.] She’ll get you some bail today and then Mr Lincoln will come in person and do the trial for you on a day that suits.’ The brothers stood up, bowing stiffly. I sat down between them and took their instructions. It was alleged that, between the hours of 10 and 11 on Friday evening, they had been seen in Whitechapel High Street, trying the handles of parked cars with the intention of stealing. The twins were outraged. Such petty crime was way below them. ‘We happen to be very successful businessmen,’ said Ronnie. ‘We happen to own three clubs which make a fortune. We’re starring in a film of our life story directed by Joan Littlewood and co-starring Barbara Windsor.’ ‘That’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘I shall certainly go and see the film. But I still have to explain to the court what you were doing in Whitechapel High Street last night.’ ‘We were putting out flyers for our new enterprise, a nightclub,’ said one of them. ‘As businessmen, we can’t never have too much publicity.’ We went into court. The twins bowed stiffly to the stipendiary magistrate and wished him a good morning. ‘Good morning, boys,’ he replied with a smile.

Tea for two: Reggie (left) and Ronnie Kray in the early 1960s

I made my application for bail, stressing the Krays’ community ties and charitable activities. Brother Charles, who had brought a bundle of flyers advertising the new nightclub, slapped it down on the railings that separated the public from the rest of the court with a thump which the magistrate could not have failed to hear. ‘Nice one,’ Charles said in chorus with his mum and the driver. Bail was granted. This was the first of many Saturday mornings spent at Arbour Square. After a time, I graduated to weekday trials and to Crown Court appearances. I won a good percentage of the cases I did for the twins and their associates. I thought that, as an advocate, I must be the cat’s whiskers. It never occurred to me that my success had anything to do with the menacing presence of large, scar-faced men at the back of the court. On one occasion, after I’d successfully defended the twins on a charge of demanding money with menaces, Ronnie said to me, ‘Mother would be honoured if you would come and have tea with us.’ We accepted a lift to ‘Fort Vallance’, as the Kray home was known in the local community. Their house was in a little Victorian terrace, Vallance Road, off Bethnal Green Road.

Outside, it was immaculately maintained. Inside, it was decorated in the style of a Romany caravan: walls covered with embossed red velvet, windows adorned with lace curtains secured by satin bows. The twins led us upstairs to a room with a long table like a boardroom. Ronnie took his place at one end, Reggie at the other. Charles, Paddy and I were shown to appropriate places. The acolytes stood behind our chairs. Mother Violet brought in tea on a tray. There was a bone-china tea set, biscuits in a barrel and cake on a three-tier stand. Charlie poured the tea: milk in first. We made stilted conversation about the traffic on Cambridge Heath Road. Ronnie rose to his feet. ‘Miss Lethbridge,’ he said, ‘We sincerely appreciate all you have done for one and all of our family. On behalf of one and all of our family, I would like to give you this small token of our appreciation.’ He handed me a thick wad of fivepound notes. I was embarrassed. I said, ‘I’m awfully grateful – it’s really sweet of you. But I get paid by legal aid.’ Reggie was gesturing to his brother. ‘Use your loaf, Ron,’ he said. ‘You know the rules.’

‘Gotcha,’ answered Ronnie. ‘All out.’ The acolytes left the room. Someone closed the door. ‘Sorry, Miss Lethbridge, I shouldn’t have done that in front of witnesses. Here we go,’ Ronnie said, handing the money to me again. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m simply not allowed to take gifts. But I do appreciate the kind thought.’ Ronnie shook his head in puzzlement. He arranged for the driver to take us back to the Temple. On the ride back, I said, ‘Oh God, I hope I haven’t blown it with the twins. We’ll probably never see them ever again.’ ‘On the contrary,’ replied Paddy, ‘I’ve arranged for them to get you a nice crocodile handbag. I’ll work it down to you.’ ‘I don’t want a crocodile handbag. I don’t want anything. Except their work, of course. And I suppose that’s gone for a Burton.’ The twins didn’t seem to have been offended by my odd behaviour. Shortly after this, they instructed me, via the solicitors, to look after their protégé Frank Mitchell, known as the Mad Axeman (later killed by gangsters). Work continued to flow to 3 Hare Court until 1962, when I left to live in Greece. In 1969, the Krays were tried at the Old Bailey for murder. Jimmy O’Connor, my late husband, and I obtained press tickets for the hearing – we were thinking about writing a book about it. I had not seen the twins for seven years. When they entered the dock in Number 1 Court, I was shocked by the change in their appearance. They were no longer identical. Reggie was thin, drawn and obviously terrified of the situation he found himself in. Ronnie was fat and seemed not to have a care in the world. I would say he was away with the fairies. He looked around the court with smiling curiosity. He could have been starring at the Palladium. He recognised me and sent me a note via one of the prison officers. It read: Dear Miss Lethbridge, You are more beautiful than ever. When I get out of this, I will take you to the moon. Alas, he got no further than Broadmoor. But he sent me a Christmas card every year until he died. Nemone: A young woman barrister’s battle against prejudice, class and misogyny by Nemone Lethbridge is out now (£12.99) The Oldie October 2021 15

My dream team After 50 years as a commentator, Henry Blofeld picks the best international cricketers ever for his unbeatable XI

ixing the perfect cricketer cocktail quickly becomes a barman’s nightmare. This human pick-me-up would have to be able to bat and bowl right-handed and left-handed with equal facility, which would not be easy. But even trickier would be the need for this team of one to develop jack-in-thebox qualities that would enable it to keep wicket to its own bowling. This composite player would also have to be the captain, and placing the field would mean he or she would need to be in 11 different places at the same time without spilling a drop – or, it must be hoped, a catch. This imaginary, liquid figure would be, for a start, distinctly Bradmanesque. Don Bradman was the most successful batter ever, averaging 99.94 in his 52 Test Matches. He scored 309 runs in a single day in the Headingley Test in 1934 and, although the quality of his batting was exemplary, he will be remembered for the quantity of his runs rather than for the strokes that produced them. This cocktail of a cricketer starts therefore with a double measure of Bradman, which will be flavoured with a dash of many other alluring ingredients. The irresistible taste of Ranjitsinhji playing his famous leg glance when making 154 not out in his first Test for England, against Australia in 1896, plus the sparkle of Victor Trumper, never better seen than in the Old Trafford Test in 1902 when he made 104 on the first morning. The classic vintage precision of ‘The Master’, Jack Hobbs, who made 197 first-class hundreds and was perhaps the best cover point of all, as well as the piquant flavour of Walter Hammond’s cover drive as he scored that 240 against Australia at Lord’s in 1938, must both be there. There should be a squeeze, too, of the twinkling improvisation of Denis Compton, which brought him 3,816 runs in 1947 – a record which will never be broken. Then a good drop of the all-round, mercurial 16 The Oldie October 2021

10 9

(1) Don Bradman (2) Jack Hobbs (3) Garry Sobers (4) Viv Richards (5) Ian Botham (6) Shane Warne (7) Fred Spofforth (8) Fred Trueman (9) Jim Laker (10) Clive Lloyd (11) Alan Knott

left-handed sumptuousness of Garry Sobers, who made the then highest-ever Test score of 365 not out against Pakistan at the age of 21. Mix in a measure of the merciless authority of Viv Richards, blended with more than a dash of the left-handed elegance of Graeme Pollock, at his best at Trent Bridge in 1965, when he made an unforgettable 125. Then a good measure of the do-or-die might of Ian Botham, as seen best in his 149 not out against Australia at Headingley in 1981; and finally a hint of Brian Lara (400 against England in Antigua in 2004/05) and a pinch of the Sachin Tendulkar who made 136 against Pakistan in Madras in 1999. Maybe it is too much to expect this mythical cricketer also to be the bowler of all time, so let us give him a bowling twin in another glass. Shane Warne must be the dominating ingredient in this second aperitif. He must be the best bowler of all time – but I can already see a look of dismay on the face of the great S F Barnes. Off a short

run, Barnes was well above medium pace and in 27 Tests, between 1901 and 1914, he took 189 wickets at 16.43, moving the ball in the air and off the seam. Now we come to the fast bowlers. A good splash of ‘The Demon’, Fred Spofforth, who made W G Grace’s life acutely uncomfortable, is essential. Then add a little bit of any, or all, of Harold Larwood, Alec Bedser, Fred Trueman, Dennis Lillee, Michael Holding, Allan Donald, Wasim Akram, Malcolm Marshall, Curtly Ambrose, Richard Hadlee and Imran Khan and our multi-faceted bowler will have an unputdownable taste. Warne is a unique leg-spinner, yet there should be a taste of B J T Bosanquet, the inventor of the googly (and the father of versatile newsreader Reggie Bosanquet). We need to add a mixture of off spin from Jim Laker, Lance Gibbs and Graeme Swann. Then there is the slow left-arm brigade led by Wilfred Rhodes, who helped bowl out Australia at the Oval in 1926 when he was 48. We must also have a taste of Hedley Verity, 10 for 10 for Yorkshire against Nottinghamshire, and Derek Underwood, whose sharp medium-paced spin made Australian batsmen wince. Our two aperitifs need to be up to it in the field. A dash of Bob Simpson, Ian Chappell and Walter Hammond in the slips, together with important zest from Colin Bland, Jonty Rhodes (South Africa), Paul Sheahan (Australia) and Clive Lloyd (West Indies), would make quick singles hard to come by. Which leaves the wicketkeeper – and here the taste of Alan Knott alone is enough. He is that twist of lemon peel so essential to the perfect dry Martini. And so we have two ideal cricketing cocktails which now need to be stirred and not shaken (sic). Henry Blofeld’s Ten to Win … and the Last Man In: My Pick of Test Match Cliffhangers is out on 16th September (Hodder & Stoughton, £20)

For 2,000 years, Julius Caesar and his family have popped up everywhere – from Renaissance portraits to chocolate coins. By Mary Beard

Hail, Caesars! W

e are still surrounded by Roman emperors. It is almost two millennia since the ancient city of Rome ceased to be capital of an empire. But even now – in the West, at least – almost everyone recognises the name, and sometimes even the look, of Julius Caesar or Nero. Their faces not only stare at us from museum shelves or gallery walls. They feature in films, advertisements and newspaper cartoons. It takes very little (a laurel wreath, toga, lyre and some background flames) for a satirist to turn a modern politician into a ‘Nero fiddling while Rome burns’, and most of us get the point. Over the last 500 years or so, these emperors and some of their wives and mothers, sons and daughters have been recreated countless times in paint and tapestry, silver and ceramic, marble and bronze. My guess is that before the age of mechanical reproduction, there were

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more images in Western art of Roman emperors than of any other human figures, with the exception of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and a small handful of saints. ‘Caligula’ and ‘Claudius’ continue to resonate across centuries and continents in a way that ‘Charlemagne’, ‘Charles V’ and ‘Henry VIII’ do not. Their influence goes far beyond the library or lecture room. I have lived more intimately than most people with these ancient rulers. For 40 years, they have been a large part of my job. I have scrutinised their words, from their legal judgements to their jokes. I have analysed the basis of their power, unpicked their rules of succession (or lack of them), and often enough deplored their domination. I have peered at their heads on cameos and coins. And I have taught students to enjoy – and to interrogate closely – what Roman writers chose to say about them. The lurid stories of Emperor Tiberius’s antics in his swimming pool on the island

of Capri, the rumours of Nero’s lust for his mother or of what Domitian did to flies (torture with them with his pen nib) have always gone down well in the modern imagination and they certainly tell us a good deal about ancient Roman fears and fantasies. But – as I have repeatedly insisted to those who would love to take them at face value – they are not necessarily ‘true’ in the usual sense of that word. I have been by profession a classicist, historian, teacher, sceptic and occasional killjoy. In my new book about the Twelve Caesars, as they are often known, I am shifting my focus onto the modern images of emperors that surround us, and I am asking some of the most basic questions about how and why they were produced. Why have artists since the Renaissance chosen to depict these ancient characters in such large numbers and in such a variety of ways? Why have customers chosen to buy them, whether in the form of lavish sculptures or as

WALTERS ART MUSEUM BALTIMORE DOMINIQUE PROVOST, ROOSEVELT PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY, ROBIN CORMACK

cheap plaques and prints? What do the faces of long-dead autocrats, many more with a reputation for villainy than renowned for heroism, mean to modern audiences? The ancient emperors are very important characters, especially the first Twelve Caesars – from Julius Caesar (assassinated in 44 BC) to the flytorturing Domitian (assassinated in 96 AD), via Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian and Titus. Almost all the modern works of art I discuss were produced in dialogue with

Top: The Death of Caesar, Jean-Léon Jérôme, 1867. Far left: Portrait of a Man with a Roman Coin, Hans Memling, c 1480. Left: Franklin D Roosevelt’s toga party, Washington, DC, 1934. Above: a modern chocolate coin showing Augustus

the Romans’ own representations of their rulers, and with all those ancient stories, far-fetched though they might be, of their deeds and misdeeds. But, in the new book, the emperors themselves share the spotlight with a wide range of modern artists. Some, such as Mantegna, Titian or Alma-Tadema, are well known in the Western tradition. Others are drawn from generations of weavers, cabinet-makers, silversmiths, printers and ceramicists who created some of the most striking and influential images of these Caesars. They share the spotlight too with a selection of the Renaissance humanists, antiquarians, scholars and modern archaeologists who have turned their energies to identifying or reconstructing – wrongly or rightly – these ancient faces of power, and with the even wider range of people, from cleaners to courtiers, who have been impressed, enraged, bored or puzzled by what they saw. In other words, I am interested not only in the emperors themselves or in the artists who have recreated them, but in the rest of us who look. There is, I hope, a number of surprises in store, and some unexpectedly ‘extreme’ art history. I shall be introducing emperors in very unlikely places, from chocolates to 16th-century

wallpaper and gaudy 18th-century waxworks. I shall be inviting readers to puzzle over statues whose date is even now so disputed that no one can agree whether they are ancient Roman, modern pastiches, fakes or replicas, or creative Renaissance tributes to the imperial tradition. I shall be reflecting on why so many of these images have been imaginatively re-identified or persistently confused over hundreds of years: one emperor taken for another, mothers and daughters mixed up, female characters in the history of Rome (mis)interpreted as male, or vice versa. And I shall be reconstructing, from surviving copies and other faint hints, a lost series of Roman imperial faces from the 16th century, which are now almost universally forgotten, but which were once so familiar that they defined how people across Europe commonly imagined the Caesars. My aim is to show why images of these Roman emperors – autocrats and tyrants though they may have been – still matter in the history of art and culture. Mary Beard’s Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern is published on 28th September (Princeton University Press, £30) The Oldie October 2021 19

A guide to con men Ruth Webster lost £30,000 to diabolically clever scammers. Here are her tips for keeping the crooks at bay

ave you been scammed? I have. It knocked the stuffing out of me, mentally and physically. I’ve never experienced such a living nightmare before. Don’t think I am exaggerating. And please don’t think, ‘This will never happen to me.’ It is happening all over, all the time – as much a pandemic as COVID. It has been cold comfort to discover how many other victims there are out there – sensible, professional, responsible people – who have been conned as I was, losing, with their self-respect, considerable sums of money. I reckon I’ve seen the last of some £30,000. When the truth emerges, the first reaction is to hide one’s shame. When my counsellor and friend asked if I had anyone I could talk to, I said I really didn’t feel like exposing my folly. ‘Wrong!’ she replied. You must tell everyone: that’s the only way of thwarting the fraudsters. It started for me with a sympathetic woman phoning to ask if I had charged a number of expensive items to my card. ‘No,’ I replied, and she said she’d cancel them. Then a man who said he was from the Fraud Office and was conducting a vital inquiry into counterfeit in a number of banks. When I asked how I could know if he was genuine, he gave me a number to ring, where his position was confirmed. ‘Why me?’ I asked. He said, ‘Because it is your money that is at stake.’ At the time it all seemed perfectly reasonable, and I felt privileged to help. Next I was sent to buy certain extremely expensive items – with the journeys meticulously planned for me – as ‘proof’ was needed for the investigation. These I handed over to couriers with passwords who came to my address, always assured that the

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money I’d spent was being returned to my account. So, with money piled up from investments in my current account (which the fraudsters conned me into handing over), I lost both those expensive items and cash. I tried desperately to get out of this, but the voice, constantly on the phone, completely mesmerised me. It was always ‘Just this once.’ I genuinely believed I was helping the Fraud Office in a detailed investigation into fraudulent practice inside my two banks. The whole ordeal lasted for nearly a month, when the voice suddenly said, ‘You won’t be hearing from us again.’ At last I sought help. To save you from this kind of deception, here are a few tips: Don’t trust the telephone. It can be used in unimagined ways to entrap you. Don’t answer calls from unknown ‘private’ numbers. Don’t be flattered into ‘helping’ with anything to do with finance. Don’t believe callers ‘from [such-andsuch] bank’: banks don’t work by phone. Don’t bother to check callers’ ‘identity’: the contacts they give will only confirm the scam. Don’t believe it will be enough to say ‘no’: the ‘persuasion’ can be interminable and deadly. Don’t ‘confirm’ information about yourself: you are handing over facts that will be used against you. Don’t let them undermine your faith in people you have had reason to trust. For me, this was the unkindest cut of all. Sounds simple? Of course – once you are aware. But I wasn’t. Before this

If, like me, you are old, single and living alone, you are fair game

happened to me, I was entirely ignorant of such frauds. These criminals are diabolically clever: the word most used about their methods is ‘hypnotic’. They know all the tricks and use them ruthlessly. If, like me, you come into the category of ‘old, single and living alone’, you are fair game, particularly now that the stresses of the many past months have left us vulnerable. Our defences are down – and our generation was programmed to stand up for what we see as our civic duty. We expect to help when asked. It must have been, for them, like taking sweets from a baby. I break out in a cold sweat when I think how gullible I was. Now people are saying, ‘How could she have been caught?’ So what can you do? Do put the phone down as soon as a stranger mentions money. Do ignore their repeated ban on mentioning the call to anyone else. Do train yourself to ignore the constant calls that batter down your resistance. Do call the police: they have been a huge support to me. A three-hour session with a note-taking detective has lifted a burden from my shoulders. They are now in control, and if the smallest detail of my evidence can help them, something good will have emerged. Do trust yourself: call for help as soon as anything rings false. Do listen to your bank: I was so brainwashed that I rejected an approach from the bank which could have saved money and possibly identified the criminals. The support of friends has helped me through the slough of despond into which I descended when the scam was revealed. Looking back, I hardly recognise myself. Should I accept responsibility for unwittingly aiding and abetting criminal activity? I feel too raw to decide. One last ‘don’t’: don’t let it happen to you.

Kim Philby was sweet, kind – and a drunk, cold-hearted liar. By James Hanning

A traitor and a gentleman

im Philby (1912-1988) was born 110 years ago this coming New Year’s Day. His early years were influenced by a remote, domineering and often absent explorer father – the cause of his stutter, he claimed. Affronted by the injustices of the 1930s, he became fired with indignation at the treatment of the downtrodden – and what he assumed was the British government’s willingness to collude with the even more oppressive forces of fascism. So far, so understandable. Lots of people joined the Labour Party or the Communist Party. Between 1933 and 1938, membership of the Cambridge University Socialist Society increased fivefold. But Philby was in a hurry. He had visited Germany with his lifelong friend Tim Milne and saw the dawn of the Third Reich with his own eyes. He had seen the brutality of Chancellor Dollfuss’s Vienna and had helped those on death lists escape. He had also been introduced to Otto Deutsch, the Russian spy who recruited Philby. Deutsch was to be the role model the sensitive, impressionable Philby might have hoped his brilliant, conceited father would be. Deutsch, said Philby, was a ‘simply marvellous man’ with a love of and interest in people. That interest was ‘sincere, unfeigned’. Philby said of Deutsch, ‘The first thing

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you noticed about him were his eyes. He looked at you as if nothing more important in life and more interesting than you and talking to you existed at that moment.’ He was ‘a kindly alien’, and had a marvellous education, humanity and a fidelity to building a new society with new human relations. This warm, human figure – so far from the wintry apparatchik one might imagine – was the one who gave direction and meaning to the amiable Philby’s exceptional analytic gifts. It was Deutsch who persuaded the well-connected Philby (Westminster and Cambridge) that he could be more effective operating in secret. As Deutsch put it, ‘An avowed Communist can never get near the real truth, but somebody moving as real bourgeois among bourgeois could.’ But why did Philby do it? Because he could. He possessed an extraordinary gift for mendacity. Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky went further, and said he had ‘a compulsion to deceive those around him’. And, to Philby, those lies were for the most part told in a noble cause – the fight against fascism and the building of an optimistic political world where human goodness could prosper in defiance of baser instincts. That the midwife of this sunny new world was Joseph Stalin makes that hope seem all the more futile. And, as Philby’s opponents are quick

to point out, this is not mere hindsight. There was mounting evidence, as the 1930s progressed, of Stalin’s show trials and the murdering of his own people. Yet, apart from a wobble over the Hitler-Stalin pact, Philby’s faith never wavered. Philby had little need for approbation of his cause. The 1930s had crystallised his mind – only patience was needed after the war. Some (Gide, Koestler and Spender) saw Communist failures as, at best, the naïve bunglings of a god that failed. Philby saw Communism as a continuing work in progress. He told his American wife, frustrated by the obstructiveness of Soviet bureaucracy, ‘One has got to remember that Communism first succeeded in Russia, and must for some time bear a specifically Russian imprint, including the centuriesold tradition of secrecy in government. Even a major revolution cannot wipe out that tradition in a generation.’ Where most of us tend to dip in and out, for Philby politics trumped everything, to the surprise of almost

Above: Philby at the 1955 London press conference where he denied he was the third man. Alan Whicker smokes, centre. Left & below: Philby and third wife, Eleanor, in Beirut

everybody. To the British cast of mind, any belief in ideology is to be viewed with suspicion. To a lot of public-school chaps, theory itself is a bit of a rum concept. When it emerged that he had signed up with alien, ‘science-based’ Communism, and for decades lied through his teeth about it, no wonder his friends were enraged and confounded. Kim was likeable. He came across as sweet-natured and gentle. He had empathy and emotional intelligence. He would make a point of doing the right thing. Tim Milne said he was ‘never one to shirk an unpleasant duty’. In Moscow, late in life, he would show excruciating levels of courtesy to those laden with shopping as they got off the underground. You knew where you stood with Kim, and he was generally holding the door open for you. Except, of course, you didn’t – and his treachery was not merely that of an innocuous, parlour-game wrong’un or golf-club bounder. People died – some of them British – when, for example, they dropped into Albania at night in the hope

of unseating the Communist Enver Hoxha, to be met with a hail of gunfire. In the words of novelist (and former fellow spook) John le Carré, ‘The scale of Philby’s betrayal is barely calculable to anyone who has not been in the business. In Eastern Europe alone, dozens and perhaps hundreds of British agents were imprisoned, tortured and shot.’ As Moscow built a buffer of nations around itself, he tricked anti-Communist activists, sending them back across their own borders, ostensibly encouraging their subversion but condemning them to death. He justified the deaths, saying he was fighting a war. He just hadn’t told those who loved and admired him. Deutsch had been right. Philby could indeed achieve that much more under cover. To those who thought he was their friend, that deception was unforgivable. Most of us could barely imagine such strength of conviction, let alone such cold-bloodedness. How did he live with himself? Drink, mainly, like his coconspirators Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean, who drank more and more as they tried to reconcile a career crammed with incompatible lies. Philby attempted suicide at least twice. He must surely have been tempted by British offers to come clean, but he remained an ideologue. He loved the idea of serving Russia and Communism, and wanted to carry on, fleeing to Russia only in 1963 when all other options were exhausted. But, like Kipling’s Kim, after whom Philby was named, there was another attraction. Kipling said of Kim, ‘What he loved was the game for its own sake – the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies.’ My concern when I started writing my book was whether people are still interested. Hasn’t Philby been done to death? Seemingly not. The fact that, nearly 60 years on, a screen version is being made of his friendship with Nicholas Elliott, starring Dominic West and Damian Lewis, suggests the appetite is still there. Yet there is so much more, and it is an extraordinary human story. It turns out much has been overlooked – about his romantic life, the seven years of happiness he enjoyed in the Lebanon after he was cleared by Harold Macmillan in the mid-1950s, and the strength of his friendship with Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and fellow Soviet mole. What’s more, there are even more holes in the official version than I thought. Love and Deception: Philby in Beirut by James Hanning is published on 30th September (Corsair) The Oldie October 2021 23

The sad death of Charlie Watts leaves two original band members rocking. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards talk to Anthony DeCurtis

The Stones keep on rolling along… W

hen the nascent Rolling Stones began performing around London in 1962, the notion that a rock ’n’ roll band would last anything remotely like 50 years was not just absurd – it was inconceivable. ‘I didn’t expect to last until 50 myself, let alone with the Stones,’ Keith Richards said. ‘It’s incredible, really. In that sense, we’re still living on borrowed time.’ Mick Jagger takes a more expansive view of its ongoing evolution. ‘You have to put yourself back into that time,’ he says about those early days in London, when he, Richards and guitarist Brian Jones shared a legendarily squalid flat at 102 Edith Grove in Chelsea (Richards described the place as a ‘beautiful dump’) and hustled gigs wherever they could find one. ‘Popular music wasn’t talked about on any kind of intellectual level. There was no such term as “popular culture”. None of those things existed. But, suddenly, popular music became bigger than it had ever been before. It became an important – perhaps the most important – art form of the period, after not at all being regarded as an art form before.’ Of course the collaboration at the heart of the Stones’ success is the creative interplay between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Jagger and Richards knew each other as young boys growing up in Dartford, Kent, close to south-east London. They lived not far from each other and attended the same junior school. They drifted apart, but then famously ran into each other one day at Dartford railway station as Jagger was heading to classes at the London School of 24 The Oldie October 2021

Economics and Richards was off to Sidcup Art College. The spark of their connection was music. Jagger was carrying The Best of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops and One Dozen Berrys, albums by artists that, taken together, provide something like the genetic code of the early Rolling Stones. Seeing the cache his friend had in his hands, Richards sensed the possibilities. ‘To me, that was Captain Morgan’s treasure,’ he said. The two men began talking and discovered their shared love for American blues and R&B. Jagger had been doing some singing. Richards had been playing guitar. Their friendship was rekindled, now charged by passion and ambition. They began to meet regularly to play songs by their favourite blues artists, and became regulars on London’s burgeoning R&B scene. ‘Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic,’ Richards soon wrote to his Aunt Pat. Over the decades, Jagger and Richards’s relationship has proven combustible. But on that day in Dartford, an unbreakable attachment was forged. Richards said, ‘It was almost as if we made a deal without knowing it. Like Robert Johnson at the crossroads. I don’t know why it should have happened, but there was a bond made there that,

‘Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic,’ Keith told his Aunt Pat

despite everything else, goes on and on – like a solid deal.’ Dick Taylor, who played bass in an early configuration of the Stones, said of the Jagger-Richards tie, ‘One day, Mick would become Keith. But then, on Proper Charlie – plus Keith, Ronnie and Mick

another day, Keith would go all like Mick. You never knew which way round it would be. But, from then on, Mick and Keith were together. Whoever else came into the band or left, there’d always be Mick and Keith.’ Brian Jones was the third key member of the original Stones triumvirate. He placed the ad inviting musicians to audition for a new R&B band that eventually led to his being joined by Jagger, Richards and Taylor. Boogie-woogie pianist Ian Stewart was the first to be accepted into Jones’s combo, which took its initial name as the Rollin’ Stones when a club owner surprised Jones during a telephone conversation by asking what his band was called. Stuck for an answer, Jones offered ‘The Rollin’ Stones’, a plural rendering of the title of one of the rawest, most brooding blues numbers on The Best of Muddy Waters. Drummer Tony Chapman joined for a time. Before long, Dick Taylor left (he

would go on to help found the Pretty Things) and was replaced on bass by Bill Wyman. Stewart would eventually cease to be a full-time member in May of 1963, and instead became the group’s beloved road manager and taskmaster. Always held in the deepest affection and highest regard by the band, Stewart would routinely summon them to the stage with such endearments as ‘You’re on, my three-chord wonders’ or passingly refer to them as ‘my little shower of shit’. A masterfully rhythmic pianist who steadfastly refused to play minor – or ‘Chinese’, as he put it – chords, he often sat in with the Stones, both in the studio and on stage, until his death in 1985. The late Charlie Watts (1941-2021) soon took over the drums spot. By the spring of 1963, the line-up of the Rolling Stones that the world would first come to know – Jagger, Richards, Jones, Wyman and Watts – was fixed. ‘Something was happening in the late winter of 1963 and afterwards,’ Richards

said, ‘because suddenly hundreds and then thousands of people were queuing up to see us. And it doesn’t take a nail driven through your head to make you realise that something’s going on and you’re part of it. It was an amazing experience and it happened so fast, starting in London and then moving out from there. It was like hanging onto a tornado.’ The Stones proceeded to press every button in the psyche of post-war British authority figures, who were desperate to restore a pre-war status quo. ‘The English are very strange,’ Richards says. ‘As long as you don’t bother them, that’s cool. But we bothered them. We bothered ’em because of the way we looked; the way we’d act. Because we never showed any reverence for them whatsoever.’ Much has been made of how the Stones, in cahoots with their young manager and producer Andrew Oldham, consciously assumed a dark, rebellious stance in opposition to the Beatles’ sunniness. If the Beatles were wearing the white hat, Richards observed, the only option left was the black hat. Jagger has compared his blues obsession to the fascination subsequent generations of white teenagers would have with hip-hop. ‘It’s the other; it’s the most different thing,’ Jagger said. ‘You’re leading a relatively comfortable life, but all the music’s about people who are ploughing fields, experiencing economic hardship and being racially abused. They’re singing about having woman problems and you didn’t even have a woman to have a problem with. You’re discovering the background of all these lives. ‘It was a socially aware music, as opposed to the other popular music at the time, which was pretty much candyfloss stuff. The blues was a much more directly spoken real experience – even if it wasn’t a real experience for us. It was a learned experience for us.’ Richards remains enthralled by the inexorable pull the blues exerted on him. ‘Why the keening sounds from Mississippi should strike notes of thrill and terror and wonder in hearts in the suburbs of London I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It can only be because it goes beyond colour, blood – it goes to the bone. Maybe that’s it. If you look closely at the marrow, there’s a bit of blue in there.’ The Rolling Stones: Unzipped, with an introduction by Anthony DeCurtis, is published on 7th October (£35, Thames & Hudson) The Oldie October 2021 25

How bankers lost credit Ex-banker Martin Vander Weyer charts the decline of moneymen from cultivated intellectuals to today’s greedy buccaneers

rime ministers, archbishops, police chiefs, England football managers: none of them seems quite what they used to be. But what about bankers? Were the City chaps (yes, they were all chaps) of yesteryear wiser and nicer than the thrusters of today? Or does that career path perpetually attract a character type the rest of the world tends to despise? Before I answer, I’ll admit I escaped from a first career in banking 30 years ago – so you might think what I’m about to express is no more than the prejudice of age. But I believe there really is a generational difference. Let me transport you to a party hosted by a banker called Michael von Clemm in Beijing’s Forbidden City in June 1989 – actually on the day of the first prodemocracy demonstration in nearby Tiananmen Square. Von Clemm, an American of AngloGerman descent, was a big shot from the Wall Street firm of Merrill Lynch. He was in China with hundreds of other financial frequent flyers (including, in a junior capacity, me) for a meeting of the Asian Development Bank, the sort of networking thrash the veteran City columnist Christopher Fildes used to make fun of as ‘boondoggles’. In essence, von Clemm’s crowd were a tribe of Gucci-shod globetrotters who prided themselves on their hinterland as much as their mastery of markets. They did huge deals for huge clients and still found time for opera, fine art, fishing in Iceland, skiing in Méribel (which they pronounced ‘Mirabelle’, like the grand London restaurant they also frequented) and shooting everywhere. Von Clemm’s own story extended to several degrees in anthropology and chairing the Roux brothers’ restaurant business. This was the generation who built the ‘euromarket’: nothing to do with the future single currency – it was a mechanism for recycling offshore dollars into bond issues

for international borrowers. Its progenitor was Siegmund Warburg (1902-82), an emigré intellectual and City mould-breaker who would habitually ask job candidates, ‘What books have you read lately?’ and ‘What do you collect?’ That Beijing throng might have included Siegmund’s protégé David Scholey (once a jazz trumpeter) or Win Bischoff of Schroders (‘dashing skier … twinkling blue eyes’, wrote a breathless profile-writer) or Michael DobbsHigginson (also Merrill Lynch, part-time Buddhist monk) or the ever-present Baron William de Gelsey of Orion Bank, who after his death this year at the age of 99 was accorded a Hungarian state funeral. These cosmopolitans did business, just as they socialised with each other, in a civilised way. Meanwhile, back home, there was another archetype of the era: the subfusc City financier whose word was his bond though his words were few. John Baring (of Barings, naturally), Lord Rockley of Kleinwort Benson and Tim Collins, a naval war hero who chaired Morgan Grenfell, were all famed for the wisdom they expressed by saying little. They were liked and trusted by their peers. They represented a golden phase of the City that lasted from the first Eurobond issue in 1963 to the forced sale of S G Warburg to Swiss Bank in 1995, shortly after the collapse of Barings. What happened towards the end of that period was a shift of power from the clienthandling polymaths and grandees to the trading-floor buccaneers. Big Bang, the 1986 change of City ownership rules, was the harbinger of change. Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s

The lust for lifechanging bonuses destroyed corporate loyalty and trust

1989 account of life at Salomon Bros in London and New York under foulmouthed trading bosses such as John Gutfreund and Lew Ranieri, was a glimpse of the world to come. As post-Big Bang remuneration scales soared, the lust for life-changing bonuses – best bagged by hopping from firm to firm – destroyed corporate loyalty and collegiate trust. The one-off deal and the billion-dollar trade became more important than the long-term client relationship. Aggression became a more useful attribute than breadth of knowledge. A search for star names of the past 25 years yields only Fred Goodwin, who brought the Royal Bank of Scotland to its knees, and Bob Diamond of Barclays Capital, who fell after the Libor scandal. Smaller fry of the new breed included Tom Hayes, a maths genius who received an 11-year sentence for Libor fraud, and Jonathan Burrows, a fund manager, caught dodging £43,000 in commuter train fares. The rest of their pack were remarkably well-portrayed in the BBC drama Industry – about stressed-out, coked-up youths making a mark in a fictional investment bank, Pierpont & Co. Too harsh about the present generation? Too nostalgic about the previous one? I honestly don’t think so. Human nature may not change, but the way people behave to impress their peers certainly does. Banking used to be a milieu in which intellect, integrity and shared culture mattered a great deal. Then it became an arena in which market power and the mathematics of money trumped all else. The gentler souls lost out and left, some to join niche boutiques that replicated the old modes of business. Many – including me – departed with great relief, to find entirely new careers. Martin Vander Weyer’s The Good, the Bad and the Greedy: Why We’ve Lost Faith in Capitalism (Biteback) is out on 14th October The Oldie October 2021 27

My brush with the Grim Reaper An operation on an intimate part of his body reminds Barry Humphries of his mortality

he scrotum is very forgiving. These comforting words were recently uttered by a distinguished surgeon before he deracinated a nasty excrescence in a dark part of my anatomy. I had the very rare extramammary Paget’s disease, first noticed under the shower – so it was a general anaesthetic and the knife. Ladies sometimes get Paget’s on their breasts but it rarely, if ever, assails a man’s front botty*. I haven’t been in hospital for ages. Not since a burst appendix which was undiagnosed for ten days because my appendix was hiding on the wrong side. Most of my life-threatening ills are, it seems, unique. On that occasion, a funny thing happened to me on the way to the operating theatre. Fear had made me rather chatty. As we trundled down a long corridor and descended in a very slow lift, I asked the kind, non-binary Executive Health Care Provider, or nurse, whether farming implements were allowed in the hospital. She said she didn’t think so, and why? ‘Because,’ I said, high as a kite on a pre-med, ‘I just saw a very tall man wearing a long, hooded robe and carrying a scythe walking past me.’ ‘Oh him!’ said aptly named Florence without missing a beat. ‘I saw him too and I sent him down to the other ward to see old Mr Henderson. That old

28 The Oldie October 2021

bastard has been giving us all a very hard time lately.’ In the Melbourne of my youth, a hospital visit on Sunday was a popular family outing. Large groups of people, admittedly from rather common suburbs, streamed into the city’s principal infirmaries to goggle at the human exhibits. It was just like Bedlam in 1750 at the height of its fame as a tourist attraction. I remember reading in the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial in the early fifties about an incident in intensive care when a woman tourist had been rebuked for eating a sedated patient’s grapes. A very nice production team from the BBC arrived on my doorstep this morning to interview me for a documentary about a world-famous personage whom I happen to know. I am told that the finished programme, to which many others are contributing, will go to air only after its subject’s death. I pointed out, to myself actually, that I was bound to pre-decease this distinguished personage – so it would be the Dead extolling the Dead. By the time the programme is transmitted, the finery I donned for the interview will have long since been snapped up at an Oxfam shop. The BBC might even be obliged to put up a subtitle explaining who I am … or was. When the time came to face my interlocutor, I got

all my tenses muddled up and began to wonder if I was dead or alive. Years ago, at a Hampstead party, I was importuned by a highly caffeinated young man who kept exclaiming, ‘I can’t believe it’s you! I can’t believe it’s really you!!’ When he’d calmed down, he explained that he was a journalist on a popular newspaper and that on that very day had been engaged in writing my obituary! With fatuous self-satisfaction, I record my reply. ‘I hope there isn’t a deadline,’ said I, quick as a flash. Do you, my dear perusers, think that the national broadcaster has already compiled a programme to be transmitted on that melancholy day in the distant future when the gladdie falls from my lifeless grasp? Who will be weeping crocodile tears on that show, do you suppose? Will there be a eulogy from Jeanette Winterson, a kaddish from Lady Gaga, and a heartfelt expression of regret from Lord (Boris) Johnson for not having given me the knighthood? One of the horrible symptoms of encroaching age is not just forgetting names, although this is a serious vexation. A friend of mine, the late Bryan Moyne, bumped into Diana Mitford at a party when she was married to Sir Oswald Mosley. ‘I’m sure we’ve met before,’ said Bryan.

NEIL SPENCE

Anatomy and melancholy: Barry Humphries in his north London home

‘Yes,’ replied Diana. ‘I was your wife.’ Getting unreasonably irritated is another troubling infirmity when you have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana skin. I am one of the most reasonable of men, but I get very tetchy when a shopgirl – aka a non-binary retail executive – doesn’t understand my request, or is not listening, and says, ‘I’ll double-check with my colleague.’ Did they check once, I wonder? Of course they didn’t. But double-checking sounds diligent. And who the hell is this omniscient colleague anyway? And when will the Mail and its

competitors stop being furious? The word ‘fury’ occurs at least twice in every issue of the paper: PAEDOPHILE’S FURY AT HARSH SENTENCE Now that The Oldie is the preferred reading of bright young people, there might still be a few readers who are old enough to get regularly irritated. There should be a forum in this periodical for us to let off steam. When my operation was successfully over, and the anaesthetic began to ebb from my system, I started thinking rancid thoughts. Pathetically sorry for myself, I thought of the people in my past life who had done the dirty. Reluctant to let them live rent-free in my brain, I decided to

take a positive – and even lucrative – approach to tackling these pygmies. I have begun writing a book about them: all those lawyers, tax advisers, accountants, promoters, Sydney estate agents and producers who took me for a ride. When it’s finished and catharsis occurs, or doesn’t, I’ll drop it in the trash where such resentments belong. Or I might actually publish it. Look out for They Pissed in My Soup (Billabong Press, 855pp). The people I will portray will be heavily disguised, but instantly recognisable. Sometimes I wish I could be as forgiving as my scrotum. *Front botty – an Australian medical term for the region of the pudenda The Oldie October 2021 29

How Gothic fashion crept from churches to vampires to pop groups. By Roger Luckhurst

Back to black I

t used to be easy to define the Gothic. A castle on a precipice, silhouetted against a gibbous moon. Next door, a ruined church with arched windows, the gravestones at crazy angles. Something unholy and transgressive stirring in the shadows under the twisted yew tree. The mist would be optional, but the bats and screech owl compulsory. This makes the Gothic a product of northern European climes: the Alpine heights where Frankenstein’s monster roams; the wild forests of Scandinavia; the bleak cemeteries of London or Edinburgh, where bodysnatchers lurk. But if these are some of its places of origin, it has since exploded across the planet. The Gothic now speaks in many languages. In a single evening, one might play a level of a Japanese survival horror game while plugged into a doomy 1980s soundtrack from the Sisters of

Blood Count: Christopher Lee’s Dracula, king of Gothic baddies 30 The Oldie October 2021

Mercy or the Cure, then stream an episode of any number of horror series from America, France or Egypt, while flicking through a few stanzas of ‘graveyard poetry’ from the 1740s, before hitting the streets in unglad rags to watch the latest Korean, Italian, Thai or Australian horror film at the cinema. The global spread of the Gothic has been swift and overwhelming – as uncontainable as a zombie virus. Some complain that the original meaning of the term ‘Gothic’ – now ubiquitous – has been entirely hollowed out. But I prefer to see it as a collection of ‘travelling tropes’ that, while they originate in a narrow set of European cultures with distinct meanings, have embarked on a journey in which they are both transmitted and utterly transformed as they move across different cultures. Sometimes the Gothic keeps a recognisable shape but more often it merges with local folklore or beliefs in the supernatural to become a weird, wonderful, new hybrid. The pointed arch that defines Gothic architecture maintains its distinctive shape, yet transforms in meaning and significance as it passes from Islamic to northern European to American settings, to the ‘Bombay Gothic’ of buildings in colonial India or the white-settler churches of Australia and New Zealand. The vampire, meanwhile, starts in rumours of foul, undead things unearthed on the borders of eastern Europe. But, as it travels by print from Prague to Vienna, and on to Paris and London, it is transformed

Darkness visible: The Abbey in the Oakwood by Caspar David Friedrich

and translated from place to place. Dracula emerges from the very specific context of late-Victorian London, but Bram Stoker’s masterpiece quickly reappeared in very free adaptations in Turkey and Iceland, the meaning moulded to local contexts. The vampire has since become a

AZOOR TRAVEL/ALAMY

recognisable trope, wildly redrawn as it arrives in Spain or Italy or West Africa or South Korea. Since the origins of Gothicism arose with the northern Goths and Visigoths, we have become familiar

with a ‘Southern Gothic’, whether in horrific projections of what lies in the unknown terrain of the Antarctic, or in the American South, steeped in genocidal history. An ‘Eastern Gothic’ has also emerged,

Dracula quickly reappeared in free adaptations in Turkey and Iceland

where the hordes of the ‘Yellow Peril’ haunt the colonial imagination. Cosmic horror brings us glimpses of the vast, incomprehensible terrors in which the whole of our fragile planet bathes. Here the Gothic achieves escape velocity: in space, no one can hear you scream. Gothic: An Illustrated History by Roger Luckhurst is published on 21st October (Thames and Hudson, £25) The Oldie October 2021 31

Town Mouse

Yola, the Polish Socrates of north London tom hodgkinson

In Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow, published in 1921, when its author was 27, a young poet visits a grand country house as the guest of a literary hostess. At the party, he meets various grandees. It’s a satire of Huxley’s real-life experiences – one character was based on Bertrand Russell – and he’s obviously fond of his characters, even though he teases them quite mercilessly. The literary hostess in question was based on Lady Ottoline Morrell, and I was reminded of the book when I heard that Yolanta May had died. Her age was a closely guarded secret. For several decades, she insisted she was 29. Yolanta, or Yola, the wife of the late literary critic and nature writer Derwent May, was, like Ottoline Morrell, a grand literary hostess, and I was lucky enough as a teenager to frequent her parties and salons, being pals with her son Orlando. They took place in the 1980s on the first floor of the May house at 201 Albany Street, near Camden Town. Yola was Polish, had a severe black bob, like a 1920s flapper, and called everyone ‘darlink’. If you had dinner there, you

would eat borscht and find yourself sitting opposite Beryl Bainbridge. The only person Yola permitted to smoke at the table, Beryl would often nod off while her fag smouldered in the ashtray. While giving you more borscht, Yola would prod your back and say, ‘Moments! moments!’ This was her way of telling you to sit up straight. She was training us to be civil. At her salons, you’d be happily chatting to one guest when Yola would pull you away by the elbow and take you to meet another. This might have been momentarily irritating, but I now realise it was being extremely generous and I’m grateful for having been hauled around. She wanted everyone to get to know one another, even us 17-year-olds with our bleached hair and earrings. I remember chatting with writers Peter Vansittart and Alan Ross, editor of the London Magazine, and thinking, this is a nice world: boozy, smoky people, who read and write books. If you were lucky, Yola would take you to meet Kingsley Amis. He was the only guest who was allowed to sit down and not required to circulate. He could

RIP Yolanta May, last of the literary hostesses 32 The Oldie October 2021

remain confident that people would come to talk to him, being so grand. So he sat in the corner with a slightly grumpy expression and held court. What a privilege to have met these greats when young! And there’s another thing that Yola did for us younger poets: she gave us social confidence. Once you’ve spent time at slightly scary parties with the likes of Beryl Bainbridge and Kingsley Amis, lesser mortals such as politicians, bankers and Jeffrey Archer tend not to intimidate you. Thank you, Yola. As Holly Golightly says in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, ‘Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.’ And we certainly need a shot of confidence now that parties are coming back. For many – in particular the slightly introverted – lockdowns provided a welcome break from social functions. So I asked the great partygoer, Gogglebox star, agony aunt and Oldie contributor Mary Killen, for some tips for town mice venturing out into polite society once more. Mary says you must not worry that others are looking down their nose at you. ‘No one is thinking about you and how inadequate you are. They are all thinking about themselves and what you think of them.’ It’s your duty, therefore, to put people at their ease. To anyone who is really nervous, Mary suggests finding a spot near the door, and staying there, so you can make a quick exit if necessary. If you get stuck with someone, you can try gradually widening the space between you until someone else fills it, and then dash off. Either that or attempt the glasses trick: carry a second empty glass with you. That way, you can say that you are on your way to the bar. When chatting to people, says Mary, you must really concentrate and listen to what they are saying. ‘But don’t keep nodding your head and going “Mmm.” ’ I would add a bit of advice from Socrates, who, as well as being the inventor of philosophy, was a dab hand at a drinks party – or a symposium (literally ‘drinking together’ in Greek), as they were known in ancient Athens. Socrates said, don’t talk about yourself. If you boast, you will not be believed. But if you are selfeffacing, you will be believed. So best to avoid the subject of yourself altogether. As for tips for hosts and hostesses, Mary reckons it’s imperative to mix the ages. ‘The young are there to provide glamour. The old must be there, so we can learn from their civility.’ Yola knew all this when she asked us youngies to join the oldie greats at her symposia. RIP Yolanta May, the Socrates of north London.

Country Mouse

The strange death of our village house martins giles wood

As the mighty Colorado River has been reduced to a mere trickle, so my marriage is now measured in small acts of mutual kindness. I bring the wife meals on a tray and drive at 20mph. In return, she mends my expanding man-trouser buttons and thoughtfully fillets the tsunami of news media to present me with articles of ecological interest to read while I’m soaking in the tub. The other day, Mary, who is overworked, had mistaken a guide to weekend retreats in the West Country for something of eco-relevance. Nevertheless it seemed to await my urgent attention. The words ‘bolthole’ and ‘escape’ jumped out at me as I leafed through page after glossy page of immaculately presented chocolate-box retreats. As I reflected that Suffolk pink has been somewhat overused as a shade, I noted that something else was wrong. Judging by the foliage, all these buildings had been photographed in midsummer – peak time for nesting house martins. But this eco-zealot has a forensic eye for detail and I found that I was looking in vain for wall striae. There was no telltale trail of guano. Had the images been Photoshopped to suit the more squeamish palates of city dwellers? Or, worse, had the house-owners Kärchered the guano off the walls, using the highpower jet hose to dispatch the nests, too? That part of south Wiltshire is too far for me to do a citizen’s arrest or spot check. One hopes that in every English village there is a busybody like me to remind householders of their duty, under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, not to destroy the nest of any wild bird. Yet many modern Britons are so de-natured that they dislike the idea of sharing their homes with wildlife. Indeed, a plumber who recently visited our cottage declared that he

‘Luckily, they’re behind bars’

welcomes the current Insectageddon with open arms as it represents considerable savings on ‘killer sprays for within the home environment’. There were more eco-crimes to be gleaned from the photos. There was evidence of chicken wire over one of the thatches to deter sparrows, which have nested in thatched hovels since Hereward the Wake. There were barnconversion retreats whose goldfish-bowl aspects permit the viewing of Britons in leisurewear moving around inside. They have no business being there. Each conversion will have meant the mass eviction of hirundines (swifts, swallows and martins), not to mention barn owls. I turned back to the agitprop mountain amassed by my kind wife – I am currently looking for someone or something to blame for the complete

Barn-conversion retreats permit the viewing of Britons in leisurewear inside

absence of nesting house martins in our own village. Widespread declines have been reported in Europe since 1970 and the usual suspects are listed − intensive farming, human disturbance and weird weather. For many years, I bucked the trend by watering the road to provide mud for nests, but this year not a single nest has been built or reoccupied. Their absence represents a total rupture with my past – and my annual ritual of watching hundreds of swallows and house martins gather on telegraph wires, bound for Africa. The superstitious side of me is aware that their absence also has a sinister meaning. I read aloud to Mary from Richard Jefferies, the Victorian nature writer, who recorded this old country-folk belief: ‘If they do not return to the eaves but desert their nest, it is a sign of misfortune impending over the household.’ ‘Does that mean our whole village is doomed?’ I quavered. Mary retorted that old Wiltshire legends bore no relevance in the modern day. She cited another superstition reported by Jefferies: ‘If an invalid takes a fancy to a dish of pigeons to eat, it is a sign either of coming dissolution or of extreme illness.’ ‘So both superstitions are bunkum,’ decreed Mary. ‘Ring round some of the other villages and see if they have any house martins.’ Sophie, living three miles away, used to demonise woodpeckers. In the past, she witnessed six out of eight of her house-martin nests being hammered by her Cannibal Lecter of a Woody. Grim to report − but Woody gobbled up the fledglings. This year, she outwitted the woodpeckers by installing concrete, artificial nests under her eaves. Local birdman Charlie Corbett, author of 12 Birds to Save Your Life (2021), living five miles away, took the wind out of my sails. His village had at least 25 pairs nesting successfully. What could account for the difference? Corbett says, ‘It’s hard to pin down a reason definitively. Our village has many old-fashioned houses with deep roof overhangs. We have the canal very close which is good for making muddy nests as well as harbouring insects. It was a very dry and cold spring − so my only theory is that you’re not very close to a reliable water source and so nestbuilding was difficult. And the cold, dry spring meant insect life in your village was at a minimum.’ ‘I’ll have my work cut out for me next spring,’ I told Mary, ‘making mud pies and attracting flies to the cottage.’ The Oldie October 2021 33

Postcards from the Edge

My Italian glamourpuss pal was Boris’s mother-in-law

Mary Kenny on Gaia Servadio, the Zuleika Dobson of Fleet Street

TOBY MORISON

To be blonde, beautiful, brainy, acquainted with the Mafia and a member of the Italian Communist Party – what more could a girl have wanted back in those golden 1960s? Gaia Servadio, who’s just died at 82, seemed to me to be the Zuleika Dobson of Fleet Street, appearing in the offices of the London Evening Standard swathed in fox furs and wafting in subtle but expensive scent. Charles Wintour (father of the more famous Dame Anna) was utterly smitten with the glamorous Gaia, and instructions would be issued to ensure her reportage was given splash treatment. She was divine: the quintessence of ‘radical chic’. I couldn’t understand a word she wrote about the dastardly Mafia – it seemed to be translated from the Sicilian – but the ace page-designer Dick Garrett made it look great. A TV company is shooting a drama documentary based on Julie Welch’s The Fleet Street Girls – the female scribes back in my prime – and they surely must include the charismatic Gaia. As Mrs Mostyn-Owen, Gaia became Boris Johnson’s first mother-in-law when he married her daughter, Allegra, although she didn’t quite give him the Partito Comunista Italiano seal of approval. Boris certainly has had some interesting matres-in-law: perhaps, when he eventually retires, he should write a memoir about them. In Juliet Nicolson’s fascinating social history Frostquake, she describes how Britain succumbed to the bitter winter of 1962/63 and when the thaw came woke up to a different world. Before the frost, it was still the culture of the repressive 1950s; afterwards, the liberated 1960s dawned. Everything had changed utterly. Perhaps something similar – in impact, if not in character – will have happened to us, post-COVID. That is to 34 The Oldie October 2021

returning. We’ll never look on such joys again with complacency.

say, as all gets back to normal, we will find much about our world has changed. Possibly, in some ways, for the worse. We may have grown accustomed to being told what to do by ‘the authorities’. We may discover we have become more habituated to being regulated, invigilated, monitored, masked, sanitised, tested and tracked. Yet on the personal side, I believe we will have learned much more about appreciation, and gratitude. There’s an Irish saying – ‘You never miss the water till the well runs dry’ – and how much I now cherish what previously I took for granted. A journey by aeroplane has become as exciting an event as it was when I first experienced the thrill of flight aged 20. A trip to the theatre is now a major treat. When invitations to a dinner or tea party started to appear again in the late summer, I might as well have been a debutante preparing for a ball. How thrilling! To be free to travel, meet family and friends again – isn’t that just wonderful! I appreciate every moment and experience. I rejoiced, in August, to see a long queue of people in jolly mood at London’s St Pancras Station, waiting to board the Eurostar for Paris: the opportunities of normal life were steadily

Princesses these days are infected with the spirit of feminism, affirming their right to make their own choices. Princess Charlene of Monaco has spent the last five months in her native South Africa, leaving her husband Albert and twin children in Monte Carlo. She seems to have embraced her heritage – ‘I am an African at heart,’ she has said – and quite evidently prefers the great open veldt to the tiny principality that Somerset Maugham memorably called ‘a sunny place for shady people’. What a contrast to her late mother-inlaw, Grace, who had to stay walled up dutifully in the Pink Palace, though she yearned to return to thespian pursuits. Brexit, or perhaps COVID, has reduced my supply of Continental publications that follow the detailed doings of the Almanach de Gotha. So I am not as well informed as I used to be about Queen Mathilde of the Belgians, Tasmanian-born Crown Princess Mary of Denmark or Archduchess Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg, who was once mooted as a bride for Prince Charles. Marie-Astrid was ruled out on account of being a Papist, although the Dutch King and Queen have worked out a compromise on this issue: Lutheranism formally prevails but Queen Maxima, Holland’s Catholic queen, is free to practise her own faith. Progressive royals! If Ireland is reunited, the Republican tricolour will probably be abolished. A harp on a blue background (St Patrick’s original colour was blue, not green) has been suggested. It might have to feature a tiny Red Hand of Ulster emblem in the corner. There’s currently much talk of a united Ireland, 100 years after partition. And yet there are still at least 97 ‘peace walls’ in Belfast, keeping warring tribes apart. Not a great augury for peace and unity.

Showbiz doesn’t pay How much money do actors really earn? The big bucks go to a gilded few. The rest of us barely scrape by, says Michael Simkins

CATHERINE ASHMORE

‘Y

ou’re an act-orrhhh, are you? So how much do you earn?’ Ah, here we go. How much do we earn? It’s a question frequently asked of thesps by guileless civilians. It’s little wonder, because actors’ salaries are the last conversational taboo in showbusiness. As a breed, we may be happy to talk endlessly about ourselves (‘But enough of me – what did you think of my performance?’), but ask us how much we’re pulling in and our natural talkativeness exits stage right. The popular perception is that actors earn fabulous sums for doing little more than pulling on a hat and pretending to be someone else for a few hours a week. But the truth is very different. And, remember, you see only the individuals who are working. Some 90 per cent of us aren’t. Most jobbing thesps consider ourselves blessed if we can scrape together 15K a year. If you’re appearing in a fringe production above the Hen & Chickens, you may be lucky to be offered anything more than a weekly travelcard by way of recompense. For a play at a regional repertory theatre, you’ll pocket between £450 and £500 a week, while a stint at the National or RSC will double that figure. Beyond that, it’s up to your agent to wangle a few more quid where they can. The only negotiating power we have is the ability to say ‘No’ and walk away in the hope our bluff won’t be called. But don’t count on it. Actors are ten a penny, and nobody’s indispensable. While subsidised theatre may be regulated by hard-won agreements chiselled out by Equity, our union, in the commercial sector it’s every individual for him- or herself. Years ago, I was offered the (to me) mouth-watering sum of £1,250 a week for a year-long contract in the longrunning theatrical hit Mamma Mia (the 36 The Oldie Oldie 2021

Black tie on a budget: Michael Simkins as Billy Flynn in Chicago

Pierce Brosnan role). On entering my dressing room to take possession for the next 400-odd shows, I stumbled on a rogue payslip left by my predecessor in the role. It revealed that my own version of Pierce had taken a substantial pay cut. My only recourse was a few choice expletives by way of a vocal warm-up. The best I’ve ever managed – a cool 2K a week – came about only because, for the only time in my life, I had some leverage over my employers. I’d been appearing in a West End comedy throughout the summer of 2012. It had proved so successful that the producers suddenly decided to extend the run, assuming I too would be happy to continue. But I was worn out, bored and in desperate need of a break. What’s more, I knew they had no time to rehearse a replacement. When I announced I couldn’t possibly face another performance, dahling, without an instant doubling of my wage packet I knew they’d agree, albeit through gritted teeth. It was a good Christmas.

In a fringe production, you’re lucky to be offered a weekly travelcard

And what of the stars, wheeling away in pantomime at the Palladium or headlining the latest blockbuster musical? Well, your guess is as good as mine. 5K a week? 10K? I’ve heard rumours of celebrities pulling in eyewatering sums, but who knows? They never talk about it. And, as long as they take the rest of us out for the odd company meal, neither do we. So much for the boards. When it comes to acting on television, salaries range from a fee of £800, for an appearance in a single episode of a daytime drama series, up to 150K a year if you’re a regular barfly in the Queen Vic or the Rovers Return – and that’s before you’ve even opened a supermarket. That’s just how it is. Or rather, that’s just how it was. Then along came Netflix. And Amazon Prime, Sky Atlantic et al. These behemoths of mass entertainment have resources the Beeb and ITV can only dream of, and have flooded the industry with cash. Get a berth on A Game Of Thrones or suchlike, even in a subordinate role, and you can be lighting cigars with fivers. Of course, most of your professional life you’re simply sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. Yet when all hope is lost and the bailiffs are hammering at the door, there’s always the possibility of an unexpected television repeat fee riding to your rescue. Only recently, I trousered £600 for a 20-year-old episode of Midsomer Murders, along with 24p from Swedish TV for A Touch of Frost and 2p for a Grantchester in the Czech Republic. I sometimes try to imagine the worldwide residuals that must presumably accrue to the stars of shows such as Friends or Downton Abbey, but I can’t count that high. So if you ever run into me and are tempted to ask how I’m doing, forgive me if I dodge the question. Especially if I’m wiping your table or handing over your Deliveroo order…

Letter from America

The schlock of the new

ANTHONY HADEN GUEST

For 40 years, my magazine has praised eternal art above showy trash roger kimball Have you noticed that, as a group, prophets tend to be a grumpy lot? From Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah, right down to Carlyle, Ruskin, Spengler and beyond: gloominess and bad weather as far as the eye can see. There are many reasons for this, beginning perhaps with what Kant called ‘the crooked timber of humanity’. The sun might be shining, but evil lurks in the heart of man and besides – haven’t you noticed? – standards are plummeting, evidence of maladies real and fabricated (racism, climate change and trans-, Islamo- and homophobia) are rife, and intolerance, ‘whiteness’ and a lack of ‘diversity’ are ubiquitous and need to be stamped out, hard, right now. At The New Criterion, the American cultural review I have been editing since about the time John Stuart Mill’s maid tried to do the world a service by (accidentally) burning the manuscript of Carlyle’s book on the French Revolution (the wretch just sat down and rewrote it), I inaugurated a series called ‘Bright Spots’. It was a Johnny-Merceresque endeavour to accentuate the positive by commenting on ‘promising things in our culture that have been unfairly neglected or are as yet insufficiently known’. I talk about artists like Jacob Collins (look him up) and pianists like Simone Dinnerstein (check out her Goldberg Variations). The series didn’t last long, but that was my fault. There really are quite a number of such figures and initiatives, in the arts and culture anyway (the situation may be more dour in the corridors of public life). In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T S Eliot criticised our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the

poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice, we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. The same argument goes for other arts. Perhaps the chief virtue of Eliot’s essay was in reminding us of how superficial and artistically limiting the Romantic cult of novelty can be. The pretence that the traditional is the enemy rather than the presupposition of originality devalues art’s chief source of pertinence: its continuity with the past. Anyone looking for evidence of this does not have far to seek. A quick glance around our culture shows that the avant-garde assault on tradition has long since degenerated into a sclerotic orthodoxy. What established tastemakers now herald as cutting-edge turns out time and again to be a stale remainder of past impotence. It is one of history’s ironies that Romantic fervour regularly declines. Most of the really invigorating action in the art world today is a quiet affair. It takes place not at Tate Modern or the Museum of Modern Art, not in the Chelsea or Bushwick galleries in New York, but off to one side, out of the limelight. It tends to involve not

‘And just why in the world would I bother to ignore you?’

the latest thing, but permanent things. Permanent things can be new; they can be old; but their relevance is measured not by the buzz they create but by silences they inspire. Again, something similar can be said about the other arts and about cultural endeavour generally. The core problem is often not the practice as such. For example, I doubt that the general level of musicianship has ever been higher than it is now – the world is awash with stunning pianists, violinists, singers etc. But the problem is rather the legitimising institutions that grant or withhold the favour of their approbation. My own view is that the time has come to create and nurture competing sources of legitimisation and approval. Who cares what the BBC or the Times thinks? I hope you won’t mind if I offer The New Criterion as an example. Two things prompt me to do so. One revolves around longevity. Serious cultural periodicals tend not to be long-lived. Ones that are as independentminded and outspoken as The New Criterion enjoy an especially parlous existence. But here we are in our 40th-anniversary season. Eliot’s Criterion, from which we took our name and whose critical ambitions we seek to emulate, had a run of 17 years, from 1922 to 1939. Of course, mere longevity is one thing. Persistent critical vibrancy is something else. It is not for me to comment on our success in that department. Rather, I turn to the editor of The Oldie, Harry Mount, who some years ago in a dazzling burst of understated candour described The New Criterion as ‘America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life’. Who am I to disagree? I hope that you’ll want to join us on the journey. The next 40 years starts now. Roger Kimball is editor of The New Criterion The Oldie October 2021 37

Small World

My first acting job – as a dwarf jester If I want to succeed in Hollywood or get a girlfriend, there’s no choice – I must lie about my height 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… As a very short man living in a very small seaside town, my only problem in the summer is seagulls with poor vision who swoop down on me, in search of prey. But this year I have a new nemesis: the algorithm. For some reason, whenever I fill in a form online, I always get results that put the psycho into psychometric. While awaiting the start of my new job, I thought I would put myself forward for any seasonal work I fancied, and not limit myself by talent or experience. Rather than apply again for Rosetta’s Roast Chicken Caravan, I put myself on the virtual books of an acting agency. I completed all the personal physical information and provided a head shot – perfectly at the intersection between wistful and wise and risk-taking roué. Then my email pinged with what I realistically expected to be an automated offer to play the part of a self-made millionaire in a murder-mystery evening or a butler with an armed-forces past in an EU-funded drama-doc for a museum. Instead, the robots decreed, ‘IMMEDIATE START IDEAL FOR YOU – DEFORMED JESTER ROLE: the opposite of the duke, who is tall, rich and powerful.’ Such was my disappointment, I even wrong-headedly took to my mother for consolation. Eyeing my photo wearily, she said, ‘You’ve got the same problem as André Rieu – imprecise squinting. It’s not clear if you’re looking for a third-row cellist or the nearest toilet.’ I persisted in believing it wasn’t the photo but the algorithm: five foot zero inches in the height column simply does not compute. The coding has clearly got unconscious bias. My father suggested, ‘Maybe it’s your artificial joints, Jem – too much platinum affecting the program.’ Endlessly looking for a defect in my photo, I suddenly realised that a studio 38 The Oldie October 2021

shot of this calibre shouldn’t be wasted – nor should the summer. So I impulsively completed a 376-question profile for a sophisticated dating website. It stated that, with such detailed calibration, it would find me only perfect matches. Moments later, another ping ended all hope. The email said, ‘We help people across the world find that special someone, and we do not want you to think this in any way a reflection on yourself, but unfortunately cannot find you a match.’ I had offered no information worthy of a de facto ban: no dungeons, prison records or penis pics. So my only conclusion was that my height – recorded as a breezy five foot one inch, in the standard one-percentile increase expected on cyber dating sites – was to blame. When the lady fills in her height requirements, even those not bothered about height probably drag the dropdown to approximately five foot four inches. They must think that reasonably shows height isn’t an issue for them. It still allows the computer to say no to me. Possibly because of all this worry about having a jester’s face, no job and a ban from online dating, I developed a chest infection. I dialled a COVID expert, who asked, ‘Have you been in close confines with anyone recently?’ ‘I should be so lucky,’ I said.

He asked me to complete an online form, which would generate an appointment at my nearest PCR testing centre. After completing the details, I was surprised to find the nearest testing centre was within walking distance – always good news for a pedestrian! When I got there, I realised it was a car park. I merrily walked over to the middle, where a gang of luminoustabarded individuals awaited. As I got a little closer, one grabbed the arms of her two companions, alerting them to my presence, and drew something from her belt. Thank goodness it was a megaphone. ‘Stay where you are – do not come closer,’ she instructed. ‘Where is your car?’ she demanded with such aggression that I actually looked around to make sure I did everything in my power to try to find one. ‘I’m a pedestrian,’ I yelled back with such spittle and sentiment that I might make a good sad-faced jester after all. ‘Yes. Sorry,’ Megaphone Lady said, her voice softened as much as is possible when anyone’s using a megaphone. ‘You’re the fifth pedestrian today. There’s something wrong with the website’s algorithm – it didn’t warn me someone like you would be coming.’ I raised my arms to the sky, longing for the seagulls to sweep me off to an algorithm-free land.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

The middle-class mummies who cheat Round and round and round it goes: coursework or exams? Who benefits from which and why? The last two years have been well out of the ordinary, and lessons were or weren’t learned by teachers and the government. The debacle of Williamson’s algorithm in 2020, followed by the shouts of exam inflation in 2021, have left parents and students confused: what do the results actually mean? And wouldn’t it be better if exams were cancelled and everything was judged on coursework? After all my years in teaching, I am absolutely of the belief that exams are the fairest way to judge a student’s performance. Some students respond well to the adrenalin rush of an exam and others don’t. Some students relish the extra time coursework gives them and some are too lazy to take advantage of that time. But the single most powerful reason against coursework is quite simply that it unfairly helps the middle class. For a couple of years in the run-up to COVID-19, I took up tutoring. I taught local children at a local reasonable price, but also took advantage of the ridiculous amounts of money some London parents are prepared to pay (on top of the boarding-school fees). I would toddle up to London every weekend, trail around

knocking at the basement doors of grand mansions. I once made the mistake of appearing at the front door, and was soon put in my Agnes Grey place. And I’d do my damnedest to push up their grades. Until I was complained about to the agency. The complaint was that one parent did not ‘like [my] morals’. On further enquiry, it turned out that what had been found offensive was my refusal to write coursework for the child. ‘Other tutors do,’ the mother complained. That might be an extreme example, but it is not the only one I can give. A child I was tutoring locally managed only a grade four in his mock exam. ‘I don’t understand it,’ the mother said, ‘you got a six in both of your last essays.’ ‘That is because you wrote them, Mum,’ answered the child. (Considering she had a degree in English, I was rather shocked at her poor result.) And it’s not only the parents who will write the coursework. I know of one case where when a particular teacher’s class coursework was moderated he was caught out, basically having written the essay. The task had been so heavily scaffolded for the students that the 30 essays were almost identical. We teachers are answerable for our results; let’s not pretend there isn’t a temptation to cheat. So what about those of a nervous

disposition who panic about exams? Should they be penalised for their sensibilities? Of course not. They too must, as Lady Macbeth would have it, ‘be provided for’. And that, I am afraid, takes hard work – hard work on the part of the students, and also hard work on the part of the teachers. The bane of all our lives is the marking that comes with the job. We heaved a sigh of relief when coursework disappeared, but if we are doing our jobs properly, we should be marking a heck of a lot more now – not less. The simplest, best, most successful way of driving children’s grades up is through practising exam questions weekly. Don’t wait until the run-up to exams; start as the students begin to grasp a text. Begin by setting easier, narrower questions, perhaps – but those students need to sit down confidently for 45 minutes again and again until the exam room holds no fears. I’m not interested in marking a parent’s attempt at a question on Henry V. I’m not interested in looking at some piece plagiarised from the Internet (although I always take a babyish pride in catching the miscreant out). I want to know that my students, whatever their ability, are prepared. That takes a lot of work on all our parts, but it’s worth it.

Quite Interesting Things about … October During the three-month breeding season starting in October, the greatest density of wildlife per square metre in the world occurs on the island of South Georgia.

In October 2008, inflation in Zimbabwe reached 231,000,000 per cent.

spacecraft travelled round the Earth at 50 times the speed of a bullet.

The First World War officially ended on 3rd October 2010.

A survey of 1.8 million office projects and 28 million individual tasks found that the most productive time of the year is 11am on a Monday in October.

8th October is World Octopus Day.

On 12th October 2017, Austrian police arrested a man in a shark costume for breaking a newly enacted ban on wearing facecoverings in public.

On 9th October 2013, NASA’s Juno

Yeager got drunk and broke two ribs falling off a horse. The next day, he became the first person to break the sound barrier. JOHN LLOYD For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia

On the evening of 13th October 1947, Chuck The Oldie October 2021 41

sister teresa

Christ’s guide to good manners With Jesus, there is no longer a sharp distinction between acting and speaking. Attention is not to be focused on ourselves and on our striving to be beyond reproach, but on other people and how our conduct or speech can whittle away their wellbeing, their sense of security and their happiness. Very specifically, this is done by our rudeness. ‘Whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says “you fool” shall be liable to the fire of hell’ (Matthew 5:22). Jesus’s condemnation of abusive language is not to be taken lightly: he sees it as being contrary to the will of God because of its lack of love. In that most famous passage in of all St Paul’s writing – 1 Corinthians 13 – we find ‘Love is never rude.’ A good question to ask oneself whenever one has been offensive is ‘Would I have said that to X, whom I find sympathetic, intelligent and understanding, rather than to Y who is simply maddening?’ The answer is, of course, no. So

perhaps a practical way of checking ourselves is to ensure that we remain at all times courteous to everybody, unselectively. We don’t like doing this because, apart from anything else, it cuts away at our pride and consciousness of being rather better than some people. I have read that, in Greek, grace and charm are closely linked, linguistically speaking. They are a far cry from the kind of human behaviour that takes delight in being blunt, indeed brutal. This calls itself frank or direct, and is all too often linked to a parody of Christianity. There are, of course, times for outspokenness, but it is required far less often than we think. Such forthrightness should be thought through, and not merely tossed around as and when we feel like it. We can flatter ourselves that we are doing someone else a good

turn by our astute insight into their character, but spontaneity can be a killer. We know that love is the most valuable thing in life, and that all other things are temporary, but do we really act as if we were truly convinced of this? Love is also the longest-lasting – so, literally for heaven’s sake, do let’s store it up. How does St Paul recognise what love is? He has not simply assembled a selection of ideal characteristics. He has two yardsticks. The first is Christ – God revealed in human form. The second is the behaviour of the Corinthian community, which is far from Christ-like and therefore far from loving. His words apply to us today, even if our circumstances are somewhat different from those of his original correspondents. St Paul: the Corinthians weren’t Christ-like or loving

Funeral Service

John Charles Woodcock (1926-2021) After 18 months of dreary social distancing and recorded singing, a traditional funeral service was held for John Woodcock, former cricket correspondent for the Times for three decades and editor of Wisden. It was held at St Nicholas’s, Longparish, on the banks of the Test near Andover. A choir sang God Be in My Head and hymns included Blake’s Jerusalem and Praise the Lord, Ye Heavens Adore Him. John’s father had been the rector at the church for 63 years. John had lived in the curacy nearby since 1947. So the service was led by five clergymen who’d served there: Martin Coppen, Dodie Marsden, David Wippell, David Roche and Terry Hemming. Real hymns, psalms, lessons, prayers and readings were heard for the first time since March 2020. There was a rendition of the 42 The Oldie October 2021

Test Match Special theme tune. Eulogies by cricket commentators Robin Marlar and Henry Blofeld and neighbour George de Watteville were reserved for the wake in a marquee in John’s garden afterwards. Nephew Christopher Woodcock read a letter written by John’s father in 1872. Another nephew, James Woodcock, gave a reading of A Glorious Game, Say We by the playwright William Douglas-Home. Soprano Emily Armour sang Felix

Mendelssohn’s anthem O for the Wings of a Dove. Jeremy Cowdrey read Driving to the Match by E V Lucas. Tom Gover read Sir John Betjeman’s poem about seaside golf at St Enodoc. Jane Snow read a passage from the autobiography of Neville Cardus whom John first met on a voyage to Australia in 1950: ‘Cricket, like music, has its slow movements, especially when my native county of Lancashire is batting,’ wrote Cardus, who said he married his wife during a slow innings at Old Trafford. We were told about the Woodcock memorial stained-glass window in the church. ‘It shows a tree flourishing by the riverside – the Test. It’s by third man as you come in,’ said Clergyman No 5. JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

The shocking truth

Electric shock treatment does help if you’re old and very depressed theodore dalrymple My first car had a design fault. It had a distributor cap immediately behind the radiator grille. Whenever I drove in heavy rain, water would enter the cap and bring the engine to a stuttering halt, often in the most inconvenient of places. When that happened, I would get out of the car and give the radiator grille a good kick, first to punish the car and second in the hope that it might work. It did – once. I always felt that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was about as sophisticated as my mechanics. It was like giving the skull a good kick to give the brain within a jolt. But, oddly enough, I became convinced that it worked – in the right cases, of course. Early in my career, there was a lady in the medical ward so depressed that she would not eat, drink or talk. Unsupported, she would have died. Then, in quick succession, she had two spontaneous seizures of the kind brought about by ECT. Immediately

afterwards, she began to eat, drink and talk − quite cheerfully. Suicide is the ultimate bad consequence of severe depression, of course. So, if ECT treats such depression, does it obviate the risk of suicide? It should – but what should be the case is often not the case. Researchers in Sweden compared the suicide rates of people with severe depression who had – and had not – been treated with ECT. Statistically speaking, the risk of suicide is greatest within three months after the end of treatment, ECT or not. They followed up the patients at three and 12 months. In short, they found that at 12 months, 1.6 per cent of patients not treated with ECT had died by suicide, but only 1.1 per cent of those treated with it had done so. Perhaps more surprisingly, there was a difference also in the all-cause death rate between the treatment groups. Some 0.7 per cent and 2.9 per cent of the ECT group had died at three and 12 months

‘Oh no! It’s the man who wanted to know why he was so accident-prone’

respectively. But in the non-ECT group, the figures were 1.7 and 4.3 per cent. Needless to say, some caution needs to be exercised in the interpretation of these figures. Although the authors did their best to control for as many relevant factors as possible, there may well still have been differences between those treated with ECT and those not so treated. Still, since ECT is usually now reserved for the most severe cases (gone are the days when many patients were lined up for what was called ‘the electric breakfast’, having been forbidden to eat before their treatment), the results may have underestimated rather than overestimated the effect on suicide rates. ECT was not effective in young people; only in those aged over 45. The more severe the depression, the more effective it was. It was particularly effective in those who were so depressed that they became psychotic. There were 62 suicides in the ECT group and 90 in the non-ECT group, and a total of 5,525 patients in each group. In other words, 5,525 courses of ECT had to be given to prevent 28 suicides; that is to say nearly 200 courses to prevent one suicide. It was no part of the authors’ intention to study and compare the side effects of the different modes of treatments. It is conceivable – though, to judge from other studies, unlikely – that ECT caused such a deterioration in post-treatment quality of life that it would obliterate the significance of the suicides prevented. Incidentally, it is when severely depressed people suddenly improve somewhat that they are in gravest danger of suicide. They are still miserable, but they now have enough energy and initiative to kill themselves. I am reminded of Tocqueville’s observation, that tyrannical regimes are most in danger of revolt when they try to improve themselves. The Oldie October 2021 43

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

Why Boris is Boris SIR: I write to correct some clear inaccuracies in the September issue. My wife was the great niece of Boris Litwin, a wealthy Jewish businessman in Mexico City. His daughter, Barbara (Bapsi), my wife’s cousin, knew Stanley Johnson at the time when he was proposing a tour to the Americas. Barbara said to Stanley that if they got to Mexico City they should look up her father. This they did, and Boris Litwin entertained them. Stanley’s partner was pregnant and Boris, concerned about the long journey back to New York by bus, gave them air tickets to fly direct. It was then that Stanley said that if the child was a boy he would be called Boris. This can be corroborated if necessary. Lindsay East, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire

Rudolf Hess’s snowman SIR: In ‘I Once Guarded Rudolf Hess’ (August issue), Valentine Cecil describes Hess making a snowman and says, ‘He had built the head separately from the body […] I did wonder if this mode of snowman-building had some Nazi link’. If it did, then every snowman ever built anywhere in North America has had a Nazi link – here, we always make our snowmen in separate sections, rolling one big snowball for the base, one slightly smaller for the chest and one

smaller still for the head. How do you do it in the UK? Perhaps there isn’t enough snow to roll, and you scrape and pat it into a little mound? Puzzled and curious, Elizabeth Cowan, Picton, Ontario, Canada

Super Minis SIR: Reading your article about the Mini Cooper (August issue) brought back wonderful memories of my youth when, in my early driving years, I borrowed two Minis (non- Coopers) from my elder sister and managed to dent them both. A friend of ours told me she had acquired a new car and I asked what it was. She replied it was a cooped-up Mini Super which described a souped-up Mini Cooper quite perfectly. Trevor Edwards, Eye, Suffolk

Go to Hell, scammers!

‘Martial arts is next door. This is marital arts’ 44 The Oldie October 2021

SIR: The article on Dante by A N Wilson (September issue) prompts an immediate response to his lasting relevance in our troubled times. One thing I have retained from studies long ago is Dante’s distinction in the Divine Comedy between malizia and frode in the treatment of criminals in the Inferno.

There it is related that those guilty of the latter – fraudsters of all ilk: cheats, con men and tricksters – were singled out to be roasted in a much hotter circle of Hell than the former, mere murderers, rapists and the like. As a victim of an online scam, subsequently enlisting as a trading standards monitor, I delight in the thought that a similar severity might be meted out to the woefully few scammers who don’t get away with it. Given the opportunity, I’ve delighted in tutoring Dante to the police dealing with my own misfortune. Michael Rand Hoare, London SW17

Merchant navy blues SIR: I was very disappointed to note that Merchant Navy Day (3rd September, every year) did not get a mention in September’s Quite Interesting Things. We (rightly) keep hearing about the plight and shortage of lorry drivers, but we never hear a dicky bird about the hard-pushed merchant seafarers who relentlessly ensure that our goods are exported and, more importantly, that all the food, raw materials and consumer goods we need are imported. As an island nation, we rely on the UK sea-freight industry for 95 per cent

of our trade volume (www.stastista.com). We need to think on! Yours faithfully, Steve Whalley (former Merchant Navy Radio Officer), Cheadle, Cheshire

Coval III

Sir Les made me cry SIR: Sir Les Patterson’s farewell piece (September issue) is the most foulmouthed, non-PC, anti-woke I have ever read. I was crying with laughter from start to finish. Wonderful! Yours faithfully, Jerry Emery, Lewes, East Sussex

Sir Les made me cheer SIR: The article in the September issue by Sir Les Patterson was absolute filth. Marvellous. Yours, David Brearley, Rawdon, West Yorkshire

Reviewers’ double faults SIR: In the past few issues, there have been four reviews of books that have been wholly or partly hatchet jobs on three of Britain’s greatest men: one on Churchill, one on Cromwell and two on Charles Dickens. None of these has taken the opportunity to point out for your readers that they contain serious errors. It should have been known without checking, for example, that Churchill did not send troops into Wales to put down miners; nor was he responsible for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign – no more than Charles Dickens was responsible for Mrs Dickens’s religion being opposed to family planning, or for her walking out on her children when the youngest of them was only six years old. Both claims are implied in the subheading ‘Poor Mrs Dickens’ added onto one review. By repeating uncritically the content of flawed books, just as the books repeat errors from other flawed sources, The Oldie’s reviewers help doubly to mislead its readers, instead of helping them to make good choices of books that they may think of buying. Yours etc, Professor A J Pointon, Portsmouth, Hampshire

The joy of Covals SIR: I’m pleased to learn (Old Un’s Notes, September issue) that a word [Coval] has been coined that encapsulates one of the few occasions in my life when I felt my body suffused in absolute joy. I was in my early 20s, out hiking on

‘I don’t play favourites. I’m disappointed by all my children equally’

Kinder Scout in Derbyshire with a group of friends on a day of perfect weather. I stood at Kinder Downfall, gazing at the sparkling, rushing waters, when a feeling of total pleasure engulfed my whole being. In recent years, I mentioned this phenomenon to a Christian friend who declared it was God infusing me, an explanation that, as an agnostic, I found to be highly unlikely. Or maybe it was God infusing me, but he/she failed to reveal him-/herself. I love The Oldie; the range and quality of the writings are so uplifting when the world around us is going raving mad. Regards, Tony Bailey, Lutterworth, Leicestershire

My two Covals SIR: How strange, your article [in Old Un’s Notes] appearing in the September issue, as I had a ‘turn’ a few days before receiving this issue. Now I know what it’s called. This Coval happened while I was walking my dog on the heath behind my house. I felt so pleasant and at one with the world – it was a fine sunny day with puffs of white cloud. It lasted about 30 seconds. This wasn’t the first time. Back in about 1993/94, after I had taken early retirement from an IT job at BT, I was struggling to find another similar job that paid well. Again, I was walking down a country lane with my dogs back to my house, when it felt as if something went through my body, I felt warmth and euphoria and an inner voice saying, ‘Everything is going to be fine.’ A week later, I had an interview with a small IT company and, days later, they offered me the job. Kind regards, Alan Taylor, St Albans, Hertfordshire

SIR: My Coval was in around 1970. It was a Sunday morning in my home in Potters Bar. My husband and two small children were still asleep in bed upstairs and I stood looking out of the window at a weeping willow in the front garden, just coming into leaf. A joint of pork was waiting in the fridge for our Sunday dinner. It was a feeling of deep contentment that I have never forgotten. Incidentally, I believe Coval Lane is in Chelmsford, not Great Baddow. I grew up in Chelmsford and I think I used to be taken to a dentist in Coval Lane – so not the happiest of associations for me! Joyce Wallis, Potters Bar, Hertfordshire

The Essex Woodstock SIR: I read with great interest John Bowling’s short article (Memory Lane, August issue) on the Essex Woodstock. Living in the locality, I was able to make the Sunday finale of T Rex and Rod Stewart – with Maggie May being encored 26 times!!! Access was, by this time, easy – so it was a free concert as the Hells Angels had disappeared and security was virtually non-existent. As Radio Caroline had been forced to stop broadcasting, it was really fabulous to hear and see artists who went on to become superstars. Unlike at most other music festivals, there was never another show. So we had the best at the right time. Roland Brockman, originally Frintonon-Sea, now Matching, Essex

Brand aid SIR: I totally agree with Matthew Norman’s anger (September issue) at insurance brands increasing premiums for continuing ‘loyal’ customers. One other issue is often not noticed, however. If you look at the small print, you frequently find that both the highpremium brand-name and the low-premium brand-name policies are in reality often being provided by exactly the same mega-insurance company. Neal Whitehead, Yatton, Bristol

‘We see you haven’t lied on your CV’ The Oldie October 2021 45

I Was Told a Joke by

Mother Teresa Occasionally, I would drive Mother Teresa when she came to London. The Missionaries of Charity had a minibus. I was a volunteer driver for their errands and night run, offering food and help to homeless people. On one occasion, some of the nuns asked me to ask Mother to tell the story about the donkey. There was a pecking order and they couldn’t ask her over the head of a superior. When we had finished the rosary and were heading for the Southall convent, I said, ‘Mother, what is the story you tell about the donkey?’ At this, she became animated and began, ‘There was this businessman and he was out in the country going to an important meeting when his car began giving him trouble.’ ‘Oh,’ I thought, surprised, ‘this is a joke rather than a holy story.’ Mother continued, ‘The car wouldn’t go any further and so he went to the nearest village and explained, “I have to

get to an important meeting. Have you got a vehicle – any kind of vehicle – that will get me there?” ‘The villagers said all they could offer him was a donkey, but it was contrary. It would answer to only two commands: “Thank God” for “Go” and “Alleluia” for “Stop”. ‘In desperation, he accepted the donkey and rode it out of the village, only for the donkey to pick up speed. They were heading for a cliff and the businessman was terrified.’ At this point, we had arrived at the

convent in Southall and the superior was standing on the kerb, waiting to greet Mother. But Mother hadn’t finished the joke. She carried on, ‘They came to the edge of the cliff and the man was trying to remember the villagers’ instructions. ‘ ‘‘Alleluia,” he shouted, and the donkey stopped. He was so relieved he said, “Thank God.” ’ Mother turned, smiling, indicating with her hand the man’s fall – and the nuns loved it. Veronica Whitty Game for a laugh: Mother Teresa, San Francisco, 1987

ROBERT CLAY/ALAMY

The joy of brass – aged nine

At the age of nine, I was given by Mr Oliver, the school caretaker, a soprano cornet. It was battered and beaten, had seen far better days and I instantly fell in love with it. I drove everyone mad playing it but, against all odds, I became quite decent, and by the time I was ten, I was first cornet in the school’s brass band. Living in South Yorkshire meant that coal-mining was everywhere and, along with that, most pits had their own brass band. Grimethorpe, Carlton Main, Frickley and many others played, marched, raised funds for local causes and competed in competitions. My local pit was Yorkshire

Main in Edlington. On a dark and rainy Tuesday night in 1972, I and four others from our little brass band piled our instruments into the school minibus and were taken to a full band practice at the pit. My first thought as I entered the rehearsal room was just how busy it was. There seemed to be people everywhere, lots of chairs in semicircular rows and noise from the chatter and

Yorkshire gold: Graham Bibby, first cornet, at nine

laughter, with people warming up, playing scales and snatches of tunes. We all felt very nervous and very small. We were introduced to the bandleader, a small powerhouse of a man called Jack Argyle who had once been principal euphonium player with Fairey Aviation’s brass band and was well respected. He decided where we would sit and who would help us. I sat next to a bloke whom I only ever knew as Pud. The reason for this nickname was never explained or questioned. All I know is he spent a lot of his time pointing at the music when I got lost, which was often. Playing with them was like driving a Formula 1 car when you were used to a bicycle. They were brilliant and talented. They welcomed

us kids with good humour and kindness. I will never forget them. No more than a couple of months after that first rehearsal, I found myself sitting next to Pud on stage, wearing full band uniform, waiting for the curtain to go up at the Gaumont Cinema in Doncaster, to play to a packed audience. I’ve never been more thrilled or excited in my life. From then on, we travelled up and down the county, playing, marching, raising funds and competing. As for Pud, well maybe he just liked desserts. By Graham Bibby, Finningley, South Yorkshire, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie October 2021 47

Books End of the road NIKHIL KRISHNAN The Amur River: Between Russia and China By Colin Thubron

GARY WING

Chatto & Windus £20 Late in this book, which may be his last, Colin Thubron writes his most unsettling sentence: ‘Over the past weeks, in a hotel mirror, I have seen with surprise an old man in his eightieth year, then forgotten him.’ He sees himself, for a moment, as his doughty Siberian companion must do, as ‘a stubborn pensioner’, travelling for obscure reasons along the mighty but unsung Amur river, through parts of Mongolia, Russia and China that only a British travel writer could love. Thubron is a travel writer in the old style, for whom the writing is as much the point as the travel. In his non-fiction – he is also a novelist of some distinction – he is both a well-known literary type, and one of a kind. He has Bruce Chatwin’s love for rugged landscapes but advances no cod philosophy to explain his idiosyncratic wanderlust. He has some of V S Naipaul’s world-historical melancholy, but no thesis to advance about history or empire. The Thubron style is marked, rather, by a low-key lyricism, a downbeat elegance. It can be funny, usually at the expense of some officious bureaucrat (of whom Russia and China ensure a ready supply), but the dominant note is elegiac. On such a journey, he is never short of things to mourn: forests razed for timber; rivers plundered for roe; the sites of mass graves or former labour camps. The journey takes him to Buddhist monasteries, abandoned churches, forests full of bears and sables, and small towns that yield nothing but stories of

loss. Thubron gives us glimpses of the landscape as seen through the eyes of other sojourners – missionaries, journalists, diplomats, exiled revolutionaries or royals and, every now and then, Anton Chekhov, the most famous literary traveller to these parts. Thubron has no defined political outlook, unless a sense of the tragic in human life is enough to count as a politics. He describes what he sees, in its occasional ugliness, and reports, usually without gloss, what the people he meets tell him, even when it is full of ignorance about the West and prejudice against the Chinese or Jews. He trusts his readers to detect his irony and to share his admiration for flawed individuals who exemplify genuine virtues (truthfulness, courage and, especially, resilience). As a traveller, Thubron shows great persistence. The considerable planning and research that make his journeys possible – the books of history and anthropology read, the years learning or

reviving languages and the months waiting for permits to militarised borders – are hinted at but left off the page. His Englishness is both a given, barely worth mentioning, and a constant point of reference. He likens himself and his companions in Siberia, eating an evening meal of ‘contraband caviar and toasts in moonshine vodka’ to ‘schoolboys at a midnight feast’. But he knows the limits of English analogies. Talking to a woman who asks him if England has anything like the Internat system which takes Siberian children ‘hundreds of miles from their homes to Russian boarding school, then returns them to their families in mutual estrangement’, he remembers ‘my schoolboy tears, and they are suddenly trivial’. Thubron is always self-effacing. His references to his own tribulations appear in parenthetical asides – ‘months later, X-rays show two fractured ribs and an ankle fibula broken’. He is ever

The Oldie October 2021 49

stoical: ‘If the surroundings are diverting enough, the last ache becomes absorbed into the body, sinking a little beneath consciousness, until it is all but forgotten.’ Earlier on his journey, he has admitted to a moment of ‘self-induced dementia’, when he loses track of his languages and tries to ‘chat to the waitress in a deranged mixture’ of Russian and Mandarin. One feels for him and admires the tenacity of both the travel and the prose – never florid and seldom lazy. Along with his last travel book, the similarly elegiac To a Mountain in Tibet, The Amur River is a showcase in the late style of a writer who has never sounded young. He was 28 when his first book, Mirror to Damascus, was published. A patrician manner and a British passport can take one a long way in this line of work, as can a thorough knowledge of the names of flowers, trees, butterflies and fish. But, more even than before, Thubron’s prose rings with the knowledge of truths too deep for words.

Mistress of disguise TANYA GOLD This Much Is True By Miriam Margolyes John Murray, £20 Miriam Margolyes is more gifted and more serious than her multifarious roles suggest. Her performance as Mrs Manson Mingott in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, although she’s playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, is the best thing in it. Manson Mingott is kindly and cynical, buried under a mountain of her own flesh. Scorsese was wise to cast Margolyes. I think this is what she is like when she is still and not scheming for attention. But she has filled her career with blockbuster, pratfall and voice-over work. Her cleverness is undeniable, as is her eating disorder, though she rarely alludes to it, saying only that her mother Ruth’s ‘weight ruined all our lives – just as mine does now’. She mostly behaves like an itinerant minstrel wondering where the next gig is. Now, at 80 – it is incredible to realise she is 80 because she is so childlike – she has written a memoir which pulses, as memoirs do, with both admission and denial. She had a fairly normal Jewish childhood – which, to anyone who is not Jewish, will sound insane. She grew up in Oxford – her parents fled there during the Blitz because they had heard Hitler would not bomb Oxford – and, like many

Jewish only children, she was worshipped but not seen. Her father, Joseph, a doctor, was gentle. Ruth was not. She was clever and thwarted – she had sought to be an actress – and wanted Margolyes to be with the ‘best people’. When Margolyes applied to university, Ruth persuaded Isaiah Berlin, then the most famous intellectual in Britain and Joseph’s patient, to support the application. She did this by inviting him to dinner and feeding him the Jewish food of his youth, and he complied. But Ruth did not trust people, which is understandable when, across the sea, Europe’s Jewish community was being slaughtered. Margolyes was raised in a ‘fortress family’ and, like Ruth and many Jewish outsiders, she is a combination of self-hatred and self-love. It’s not unusual in a clever Jewish woman to think the world beyond the door is dangerous, and that she is not beautiful enough for it. The best example of her confusion is probably this: she won’t ‘f**k anyone without a PhD’. That is Jewish snobbery, which is intellectual snobbery, and she has been with a kind and appropriate female academic called Heather – the anti-Ruth – for 53 years. But as a young woman she would perform fellatio on men she met in the street, as if she were shaking hands. ‘It didn’t matter to me whose penis was in my mouth – it was all grist to the mill,’ she writes. ‘I knew I was giving pleasure, which was what delighted me.’ She studied English at Cambridge University and was bullied in the Footlights: ‘These chaps wanted to sleep with women, not compete with them. I was neither decorative nor bedworthy, and they found me unbearable.’ She learnt she was a lesbian and told

her parents. Ruth, thwarted again, promptly had a stroke in revenge. But nothing could dent Margolyes’s love for her mother, even if Ruth had confided that, fearing childbirth, she had wanted to abort Miriam. When she buried Ruth, she realised she was screaming. I think Margolyes’s vulgarity – the fart jokes, the profanities, the flashing of her breasts, the mooning – are her defence against Ruth and the world. She will not be a good Jewish girl and she will pre-empt all criticism – all rejection – with laughter. She had therapy, where she progressed from four years old to 12 and learnt to be objective about Ruth: ‘To make any criticism of Mummy feels like treachery, but I must acknowledge she had terrible moments.’ Only once does Margolyes admit – when she forgets to perform – that her real nature is ‘melancholy’. (Scorsese saw it, too.) Sometimes she is very acute. She says of Dickens, on whom she’s an expert, ‘He pushes reality to extremes. I don’t think there are many other actresses who are as temperamentally suited to interpreting his work as I am. I’m an over-actress; I’m at home in extremes: that’s my weakness and my strength.’ Or there’s this, on growing up in Oxford: ‘A place of harsh judgements and little compassion.’ She is right. These observations make me long for the serious Margolyes in prose, as I long for her on screen. Sometimes you find it, but not where you expected, and at the edges, because that is where she finds herself.

Daddy’s girl JANE RIDLEY Mary Churchill’s War: The Wartime Diaries of Churchill’s Youngest Daughter By Emma Soames Two Roads £20

‘No point in hunting when you can order online’

Mary Churchill (later Soames) was just 17 when the Second World War broke out. She began to keep what she described as a ‘diary of an ordinary person’s life in wartime’. In fact, she wasn’t an ordinary person at all. She was Winston Churchill’s daughter, and her account of Churchill family life is what makes this diary historically significant. The war uprooted Mary from her life as a priggish, horse-mad teenager at Chartwell, where she was brought up almost as an only child – the nearest sibling to her in age was Sarah, who was eight years older. Chartwell became The Oldie October 2021 51

a hospital. Mary accompanied her parents to London, first to a flat in Admiralty House and then to Number 10 when Winston became Prime Minister. Her diary makes plain her worship of Papa. She sat in the gallery at the House of Commons and listened to him speaking, ‘breathless with pride’. At one point, she wrote, ‘My love of Papa is like a religion.’ In spite of worshipping her father, she managed to remain reassuringly normal. Warm-hearted, direct and full of common sense, she was the only one of Churchill’s children who didn’t divorce. She was bitterly critical of Randolph, her only brother, writing perceptively that the greatest misfortune in his life ‘is that he is Papa’s son’. Randolph was Churchill’s blind spot. He spoilt him and couldn’t see his failings or his lack of ability. Mary was torn by the war. She felt a duty to stay with her parents– ‘I know I help Mummie by being at home; also, in a queer way, Papa.’ On the other hand, she desperately wanted to do something for the war herself. In August 1941, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the volunteer force that had been formed to allow women to perform men’s tasks, including working on anti-aircraft batteries. To her fury, she was discovered and photographed by the press, but she thrived on her hectic life in khaki – the 6.15 reveille, and the rowdy parties in the sergeants’ mess. Whenever she could, she escaped home on leave, and binged on shopping and huge meals and stayed late in bed. She had a series of boyfriends, most of them unsuitable. When she became engaged to one of them, her mother, Clementine, insisted that the announcement should be put off for six months, and enlisted Lord Beaverbrook and Averell Harriman to talk her out of it. These relationships involved a lot of dancing, and very little sex – the nearest she came to that was a single kiss. Mary’s most valuable war work was accompanying her father as aide-decamp on his visit to Quebec and to Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home in America in 1943. Clementine came too, but she was in a nervous state, fussing over trifles, and Mary’s buoyant cheerfulness and energy helped Churchill to survive the rigours of the trip. Mary was rewarded with the OBE. Mary considered that her diary would be useless to the would-be biographer of her father. ‘Here I am, the daughter of one of the greatest men & on reading my diary I find it is an account of ME!’ She was too young and too adoring of her father to write a critical account, but

what emerges very clearly is Churchill’s affection for her. She describes having lunch with him one day when he was ill in bed, and they ate crab, beef and mince pies with Liebfraumilch to drink. ‘I did so love being alone with him,’ she wrote. ‘Only I’m always afraid of boring him – so I was careful not to stay too long’. But Churchill needed her. On Victory in Europe Day, Mary was in Antwerp with her battery, walking through the joyful crowds, when she was summoned back to London by Churchill to accompany him on his victory drive through London. After all the cheering, Churchill’s defeat in the election came as a terrible shock. Not until the morning of the count did he realise he had lost. As Emma Soames, Mary’s daughter, writes, it seems extraordinary today that when the war ended, her highly competent 23-year-old mother never thought of getting a job. But, like most women of her generation, Mary Churchill was intent on finding a husband, and she married Christopher Soames after a whirlwind romance. Emma Soames provides just the right amount of commentary, and this diary gives a new and valuable perspective on Churchill in wartime.

Not so super Mann RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN The Magician By Colm Tóibín Viking £18.99 Colm Tóibín has already ambitiously written a novel about a great novelist – The Master, focused on Henry James, published in 2004. He’s now returned to the peculiar challenge posed by the genre, in telling the story of Thomas Mann. He moves in a fairly straight chronological line from Mann’s birth in mercantile Lübeck

through to his final years of exile in California and Switzerland. The result is frankly disappointing and a bit of a slog. I didn’t feel that Tóibín managed to render Henry James’s mercurial intelligence and fine sensibility in The Master, but he nobly tried. Here he seems positively uninterested in Mann, tracking his 80-year journey in an elegantly fluent prose. There’s not a clunking or pretentious sentence in over 400 pages. But the prose never rises to any pitch of excitement or intensity. Instead of attempting to imagine or inhabit Mann’s inner life – his mindset or psychology – the novel merely reports events and feelings in a key that seems almost wilfully flat. The novel that emerges may serve as a competent chronicle, peppered with some invented passages of dialogue, but it certainly doesn’t amount to enthralling fiction. Perhaps Mann really was as outwardly dull as Tóibín suggests – Gustav von Aschenbach of Death in Venice being an ironic self-portrait. But if so, why choose to make him the subject of a lengthy fiction, devoid of any external drama to animate it? Yet material is there for the picking. Mann’s tremors of lust in the face of naked male pulchritude, his complex relationships with his six very different and variously troubled children, his spats with his more flamboyant brother, Heinrich, his gingerly critique of Nazism, his ambivalent attitude to the USA and his postwar return to Germany … any one of these could have been mined and explored and refracted into something with emotional texture and resonance. But that doesn’t happen. Instead we get one damn thing after another, moving imperturbably on. The portrait that emerges seems to me excessively lugubrious for someone whose novels are so rich in ironic humour. Confessions of Felix Krull is high farce. The Magic Mountain is as much a satire as it is allegory. And Buddenbrooks is full of sardonic comedy. But then it’s a strange aspect of Tóibín’s approach that he seems reluctant to engage with Mann’s writing at all. We never get any sense that authorship impelled or defined him. (Or if it didn’t, what did?) A few pages are predictably devoted to the experiences that seeded Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus, but nothing leads the reader beyond what a decent A-level essay might elucidate. Mann’s fourvolume magnum opus, Joseph and His Brothers, the composition of which consumed him for 16 years, is barely The Oldie October 2021 53

mentioned. And the masterly novella Mario and the Magician, which subtly encapsulates so much about the appeal of Fascism, is bypassed altogether. Another of Mann’s novels that is ignored is the enchanting (and undervalued) Lotte in Weimar, in which Mann does for Goethe and his situation exactly what Tóibín should have done for Mann. He daringly enters Goethe’s mental process in something like a stream of consciousness and drives the narrative from an oblique angle, rather than addressing it head on in cradle-tograve fashion. Passing appearances made here by Alma Mahler, Auden and Isherwood, all camping it up, are briefly enlivening, reminding us that Tóibín has novelistic gifts that he unaccountably seems to be suppressing. Other subsidiary characters – even Mann’s wonderfully rackety, quasi-incestuous offspring Erika and Klaus – remain grey and anodyne figures, as Tóibín almost prudishly refuses to follow them into any of their darker places. Such restraint leaves The Magician a dully even read. Tóibín’s treatment of his subject is dutiful, but he fails to make him live. Readers seeking genuine insight into the mind of Thomas Mann would be better off turning to the intelligently speculative biographies by Anthony Heilbut and Hermann Kurzke.

Paxo underground KATE HUBBARD Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain By Jeremy Paxman William Collins £30 The story of coal, Jeremy Paxman says, is the story of Britain. It’s one he tells well, deftly combining the political and the social in a brisk and bracing narrative, with plenty of scope for Paxmanian indignation and scorn. People have been digging for coal since the Middle Ages. But Paxman focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, taking in the industrial revolution, two world wars, the first Labour government, the birth of trade unionism, nationalisation, strikes, smog and pit accidents, with much odd and interesting detail along the way. In the Second World War, miners were not exempted from conscription, which meant a shortage of labour. Bevin Boys (after Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour) were the solution: lay miners. After just four weeks of training, they were sent underground.

‘I was wondering if you could shed some light on why your son is so domineering in class’

Eric Morecambe and Jimmy Savile both became Bevin Boys. Coal made Britain not just warm but powerful, firing manufacturing, steam, gas and electricity. This came at a cost: 85,000 miners died in accidents between 1873 and 1953, and John Evelyn had been complaining about the London smog back in the 17th century. While the 19th century saw the industry boom, the 20th brought its decline. The writing was always on the wall – coal was a finite resource, inevitably to be superseded by other forms of energy. But George Orwell understood, as trade-union leaders did not, that a great many miners had conservative hearts. When they came out on strike, as in 1984, they were striking not for better pay, but to preserve a way of life. The brutish business of mining is already receding in our memories. Black Gold serves as a reminder. Men dug on their hands and knees, or lying down, often naked because of the heat. Scabs studding their vertebrae were known as ‘buttons down the back’. Up until 1842, when an Act banned women and girls from working underground, girls as young as five did 12-hour shifts in the dark. They opened and closed trapdoors to control ventilation or hauled wagons of coal, with a belt around the waist and a chain between the legs. Accidents were frequent and terrible. In 1862, at the Hartley Colliery, a huge iron girder crashed down the only shaft, trapping the men below. The nation was gripped; Queen Victoria sent a telegram; a Mr Hill of Bristol suggested boring a hole in the debris and pouring down soup. But there were no survivors; 204 men and boys died, crushed or asphyxiated. Every disaster was followed by an inquiry, which, says Paxman, generally failed those most in need. The story of coal is one of greed and

indifference, of lessons not learned and warnings not heeded. After nationalisation in 1947, landowners were paid nearly £81 million as compensation for coal left in the ground. In the 2000s, the offer of compensation for miners with broken health became a bonanza for solicitors – one received £16.7 million in a single year. The average payment for a miner was £1,000. There aren’t many heroes here, with politicians, proprietors, trade-union and Coal Board officials mostly getting it in the neck. The ‘weaselly-faced communist’ Arthur Scargill is ‘a creature of the media age’. When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, an ex-miner sent Scargill a text: ‘THATCHER DEAD’. ‘SCARGILL ALIVE!’ came the reply). Yet coal was ‘midwife to genius’ and this is also a story of extraordinary ingenuity. Paxman reserves his admiration for the miners, engineers and inventors. One is William Armstrong, who specialised in hydraulics and made a fortune by using steam power to make artillery. His Newcastle mansion was the first domestic house to be lit by hydroelectricity and he had the foresight, in 1863, to predict the demise of coal. The future, as Armstrong saw it, lay in renewable energy.

Irish eyes aren’t smiling ALEX CLARK The Letters of John McGahern Edited by Frank Shovlin Faber £30 John McGahern said letters are ‘never quite honest. Often out of sympathy or diffidence or kindness or affection or self-interest we quite rightly hide our true feelings.’ He was writing in 1991 to the critic Sophia Hillan, who had asked for permission to quote one of his letters in a monograph. It’s impossible to work out whether his opinion of letters reflected general misgivings or a more specific anxiety – even admission – about his own. How would we know? McGahern’s novels – from his first, 1963’s The Barracks, to Amongst Women and That They May Face the Rising Sun – are taut masterpieces of the art of showing through concealment. They are stories that operate through constraint – an unhappy family, inescapable location or overwhelming emotion. And yet they suggest something much broader and more capacious about human experience. He is, for example, a master of the passive voice, as in this sketch of The Oldie October 2021 55

Bill Evans, a character in That They May Face the Rising Sun: ‘He would have known neither father nor mother. As a baby, he would have been given into the care of nuns. When these boys reached seven, the age of reason, they were transferred to places run by priests or Brothers. When he reached fourteen, Bill Evans was sent out, like many others, to his first farmer.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, McGahern’s letters are – when compared with some in the literary canon – usually circumspect, often businesslike and frequently fond without being impassioned. The great dramas of life – an early love affair that came to nothing, the break-up of his first marriage or the deaths of friends and family – are conveyed phlegmatically, even ironically. ‘It was the heart my father died from, but he sank slowly, fighting each inch,’ he wrote to his friend Niall Walsh in 1977. ‘The sisters seem calm enough. The prospect had been dramatised so that I suspect the real thing was a let-down.’ In the next paragraph, he details the purchase of some cows, and the pressure to deliver a new novel to his publisher. He had previously characterised his sisters’ response to his father’s illnesses as hysterical. But, again, one must read between the lines. McGahern’s mother had died of breast cancer when he was ten, and his father had been living in Garda barracks in Roscommon. Subsequently, McGahern and his six siblings were sent to live with his father. It had not been an easy relationship, and when McGahern’s story Bomb Box was published he sent his son an abusive letter. ‘Incidentally,’ McGahern wrote to his editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, ‘he got the allusions completely wrong.’ McGahern’s first career was as a teacher. Although he appears to have had

‘Endsleigh Cottage’, engraving after Thomas Allom. From The Story of the Country House: A History of Places and People by Clive Aslet (Yale, £18.99)

a gift for it, it brought him trouble. When his second novel, The Dark, was published, it was seized by Irish customs officers and then banned in Ireland, on the grounds of its supposedly obscene

‘Charles writes all his own T-shirts’

content. McGahern turned down the offer of support from Samuel Beckett, preferring to take his lumps. He was then suspended from his position at the Belgrove national school. Both the novel and his marriage to the Finnish director Annikki Laaksi, which had taken place in a foreign register office, were too much for the authorities to stomach. ‘It’s a long and mostly boring story,’ McGahern explained to his American editor, later relaying, without comment, what the school’s priest said to him: ‘That was an awful schemozzle that book made; put your foot right into it. I couldn’t take you back; there’d be uproar, teaching. What are you going to do for yourself now?’ What the writer did was to take himself away and write a series of obliquely brilliant novels that laid out the realities and contradictions of Irish life from the mid-twentieth century onwards. The Oldie October 2021 57

He wrote about everything – sex, the Church, domestic violence and the Troubles – from an angle. His novel The Pornographer is in fact more about familial duty and the conflict between town and countryside than it is about the sexually explicit stories his protagonist creates. His letters give a sense of a man ferociously interested in creating work. Aside from the pleasant exchanges he has with fellow writers – including Seamus Heaney and Colm Tóibín – and the occasional broadsides he issues, especially when he thinks a publisher might be about to land a stereotypically Irish cover on one of his books, he keeps his emotions in check. If we are truthful, we might say that the collection doesn’t make for fantastically racy reading. But it does provide a wonderfully consonant picture of the man and his novels.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Spad cad FRANCES WILSON Making Nice By Ferdinand Mount Bloomsbury £16.99 How does he do it? It wasn’t a year ago that I was reviewing Kiss Myself Goodbye, Ferdinand Mount’s glorious account of his amoral Aunt Munca, whose every word, as the novelist Mary McCarthy said of playwright Lillian Hellman, was a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ Now this novel lands on the doorstep and it’s another peach. Making Nice is a satire on spads and dukes of dark corners like Dominic Cummings, but Mount’s aunt and his latest villain, Ethelbert Evers, have so much in common that they might be two versions of the same person. Munca, who took her own fond

nickname from Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice, was otherwise known as Eileen Constance Sylvia McDuff, Patricia Elizabeth Baring, and Mrs Greig Mount. Ethelbert, who models himself on the Pied Piper, calls himself Ethel while his real name, he admits, is Johnny although it is actually Ethelbert. Munca invented her posh parentage, passed off her son as her brother, disguised her sister as her friend, and had several husbands at the same time. Ethel invents his heroic parentage, passes off his mistress as his business partner and is engaged to two women at the same time. Like Munca, Ethel makes fools of everyone. He is also, however, a magician of sorts who often appears out of nowhere pulling rabbits out of hats. He knows where you live, knows what you earn, knows your daughter’s phone number, knows you’ve lost your job and knows what you’re thinking before you’ve even thought it. The events are narrated by Dickie Pentecost in quick, light, deadpan prose, which lands perfectly where it falls. A middle-aged diplomatic correspondent who sees himself as a ‘low-key character,’ Dickie first meets Ethel in the queue for the toilet on a Welsh campsite. ‘Not D K Pentecost?’ says Ethel. ‘I read all your stuff… Originally Pentecostas, am I right? Left Smyrna in 1922 – not you, of course, obviously, but your dad perhaps?’ And just like that, Dickie becomes Ethel’s creature. Dickie, his wife and his teenage daughters are ‘champing’, which is what you call camping in a disused church. Champing is one of the many new terms to be found in Making Nice. Another is ‘making nice’ itself, which means being nice to someone you do not harbour nice feelings towards. Ethel’s company is called Making Nice, and making nice is, he explains in his Ethel-speak, all about

‘Hold up, lads – we’ve got a problem. They’ve installed one of those security-camera doorbells’

‘the bottom line. You make nice, you make moolah, lots more moolah … we’re engineering a paradigm shift, the ambition is to transform the System into a game you can’t help falling in love with.’ His real ambition, Ethel later reveals, is to become a ‘human people-carrier’ like his much-maligned hero, the child-abductor of Hamelin. Before long, Dickie is working in the Reputation Management arm of Making Nice, even though he has no idea what his job entails or how he ended up there. It all seems a bit dodgy ‘but, to be honest, it was the dodginess that caught my fancy’. Soon he is being sent on dodgy missions to Africa and America in order to burnish the reputation of dodgy politicians. Meanwhile, Dickie’s 16-yearold ballet-dancing daughter is also doing dodgy stuff with Ethel, who looks set to become Dickie’s son-in-law. The plot, both crazily implausible and totally believable, rattles along like one of those Looney Tunes cartoons in which Wile E Coyote (the E, as I’m sure Ethel knows, also stands for Ethelbert) tries to catch and eat the Road Runner. Ethel makes a terrific political operator, but the most entertaining character is Dickie himself. Spineless and easily corrupted, Dickie is even more dangerous than Ethel because he does not believe in anything. Instead of being, like Ethel, one step ahead, Dickie is one step outside his own story. This is how Dickie describes his wife: ‘She is handsome, Jane. I love the way she looks, with such a classical profile, that alabaster skin and those grey-blue eyes – rather how I imagine the goddess Athena looking. But there is something severe about her, I can’t deny it. She is not the first person I would choose to tell me that from now on it’s palliative care only.’ Dickie knows both everything and nothing about himself, which is what makes him such a good narrator. He knows, for example, that you can’t ‘believe a word Ethel says’ but doesn’t know that he, Dickie, is equally duplicitous. He also sees everything and nothing. He fails to see that his daughter is pregnant by Ethel. But he notices that when Ethel tells his life story at the Nunthorpe Travelodge, his ‘grey eyes were really shining bright, for the first time since I had met him, with that intense warmth which some people display only when they’re talking about themselves’. Making Nice is the funniest, shrewdest, most elegant novel I have read in years. What will Ferdinand Mount conjure up next? The Oldie October 2021 59

Media Matters

Kremlin trolls are wasting their time

Russian spies get nowhere by posting comments on British articles stephen glover According to researchers at Cardiff University, Russian trolls have been inserting propaganda and disinformation in the reader comments of Western news websites. These include Mail Online, the Times, Le Figaro in France, and Der Spiegel and Die Welt in Germany. The pro-Kremlin comments are then fed back to a range of Russian media organisations. One example cited in the report by Cardiff’s Crime and Security Research Institute concerns a story on Mail Online about America’s ‘unwavering’ support for Ukraine, which appeared on 1st April. Many of the comments below the article were supportive of the Biden administration, but a few were strikingly critical. These were taken up by a number of Russian news websites and presented as being characteristic of what Mail Online readers believe. The Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti mendaciously claimed the next day that ‘Daily Mail readers ridiculed US willingness to support Ukraine’, which rapidly achieved over 33,000 ‘views’. The report offers many other convincing examples from Mail Online and other western newspaper websites of Russian infiltration. The Cardiff researchers – were they first alerted by our own intelligence services? – appear to have uncovered an entire industry of Russian trolls whose unenviable duty it is to trawl through hundreds of articles and give the impression that they are ordinary, disinterested readers, whereas in fact they are employees of Vladimir Putin. May I make a suggestion? Even before I learnt about these pro-Kremlin trolls, I had long thought that it would be an excellent idea for online newspapers to withdraw the facility for posting comments. The original impulse, which was to encourage readers to feel involved, was open and democratic. In

the event, a highly opinionated, unrepresentative minority is attracted to expressing views that can be unpleasant and ill-considered. I have given up reading such comments below my own columns on Mail Online because some of them are rude and intended to demoralise. I always advise my journalistic friends to do the same if they haven’t already done so. Most have. The rudeness is just as likely to be directed at other posters as at the writer of the piece. Fierce quarrels can ensue. When it comes to posting comments, normal, balanced, polite and thoughtful readers are greatly outnumbered by bigots and the unreasonable. If there were a proper system of registration, and people were required to identify themselves, it might be possible to have civilised and enlightening debates. Journalists would be able to learn from their readers. As it is, anonymity tends to encourage the worst human traits. This is as true of Doris in Detroit, who dispenses poison and vitriol, having barely read the piece she decries, as it is of Sergei in Omsk, working in his airless basement in clandestine service of the Russian state. The figure journalists most fear is the ruthless businessman with little or no journalistic background who is parachuted into an ailing publishing company to turn it round and make it profitable again. Such a person is Roger Lynch, who in 2019 was appointed chief executive of Condé Nast, an American behemoth with magazines around the world. His previous job was running the US music-streaming outfit Pandora, where he seems to have been successful. However, he doesn’t appear to know a lot about publishing.

Mr Lynch’s big idea is to internationalise Condé Nast’s publications so that editorial directors based in London, New York and Asia can collaborate to create uniform issues of magazines such as Vogue and GQ designed to appeal to global audiences. A bit like cornflakes, one might say. Condé Nast is loss-making – so something has to be done. But is this the right approach? Most successful publications are rooted in the readerships they serve, which is why magazines with a strong individual identity thrive. Producing the same homogenised stuff for people in Shanghai, Rome and Los Angeles may be the best way of disappointing everyone. Hundreds of journalists are being made redundant to save money, including some in London. Even Dylan Jones, the renowned editor of British GQ, has departed. Condé Nast used to be a great publishing company, created and sustained by people with journalistic flair. Can it really be saved by a moneybags who apparently doesn’t understand magazines? Hats off to Stig Abell, who has secured a three-book deal with the publisher HarperCollins, including his first crime novel and a non-fiction work. Mr Abell is not yet a well-known thriller writer, though he may soon be. But he is a former managing editor of the Sun, an ex-editor of the Times Literary Supplement and currently a presenter on Times Radio. All are owned by Rupert Murdoch – as is HarperCollins. Stig’s literary accomplishments are doubtless so considerable that he could have acquired a three-book deal with any publishing company. But if Mr Murdoch did give the 41-year-old prodigy a helping hand, it is yet one more heart-warming example of the aged tycoon’s fond indulgence of treasured employees. The Oldie October 2021 61

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

La lingua della musica

TOM PLANT

Pythagoras thought maths was the language of music. It was an ambitious claim, though not altogether absurd: modern musicologists delight in discerning mathematical patterns in the works of Bach and Mozart. Nowadays, though, the language of music is surely Italian. How on earth has this come about? Music has, from the first grunts of mankind, been made by everybody everywhere, and Italy might seem an improbable country to lead the world in musical influence. It has been a single independent country for scarcely 150 years, with little political power to impose any language on anyone far beyond its borders. So is Italy’s musical dominance a fiction? Just look at ‘bebop’, ‘fado’, ‘lieder’, you may say, or ‘mazurka’, ‘polonaise’ or ‘tango’. Remember, too, that French has provided ‘plié’, ‘entrechat’, ‘arabesque’ and nearly all the standard terms of ballet. It’s also true that foreigners have sometimes marked their works not in Italian but in their own tongue. French composers such as Debussy and Ravel did so. So did several German-speakers. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, No 6, is marked in German. Mahler too would use a feierlich (solemnly) here or a fröhlich (lively) there. And when Schumann wanted to counsel ‘funny’ or ‘impatient’, he wrote lustig or ungeduldig. If British composers have been more reluctant to use their native language, be thankful: imagine scores adorned with

Modern hotel rooms The Fairmont Hotel in Azerbaijan is a 500foot monument to Central Asian bling done out in oligarch-chic. It does, however, boast fantastic views over the Caspian Sea. So on a recent stay, the first thing I did was open the curtains of my huge window on the 12th floor. 62 The Oldie October 2021

‘buck up’, ‘whoa’, ‘less emotion’ or ‘full steam ahead’. Anyway, there has been no need. English thrives on theft. ‘Lullaby’ came to Middle English from Swedish. ‘Minuet’ is French in origin. ‘Polka’ is Czech. ‘Guitar’ is Greek. ‘Rasgueado’ – playing guitar strings with the back of the fingernail – is Spanish. But none of these, nor any others, can shake the proposition that Italian is the language of the andante, the arpeggio, the sonata and the virtuoso, of the piano, the prima donna and the pizzicato – in short, the language of music. It may have begun about 1,000 years ago, when Guido D’Arezzo, an Italian monk, invented a new way of writing Gregorian chant, using a four-line stave and letters as clefs. This became the basis of the musical notation in worldwide use today. After such a good start, Italians were musically on their way. Indeed, they gained a reputation for all things musical, just as they were becoming famous for other artistic accomplishments. Though Italy was merely a geographical expression, its component parts were evolving into centres of commerce and culture, leading in the 15th and 16th centuries to the Renaissance. In music, as in painting, architecture and the sciences, the Italian peninsula became pre-eminent and thus influential. It was soon the place to hear and learn music. Composers such as Palestrina and Striggio were the pop stars of the

Or rather, I tried. The curtains were operable only via an electronic control panel that, like the hotel itself, ignored the maxim that less is sometimes more. There were five options – none of which seemed to include the basic command of ‘Please, just open the bloody curtains.’ After half an hour in darkness, I had to call the concierge for help. It isn’t just the curtains, where the simple act of drawing them by hand is no longer an option. Hotel-room lights used to be operated by buttons or cords next to the device in question. Now they’re often controlled from a single master switch, bearing labels such as ‘Lobby’, ‘Cupboard A’

16th century. Italy was also a leader in publishing sheet music. And its instrument-makers – the Amati family, Stradivari, Bergonzi and Guarneri – were unrivalled. All over Europe their products – cellos, pianos, violas, violins – took Italian-derived names. Meanwhile Italians began to develop new genres of music. Early in the 16th century, Monteverdi, a composer of both sacred and secular pieces, helped to establish opera, an art form at which Italians were to excel over the next 400 years. Italian influence was such that foreign composers would often use Italian librettos: several of Mozart’s operas were written in Italian, among them Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. The oddity in this story is that Latin plays no great part. Of course, Latin is the basis of Italian and was long used in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church. Latin was also the language of educated people all over Europe for hundreds of years. But it has not thrived as a sung language in the way Italian has. Mozart’s first opera, Apollo et Hyacinthus, written in Latin (when he was 11), is seldom performed these days and choral Latin is confined chiefly to religious music, much of it early, a few Christmas carols and one or two school songs. One explanation for the weakness of Latin may also be an explanation for the success of Italian. Latin is not a pretty language. Italian is beautiful.

and ‘Bathroom Mirror B’. Invariably, though, there is some wall-panel or floor light that can’t be switched off, angled like an interrogation lamp on your pillow. Worse still are airconditioning controls, which come with a maelstrom of

SMALL DELIGHTS My car altimeter registers minus numbers in Fenland, where it’s below sea level CARRY AKROYD, CAMBRIDGESHIRE Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

symbols. In desperation once, I googled ‘Hotel airconditioning symbols’, to discover a table showing some 70 different hieroglyphics used by different manufacturers. Who would have thought the world of air-conditioning required its very own Rosetta Stone? The rational response, of course, might be a little patience. But patience is not something every hotel guest has much of. Not if you’ve just checked in at 3am and have to be up for a business meeting in three hours’ time. It’s enough to make you raid the mini-bar. Assuming you can open it. COLIN FREEMAN

History

Parliament’s history boys

The best MP-historians, from Macaulay to Churchill david horspool Being a historian should be a good preparation for a future political career. Just think of the adage ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ But historians have long been in a tiny minority in the House of Commons when compared with lawyers, journalists, trade-union leaders and business people. There are some honourable exceptions among honourable members. Until he jumped ship in 2017 to become Director of the V&A in London, the best-known MP historian of recent times was Tristram Hunt, former Labour member for Stoke-on-Trent Central. Hunt, who has just published a biography (highly recommended) of the Potteries’ favourite son, Josiah Wedgwood, has a knack for tackling thorny subjects with authority and a light touch, from the ‘frock-coated communist’ Friedrich Engels to the rise and fall of the Victorian city. As an MP, he put his historical training to good use when campaigning to save the Wedgwood Museum from closure and its collection from being broken up when the parent company went bust. Hunt’s departure followed that of an MP whose historical contribution came later in his political career: William Hague, who moved up to the House of Lords in 2015. Hague’s widely praised life of Pitt the Younger was followed by an equally well-received biography of William Wilberforce. Whether Hague or Douglas Hurd was the better Foreign Secretary might be open to debate, but not many readers would pick Hurd’s lives of Peel or Disraeli (damned by a reviewer as ‘respectable and competent’) over Hague’s study of his fellow wunderkind, William Pitt. There are still historians left among today’s MPs,

though none as high-profile. Labour’s Chris Bryant was a priest in the Church of England, not a historian, before he took political orders. Still, he has established himself as a forthright analyst of past injustices, perpetrated either by the British aristocracy, of which he wrote a ‘critical history’ in 2017, or by the wider Establishment, as with the subject of his recent group biography of the gay MPs who resisted appeasement and bore the brunt of conventional homophobia for their troubles (The Glamour Boys). On the Tory side, there are two historians who take a longer view. Chris Skidmore, Member for Kingswood, in Avon, is an expert on the last Plantagenets and the Tudors. If that sounds rather removed from contemporary concerns, Skidmore might disagree. He has mused that ‘If people have nothing to lose, they will take action.’ Though he was referring to those around Richard III, the insight still applies today. Another Tory, Alex Burghart, who represents Brentwood and Ongar, is a former tutor in Anglo-Saxon history at King’s College London. His study of Mercia is still hoped for. He keeps his hand in with historical contributions to various publications, and as host to lectures on subjects not usually given much airtime at Westminster, such as one to come on Athelstan and the origins of the English Parliament. There are others for whom historical claims could be made, including the Leader of the House and the Prime Minister. But Thomas Macaulay, MP and historian

both Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson have written history books of the sort that are politics by other means: the former in his encomium of Victorian virtues, the latter in his embrace of Winston Churchill as a supposedly Johnsonian predecessor. A more convincing MP biographer of Churchill was Roy Jenkins, who also wrote historical biographies of Gladstone and the forgotten Liberal radical Sir Charles Dilke, whose reputation he revived almost single-handedly in his 1958 book. Churchill himself was almost as much a historian as a politician, especially when the politics wasn’t going so well. He told the House in 1948 that he considered ‘it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself’. As well as writing the history of his own times, he drew on historical inspiration, whether evoking the example of a Drake to toughen the sinews against invasion, or trying to apply the lessons of his ancestor Marlborough’s campaigns to contemporary embroilments. One of Churchill’s greatest models as historian was another MP, Thomas Macaulay, whom he had loved ever since winning a prize at Harrow for memorising 1,200 lines of Lays of Ancient Rome. Despite Churchill’s colossal reputation, and colossal sales of history books, it is to Macaulay that we should really offer the palm as MP historian. After all, even Churchill himself never conceived of a theory of historical change – what we know as Whig theory – that is still invoked and attacked more than 150 years after his death. Macaulay (1800-59) may have started his parliamentary career in a rotten borough before embracing reform and representing the new industrial constituency of Leeds. But he is, on this evidence, the greatest MP-historian on either side of the House. The Oldie October 2021 63

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT THE SERVANT The Servant (1963), re-released in cinemas this September, is a toxic version of Jeeves and Wooster. Dirk Bogarde’s Barrett isn’t just brighter than his master, Tony (James Fox). He’s also a lot nastier. The idea of the intelligent servant goes all the way back to Plautus, who features a clever slave in several of his plays in the third century BC. But to make the servant clever, horrible and ultimately his master’s master is the brilliant idea by Robin Maugham (Somerset’s nephew) in his 1948 short story, The Servant. Directed by Joseph Losey with a subtle screenplay by Harold Pinter, the film is wonderfully menacing, its melancholy strain intensified by John Dankworth’s jazz soundtrack, including All Gone, sung

by Cleo Laine. Pinter, only 32 at the time, also has a bit part in the film as a young ‘Society Man’ with a la-di-da voice. The Servant isn’t just about the flip in power between master and servant. It’s also, without it being said, about the flip of the old order in postwar London, as Society Man gives way to his supposed inferiors. In 1963, Chelsea is about to get trendy. Tony nurses his growing drink problem in lovely suits and ties, but he also sports a cardie and sheepskin coat, and is very proud of his new abstract picture. As well as dining next to Society Man in a smart French restaurant with his Society Woman, Susan Stewart (a haughty, imperious Wendy Craig), Tony heads for an informal trat, where a guitarist strums beatnik numbers. Fox is a bit wooden but that doesn’t matter – plenty of toffs are timber from the neck up and are also given to stiff arm movements. Maugham and Pinter nail that combination of stupidity and

Polished performance. Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) and Tony (James Fox) 64 The Oldie October 2021

Olympian confidence often found in the upper classes. Tony’s dim confidence dissolves as Barrett slowly, subtly turns the tables on the ruling classes. He starts with little flashes of anger at Susan Stewart, when she disapproves of his décor and wine choices. It isn’t long before he’s removing Miss Stewart’s ‘chintz frills’ from the master’s dressing table – the first stage in Barrett’s war to detach Tony from his girlfriend, so he can have complete power over him. Soon Tony is craven and cowed, feeling trapped in his own house, while trying to conceal his affair with Vera (Sarah Miles), who pretends to be Barrett’s sister but is in fact his lover. How good Bogarde is at threatening, weary arrogance wrapped up in servility. He offers something to Tony – ‘Would you like a nice hot drink?’ – before following it up with an ‘I couldn’t care less’ gesture when the offer’s turned down. Bogarde promptly drops the servility when he’s away from James Fox. So he’s really playing two subtly different people: the compliant servant turned swaggering bully, with a touch of campness in the affronted uplift of his chin. Bogarde is the stand-out star of the film. Only 42, he retains his matinée-idol looks, if they’re a little drawn. He gets Barrett’s northern accent spot-on, too. It’s a long way from Simon Sparrow in Doctor in the House (1954). The whole role-reversal thing is a fantasy, of course. But, where it would be blown up into comedy in P G Wodehouse or Plautus, Pinter makes it credible with his understated screenplay, as do the actors by avoiding melodrama. Even as Barrett becomes the boss, you can really believe he was once a servant, by the brisk, impatient, professional way he clears the dishes with little fluttering gestures. A master-class in how to play a servant.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK MARY POPPINS Prince Edward Theatre, London When you tell people you’ve been to see Mary Poppins on the West End stage, the question they always ask is ‘Is it as good as the film?’ The short answer is, ‘Yes indeed. In fact, it’s even better.’ The original film is still charming, after all these years (I saw it again just the other day, and it hadn’t dated in the slightest), but Cameron Mackintosh’s theatrical production has far more depth and a lot more light and shade. Don’t get me wrong. Like the vintage Walt Disney movie, it’s supremely entertaining, but the characters are more rounded, the storyline more complex. It’s thrilling to watch this magical yarn unfold up close and personal rather than on a flat screen. You’d think the stage show had inspired the movie, rather than the other way round. All oldies worthy of the name will be familiar with the plot, and I’m pleased to report that this production doesn’t take any liberties with the basics. However, Julian Fellowes’s subtle script fleshes out the relationships between the characters, and adds a layer of suspense and intrigue that’s missing from the feelgood film. The story never gets too dark, but you never forget you’re watching something strange and supernatural. This Mary Poppins is a heavenly phantom, but a phantom all the same. After reading the credits for the creative team, one is not surprised that this production (which premièred in this theatre in 2004 and was revived in 2019) rattles along like a well-oiled steam train. The director is Sir Richard Eyre, doyen of the National Theatre for a decade. The choreographer is Sir Matthew Bourne, who reinvented modern dance. Bob Crowley is renowned as one of the best stagedesigners on either side of the Atlantic. His beautiful sets for this enchanting show are artworks in their own right. But the main credit, as in any musical, should go to the performers – above all, Zizi Strallen for her bewitching Mary Poppins. Remarkably, she escapes the long shadow of Julie Andrews, and creates a character who’s entirely different – just as lovable but more mysterious; an apparition from another world. Charlie Stemp is a brilliant Bert, doubling up as a kind of compère, a bridge between the stage and the stalls. His chirpy front-ofcurtain banter is worthy of a trad standup comic, and his dancing is mesmeric.

Bird woman (Petula Clark), Mary Poppins (Zizi Strallen) and Bert (Charlie Stemp)

Thanks to Fellowes’s clever plotting, there are also plenty of good supporting parts. George and Winifred Banks (the mum and dad) are proper, threedimensional characters, rather than flimsy foils. Charlie Anson (as George) performs a wonderful transformation from uptight wage mule to doting dad. Claire Machin and Jack North do a neat double act as the cook and butler, reminiscent of old-time music hall. Evergreen Petula Clark performs a poignant cameo. Funny to think she was already a showbiz veteran when the movie premièred in 1964. Yet special praise must go to Mackintosh, without whom the stage version of this modern fairy tale would surely have remained a mere pipe dream. Though the movie was a huge commercial hit, and won several Oscars, apparently Pamela Lyndon Travers, who wrote the books on which it was based, wasn’t entirely happy with the way it turned out. Consequently, the doughty author rebuffed all requests for the stage rights, until Mackintosh came along. When he approached her, in 1993, she was already in her nineties, but they hit it off and she gave him her consent, and a classic musical was born. P L Travers didn’t live to see the première (she died in 1996, aged 96), but I feel sure she would have liked it. A co-production between Disney and Mackintosh, it really is the best of both worlds: a British treatment of a British story, with transatlantic appeal. This musical includes all the Sherman

Brothers’ famous songs (A Spoonful of Sugar, Chim Chim Cher-ee, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious…) plus half a dozen new ones by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe – the best compliment I can pay them is to say that theirs don’t feel at all out of place. This Mary Poppins is terrific fun, and surprisingly moving. The performance I saw ended with a standing ovation, and I was delighted to join in. The little girl sitting in front of me absolutely loved it. Whatever age you are, I bet you’ll love it, too.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE In just over a year’s time, the BBC will celebrate its centenary. On 14th November 1922 the first broadcast was aired, carrying into our homes ‘all that is best in human knowledge, endeavour and achievement’. The dwindling cohort of radio hacks will doubtless be recalling the Best of Reithian Moments. But a prime candidate for Worst Radio moment was revealed lately on Feedback. ‘Why?’ chorused the protesters. ‘On prestigious Front Row? What were you thinking of?’ The bone of contention was Fergie, interviewed at pointless length about her new Mills & Boon book. No, of course she didn’t write it. Hence the fatuity of the interview, and the Duchess of York’s self-delusion. ‘I am a director,’ she proudly claimed, ‘not an actual The Oldie October 2021 65

scribe,’ as if setting the words on paper were the least necessary element in the creation of a novel. Rachel Cooke, the Observer’s shining literary critic, called it an interview ‘of quite unparalleled inanity’. Front Row sent a statement citing ‘significant public interest’. (Yes, it is indeed of interest that ghost-written celebrity books are still allowed a place in bookshops at all.) And the interviewer Nick Ahad, as Cooke said, was ‘buttock-clenchingly credulous and obsequious’. Take this example: Ahad: ‘Is this a feminist story, do you think?’ Fergie: ‘Someone asked me the other day about feminism – and I wondered what they meant.’ But narcissism propelled her blithely onward. Might there be a film? ‘Cinematography is my middle name! I love Young Victoria!’ Fergie continued. ‘I made that movie – you’ll see my name on it, as producer!’ This stuff is of no consequence, you will think, compared with the news bulletins by Lyse Doucet and others from Kabul, starkly exposing the Afghans’ deprivation and destitution. We take such news, which we trust, for granted. Meanwhile I make angry notes when someone (even the Rev Richard Coles) says, ‘Her mother and her were having lunch…’ or a vox pop delivers an unendurable monologue full of ‘I was like’ or ‘so I’m like’. As a result, I make gratified notes when alerted to a good programme I’ve missed: ‘Did you hear the history of the digestive biscuit?’ or ‘Did you hear Vanessa Redgrave on A Good Read, ticking off Dame Eileen Atkins about Sylvia Pankhurst?’ ‘Darling heart, forgive me,’ said Vanessa, croaky with emotion, ‘but she was so much more than an activist − she was a campaigner.’ Then someone I admire told me to listen to the Fortunately… podcast, with Jane Garvey and Fi Glover. ‘We weep with laughter,’ she promised. I tried it. It was ho-hum: unedited, milquetoast musings. Where’s the waspish gossip? Oh for an Alice Roosevelt Longworth figure, with her cushion famously embroidered ‘If you have nothing good to say of anyone, come and sit by me’. I take refuge in Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. In 1961, my pa brought home from Fleet Street the very first edition. In March 1962 I took the eight-page Eye number 7 to school, to impress the economics master, J M Oliver, on whom I had a crush. He said disapprovingly, ‘Oh, poor Mr Gaitskell!’, as the cover showed Hugh looking ill. The guying of politicians has been a 66 The Oldie October 2021

consistent feature ever since. On Page 94, Ian Hislop and Adam Macqueen, compiler of the 60thanniversary book, reminisced. It’s been a remarkably homogeneous six decades, despite the losses of Auberon Waugh, Willie Rushton, John Wells, Peter Cook and Footy. Glenda Slagg, who arrived in 1969, endures. The prime-ministerial diaries, including the ‘fantastically racist’ Dear Bill, have all been brilliant and so have Sylvie Krin’s royal stories. ‘The Royal Family really is the joke that keeps on giving,’ said Hislop. And thank God for Paul Foot’s scandal-digging, making the Eye the top grass, for which the nation must be grateful. Roll on, tales of tax evasion and dodgy contracts to Tory donors. Happy 60th anniversary, Lord Gnome.

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS What I’d commission were I in charge – Freddie Fox starring in his dad’s old role in a six-part serial of The Day of the Jackal, set in 1963, recreating a France since lost underneath the unrestricted immigration of British expatriates. I’d want to find the new Jack Hargreaves, who can impart pearls of wisdom from his potting shed on how to eradicate seagulls. There’d be a classic series based on my own Seasonal Suicide Notes, destined to be funnier and more beloved by audiences than Fawlty Towers, and starring Simon Russell Beale and Rosamund Pike. Perhaps this has been done and I missed it – but Miranda Hart was surely born to play Aroon, the gawky daughter of a decaying big house, in an adaptation of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. A tragicomedy set in Ireland after the Great War, the novel will make classic television – the heroine who longs

for love and approval and ‘to make a good impression’, and who has no idea what is going on; everybody’s manners, discretion and silences concealing alcoholism, homosexuality, adultery and murder. Anyway, instead of my proposed schedules, what do we have? Cheaply and unimaginatively made travelogues, with all these minor celebrities out and about – Paul Merton in a camper van, Pam Ayres gasping when she catches sight of Blenheim Palace, even though she’s from Oxfordshire and will have seen it before, and Fern Britton in a static caravan in My Cornwall. What I did sit through, as I hail from thereabouts, was four hours of chubbycheeked Michael Ball tooling around Wonderful Wales. ‘Wales. From coastline to castles. Majestic mountaintops to vast valleys. Join me, Michael Ball, as I receive a welcome in the hillside.’ Tranquillising narration like that hasn’t been heard since the fifties, when archaic little colour films were made about touring Devon in a motorcoach. ‘I do feel Welsh,’ said Ball, whose mother was born in Mountain Ash. We met his aunties, still found in the vicinity, who baked coronary-inducing fairy cakes. Ball went to the Welsh Mining Experience Heritage Centre in Merthyr – the shaft goes 1,400 feet straight down to New Zealand and there are miles of tunnels. Wales earned a black mark here, however, as it was Welsh coal that powered the Empire, allowing the British merchant fleet and Royal Navy to rule the waves. We are meant to feel guilty about that, though I don’t myself. Ball then went cockle-hunting in the Gower – the cockles go to Spain. We saw a lot of filthy wildlife, gulls, falcons, dogfish and bison – all apparently these days indigenous. And, of course, the ebullient – ever jolly – Ball, with arms

Classic TV: Jack Hargreaves (1911-94), presenter of How, pictured in 1975

Ed McLachlan

‘Isn’t it time they got rid of this old telephone box?’

outspread and legs apart, kept bursting into song, in the street, on the beach and in a slate quarry; anywhere, really. Here was a man turning in full public view into Harry Secombe, who was also known as Neddy Seagoon, though in fairness Ball has yet to start blowing raspberries. The eagerness of manner is exactly like Sir Harry’s, as is the wobbly, strained tenor and sheer love of being loud. Good luck to him, when it comes to reviving Pickwick and If I Ruled the World! The producer was fond of aerial drone shots – you don’t need a helicopter these days. Two things struck me. First, the documentaries were filmed on the only day when it wasn’t raining. Secondly, what a lot of empty Welsh countryside there is. There was another one on A Year in the Beacons, narrated by Dame Siân Phillips, Mrs Peter O’Toole as was, but by then I’d had a gutsful of the Principality. I heard that Gyles Brandreth did a programme about the Brontës. I didn’t

see that, either. But I hope Gyles dressed up in a frock and bonnet, as Valerie Singleton did on Blue Peter years ago, when she went to the Parsonage. Another week, Valerie got into character as St Thérèse of Lisieux. The one many of us are hoping Gyles will soon re-make is the Blue Peter Royal Safari, of 1971, where Valerie had a peep around Kenya with Princess Anne.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE EDINBURGH’S FALSTAFF In the late 1960s, as I waited for the curtain to go up on a matinée performance in Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, I confided to one of the city’s fabled Morningside ladies that I was tempted to move to Edinburgh, so addicted had I become to the city and its festivals. ‘Och, no,’ she counselled, ‘it’s vairy quiet in the winter.’

This year, it was ‘vairy quiet’ in the summer, too. And not before time, some would say. It’s estimated that, in 2019, 4.4 million people arrived in the city to witness 25,000 performers in some 5,000 events. Whatever your point of view, it’s a situation that had become unsustainable. Has 2020-21 provided a welcome firebreak to the expansion, here and elsewhere? I suspect so, though it may also have provided the cue some editors and arts administrators have been seeking to dump online – or simply dump – such old-world inconveniences as printed concert programmes and comprehensive review coverage. Thinly reported, even in Edinburgh, the 2021 International Festival was a largely local affair, much of it performed to limited-capacity audiences in opensided tents. It was the price exacted by the social-distancing rules in force when booking opened in June. Curiously, the reduced capacity remained, despite the fact that Scotland abandoned such measures at the start of the festival’s first full week. Festival director Fergus Linehan cited on Radio 4’s Today programme the need to keep faith with those who had ‘felt safe’ booking under the old two-metre rule. It was an odd excuse, one that denied scores of visitors the chance to relish, say, David McVicar’s theatrically absorbing English-language production of Verdi’s Falstaff, a cherishable one-off with Roland Wood powerful as the disreputable knight and a sublimely sung Nannetta from Gemma Summerfield. Seen in broad daylight, the local audience did, indeed, seem to be as cautious as it was compliant, queuing like supplicants before a communion rail for a dollop of the ubiquitous handsanitising gel before entering open-sided venues in which there was, in fact, nothing to touch: no tickets, programmes or chair arms. They also seemed pretty keen on the masks that remained mandatory in Scotland in enclosed public spaces. Yet, looking round the thinly peopled Festival Theatre as the house lights went down before the third act of Falstaff, I noticed that virtually no one was wearing one. What a strange charade the whole thing has become! The larger of the two concert venues, pitched in the capacious playing fields of one of Edinburgh’s many private schools, worked rather well, with decent sound insulation – though the £18 return taxi fare from the city centre was a bit of a downer. The Royal Scottish National The Oldie October 2021 67

George Crumb’s mesmerising 1983 Processional, and Michael Tippett, wild-eyed and confrontational in his Piano Sonata No 2, attempted to take on Beethoven at his own game. BBC Radio 3 broadcast the recital the following afternoon – or part of it, their cack-handed scheduling forcing them to omit the Crumb. Close-miked to edit out the weather, the broadcast gave little sense of the thrills and spills of actually being there. It’s an ill wind…

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON ROCKING INTO YOUR 80S

JULIE HOWDEN

Summer knight: Roland Wood as Sir John Falstaff in Verdi’s Falstaff

Orchestra’s opening concert offered us a rare chance to hear in its entirety the miracle that is Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, complete with extracts from the play, delivered with her own beguiling musicality by Dame Harriet Walter. The moment the Mendelssohn started, the heavens opened. Yet, strange to report, the downpour helped make the occasion. This is a play where Oberon’s rages cause ‘every pelting river to overflow its continents’; where ‘the nine men’s morris is filled up with mud’. I imagine Mendelssohn, who loved Edinburgh and was no stranger to the vagaries of the Scottish weather, would have been enchanted. Less welcoming was the festival’s improvised chamber-music venue in the old university courtyard on South Bridge. Here I experienced complete aural wipeout during a violin-and-piano recital, as the rain thundered into the uninsulated plexiglass roof. I fled after the first sonata, my £32, more or less literally, down the drain. The following day, in greenhouse conditions under a burning sun, I heard the Zehetmair Quartet give superb accounts of two Brahms string quartets. Later in the week, the wind arrived – a stiff north-westerly – causing an untethered door in the adjacent Law Faculty to clatter and creak through the final pages of Steven Osborne’s elemental account of Beethoven’s last piano sonata. Not that it mattered. We were already well out of our comfort zone, such was the nature of a fascinatingly devised and thrillingly realised programme in which a Schubert impromptu morphed into 68 The Oldie October 2021

Quem di diligunt adulescens moritur – ‘He whom the gods esteem dies young’ – has been the unofficial motto of the music business. If you were a proper rock ’n’ roller, you didn’t remember the Sixties. Real hellraisers were in the 27 Club along with Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain. Plane crashes took Buddy Holly aged 22, Otis Redding aged 26 and Patsy Cline at 31. Ian Curtis of Joy Division hanged himself aged 23. Karen Carpenter died of a heart attack, aged 32. Dennis Wilson drowned at 39. John Lennon was shot dead aged 40. The list is long. But the list is far longer of those who have made smaller headlines and older bones. The Rolling Stones are a case in point. Bryan Jones drowned in a swimming pool aged 27, but the late Charlie Watts, a man who described his career as ‘four decades of seeing Mick’s bum running around in front of me’, is more typical of the industry.

Hope I die after I get old: Charlie Watts died at 80

‘Hi, honey, I’m not home’

Papa was a rolling stone, and then Grandpa was – now even Great-Grandpa can be a Rolling Stone (Mick Jagger became one in 2014, aged just 70). Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Diamond are all around 80 – the reasonably ripe old age at which Watts died. Watts hated Glasto and didn’t like festivals, far preferring jazz. His Desert Island Discs, with Tony Hancock, Frank Sinatra and Charlie Parker among his picks, is worth a listen. Fame was never the spur. Nor girls. He married Shirley in 1964 and hated women ‘chasing me down the road’. He was the opposite of a burn-thecandle rocker. When he and Bill Wyman decided to grow beards, he said, ‘The effort left us exhausted.’ He would describe his long career with the Stones as an accident. ‘It was just another band. I thought it would last a year, three years, and then I stopped counting.’ And ‘the problem with the Rolling Stones was – you saw them in the newspapers.’ The morning after he died, the Today programme closed to a medley of Stones hits. I was doing the washing-up and I stood at the sink motionless as shivers went up and down my spine. I listened to his drumming properly for the first time and realised that every time I danced to the Stones, I was dancing not to Mick’s vocals but to the beat of Watts’s drum. What a very fine drummer this modest, dapper, Savile Row-suited man was. ‘I just like to be in there right in the front and very loud,’ he said. I would say, ‘May he rest in peace’ – but from the sounds of it, given the choice, he’d prefer a nice bit of jazz. RIP Charles Robert Watts (2nd June 1941-24th August 2021)

Rossetti’s The Blue Silk Dress (1868), on show at Bath’s Holburne Museum

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU FIRLE PLACE: THE REGENCY WARDROBE 29th August 29 to 26th October CHARLESTON: DUNCAN GRANT 1920 18th September 18 to 13th March

SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES, KELMSCOTT MANOR

HOLBURNE MUSEUM, BATH: ROSSETTI’S PORTRAITS 24th September 24 to 9th January Stephanie Smart is a most remarkable artist and craftswoman; in her case, the always dubious distinction does not exist. She creates dream figures, using many types of paper, paper-craft techniques and embroidery thread – 30,000 yards for this project – combined with illustrated and written details. Like all good dreams, her figures give the illusion of reality. She says, ‘The ambition behind every piece is that it be simultaneously visually beautiful, technically ambitious and conceptually interesting.’ Had she wished to be a fashion designer, she would have been a good one – but what a waste that would have been. At first sight, the 11 life-size Regency outfits (on stands, without actual bodies), 12 accessories, four wall-hangings and

jewel box seem to be copies of real items. In fact, they are variations on the themes suggested by the paintings and works of art among which they are posed at Firle Place, East Sussex. Smart has created installations for a number of houses in Sussex and elsewhere. Elements from this one will be at Chertsey Museum, 6th November to 26th February, and Worthing Museum from 17th April to 1st August. Her original inspiration was a paper kaftan inscribed with Koranic quotations in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, which was made for Suleiman the Magnificent. She founded her House of Embroidered Paper to make similar wonders in 2017.

Particularly impressive is the historical research behind her storytelling. Who knew, for instance, that artists might be employed to make elaborate designs on Jane Austen’s dance floors, not just to prevent falls, but also to be erased by morning – intimations of mortality like Buddhist sand pictures? Firle Place is open only on Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays – in case you’re planning a combined visit to Charleston. Charleston, the rural face of Bloomsbury, is on the Firle estate, and there is a Duncan Grant portrait at Firle – but what a contrast between the houses. Grant has not had a solo show since 1978, and this is a fascinating recreation of his first, in 1920. More than 30 paintings have been gathered: landscapes, still lifes and portraits, which chronicle the creation of the artistic colony. Surprisingly, the Holburne exhibition is the first ever devoted to Rossetti’s portraits, and many ‘stunners’ are duly on parade, with Jane Morris and Lizzie Siddal to the fore. So too are drawings of his early colleagues, including one of Holman Hunt that was part of a group to be sent to the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner, who had emigrated to Australia. Rossetti could be a sloppy draughtsman, but that is not evident here. The Oldie October 2021 69

Pursuits

NORTH WIND/ALAMY

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER JANE AUSTEN’S WELSH ARCADIA If Bryan’s Ground, our former Herefordshire home, was E M Forster Arts & Crafts, Upland, our new resting place in Carmarthenshire, is Jane Austen Arcadia. We will garden differently. I’m no stranger to South Wales. My father grew up in Swansea, and happy memories of childhood holidays on and around the Gower endure. We are further west, a mile from the Towy estuary as the gull flies, not far from Ferryside. We decamped in mid-August. The weather was fair. Mornings were crisp, afternoons were hot, evenings were still long and fiery sunsets out in the Atlantic radiated far inland deep into the night. We had clocked up 28 years at BG. So the uprooting process was unfamiliar, expensive, occasionally fretful and something of an ordeal. Our worldly goods were packed, driven and unloaded by a team of seven men in seven lorries over a seven-day period. I lost count of the tea bags and biscuits consumed – the guys needed to maintain their strength. After all, we were moving garden as well as moving house, which meant the handling of a considerable accumulation of benches, oversize terracotta pots, wheelbarrows, a bowser, push and ride-on mowers, an armoury of tools and a consignment of worthless but muchloved, moss-encrusted sculpture and ornamental ironwork. Separate arrangements had to be made to transfer some 200 live plants, propagated over a six-month period before we sold up. Enter Richard, an old friend and sometime ‘man with a van’. Less sprightly than he was, owing to recent heart surgery, he was aided by his wife, the kind of gal who gets a job done while others stand around thinking about it.

I was careful not to water the plants too much before moving, as those extra gallons would weigh heavy on the van, resulting in smaller cargoes and more trips. Surprisingly, the entire ensemble was safely shipped in just two journeys, thanks largely to the ingenious use of several old garden tables to create two more ‘floors’ in the vehicle on which to stack things. Blessedly, the plants were refreshed by a light shower when released from incarceration. I write after just one week and cannot yet claim to have fully explored our dozen or so mostly wooded acres. But, having performed a few chemical tests when we first saw the property, I am assured of the soil’s fecundity. Weeds also tell you a lot. A towering rhododendron, possibly Old Cornish Red, stands some 40 feet high, planted 100 years ago and said to be in flower from mid-February until the end of May. And with a pH of between 5 and 6.5, my hydrangeas won’t be pink. Our proximity to the sea should protect us from early and late frosts – the gardener’s worst enemy. We’re sheltered from marine gales and comfortably enough inshore for the wind to jettison

‘To look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment’ – Mansfield Park

potentially plant-damaging salt. Thankfully, Upland has not been intensively planted, providing us with a largely clean canvas on which to work. I have gardened in double harness with a partner of more than 30 years. We’re well aware of each other’s likes and dislikes, meaning we will most likely create two gardens again (with, of course, cross-over privileges) – one beautifully and appropriately designed, the other (mine) more highly tuned to a plantsman’s incurable acquisitiveness. In receipt of the state pension for more than a decade, I’m anxious not to waste time. Trundling backwards, so to speak, from Howards End to Mansfield Park, I heed Shakespeare’s apt reminder in Twelfth Night: ‘In delay there lies no plenty.’ David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD SEA SPINACH I have often admired the glossy, dark green leaves of wild sea spinach when walking along a cliff path or on the shore above the tide line. But I am always reluctant to pick and eat it, as the spinach is also admired and sprayed by passing dogs. Earlier this year, however, I bought a packet of sea-spinach seeds (from Pennard Plants of Somerset) and am having some success. They will grow perfectly well inland on well-drained soil – we are on greensand here – and prefer a site without any shade. This perennial plant, also called sea beet, is the ancestor not only of all our cultivated beetroots but of leaf beet, seakale beet, Swiss chard and garden spinach. In a previous column I commented on the difficulty I have had with growing ordinary spinach: it requires a lot of The Oldie October 2021 71

watering, tends to run to seed in summer and is prone to a fungal disease called downy mildew. When cooked, a large handful of leaves will reduce to little more than a spoonful. Sea spinach, on the other hand, has none of these disadvantages. The plants I have grown this summer have not needed watering, they are thriving now and, as a hardy perennial, they should keep producing next year. I have paid them little attention except to cut off the seed heads when they appeared. Most importantly, the leaves do not shrivel up when steamed nor lose any of their flavour, which is undoubtedly superior to that of garden spinach. New Zealand spinach is another vigorous variety, similar in appearance to sea spinach. It is a low-growing annual which was introduced to this country by the great botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who was with Captain Cook on his voyage to Australasia in the 18th century. His sailors were given this spinach to ward off scurvy. It will tolerate hot, dry conditions without bolting, and though the plants will flower, the yield is not affected. The seed is usually sown in spring but, if it’s sown now and given the protection of a greenhouse, the plants should crop through the winter.

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD LET ME EAT CAKE Artisan baker Dee Retalli’s Baking with Fortitude has arrived just in time to replace the sourdough mania that swept the nation during last year’s winter. Mostly about cakes, it’s intelligently illustrated, quietly confident in its time-tested recipes and mercifully short. The author established the London bakery from which the book gets its title four years ago, not long before we were all confined to quarters. As a pioneer of the organic movement in the olden days of the 1980s, she is interested in traditional baking processes that include fermentation, the method that produces leavened bread through natural yeasting. Anyone who’s been hesitant about starting their own starter (me too) will find a warm welcome to the world of microbial activity without all the fuss. As an Irishwoman who bakes her mother’s recipe for soda bread with the addition of a jarful of marmalade, she’s relaxed about the use of baking powder as a raising agent – as well as yoghurt and buttermilk with a side order of cold-brewed coffee. It may not change your life, but it’s a start. 72 The Oldie October 2021

the flavours), store in the fridge in an airtight container for three days. Tip the batter into the loaf tin, spreading it into the corners, and bake for an hour or so, until firm to the touch. Leave to cool in the tin before unmoulding. Keeps well in an airtight container for five days in the fridge if fruit is included; seven days if plain.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE DORSET VS CHELSEA Four-day buttermilk starter for a sourdough loaf cake Using your hands (so as not to waste those natural yeasts), mix together in a bowl 80ml buttermilk, 25g organic self-raising white flour and 25g unrefined golden sugar. Transfer to a two-litre preserving jar with a loose-fitting lid and set it somewhere cool (not in the fridge unless in very hot weather). Top it up next day and the following three days with the same mixture. Keeps for up to ten days in the fridge. To prepare a plain sourdough loaf cake, make a batter with 200g softened salted butter beaten to a cream with 200g soft light brown sugar. Beat in four eggs. Fold in 225g self-raising white flour mixed with 50g ground almonds. Using your hands, fold in the buttermilk starter. Store in a sealed container at room temperature for two or three days, till the batter becomes runny and bubbly. Pour into a floured and buttered cake tin; wrap in greaseproof paper to prevent tiny explosions. Bake for 90 minutes or so, till a knife inserted in the centre comes out clean. Basic one-bowl yoghurt and almond cake Once you get the hang of the basic recipe, says Dee, you can add any seasonal fruit you like: fresh or dried and pre-soaked. Suggested combinations include apple cooked with maple syrup and cinnamon; grated raw pear with lemon juice; damsons cooked with sugar and sage. Makes a two-pound loaf 150g soft light brown sugar 250g live yoghurt 50ml pomace oil or light olive oil 200g plain white organic flour 75g ground almonds 1 tsp baking powder ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda ½ tsp fine sea salt Preheat the oven to 200°C/390°F/Gas 6. Line and butter a 900g loaf tin. In a large bowl, combine the sugar, yoghurt and oil; then add the remaining ingredients and mix well (this is the moment to add fruit). To produce a light fermentation (optional, but it’ll develop

There’s a saying that for every ten miles out of London, one retreats a year in gastronomic terms. Not so in Dorset, one of only eight English counties without a motorway. Daily rail commuters were a rare species before the pandemic. They are now all but extinct and ready to fill a display case in the recently reopened Dorset Museum in Dorchester, complete with a halffinished crossword and empty miniature Bell’s whisky bottle(s). The best entry point to the county is via the extortionate Sandbanks Ferry with its fabulous views of Poole Harbour, the second-largest natural harbour in the world. A couple of miles after disembarking, you will follow the sandy beachline to Studland, the home of the Pig on the Beach. In 2014, Robin Hutson’s Pig group snapped up the tired Studland Manor Hotel, the former summer villa of the Bankes family, who bequeathed 16,000 local acres, including Corfe Castle and Kingston Lacy, to the National Trust in 1982. The Pig is the local Big Treat, and you know why when you stroll into their garden overlooking Old Harry Rocks and Studland Bay. The menu is all locally sourced: crab, venison, beef etc – and very well prepared. The conservatory is a great setting at lunch or dinner, and it empties at 10.15pm when the Bournemouth crowd rush for the last ferry. Order only their house wines (£34.50 a bottle) if you want to be able to afford pudding. Driving west, you’ll notice that Thames Estuary accents have been eroded by the Dorset burr by the time you reach the Crab House Café, on the approach to the spooky Isle of Portland. It’s set on a wilderness, worthy of Derek Jarman, behind Chesil Beach. After a few oysters from their own beds, I bypassed the multiple crab options and went for a crumbly fish bhaji and a well-endowed fish stew to go with my 50cl carafe of local Bride Valley Chardonnay. Again, book weeks in advance. Then on to trendy Bridport, where an old friend treated me to supper at Dorshi,

which must be the best Asian restaurant west not just of London but of Asia. The shock of this innocent back-street joint is still with me: dish after £8 dish of joy, made by Radhika Mohandas and Jollyon Carter. They won the national street-food awards in 2014, having built a huge following at festivals. And they have no interest in starting a chain. So drive from wherever you live, stay at the sublime Seaside Boarding House at nearby Burton Bradstock, and divide your cocktails and dinners between the two. Just inside the County Gates lies Dorset’s last treat: tiny Robin Wylde, in Lyme Regis. My friends Guy and Flora (she who swims 365 days a year) booked our nine-course dinner a month before. The owner chef, Harriet Mansell, used to cook for Rupert Murdoch and the Qatari royal family – fortunately not at the same sitting. Born in Sidmouth, she is back to set the West Country ablaze. Her rare gift is that her cooking is experimental without being irritating. Eel in nasturtium, garlic scape, smoked roe and sablé all found themselves on one plate, and the other eight dishes included Portland princess oysters served in a vermouth-and-herb butter, and a shiitake tartlet. It all goes to show that Dorset is light years ahead of Chelsea. The Pig on the Beach, Studland B19 3AU; 01929 450288; www.thepighotel.com Crab House Café, Portland Road, Weymouth DT4 9YU; 01305 788867; www.crabhousecafe.co.uk Dorshi, 6 Chancery Lane, Bridport DT6 3PX; 01308 423221; www.dorshi.co.uk Robin Wylde, Silver St, Lyme Regis DT7 3HR; 07308 079427; www.robinwylde.com

DRINK BILL KNOTT WHY I’M A CIDER DRINKER What, do you suppose, are Brown Snout, Woodbine and Sweet Alford? Archaic brands of cigarette? And what links Prince William with the Fair Maid of Taunton? They are all, in fact, cider apples. A good cider apple needs a high level of sugar (that is where the alcohol comes from). Cider-makers also prize bitterness and astringency, and a crafty combination of different varieties will give the finished cider a pleasingly rounded palate. Single-variety ciders are the exception, not the rule. The process of making cider is about as simple as making an alcoholic drink can be, as I discovered, many years ago,

during a weekend at a friend’s cottage in Dorset. It was October, his orchard was laden with ripe fruit and the cider man was due on Sunday afternoon. Pleading a dodgy back, my friend retired to a deckchair, leafed idly through his newspaper and sipped chilled Mâcon, occasionally raising a languid hand to point out some apples I had missed as I flailed ineptly atop a stepladder. The cider man arrived with a woodchipper, through which the apples – stems, pips, snails and all – were pulped. We tipped the pulp into a pneumatic barrel press, pumped up the big black bladder in the middle and the juice gushed through its slats into buckets. Wild yeasts would do the rest, and by the following spring we would have cider. Or vinegar, as it transpired. Charlie Newman, landlord and proprietor of the Square and Compass at Worth Matravers, on Dorset’s glorious Isle of Purbeck, makes cider just as traditionally but rather more professionally, pressing 200 tonnes or so of apples in the six-week season in late summer and early autumn, from his own orchards and elsewhere in the county. All his cider is fermented until it is fully dry. Sat Down BeCider comes straight from big old wooden barrels, while his medium and sweet ciders (Eve’s Idea and Kiss Me Kate) are ‘back-sweetened’ in small kegs, so that the cider has no chance to start fermenting again before the clientele of the Square and Compass have happily necked it. More industrial ciders use non-fermentable sugar substitutes like xylitol and sucralose to avoid refermentation and prolong shelf life. The Square and Compass is one of only a handful of pubs to have been included in every issue of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide since 1974. Charlie’s draught ales come from Hattie Brown’s Brewery near Swanage, and are excellent, light in alcohol but full in flavour. And in a neighbouring field there is Charlie’s whimsical Woodhenge, a 12-foot-high sculpture made from 35 tonnes of tree trunks and modelled on the Salisbury Plain original. Charlie’s main obsession with the past, however, is with things even older than Stonehenge. Walk through the pub’s main entrance, stop at the hatch (there’s no actual bar), buy a pint and a pasty. Then, on the left, you will find a small museum dedicated to fossils Charlie and his father Ray collected from the paleontologically plentiful Jurassic Coast. Spend a few minutes perusing and sipping. Then emerge back onto the pub’s front terrace to finish your well-earned lunch. Now that’s what I call a circular walk.

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a terrific, classy fizz from Catalunya; a dry white that demonstrates how good Sicilian wines can be; and a Gamay from Burgundy that, for the price, compares very favourably with Pinot Noir. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine. Altopiano Bianco, Terre de Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy 2019, offer price £8.20, case price £98.40 100 per cent unoaked Trebbiano from Italy’s smallest DOP, in the heart of Abruzzo. Light and zesty. Florão, Quinta da Fonte Souto, Portugal 2019, offer price £10.75, case price £129.00 Arinto and Verdelho co-star in this dry white from the illustrious Symington stable: crisp, with hints of tropical fruit. Aguaribay Malbec, Valle de Uco, Argentina 2017, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88 £131.88 Rich cherry and raspberry fruit, with smooth tannins and a long, savoury finish.

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The Oldie October 2021 73

PA IMAGES/ALAMY

SPORT JIM WHITE KENT’S W G GRACE At this time of year, we start thinking of the most appropriate recipient of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award. Who gave us the most pleasure in sporting competition? Who best represented our values and ideals? And this year, never mind Adam Peaty and Max Whitlock; forget Lewis Hamilton and Dame Sarah Storey; stand aside, Joe Root and Harry Kane. For us oldies, there can be only one candidate. Step forward the remarkable, age-defying and apparently unbreakable Darren Stevens. This last season, the Kent cricketer became the oldest player since Norman Armstrong in 1938 to score three centuries in a Championship season. And he didn’t hang about achieving that record: playing for Kent against Leicestershire at the end of August, he scored 107 off just 70 balls. He did that aged 45, an age when most of us were struggling to read a car number plate at 25 paces, never mind spot a cricket ball heading for our chin at 85mph. We all like to think we have got better with age, maturing like a fine claret. And Stevens genuinely has. Back in 1990, he was spotted as a schoolboy by Colin Cowdrey, who remarked on his maturity. He made his debut in the County Championship, aged 21, in the month before Tony Blair entered 10 Downing Street in 1997. But in his first eight years as a professional, when he was reckoned to be solely a batsman, he took all of six wickets. Then, one afternoon in 2004, with several frontline bowlers injured, his county captain chucked him the ball in desperation. He took four wickets that day and hasn’t stopped since. He has now recorded 26 five-wicket hauls in matches. And all of them were taken after he passed the age of 35, the chronological landmark reckoned by most cricketers the time to hang up their boots. His career-best batting performances in all three formats of the game came after he was 39. Two summers ago, at the age of 43, he hit 237 for Kent at Leeds, including 28 fours and nine sixes, and followed that up by dismissing eight Yorkshire batsmen with his wobbly, tricksy medium-pacers. Thus he became the oldest player since W G Grace to score a double century and take five wickets in the same match. And in the 2020 edition of the Cricketers’ Almanac, after the editor received dozens of letters from readers demanding his recognition, he became the fourth-oldest cricketer ever to be named one of the Wisden Cricketers of 74 The Oldie October 2021

the Year. ‘I feel as fresh as a 34-year-old,’ he chuckled on winning his award. For those of us who creak up the stairs and emit involuntary grunts when we bend down to pick up a newspaper, he is a role model: the man who refuses to yield to assumptions about ageing; the cricketer who just carries on going. His email inbox is filled with correspondence from oldies whom his performances have encouraged to continue putting on their whites. ‘I’m still doing it professionally – so why can’t they do that socially at their clubs?’ he told Wisden. And here’s the thing: his hairline may be rapidly receding, the lines round his eyes may be more pronounced and his waist may be expanding, but Stevens is not giving up any time soon. He is going to play for Kent next year, too. Why would he stop? At the rate he is going, England recognition must surely eventually arrive. It would be about time.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD THE BENTLEY BOYS – AND GIRLS In 1903 Mary Anderson, a real-estate developer from Alabama, patented a window-cleaning device. There were few cars then and no one wanted her invention but, after 1920, when the patent had expired, her design was widely adopted by the motor industry. By the time she died in 1953, it was ubiquitous. We call her invention windscreen wipers. She never made a cent from it. In 1910, a 15-year-old girl became the first woman in Britain to be fined for speeding. She stood five feet two and rode a Matchless motorbike. In 1926, as the Hon Mrs Victor Bruce, she won the inaugural Monte Carlo rally, Coupe des Dames, in an AC, driving the whole way from John o’Groats. She next persuaded W O Bentley to lend her a 4.5-litre monster to attempt the world 24-hour solo record. Never having driven a Bentley, she needed three cushions to reach the pedals and see over the bonnet. In Bond Street, she bought herself ‘a pale blue leather jacket… It had no special padding

Queen of the road: Dorothy Paget, with Sir Henry ‘Tim’ Birkin at the wheel

but I thought it looked very smart.’ She averaged 89.57mph over 2,000 miles and remains the only Bentley driver of either gender to achieve a solo 24-hour record. Around the same time, multimillionaire Dorothy Paget – famed for her racehorses, gambling, girth and 100-a-day consumption of Balkan Sobranie cigarettes – was taken in a Bentley for a 130mph spin round the banked circuit at Brooklands. Trussed up in a tweed coat she called ‘speckled hen’, she was so enthralled that she bank-rolled the development of supercharged racing Bentleys. The fame of those beasts is partly why there is still a firm called Bentley today. These determined ladies all feature in a fascinating new book, Racing in the Dark, by Peter Grimsdale. This despite the fact that the book is actually about the Bentley Boys – wealthy sponsors and enthusiasts of the fledgling Bentley Motors such as Sir Henry Birkin, Woolf Barnato, Dr Dudley Benjafield, John Duff, Frank Clement, Noel van Raalte and Sammy Davis. They weren’t just the rich playboys of legend – though some were indeed rich and played hard – but seriously capable racing drivers in an age when handling those cars at speed took muscle as well as nerve. You were lucky if you walked away from a crash. ‘My first impression,’ wrote Benjafield, ‘was that the whole of my chest had been stoved in … my mouth felt different … the four upper front teeth had been broken off flush with the gum and, with the exception of a few bits embedded in my lower lip, which was pulp, they were stuck in the steering wheel.’ But it wasn’t just the drivers who led Bentley to dominate Le Mans during the hectic decade of the marque’s independent existence. It was the engineering genius of W O himself, the public schoolboy apprenticed to the Doncaster railway works, who transformed the Sopwith Camel into one of the best fighter planes of the First World War. He was a natural leader, a taciturn, focused perfectionist respected as much by the London East Enders who built the first Bentley in a hayloft as by his millionaire backers. However, he had little time for shareholders or running a business, which is why in 1931 the buccaneering Bentley Motors was absorbed by its stately rival, Rolls Royce. Grimsdale’s book is as much about the people as about the cars. He evokes them vividly, demonstrating that, whether behind the wheel, in the boardroom or sweeping the workshop floor, character – as is said but not often enough – is destiny.

Ed McLachlan

‘Well, I’m not impressed with bread and circuses so far’ The Oldie October 2021 75

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Look after the internet pennies... Jane Austen measured wealth by income, not capital. It wasn’t just Mr Darcy’s handsome features and noble mien that drew Mrs Bennet’s attention, but also his ten thousand a year. These days, there is an opposite calculation to be made. Lack of wealth (or my lack of it, at any rate) is easily measured by the absurd number of internet-related subscription services I realised I was paying for but no longer used. The trouble is they all seemed like a clever idea at the time. Don’t judge me too harshly. I run a couple of small online ventures – so it’s inevitable that I will

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

The head of Nero www.askwebster.co.uk/nero The head of Nero: reading a broken Roman Statue, from a British Museum curator Project Gutenberg www.gutenberg.org A library of over 60,000 free ebooks. Read them on Kindles, tablets or your computer. Pride and Prejudice is www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342 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

have more of these than many readers, but I still had too many. For example, I have a Zoom subscription (£90 pa). I shan’t renew it, as the free version is usually good enough and the Microsoft equivalent (Teams) is better than Zoom anyway and is included in the £80 pa I willingly pay to Microsoft for software and other services. I was paying about £260 pa to send out newsletters; not any more. There is a very similar (and better) service for 90 per cent less. It cost me £120 pa for a service that allowed me to arrange emails to go out in the future. No need for that, as Gmail now includes that for nothing. I found that I was chucking away almost £200 pa to be able to modify documents online. Ridiculous. I already have software for that. I was caught by a free trial ages ago. I pay various subscriptions to technical and trade news sources. One of them (£95 pa) has gone right off the boil – so that’s been stopped. I used to pay £45 pa to Evernote, a service for saving and sharing notes, but their free version is really all I need. In the bin it went. And £90 pa for an online fitness course? Again, sucked in by a free month. Binned it. I pay £45 pa to something called Trello; it is a system that allows several of us to collaborate on a project remotely. It works very well, but I cannot help thinking that if I took the trouble to investigate it, Microsoft Teams would

offer something similar at no cost. I’ll look into it, pronto. I pay £120 pa for printer ink. It is a service that ensures I never run out. I suppose I’ll carry on. While I’ve no way of working out if it’s worthwhile or not, it’s very convenient. I’ll keep an eye on it, though. Then there’s the entertainment; this is where the real money goes. I subscribe to Now TV (originally for rugby internationals that are now on normal television), Netflix, ITV, BritBox, Amazon Prime (free delivery and video service, all of which I can share with my wife), Spotify and YouTube premium, which allows me and my family to watch YouTube without adverts (worth every penny) and gives access to YouTube music. Those seven services add up to a staggering £887 pa. No wonder I’m feeling broke (although some family members who benefit do contribute). A little checking on what we use and it’s clear that Now TV (£120 pa) and ITV (£40 pa) are certainly getting the chop. I can always resubscribe if I need them. And Netflix is under threat. Just by cancelling unneeded online subscriptions, I have saved over £1,000 pa, and my online life is unaffected. I urge you to do the same review. You might think I have revealed a casual, spendthrift streak. If you do, I’m not sure that I could argue with you. But I have now taken action and am better off by 10 per cent of Mr Darcy’s income. Miss Austen would think well of me, I hope.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Tips on tipping Restaurant and café staff are delighted to be back at work, and earning tips, now that we are able to eat out again. It used to be standard practice to pay gratuities in cash. When we realised it was more convenient (and, since the pandemic, more hygienic) to add a percentage to the bill, we frequently paid it all with a credit or debit card. You might not realise that 76 The Oldie October 2021

this usually means the staff receive less money. The way that restaurants handle workers’ tips, whether paid in cash or on cards, has long been a contentious subject. There is no law to guarantee staff will receive the money customers leave for them. Even the government’s code of best practice allows bosses to keep some of the money for themselves, and many

regard tips as an excuse for paying low wages. There are instances where unscrupulous bosses have kept all the money grateful customers believed they were giving to the workers. Fortunately, this lack of employeeprotection should be changing. The Tips Bill is edging its way through Parliament. If it becomes law, it will entitle staff to receive every penny left for them in tips.

‘Three ... maybe four days. I’m sorry’

When tips are shared with backroom workers such as chefs and dishwashers, it will clarify how the money is distributed. Generally, waiters prefer tips to be left in cash they can take home at the end of their shift. When tips are paid on plastic, there is a delay while the payment is processed by the bank. Then employers might pass the money back to staff through

the payroll, which means they have to wait even longer for their reward. Bosses can deduct any amount from these tips, including the cost of the card-processing fees. Staff have to pay income tax on the tips they receive. Tax is automatically deducted when they are paid through PAYE. Cash payments should be declared at the end of the year on an HMRC self-assessment form.

If the employer decides how tip money is shared out between staff, workers pay National Insurance contributions as well. The sharing system is called a ‘tronc’ and employers must tell HMRC who is the troncmaster. Some restaurants automatically add a service charge to the bill, which they might put towards overheads such as wages or the electricity bill. It would be more honest simply to raise the cost of the food. If paying a service charge is compulsory, it is not regarded as a tip. But if the employer does pass some of the money on to staff, it becomes part of their wages, which are taxed. When payment is voluntary, staff must pay both tax and National Insurance contributions on the amount they receive. In future, please make an effort to keep money to hand so you can always tip waiters in cash. If you don’t have the cash, be extra generous with a tip on your card. Ask the waiting staff if they are allowed to keep all their tips. If they aren’t, complain to the management. We should try to improve practices without waiting for the Tips Bill to become law.

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The Oldie October 2021 77

Getting Dressed

Get me to the church in style

Rev Catherine Llewelyn-Evans shines in cassocks and dog collars brigid keenan What should a woman priest wear? The first Anglican women priests were ordained in Britain in 1994. There were just 32 of them then; there are now 1,380 in the Anglican communion around the world. They often choose traditional cassocks for services. But there are no strict rules for their civvies. A woman priest is caught in a bit of a bind: she can’t dress too sexily, flamboyantly, expensively, cheaply or drably. No wonder the Reverend Catherine Llewelyn-Evans has found herself thinking that perhaps the original sin of Adam and Eve was just getting dressed. ‘Once you have to put on clothes, you differentiate yourself – and, in my case anyway, you go through years of selfconsciousness. Had we all remained naked, none of this would have happened.’ Catherine, as she likes parishioners to call her, did find her own successful style, but only after much trial and error. Ordained at 45 (she is now 66), Catherine has served as a curate and vicar. Now retired, she is an unpaid supply priest, serving villages around her home in the cathedral city of Wells. The Church was in her DNA. There were missionaries and churchmen in her father’s family, and her parents held open house for clergy and lost souls. ‘Perhaps the two are the same,’ she muses. Her father, though a layman, served as administrator at Ripon Cathedral and wrote its definitive guide. She revelled in the out-ofhours access to the wonderful building – Collared Clergywear top. Skirt: East (via eBay). Shoes: Moshulu. Hat: Powder. Necklace: Claudia Bradby

the darkness and the silence. But the job was badly paid and they lived frugally. ‘My father believed pennilessness was next to godliness.’ After Durham University, she became a teacher, married a solicitor and had three boys. Only when they were older did she contemplate a new career. She thought of counselling or physiotherapy because she never expected to be accepted for ordination. ‘I had assumed you had to be male, public school, stiff upper lip and all the rest.’ After ordination, there came the question of what a priest wears. Her mother had made all her clothes for her as a child. ‘Wanting to retain my sweet innocence, she dressed me like a cross between Anne of Green Gables and Looby Loo. I probably wanted that too, as I saw myself as Beth in Little Women – though later I realised there was more of Jo in me. ‘The only time I remember being bought clothes was when my mother appeared with that amazing new type of garment – SLACKS. I loathed them and have loathed trousers ever since – which is annoying as they are so practical.’ Catherine says she was never any good at clothes. During a miners’ strike, when girls at her school were told they could wear mufti, she was the only one who choose to remain in uniform. ‘Everyone thought it was because I was head girl. Only I knew that it was because I didn’t really know how to dress like a normal girl.’ At university, someone on her course told her she was

Experimenting with a loose dog collar in the early 2000s – Velcro was required

the worst-dressed girl he knew. ‘He was probably right, I dressed like a very drab Amish.’ As a priest, with few guidelines from authorities, she began experimenting. How did she escape from the traditional clergy shirt, which was black and stiff and very uncomfortable? She found the shirtless dog collar. ‘But you needed an implant of Velcro on the back of your neck to keep it in place. When I wore it, the postman said, “Excuse me, miss – are you a vicar or just a weird dresser?” “Both” was the answer.’ Eventually she found the softer quasi-T-shirt with integrated dog collar that she wears now, teamed with long skirts (bought at charity shops and on eBay) and discreet jewellery. She has never had trouble keeping slim. A ‘genius’ hairdresser, Jess at Bijou in Wells, keeps her bobbed hair trim. She teams her cassocks with lowheeled shoes in liturgical colours: gold, green, red – and pink for the days she wears purple cassocks. For church services, she wears a simple, slightly shaped cassock in white or black. The very first one was made for her ordination by a dressdesigner friend. At first, she was nervous to wear it outside the church but now, in the traditional villages she serves, she likes to. ‘It makes it easy to identify me – plus I don’t have to worry about what I’m going to wear.’ The Oldie October 2021 79

The Tufted Duck by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd The jaunty topknot on the head of the drake tufted (Aythya fuligula) – allied to the species’s jack-in-the-box water antics – makes them the jokers in the duck pack. Those with only a passing interest in birds, such as children, are excited to find some ducks dive and zoom about underwater. The tufted does this incessantly, diving with particular panache – not at a slant, but on the spot. It emerges after as long as a minute, dry as dust, the water droplets, bright as its yellow eyes, slipping off the black (drake) or brown (duck) waterproof plumage like quicksilver. Until the 19th century, they were only winter migrants. The first record of a British nesting was in 1849, in Yorkshire. Today it is our commonest diving duck. The 19,000 residents are joined in winter by 140,000 incomers, notably from Russia: a tufted ringed in London’s St James’s Park was recovered a year later in Siberia. Freshwater lakes are the preferred breeding habitat and they have benefited from the modern demand for reservoirs and gravel pits. The downy nest is hidden in vegetation. Islets are a favourite location, not least in urban lakes. Ducklings dive adeptly within hours of hatching. Tufted swim in company and fly in small, quick-winged packs. They formed part of Lord Grey’s wildfowl collection at Fallodon and contribute to one of the most memorable passages in his classic book The Charm of Birds. He had two ponds, sometimes dominated by them to the point of overcrowding: ‘Tufted ducks are prone to what Peacock calls “stay-athometiveness”. The young broods are apt to be content with the place in which they have been reared… Some eight or ten of these tufted ducks will stand at my feet, looking up in the most engaging way to be fed by hand.’

Grey was not averse to giving ducks bread – helpful with regard to children’s fun. Tufted tame easily and Grey’s homeraised colony was swelled by indistinguishable intruders. There was ‘nothing to be done but acquiesce’. Early one windless Christmas Day, he found all his duck species congregated to feed at the first pond. So he went and sat by the second, which was contrastingly still and deserted. Slowly the ducks arrived from the other pond and, apparently rejoicing in the previously absent sunlight, ‘began to sport and play’ until ‘there was not a

square foot of water that was not in constant agitation’. One imagines it was the numerous tufted above all that ‘dived unexpectedly, travelled under water, came up in some new place and then, as if surprised by what they saw, dived again with exceeding suddenness’. The chaos abruptly ceased. The ducks swam ashore and slept: ‘There are hours of which it can be said, “Thought was not: in enjoyment it expired.” So it was now, and if anything stirred in the mind at all, it was an echo of the words, “And God saw that it was good.” ’ The Oldie October 2021 81

Travel Late-youth hostel Middle-aged William Cook and his mother rediscover the joys of youth hostelling – and the splendours of Berwick-upon-Tweed

here did you go on your summer holidays? I took my mother to a youth hostel in Berwick-uponTweed, to celebrate her 80th birthday. ‘What a shameless cheapskate!’ I hear you cry. ‘What a penny-pinching skinflint! Couldn’t you have taken her to a nice hotel on the English Riviera?’ Not on your nelly. My mum adores Northumberland, and she can’t stand posh hotels. She’s always loved youth hostelling, she’d stayed in this hostel before and she told me it was really comfortable. I must admit I was sceptical (my memories of the Youth Hostel Association were rather Spartan) but I decided to give it a go. Well, it was her birthday, after all. My recollections of youth hostelling are rooted in the late, unlamented 1970s, when hotels were dowdy and B&Bs were often dire. Youth hostels didn’t promise much, but there were no unpleasant surprises. It wasn’t always cheerful, but it was cheap, and you got what you paid for: a communal kitchen, a communal bathroom, and a bunk in a single-sex dorm. I went youth hostelling several times in my teens (to the Lake District, Skye and Cornwall) and I had a great time. 82 The Oldie October 2021

William and mother at the Berwick hostel. Right: the pair 50 years ago

OK, so it was pretty basic, but what was the alternative? I couldn’t afford a hotel, caravanning felt too

suburban and camping left you at the mercy of the capricious British weather. Still, I’m far less intrepid than my mother. Throughout my adult life, I’ve relished staying in swanky hotels. What’s the point of going on holiday, if the place where you’re staying is less comfy than your own home? If it hadn’t been for her, I never would have set foot in another hostel. And I never would have known what I’d been missing. On our arrival at the YHA in Berwickupon-Tweed, the first thing that struck me was how smart it was. This didn’t seem like a youth hostel – more like a budget boutique hotel. The hostel is in a converted granary. The ground floor is a cosy café. The biggest difference was the ambience. Youth hostels used to have stern wardens who seemed more like sergeant majors than like hoteliers, but the staff here were charming. As they told me, there have been a few changes since I last stayed chez YHA. Bedding used to be a blanket and one of those ghastly sheet sleeping-bags – now it’s fitted sheets and duvets. You used to have to do a daily chore before you were released back into the community. Not any more. You can still cook your own grub, but they also serve

EFRAIN PADRO/ALAMY

Golden borderland: Berwick’s battlements and town hall spire (1760)

canteen food. There are still dormitories with bunk beds, but there are also private rooms for singles, couples or families (my mum and I shared an en-suite twin for £60 a night). You don’t even need to be a YHA member to stay here any more (though membership, from £15 pa, gets you 10 per cent off every booking). And, contrary to popular misconception, there’s never been an upper age limit. Oldies have always been more than welcome. Most of our fellow guests were middle-aged: empty-nesters like me, or parents with teenage children. So how did the YHA begin? Like a lot of hale and hearty notions, the idea originated in Germany, before the First World War, and was copied by British hikers in the 1920s. In 1930, various British hostelling groups amalgamated to form the YHA in England and Wales (joined by parallel organisations in Scotland and Northern Ireland). The golden age of youth hostelling was either side of the Second World War and, following a period of decline, the association is now enjoying a discreet revival. Once it was the butt of condescending jokes: who can forget Alan Partridge’s idea for a travel show (sadly never made)

– Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank? Yet, after decades in the doldrums, something’s shifted. Youth hostelling is (almost) fashionable again. Why? Three reasons, I reckon. Since the financial crash, holiday budgets have got tighter. The novelty of staying in plush hotels has worn off. And the hostels have got a lot better. The association now has 150,000 members, and turns over more than £50m a year. The number of hostels has halved, from around 300 in the 1950s to 150 today, and those that have survived are far smarter. The YHA in Berwick even won a RIBA award. So what’s Berwick like? Delightful. I’d spent an idyllic afternoon here a few years earlier, on my way back to London from the Scottish Borders. Although I was eager to revisit it, I did think that, after a few days, we might run out of things to do. Not a bit of it. We spent five days in Berwick and when we left for home, there was still lots of stuff we hadn’t seen. Berwick’s greatest glory is its magnificent battlements, erected by Edward I and reinforced by Elizabeth I. You can walk all the way round these walls, which provide stunning views across the River Tweed, out to sea and

down into the antique town within. The Old Town is full of handsome, historic buildings, many of them Georgian, some a good deal older. Berwick’s striking parish church, Holy Trinity, was one of the few churches built during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. The only English territory north of the Tweed and previously Scotland’s greatest seaport, Berwick changed hands 13 times between 1296 and 1482. Although it’s been English for over 500 years, it still has one foot in each nation. The crosses of St George and St Andrew fly side by side outside lots of buildings. Scots and Northumbrian accents mingle in the local market. Berwick Rangers FC play in the Scottish League. Berwick was a garrison town until the early 1960s, and the robust barracks, built 300 years ago, now house a fascinating military museum. Berwick’s art gallery has Old Masters from the Burrell Collection. There are more paintings at Paxton House, a splendid stately home a few miles away, across the border. There are several sandy beaches within walking distance of the walls, and some lovely walks along the Tweed. Berwick suffered badly from the decline of its traditional industries. It used to be a busy port: herring- and salmon-fishing, shipbuilding, and freight and passenger shipping. It’s now becoming a cultural destination. There are some good commercial galleries and quirky secondhand bookshops. Trendy bars and cafés are sprouting up alongside its traditional pubs and fish-and-chip shops. I thought we might be the only sightseers, but we met lots of kindred spirits. Our hostel was full. Berwick’s most famous tourist was L S Lowry, who came here for his summer holidays for 40 years. He did lots of paintings here (a nice contrast to his sooty cityscapes) and there’s a wonderful Lowry Trail which doubles as a walking tour of the town. He stayed at the Castle Hotel, by the station. When I dropped in there, I heard a funny story. Apparently, the hotel had a pretty receptionist. When Lowry returned there in the evenings, after a day’s drawing, he used to give her little sketches. But she had no idea who he was – so she threw them all away. For information about youth hostelling, visit www.yha.org.uk. For information about Berwick-upon-Tweed, go to www. visitberwick.com The Oldie October 2021 83

Overlooked Britain

Edinburgh’s glass menagerie lucinda lambton The Victorian stained glass in the Café Royal dazzled me – and the Everly Brothers

Ballantine, had been one of the first Many are the minutes – even hours – artists to revive the art of glass-painting. that I have sat in contemplative wonder, In 1845, he published Stained Glass, looking at the fragments of the first Showing Its Applicability to Every Style stained-glass window in the country, if of Architecture. not the world, dating from 670 AD. Also greatly enhancing the Café Royal The window is hard by the centre of Sunderland, within the walls of St Peter’s – founded, incidentally, in 1863 as a showroom for gas and sanitary fittings Church, Monkwearmouth, County – is a wealth of Royal Doulton’s ceramic Durham, one of the most important tiled portraits, all lit by gilded Anglo-Saxon churches in the country. If chandeliers. HURRAY! They were created you dwell on what was subsequently to to celebrate many of Scotland’s greatest be produced with this glowingly innovators. Here is Robert Stephenson, translucent art, you are quite floored ‘father of the railways’, in his workshop. with delight. Gleaming with distinction, they were With stained glass being associated designed by John Eyre and painted by most generally with the Church for well Katherine Sturgeon and W J Nunn. over 1,000 years, I find it particularly appealing in a secular light. What about All produced by Doulton, they were the shock-a-second sight of the excellent already famed nationwide, from the and elegant crowd of Victorian notables moment they went on show at the 1886 and sportsmen, portrayed in both stained Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art, glass and tiled tableaux, at the Café Royal held on Edinburgh’s meadows. Seven in Edinburgh. more renowned figures of the day shine There are two bars – the Oyster and forth: Benjamin Franklin, Michael the Royal Circle – both replete with quite Faraday, Robert Stephenson (for calico exhaustingly distinguished decoration. printing), William Caxton, George The more I think of them, the more I Stephenson, James Watt and Robert Peel. marvel at their brilliant survival – by a I have a strangely happy memory of whisker, I may say, in that in the 1960s Edinburgh’s Café Royal; of making a film they were doomed to be replaced by there for the BBC about the Great North Woolworths. Objections were rife and Road. Delighting in showing off the rampant, eliciting an enraged petition of sights from London to Edinburgh, we some 8,700 signatures, and the building decided, as a grand finale, to finish our was saved. journey with, of all people, the Everly Staring at you from on high at the Café Brothers. Decades earlier, I had met Royal, among the life-size stained-glass them on the Flying Scotsman, along with figures who march forth while Buddy Holly’s Crickets, when we had illuminating your splendid situation, the played and sung the night away in a cricketer and rugby player have particular grace. The mustachioed, brown-coated angler is at work, assembling his bait with beautifully elegant fingers. The pink-coated huntsman stands with his whip at the ready, while the tam-o’shantered huntsman, who has just felled a stag, is inspecting his gun. These characters were all created by Ballantine and Gardiner, an Edinburgh Dream, dream, dream: Lambton and firm of glass-stainers. Its founder, James Phil Everly, Piccadilly Circus, 1960 84 The Oldie October 2021

first-class sleeping car! Of all happy coincidences, the Everlys were to be in Edinburgh that same night. Thus it was that Phil and Don Everly, the famed duo from Nashville, Tennessee, were there to delight in the Victorian stained-glass windows of Edinburgh. As I’ve been writing this, Don Everly has, sadly, died, at 84. Phil died in 2014, aged 74. While we are in the Scottish capital, we must rest a while longer to admire the mournfully beautiful stained-glass window that once enhanced the Cottars Howff – Scots for a favourite meeting place – the public house at 21 Rose Street. Now permanently closed, with the great window gone, it must be written about before it is forgotten. It was enormous, in three sections, showing a sorry scene from the Crimean War: an ashen-faced Black Watch soldier is breathing his last, in the arms of a heavily mustachioed and busby-wearing comrade. Sporrans flourished, they are surrounded by tartan-kilted allies in brilliantly accurate, red uniforms. Side panels showed the names of the battles in which their regiments fought. There are secular subjects in ecclesiastical settings, too, such as the delicate little 16th-century dancing wren, about to catch a spider in a cobweb, in York Minster’s Zouche Chapel. Then there is the unique portrayal of Queen Victoria wearing specs and in a wheelchair, in a window in St Mary’s Church, Hook, Yorkshire. Surrounded by medics and dignitaries, she is in hospital, presenting daffodils to soldiers wounded in the Boer War. A wan recipient lies in bed. A beautiful series of windows of the Gloucestershire countryside was designed to commemorate the life of the composer and poet Ivor Gurney, in Gloucester Cathedral. Sandwiched between medieval fragments and plain-glass Gothicry, the windows glow through morning, noon and night, alive with the romance of his poems about his beloved county. Commissioned in 1913, they have

LUCY LAMBTON/ALAMY

Above: Café Royal, Edinburgh. Far left: Wheelchairbound Queen Victoria with the war wounded, St Mary’s Church, Hook. Left: wren hunting a spider, Zouche Chapel, York Minster

many a poetic figure roaming by, enjoying Gurney’s favourite aspects of the place. The First World War comes to poignant life in stained-glass windows all over the country. Horses heave forth great guns in Radley College Chapel, Oxfordshire, while uniformed soldiers kneel to receive Holy Communion at Coldharbour, Surrey, against the

backdrop of ravaged landscape beyond the bombed walls of the church. The National Inventory of War Memorials in London’s Imperial War Museum lists 3,000 stained-glass memorials. Some 1,800 relating to the First World War are mostly in churches. A window in St George’s Church, Windmill Hill, Enfield, has the mournful sight of a dead soldier with his hand

lightly laid on the foot of a crucified Christ, whose head is amidst the clouds. Both figures are swirled about with waves of green and purple, as if in a vision. The wonder of stained glass being ‘alive’, via the simple virtue of the ever changing weather outside, along with the complex mixture of emotions evoked by war, gives glass war memorials a most particular poignancy. The Oldie October 2021 85

On the Road

A farewell to qualms Giles Coren was an angry young man. He’s happy now, thanks to his journalist wife, early nights and long grass. By Louise Flind

Is there anything you can’t leave home without? My Kindle because I used to pack at least one book per day – so there was never any room for clothes. Is there something you really miss? London water for drinking and making tea. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? Corfu and Ibiza were the two places my parents used to go. We’d go for a fortnight and rent a villa. It was the early ’70s: choc ices, Uvistat sun cream if there was any, and buying Disney comics in Spanish, Portuguese or Greek – and my dad pretending to translate them. What are your memories of your dad, Alan Coren, on holiday? My dad loved his holidays, didn’t wear sun cream, always burnt, always wore little Speedos. Were there family arguments on holidays? Lots of arguments, all the time. We’d often drive down to the South of France in the Volvo with the windows wound up. My parents would smoke 60 fags a day and my sister and I would be going green in the back of the car, begging them to wind the window down, but they wouldn’t because it would spoil my mum’s hair. The Corens were very good at holidays: everyone just got drunk, smoked cigarettes and got sunburnt. Were there constant discussions about papers and books when you were a child? Yes – we talked about them all the time. What’s your favourite bit of Hampstead Heath? Do you bump into Hunter Davies, Valerie Grove and other Oldie writers? I like it deep in August when the grass gets up very high. I haven’t seen Valerie but I see Hunter almost every day and we always stop for a chat. I bumped into Melvyn [Bragg] the other day. I see 86 The Oldie October 2021

Julian Barnes, Howard Jacobson, Julia Hartley-Brewer … lots of people I know.

everyone else was playing football, I’d wander into Westminster Abbey.

You wrote a book about anger. Are you less angry than you used to be? I used to get angry but don’t any more. My dad had a short temper.

You were at Oxford – your favourite building in Oxford? I didn’t like Oxford much. Out of loyalty’s sake, I’d better say Keble Chapel [he was at Keble College].

Did you mind having to write about your family during the pandemic in your Times magazine column about life at home? No, it was my idea. What is your favourite restaurant in Britain and abroad? The Bell Inn at Langford in Oxfordshire. I don’t like foreign restaurants [giggles]. What do you read on holiday? Sometimes two novels a day – anything except Harry Potter. Do you prefer writing or being on telly? I hate them both. If I had money, I wouldn’t do either… Lord Beaverbrook said, ‘I pity anyone who isn’t a journalist.’ Is it the best job in the world? Yes, yes, of course. A wonderful quote – and I hadn’t heard it, of course. The reason I’m so happily married to my wife is not because she’s beautiful, funny and nice but because she’s a journalist. If you weren’t a journalist, what would you be? A bad, penniless novelist. What’s your favourite building in London? When I was at Westminster School, we had our dinner near the Jerusalem Chamber where Henry IV died. Did you like Westminster School? I didn’t much appreciate the school; I was sort of lonely and miserable. When

You lived in Paris – what is your favourite building in Paris? I didn’t like Paris, either! The Hôtel Salé with all those Picasso goats in the garden. Where did you go on your honeymoon? Crete for a week, and Santorini for another. Do you lie on the beach? Yes, yes, all the time – and anyone who says they don’t like it is a fool… Do you have a daily routine even when you’re away? I wake up and go to bed early wherever I am. Do you stay in a hotel or in an apartment? Ideally in a villa with a cook. What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten? Raw donkey in Tuscany. What’s your biggest headache? My fear of disappointment. I like to know what’s going to be there, arrive and find it. What’s the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away? On a patch of grass when I was 20 in the Hippodrome, Istanbul. Do you like coming home? I like being at home all the time, which is why I liked lockdown. Giles Coren and his wife, Esther Walker, appear in the podcast Giles Coren has no idea

Taking a Walk

The joy of Devon’s fake lake patrick barkham

GARY WING

The vast lake snaked onwards – a collage of headlands, forest and silver water that appeared without end. The scene at Roadford Lake looked, to my uneducated eye at least, as ancient, natural and unchanging as any ‘wild’ part of Britain. So it was disorientating to read on my pink-jacketed OS map, which I still considered more or less contemporary, that this vast Devonian lake did not exist when the map was printed in 1986. The map marked open fields, farms, the valley of the River Wolf and, in blue script, ‘Roadford Reservoir (under construction)’. This landscape of lake, forest, footpaths and distant wind turbines had been assembled in the 30 years since the dam was completed in 1990 to supply Devon towns with water. The drive to the lakeside café and walking trails on a new road across the top of the dam were a bit of a giveaway, but if I had been brought here blindfolded I would have never guessed it was all so ersatz. The division between artificial and natural is rarely clear in a country so conclusively shaped by people, and I guess Roadford Lake became a

natural-seeming place the moment other species moved in. For here they were, as soon as we set off down the wheelchairaccessible lakeside path: willow warblers singing somnolently from sallow thickets, a woodpecker drumming on an oak and Freya, a springer spaniel, who delighted in bathing on a small beach by the lakeshore. I’m a romantic – so I tend to mourn what’s been lost, imagining the old hedges, gateposts, pastures and farms beneath the silvery water. The reservoir was planned following the drought of ’76, but stalled under environmental objections. Were the residents of Hennard Farm, Hennard Mill and other lost Wolf-valley landmarks devastated by their losses? Were surviving farms grateful for a waterside view? Perhaps wounds have healed. The present rapidly overwhelms the past, and newcomers would not be struck by any ghosts of past landscapes here, apart from at low water, when lanes can be seen disappearing into the lake. When I visited, there was no unsightly tidemark around the shore as in a dirty bath. As one of South West Water’s many signs revealed,

water levels were currently 94 per cent of capacity. The shallows were gin-clear except for some brown churn where the spaniel swam. Walking by water always makes me want to swim, but more signs informed us that swimming wasn’t permitted so that the water stayed clear and clean. We humans were too dirty for this sparkling reservoir. We entered a conifer plantation that had rapidly grown to maturity. Further signs informed us that tree-thinning work was ensuring the forest stayed healthy. Helpful signage feels bossy after a while. Natural landscapes wouldn’t require so much guidance. The next sign I encountered informed us that one pretty meadow was a surviving example of culm grassland. This nutrient-poor, orchid-rich place, traditionally grazed by Devon red cattle in summer, is unique to this region, and home to the rare and declining marsh fritillary butterfly. South West Water was taking extra special care of this meadow, although my inner cynic wondered how much had been lost to the reservoir. I vowed to spend the rest of this walk not imagining the losses but considering the gains. Generally, if we add water to a landscape, we boost wild diversity, and the lake, a sanctuary for wildfowl in winter, was rich in brown trout. It may soon become home to osprey as well. Roadford Lake was also home to many happy people, who visit it to fish, sail, kayak or walk. Publicly accessible waterside – even with lots of rules – is cherished by everyone. And Roadford, barely five minutes from the A30, has a café, a toilet and a billion times more tranquillity than any roadside services for anyone sweating down to Cornwall. Just don’t try and cool off with a swim. Roadford Lake, Broadwoodwidger, Devon PL16 0RL. Follow the trail past the café for a there-and-back lakeside walk with a variety of loops in the forest. Open seven days a week, 8.30am-5pm The Oldie October 2021 87

Genius crossword 405 el sereno This is to all intents and purposes a normal cryptic crossword. However, 2 clues lack definitions, and an extra word has been added to one clue. This word is an anagram of the solution to 23 down. These provide the answer to a mystery. Across 1 Striker must lose one for a great deal of money (6) 4 Sweeper keeps everybody on their toes here! (8) 10 Runs in desperate hope - wins possession (9) 11 Issue seeing boss initially cross (5) 12 City formed from mostly ecclesiastical district (5) 13 Bird having split crest (9) 14 Firm’s only source of liquidity (7) 16 Appear ominously close to depression - not good (4) 19 Creature that may appear before March? (4) 21 Sun involved in slander (7) 24 Son loses heart with a racehorse that may be beaten (5,4) 25 Plant that is right by Britain (5) 26 William Goddard’s rejected doctrine? (5) 27 Partnerships made when holding criminal in a cell? (9) 28 Office item making mum more embarrassed (8) 29 Backing party song that’s simple to hear is a quirk (6)

Down 1 The chance of a view (8) 2 Rules may see prisoners eating fish, mostly (8) 3 Pulls in listeners around North (5) 5 Soldiers wearing shock gear (7) 6 Heavy debts coming after childbirth in the States (9) 7 Ragged shapes coming from old empty spaces (6) 8 Refuse giving rise to obscure study (6) 9 Husband in place set for service here (6) 15 Titled ladies rush up to employ one person whose charges are small (9) 17 Musician’s disturbed air breaking sound barrier (8) 18 Areas DIY ruined, possibly (1,4,3) 20 Bishop invested in sort of music that’s rubbish (7) 21 Incoherent speech from parent on belief, oddly (6) 22 Tracks unrelated remarks (6) 23 see preamble (6) 25 Label reduced spirit (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the current coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 20th October 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 405 Across 3 Delicate material (4) 7 Secure (4) 8 Tresses, fur (4) 9 Couples (5) 10 At a distance (4) 11 Concealing (6) 13 Parasol (8) 15 Eschew (4) 16 Asian desert (4) 17 Period of celebration, fête (8) 18 Destroy, chew up (6) 21 Refined woman! 23 Japanese fish dish 24 Call, identify (4) 25 Requirement (4) 26 Male pig (4)

Genius 403 solution Down 1 Young whale (4) 2 Dispiriting (10) 3 Den (4) 4 Bank clerks (8) 5 Hindu dress (4) 6 In the first place (10) 10 A task allocated (10) 12 Field of study (10) 14 Outdoors (8) 19 Lacking sensation (4) 20 Addict, exploiter (4) 22 Attracted (4)

Winner: N J Turner, Sutton Coldfield Runners-up: Hugh Darwen, Warwick; Charles Gratrix, Llanidnoes, Powys

Moron 403 solution Across: 1 Party, 4 Sepal (participle), 10 Relieve, 11 Frame, 12 Tibia, 13 Annoyed, 15 Goya, 17 Cower, 19 Idler, 22 Ably, 25 Lovable, 27 Nadir, 29 Torso, 30 Session, 31 Perks, 32 Types. Down: 2 Ad-lib, 3 Teenage, 5 Elfin, 6 Analyse, 7 Truth, 8 Decay, 9 Ready, 14 Nail, 16 Oral, 18 Obverse, 20 Dynasty, 21 Elite, 23 Beast, 24 Wrong, 26 Brook, 28 Drive. The Oldie October 2021 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO This month’s deal was one of several swings necessary to overturn a deficit of 67 International Match Points in the Vanderbilt Knockout Teams, one the US Majors. Dealer North Both Vulnerable

West ♠ 75 ♥Q72 ♦ 10 4 ♣J 10 9 7 6 4

North ♠ AJ6 ♥AK53 ♦875 ♣A 5 2

South ♠ K984 ♥86 ♦AKQJ9 ♣Q 8

East ♠ Q 10 3 2 ♥ J 10 9 4 ♦632 ♣K 3

The bidding South West North East 1♥ Pass 2♦ Pass 2NT(1) Pass 3♠ Pass 3NT Pass 4NT(2) Pass 5♦(3) Pass 6♦ end (1) Best played as 15-19 and forcing to game after a two-over-one response. (2) Quantitative slam try. (3) When you’re accepting a quantitative slam try, it is best to bid naturally. North likes his top cards for suit play and offers Six Diamonds as an alternative slam with his three-card support. West led the knave of clubs; declarer, Eric Rodwell, ducking the trick to East’s king. He won East’s knave of hearts return with dummy’s king, and drew trumps, West discarding a club. He cashed the queen of clubs, crossed to the ace of hearts and cashed the ace of clubs, East discarding a spade. He then ruffed a third heart to reach this ending:

West

♠ 75 ♥-

♦-

♣10 9

North ♠ AJ6 ♥5 ♦♣South ♠ K98 ♥♦J ♣-

East ♠ Q 10 3 ♥ 10 ♦♣-

Declarer led his last diamond, West discarding a club. Declarer paused. His most obvious 12th trick was a spade to the jack. However, West was known to have started with six clubs, two diamonds and three (or possibly four) hearts. That meant East held four (or five spades), therefore likely the queen. Rejecting the spade finesse, declarer discarded the jack of spades. What could East discard? East had to keep the master heart, so away went a spade. Having squeezed East down to two spades, declarer crossed to the ace, returned to the king, and triumphantly tabled the promoted nine. Slam made. ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 271, you were invited to write a poem with the title Convenience. It was an inconvenient match between so many good entries and so little space to print the winners. Katie Mallett gave a recognisable account of stopping in for a delivery: ‘And so you pick the time, the week, the day / When this will happen, though deep down you know / From your experience it won’t be so.’ Anthony Young observed that the savings of convenience are always of their time and equipment: ‘The ticket for my flight’s online, / The printer that I need is mine.’ Adrian Fry had a quirkier conceit: ‘Mama can’t use the convenience store, / Convenience being a Sin.’ D A Prince, contemplating the difficulty of preserving valuable architectural details of public lavatories, concluded: ‘Urinals have no value in Art’s eyes, / Although Marcel Duchamp thought otherwise.’ From a station on the Talyllyn Railway, Angela Brown sent a tale of automation and espionage. Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of that truly convenient resource The Chambers Dictionary going to Michael R Burch of Tennessee. Convenience, or Hymn to an Art-omatic Laundromat O, terrible-immaculate ALL-cleansing godly Laundromat, Where cleanliness is next to Art – A bright Kinkade (bought at Kmart), A Persian rug (made in Taiwan), A Royal Bonn Clock (time zone Guam) – Embrace my ass in cushioned vinyl, Erase all marks: anal, vaginal, Penile, inkspot, red wine, dirt. O, sterilise her skirt, my shirt, My skidmarked briefs, her padded bra; Suds-away in your white maw All filth, the day’s accumulation. Make us pure by INUNDATION. Michael R Burch My mother lifts the phone down from its niche, Black Bakelite and hostile, clouded and ashine With adults’ breath and adults’ fingering. ‘Now, when Christine’s mummy answers, say, “Would it be convenient for me to come and play?” ’

My small forefinger drags the silver circle round the dial. A purr, a click, I breathe and speak my line. ‘Would it be convenient –’ ‘Hello?’ ‘Would it be conve–’ ‘Hello? Hello?’ ‘Would it be con–’ ‘Anybody there?’ A clatter. Wobble-lipped and face aflame I set the feared receiver on its sprung chrome studs And stand with the squat, silent, numbered thing Designed for my convenience, and watch A single tear plop on its plaited cord And darken its brown cotton covering. Jane Bower A lifelong life, the normal sort, Resentment of it being cut short. Grim prognosis, months remaining, Slowly, quietly, life force draining. Drugs prescribed to help with pain, Even if they dull the brain. Booked into a hospice bed, Remaining there till safely dead. Funeral details carefully planned, Quick cremation, all in hand. A chosen spot, his ashes strewn, A pleasant Sunday afternoon. Now the widow, once a wife, Calmly carries on with life. Minimises sentiment, Makes life, like death, convenient. Martin Brown To get the car out, drive six miles, Load, unload it, park it. I walked to the convenience store, Saved five quid on petrol, Overspent by twenty more. Homewards in the rain – this bladder! – I stopped off at the pub cons (closed), And walked under a handy ladder. I’d bought a ready meal in a pouch, Burned myself in opening it And spilled half on the couch. Wine, surest of expedients, Comes now, praise be, in screw-tops. Cheers! Here’s to convenience! David Shields COMPETITION No 273 Paper or plastic, saddle or hand – bags outnumber human beings. So a poem, please, called Bags. Maximum 16 lines. We still cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@ theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 273’, by 21st October. The Oldie October 2021 91

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside The Guest from Hell

Just before we were locked up, an old artist friend of my husband’s occasionally stayed with us – always telling us at the last minute – as we live near to where he has an occasional job. We didn’t enjoy having him to stay as he invariably arrived drunk, and insisted on smoking – albeit outside – and left a mess. He always made my husband feel bad because he’d say, ‘Don’t go to any trouble! Just a rough blanket and I’ll sleep on the floor!’ This is not how we operate at all and we were relieved when his work was curtailed by COVID. But now he’s started asking to stay again. How can we tactfully say we don’t like this arrangement? S J, Hastings Next time he comes to stay, guide him to the spare room where you have made up a bed specially, with fresh flowers, tissues, clean sheets etc. Make him a very nice breakfast with fresh orange juice. Make it clear that organising this has been exhausting and has put you out, but accept it cheerfully. Ask what date he plans to come again as you like to be prepared. ‘Since COVID, we really like to feel in control and have proper notice and make things nice,’ you can explain. I suspect he’ll feel so guilty he won’t want to put you to so much trouble again. If that doesn’t work, you’ll just have to turn him down with the

The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

98 The Oldie October 2021

excuse that you’re both ill and infectious. You don’t have to say with what.

Eyes on the road

Your correspondent [August issue] was upset at the idea of giving up her car. Why didn’t you suggest that she have an eye test? A new pair of specs might fix the problem. A P, by email It might – that’s true. More likely, if her daughter is really concerned, it’s more than her eyes that are the problem. But it’s a good idea. The problem with eye tests is that probably half the oldies on the road at the moment have poor eyesight, so getting it tested isn’t always the answer. Other suggestions in answer to this problem were, first, from Gill Sheppard who pointed out that there’s an alternative to taxis. ‘The Royal Voluntary Society operate Country Cars – a service specifically for those in rural areas who don’t have access to a car. ‘I volunteer with them, and take people shopping, for medical appointments, to meet friends etc. There is a small fee to pay based on mileage, but it is much less expensive than a taxi. There are other volunteer-operated transport schemes where I live – I’m sure this is the same in other parts of the UK.’ And Gerry Ryan suggested a road-legal electric scooter, on which you can travel, legally, on local roads at 8mph for 14 miles between recharges.

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A deadly conversation

My parents are both very elderly and there are quite a lot of questions I’d like to ask them before they die. But it seems a bit rude to put it quite as crudely! They are very sensitive about the idea of death. Can you think of any way of putting things tactfully so I don’t upset them? Annie M, Sussex You could ask them the questions outright, without the preamble of ‘Since you’re going to croak quite soon…’ Guide the conversation round to childhood – or whatever it is you want to ask them about – and then start digging. Alternatively, you could try what a friend has just told me about, which is a fun way of getting information of a kind out of older people. Get them each, separately, to choose eight pieces of music and record a Desert Island Discs with them. Record Sleepy Lagoon – the theme tune by Eric Coates, seagulls and all – and lull them into a false sense of security. Then you can quite legitimately interview them about their lives and find out anything you want – all in the spirit of entertainment. This is something it’s amusing to do anyway, with friends, relations or whomever, with a memorable recording at the end. Because you’re in interviewing mode, you’ll find they may drop their guard and see you more as Lauren Laverne, or a psychiatrist, than as their own daughter. Bingo.

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

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Review of Books Autumn round-up of the reviews

Michael Barber dissects what MPs are reading My embarrassing meeting with children’s author Leon Garfield – William Cook Biography & Memoir History Fiction Arts Current Affairs Disease Paperbacks Autumn 2021 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Winners and losers Review of Books Issue 57 Autumn 2021 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie Churchill’s Shadow by Geoffrey Wheatcroft The Sins of GK Chesterton by Richard Ingrams Family Business: An Intimate History of John Lewis and the Partnership by Victoria Glendinning Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure by Dennis Duncan Turning Point: A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Being a Human by Charles Foster Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead The Sea Is Not Made of Water by Adam Nicolson

There seem to be more and more prizes for fiction every year. Good news for authors, then. But are they really so fortunate? Forget the JK Rowlings, Dan Browns and Stephen Kings of this world, and think of the ‘average’ writer – whoever that is. According to a recent survey, the top 10 per cent of writers account for 70 per cent of revenues, with under 14 per cent of authors making their living solely from writing. And apparently the average author income has been dropping over the past 15 years or so. So perhaps it’s better to pause before quitting the day job. This year’s Booker Prize winner will be announced in November but, as Robbie Millen exclaimed in the Times, ‘What a shocker! Fire the Booker judges! How dare they produce a longlist so free of controversy?’ He thought that this year’s longlist of 13 books was ‘safe and sensible’ – unlike in previous years. Four authors have won the Booker twice – JM Coetzee (1983 and 1999), Peter Carey (1988 and 2001), Hilary Mantel (2009 and 2012) and Margaret Atwood (2000 and 2019). Mantel is not on the longlist for The Mirror and the Light but her novel did win this year’s Walter Scott prize for historical fiction. She was also on the British Book Awards fiction shortlist but was pipped at the post by Maggie O’Farrell with Hamnet. Kazuo Ishiguro is on the Booker longlist with Klara and the Sun; he, too, has been a previous winner with The Remains of the Day (1989). There are also the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Costa Book prize, the McIlvanney Prize, the Portico Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction (Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half is shortlisted for this as well as for the Orwell Prize) … and so the prize lists go on. Inside this supplement, there may well be reviews of next year’s prize-winning authors’ work – both factual and fictional. My suggestion: get reading if not writing ... Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

19 FORGOTTEN AUTHORS

William Cook on Leon Garfield

Hogarth: Life in Progress by Jacqueline Riding

20 MISCELLANEOUS

Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy by Anne Sebba

22 CURRENT AFFAIRS

Re-educated: How I Changed My Job, My Home, My Husband and My Hair by Lucy Kellaway

10 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

COVER ILLUSTRATION: BOB WILSON

Reading Walter de la Mare, edited by William Wootten

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Pembroke Editor: Liz Anderson Design: Lawrence Bogle Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Deborah Maby, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Kami Jogee, Jamil Popat For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, email editorial@ theoldie.co.uk

24 DISEASE 25 FICTION 15 READING LIST

Michael Barber on our parliamentarians’ holiday books

30 CHILDREN’S BOOKS Emily Bearn

17 ARTS

30 PAPERBACKS The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 3

History

Operation Pedestal, August 1942: the merchant ship Waimarama is bombed

THE FLEET THAT BATTLED TO MALTA 1942

MAX HASTINGS William Collins, 336pp, £25

In 1942, a British convoy set out to relieve the starving people of Malta, which was our crucial military base in the Mediterranean. Regarded as a suicidal mission, only five out of 14 merchant supply ships made it through and 500 lives were lost. This is ‘an eye-level view of mortal danger set against a major inflection point during World War II’, wrote Jonathan W Jordan in the Wall Street Journal. ‘Mr Hastings paints a portrait of naval combat with an artist’s brush guided by more than a half-century of combat reportage. Compassionate toward men who braved bombs, torpedoes, fire and a cruel sea, he showcases the Royal Navy – along with the merchant vessels it guarded – at its finest hour.’ In his review for the Sunday Times, Giles Milton praised ‘the white-knuckle ride of Hastings’s gripping narrative... a high-octane adventure served up with torpedoes, Stuka dive bombers and catastrophic U-boat attacks… heart-stirring… memorable… and highly readable’. Declaring it ‘a cracker’, Gerard DeGroot in the Times, wrote that ‘with his usual combination of sensitivity to human suffering and superb dramatic instinct, Hastings has given us a gripping tale that reminds me of reading Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea when I was a boy... The immediacy of this 4 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021

book obliterates the cold detachment that time’s passage usually allows. We feel in our bones torpedoes hitting home. Hastings takes his readers into the bomb-blasted wardroom of the carrier Indomitable where Arthur Lawson encounters “an officer finishing a drink he was having, with his head half blown away”. In that same wardroom Hector Mackenzie “was distressed by the sight of a gaping hole in the... wooden panelling, through which had been blasted the head of... George Measures, his closest friend”. Mackenzie’s horror becomes ours... The delight lies in the detail, the percussive power of tiny facts... Hastings understands the fragility of human beings at war.’ Indeed, wrote Saul David in the Sunday Telegraph, Hastings ‘has written many wonderful books, but few combine so well his unique gifts as a historian: an understanding of human nature, a nose for a telling quotation, and the ability to write gripping prose.’

CHECKMATE IN BERLIN

THE COLD WAR SHOWDOWN THAT SHAPED THE MODERN WORLD

ALL IN IT TOGETHER ENGLAND IN THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY

ALWYN TURNER Profile, 357pp, £20

This is the fourth of Turner’s social histories of Britain, following studies of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, and it covers the period from the general

GILES MILTON John Murray, 416pp, £25

Milton’s book covers events between the Yalta conference in February 1945 to the breaking of the Soviet blockade of West Berlin in May 1949. Craig Brown, in the Mail on Sunday, called it ‘a wonderfully clear and digestible account’. He found that ‘the

Yes Scotland activists at demonstration

BRIAN MCNEIL.

OPERATION PEDESTAL

devastation wrought on Berlin by the Russians is vividly described... in a series of sharp vignettes’, such as the slaughter of an ox in the abandoned zoo, with starving citizens ripping out its tongue. ‘After repeatedly being outwitted by America and Britain, Stalin cut off all food and fuel in 1947, leaving Berlin effectively under siege for the next 323 days. Milton’s account of the breaking of the siege is as gripping as any thriller.’ Times reviewer Roger Boyes agreed that it was ‘expertly told... through the eyes of the chiefs of the Kommandatura – the heads of the four Berlin zones of occupation. All were logistics experts, rough and ready problem-solvers. The most completely realised is Frank “Howlin’ Mad” Howley, an American colonel who had run the smashed port of Cherbourg after the D-Day landings in June 1944 and had gone on to organise the feeding of five million Parisians after its liberation... This is a book full of heroes, but Frank Howley takes the starring role. Milton has spun a good yarn about a gifted man who followed his gut.’ For Jake Kerridge, writing in the Daily Telegraph, it was ‘a sparkling, Le Carré-esque history’ and ‘the triumph of the book is its depiction of the men who ran things on the ground in Berlin, who in Milton’s hands turn out to be figures hardly less compelling than Churchill and Stalin... Thoroughly entertaining.’

History election of 2001 to the Scottish referendum of 2014. ‘Unlike some historians, Turner knows there’s more to life than politics,’ wrote fellow social historian Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times. ‘Instead he peers into the darkened corners of British life, exploring, say, the extraordinary popularity of the comedian Roy “Chubby” Brown, who was effectively blacklisted by the mainstream TV channels, but reportedly made millions from his DVDs... Turner’s genius lies in finding the odd little stories that get under the nation’s skin and reveal what people were really thinking... The result is a rare thing: not just a serious work of contemporary history, but an unashamed, 24-carat hoot.’ Another fan was Mail on Sunday reviewer Craig Brown, who found that Turner’s book ‘zings along with... telltale facts and figures, often with an injection of black humour’. Quentin Letts, in the Times, was less effusive, bemoaning Turner’s lack of analysis. For example, the decline of the Church ‘is attributed to ecclesiastical child abuse and the popularity of the media-savvy atheist Richard Dawkins. There is little sign that Turner has considered the damage done to churchgoing by liturgical changes, priestly wetness and the ghastliness of Graham Kendrick’s hymns.’ The book is ‘a fluent enough trot over the ground’ and ‘Turner would probably be a decent time-filler on a Radio 4 morning show. The praise for [Ann] Cryer, a Labour MP who bravely denounced Asian forced marriages and abuse of young women in her Keighley constituency, is good to read. But otherwise there is no whiff of cordite.’

THE IRISH ASSASSINS

CONSPIRACY, REVENGE AND THE MURDERS THAT STUNNED AN EMPIRE

JULIE KAVANAGH Grove Press, 473pp, £18.99

Julie Kavanagh, once a ballerina, then a Vanity Fair writer who specialised in dance, inherited her journalist-father’s abiding interest in the 1882 murders of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Chief Secretary of Ireland, and Thomas Burke, his Under-Secretary, in Dublin’s

narrative too thinly – but still makes most other accounts of the period seem bloodless by comparison; while Tim Bielenberg in the Sunday Independent (Ireland) said it ‘is one of the best researched and most enjoyable historical reads I have come across in quite some time’.

THE ARAB CONQUESTS THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AND THE FIRST CALIPHATES

JUSTIN MAROZZI Head of Zeus, 256pp, £18.99 Lord Frederick Cavendish: murdered

Phoenix Park. They were brutally hacked to death with surgical knives by radical Irish Republicans known as the Invincibles. Her father, who died at the age of 52, bequeathed her his voluminous research.

The story has ‘an ending worthy of a Victorian melodrama’ ‘Her approach is intelligent and innovative,’ wrote Mary Kenny in the Literary Review. ‘She reports the double murder as a terrible event in itself, while also setting it within the wider context of Irish history, switching imaginatively from place to place and period to period... It is a long, complex story, involving history, politics, social circumstances and numerous personalities.’ It also has ‘an ending worthy of a Victorian melodrama’. Kavanagh’s account reminded Times reviewer Gerard DeGroot ‘of the very best of true crime, the sort that Dominick Dunne used to write for Vanity Fair. Like Dunne, Kavanagh never hurries; she takes the time to describe characters and places with exquisite detail. An engaging story is rendered beautiful because of the tiny ephemera that a less sensitive author might have carelessly discarded.’ The reviewer for the Sunday Business Post (Ireland), Andrew Lynch, said it ‘has the plot and intrigue of a sweeping 19th-century novel…The Irish Assassins is a colourful, ambitious book that sometimes spreads its sprawling

Starting in the year 634 with the first recorded reference to the Arabs of Muhammad, Marozzi traces the development of Islam until 750 when its first great dynasty is overthrown. ‘There are heroes and traitors; scenes of gore and pathos, loss and triumph. The narration moves swiftly but gracefully from episode to episode,’ wrote Ian D Morris in his review for the Sunday Times. ‘Throughout there are sumptuous photos of art and architecture, but also shots of barren landscape, the deserts and mountains through which Arab armies trudged on their way to victory. Indeed, the book as a whole is a lovely artefact. This is the sort of popular history I would sit with as a youngster for hours, engrossed in the vivid detail. As an adult, though, I find myself wanting more.’ What the book lacks, Morris said, is ‘the deeper structures of economy and society whose tectonic movements carry all of us... For now The Arab Conquests is thoroughly

Islamic art: detail from the book jacket The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 5

History good fun, but what you learn from it you may soon have to unlearn.’ Writing in the Times, Gerard DeGroot found that Marozzi ‘occasionally deploys his imagination to reconstruct events, but otherwise obediently confines himself to what the evidence can prove... This book delivers drama through sublime writing, but mainly through marvellous images... Superbly reproduced photos are embedded in the text, instead of being crammed into a plate section. Images stir the imagination when mere words cannot.’ Spectator reviewer Anthony Sattin concluded that while the story of Islam’s ‘remarkable 120 years of expansion has been often and well told by writers from Edward Gibbon to Hugh Kennedy and Barnaby Rogerson, Marozzi’s beautifully illustrated volume sits well beside them as a shorter, lighter overview’.

BLOOD LEGACY

RECKONING WITH A FAMILY’S STORY OF SLAVERY

ALEX RENTON Canongate, 340pp, £16.99

Alex Renton draws on the archives of his Scottish Fergusson ancestors to expose the horrific brutality of slavery in the West Indies. ‘This is an important book … because it establishes the vital link between then and now, cause and effect, history and its long and damaging legacy,’ Andrew Anthony wrote in the Guardian. ‘Blood Legacy lays bare the ruling class’s most heinous historical crime: the brutal project to reduce human beings to the condition of working farm animals for financial profit,’ he continued. ‘It is a horrific narrative of rape and racism, torture, insurrection and murder, remembered in the Caribbean but barely in modern Britain,’ Andrew Marr wrote in the Sunday Times. It ‘makes for unbearable reading’, Stuart Kelly agreed in the Scotsman. ‘Worse: the value of life is shown in arithmetical horror’ in the family’s accounts, where, for instance, the price of two children was barely more than one donkey. Sir Adam Fergusson never visited his plantations, ‘so the appalling reality of slavery was something that could remain safely abstract’, 6 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021

Horrific narrative: a 1769 poster

Anthony observed. However, ‘It is impossible to read about the plantation managers, their various sexual abuses, tortures and sadistic vengeances without revulsion,’ Kelly noted. ‘The book as a whole is a useful counter to British self-congratulation on the ending of the Atlantic slave trade,’ Marr concluded. Reparations were made to the slaveholders, not the slaves, and amounted to 40 per cent of the government’s annual budget, funded by a loan paid off only in 2015. It enabled the slaveholders to buy great estates and use their wealth for political influence.

X TROOP

THE SECRET JEWISH COMMANDOS WHO HELPED DEFEAT THE NAZIS

LEAH GARRETT Chatto & Windus, 351 pp, £20

X Troop sound like the cast of a gung-ho war movie, but there was nothing make-believe about their exploits in World War Two. Recruited from German, Austrian and Hungarian Jewish refugees who were desperate to hit back at the Nazis, the 87 men selected were trained as commandos and given British identities to protect them from summary execution in case of capture. After a traumatic baptism of fire at Dieppe, they were scattered far and wide. Some helped capture Pegasus Bridge on D Day and then

fought in Normandy, Holland and Germany. Others were posted to Italy and the Adriatic. After the war, in which more than half became casualties, they were crucial to the capture and prosecution of many Nazi war criminals. In the Telegraph, Anne de Courcy concluded that ‘To discover the origins of this unknown troop (until the end of the war only one man knew their real identities) Leah Garrett, an American historian, trawled endless records and interviewed the few survivors and the families of others. What she found makes a thrilling, stirring story, well told.’ The Times’s James Owen said that Leah Garrett’s ‘real strength is her ability to relight the lamps of the past so that they glow anew’. But Owen regretted that ‘Garrett does not address, in her upbeat account, any of the more awkward questions about the commandos, notably, given the vast resources allotted to them, what their strategic value really was.’

THE ANGLO-SAXONS

A HISTORY OF THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLAND

MARC MORRIS Hutchinson, 528pp, £25

The Anglo-Saxon period, which saw the emergence of the English and the development of England, stretched over seven centuries, from the collapse of Roman rule in Britain to the Norman Conquest. It’s ‘a long way from the mead-halls of Sutton Hoo to the lawgiving national kings on the eve of the Conquest’, Christopher Howse noted in the Telegraph. ‘Encapsulating this in a single volume is a Sisyphean task,’ Philip Parker acknowledged in the Literary Review. ‘Morris has produced an impressive volume, a big gold bar of

West Stow Anglo-Saxon village

History delight,’ Alex Burghart applauded in the Spectator, describing it as ‘top-notch narrative history’ which ‘he delivers with gusto through the stories of vivid characters in consecutive periods, using their lives as windows on to a changing world’. ‘This approach works neatly,’ Eleanor Parker agreed in the Financial Times, though regretting his exclusion of some influential women. ‘Morris’s canon of knowledge centred on great men impoverishes us all,’ Tom Licence fulminated in the Times Literary Supplement. Pippa Bailey in the New Statesman was more sympathetic: ‘Given the scale of his subject and, in places, the paucity of evidence … a definitive history is impossible … but this colossal book comes close.’ Dan Jones in the Sunday Times described it as ‘a clever, lively book’, while James Hawes in the New European concluded that ‘with this gorgeous volume he delivers a triumph’. The ‘perennial spats, rebellions and invasions Morris describes made a centralised nation far from inevitable’, Burghart noted, but the ‘Anglo-Saxon institutional legacy is substantial. It bequeathed the monarchy, the currency, the shires, the towns, the law, and both the fact and the idea of England.’ ‘Much of the Anglo-Saxon world was wiped out by the Normans,’ Jones acknowledged, ‘but as Morris’s splendid new book shows, there is plenty we can still see, and enjoy, today.’

MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH

THE BELGICA’S JOURNEY INTO THE DARK ANTARCTIC NIGHT

JULIAN SANCTON WH Allen, 350pp, £20

It’s a fair bet that Adrien de Gerlache, an aristocratic Belgian, would not feature on most people’s lists of polar explorers. So Julian Sancton’s epic tale belatedly does justice to a man who, although not exactly heroic, deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Scott and Shackleton. In August 1897 de Gerlache set sail for the Antarctic in the Belgica, a three-masted steam whaler. But what began as an exuberant odyssey, undertaken by a ragtag team of scientists, sailors and adventurers, later became a terrible ordeal in one

Adrien de Gerlache, polar explorer

of the most hostile environments on earth. Weakened by scurvy, the crew also suffered from boredom, fatigue, depression and hysteria. In the Guardian Geoff Dyer praised Sancton for his ‘watertight narrative’, which records how, the further south they go, the leader’s log becomes ‘a chronicle of slow but inexorable constriction. The days shorten and soon turn into endless night. And then they are stuck, with no choice but to wait for the sun to return and the ice to free the Belgica from its grip. Or to tighten it, and shatter their fragile refuge.’ ‘This section of the book,’ said James McConnachie in the Sunday Times, ‘feels like a stage play of the most unbearably tense and gothic sort. De Gerlache retreated to his cabin, staring for hours at a blank log book … Meanwhile the ship’s American doctor, Frederick Cook, saved the crew’s lives by making them eat seal and penguin meat, either raw or sealed in oleomargarine … When the ice finally loosened, in March 1899, they had to use explosives to clear a “claw” of ice around the stern, then ram their way through using penguin corpses – a final gothic touch – as bow fenders.’

KING RICHARD

NIXON AND WATERGATE: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

MICHAEL DOBBS Scribe, 416pp, £18.99

This book has ‘a cast of characters worthy of a Graham Greene novel – connivers, fabulists, rats, and back-stabbers,’ wrote David Holahan in USA Today. ‘This fast-paced opus would be a rollicking fun read, a beach book even, if it weren’t so doggone real – and if it wasn’t so

reminiscent of recent machinations in our nation’s capital. But fun or not, this is an important book at this moment in our tortured political history.’ Although ‘aficionados of Watergate will not find anything new in Dobbs’s account’, wrote Daniel Finkelstein in the Times, with ‘no fresh details and no surprising theories... it is still, however, an absorbing book’. Divided into short chapters, each of which represents a day in Nixon’s presidency from the day of his second inauguration onwards, it has the advantage of concision. ‘I’ve often been asked to recommend a good, brisk and readable single-volume account of Watergate,’ Finkelstein concluded. ‘I think in future I will recommend this one.’ Jennifer Szalai, in the New York Times, praised Dobbs’s ‘rich and kaleidoscopic’ book. ‘Dobbs has carved out something intimate and extraordinary, skilfully chiselling out the details to bring the story to lurid life’ and he makes ‘vivid use’ of Nixon’s approved secret tapes ‘to convey a White House that seemed to be an unholy combination of the grimly determined and aggressively puerile’. In the Washington Post, Joe Klein enjoyed the author’s ‘keen sense of drama’ and, like Szalai, he appreciated the ‘intimacy’ of his approach. ‘The story Dobbs tells is, by turns, hilarious, pathetic, and infuriating.’

AFTERMATH

LIFE IN THE FALLOUT OF THE THIRD REICH 1945-1955

HARALD JAHNER, TRANS SHAUN WHITESIDE W H Allen, 400pp, £20

‘In the aftermath of the Second World War many Germans, instead of succumbing to guilt about the horrors they had brought upon the world, indulged in an orgy of self-pity,’ wrote Max Hastings in the Sunday Times. ‘Harald Jähner, the author of this important, exemplary account of postwar life in the defeated Reich, writes that most older Germans embraced a narrative of their own victimhood. This displaced compassion for others, notably for six million Jews... This is the kind of book few writers possess the clarity of vision to write.’ Another keen admirer was Rupert The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 7

History Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Drawing on the huge literature listed in the bibliography, it takes a lucid overview of the astonishing decade following the defeat of Nazism and the partition of Germany between the Western allies and Soviet Russia. Although it embraces subjects of explosive ideological controversy, the story is told with judicious impartial intelligence and a light touch: Jähner has no axe to grind and he casts his net wide, fully aware of the large patches of grey morality through which he is treading. There are great lessons in the nature of humanity to be learnt here.’ According to James Hawes in the Spectator, Jähner’s book ‘is what every reviewer longs for: a scholarly masterpiece which is also a good read. The material is as grim as can be imagined, and Jähner pulls no punches. But he doesn’t allow his story to degenerate into a catalogue of horrors. Instead, we are offered anecdotes and incidents, each memorable, many illustrated by newly discovered photographs, which build into a history which reads like a prelude to Waiting for Godot, that great work of 1949.’

TIME’S WITNESS

HISTORY IN THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM

ROSEMARY HILL Allen Lane, 416pp, £25

In Time’s Witness Rosemary Hill examines the influence of British and Continental antiquaries on historiography, particularly between the French Revolution and the Great

Exhibition. Unlike the great enlightenment historians or their more professionalised 19th-century successors with their grand narrative sweep, antiquaries tended to be of lower social status and more interested in detailed local records and material evidence. Their studies embraced architecture and archaeology, botany and geology and widened the scope of the history with a new spirit of empiricism. The depredations of the French Revolution fed a nostalgic hunger for the desecrated remains of the past; while Romanticism helped re-orient the imagination from classical scenes to a murkier interest in the Gothic, where the remains were both more plentiful and easier to fake. Most reviewers agreed with John Carey in the Sunday Times that ‘Hill is a magnificent historian and commands a vast range of sources’. In the Daily Telegraph Rupert Christiansen remarked on ‘the unassertive grace and quiet wit’ of Hill’s prose, while warning that ‘some of its matter is densely circumstantial and one wouldn’t recommend it to anyone in search of narrative thrills or scandalous spills’. Nicholas Penny in the London Review of Books reflected on the irony that a book that ‘records with such verve the steady extension of subjects deemed fit for scholarly investigation two hundred years ago, is published at a moment when much of the curiosity and many of the pursuits it documents are endangered’ while in museums cataloguing the antiquities in store is no longer a priority.

THE ARISTOCRACY OF TALENT

HOW MERITOCRACY MADE THE MODERN WORLD

ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE Allen Lane, 496pp, £25

Delacroix’s painting commemorates the French Revolution of 1830 (detail) 8 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021

‘Merit had been the precious element which would, if nurtured in the young, render the playing field of life and work more level, less populated by those who graced the playing fields of Eton,’ explained John Lloyd in the Financial Times. But Adrian Wooldridge, political editor of the Economist, in what Lloyd calls a ‘finely constructed’ book, identifies what he regards as ‘a misguided backlash against meritocracy: a

The Ladder of Fortune, 1875, Currier & Ives, published in New York

widespread revulsion of elites, first by millions of voters (who have often simply voted for different elites) and more recently by academics and journalists, a significant number of whom believe that the masses have been betrayed – economically, socially and culturally – by the highly educated, who also tend to be highly paid and all but monopolise the top positions.’ He ‘insists that meritocracy must remain, but “moralized”, infused with a largely lacking sense of duty’.

There’s a ‘misguided backlash against meritocracy’ In his review for the Times, James Marriott wrote that ‘meritocracy structures our lives, tells us who we are. The struggle for exam results, university places, prestigious jobs and promotions defines us in a way that would have been incomprehensible a hundred years ago’. Wooldridge ‘quite brilliantly evokes the values and manners of the pluto-meritocrats at the top of society... They would do well to read Wooldridge’s erudite, thoughtful and magnificently entertaining book.’ Its ‘most alarming’ conclusion is that, ‘for all their intellectual peacocking our elites cannot seriously claim any longer to represent the most brilliant members of society. “The engines of upward mobility have been silting up for decades,” Wooldridge writes. Merit risks once again becoming divorced from success.’

Biography & memoir

Drawing by Charles Masson of the Stupa at Bimaran, Afghanistan

ALEXANDRIA

THE QUEST FOR THE LOST CITY

EDMUND RICHARDSON Bloomsbury, 352pp, £25

Reviewers thrilled to Edmund Richardson’s account of the extraordinary life of the 19th-century archaeologist, explorer and eccentric adventurer Charles Masson. In the Guardian, William Dalrymple called it ‘utterly brilliant’. It is, wrote Bijan Omrani in the Literary Review, ‘a tale of intrigue, espionage, blackmail, disguise, rebellion, treasure and the discovery of lost civilisations’. Thought the Spectator’s ASH Smyth, ‘I’ve not read anything this rollicking in years.’ The ‘quixotic and wildly colourful’ Masson was, observed James McConnachie in the Times, ‘One of the great early travellers in the subcontinent, he was also a pioneering archaeologist, ferocious critic of British imperialism and reluctant spy. The book’s publicists call him a real-life Indiana Jones; the likeness, for once, is not so far off.’ As Smyth put it: ‘Masson became the first westerner in centuries to see the Buddhas of Bamiyan; he deciphered the forgotten script of Kharosthi, unearthed the priceless Bimaran casket, and after five years of wandering in the wilderness discovered (spoiler alert: but this is on page 2) a lost city buried beneath

‘I’ve not read anything this rollicking in years’ 10 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021

the plains of Bagram.’ Not bad for an English soldier who deserted his regiment in 1827. Dalrymple was among many delighted that Masson’s adventures have been brought in from the margins of history. ‘Only now, with this superb biography, is his tale told in full for the first time. The result, evocatively written, impeccably researched and minutely footnoted, but with the pace and deftly woven plot complexity of a John le Carré novel, is a small masterpiece. It solves most of the mysteries of Masson’s story and deserves all the acclaim it will undoubtedly win.’

HIGH RISK

A TRUE STORY OF THE SAS, DRUGS AND OTHER BAD BEHAVIOUR

BEN TIMBERLAKE Hurst, 312pp, £16.99

‘Boys Own with Brains’ is how Justin Marozzi described former Special Forces soldier Ben Timberlake’s memoir in the Sunday Times. And ‘dark, visceral, clever and very funny’. There is certainly a lot of alpha-male action. ‘One Christmas Eve, while serving with the SAS in Iraq, he doled out Ecstasy pills to some American soldiers and spent the night spraying a 7.62mm M240 machinegun across the city of Ramadi until the barrel was red hot and glowing translucent, the bullets visible like “demonic frog-spawn” in the barrel. “High? I was f***ing Airborne.” A few pages later Timberlake is jumping out of an aircraft just as he’s peaking on MDMA. “A slipstream at that speed on adrenaline and MDMA is like being cuddled by god.” ’

If that is the kind of story you thrill to then you will thrill to the stories in this book. As the website Goodreads confirmed, ‘this memoir takes a gonzo look at terrorists, junkies, soldiers and strippers through the tale of one extraordinary life’. Marozzi concluded, however, that there was a bit more to it. ‘If that was all this book was about, fair enough, it would be a high-jinks, faintly thrilling but ultimately unsatisfactory shoot-’em-up-fest. Fortunately for those of us who like something more thoughtful – plus all the sex, drugs and shooting – Timberlake has much more to offer. This is a fully threedimensional memoir of a man who has done all the electrifying special forces stuff, set himself the most absurd challenges and not only lived to tell the tale but write about it with real verve, insight and originality.’

CONSUMED

A SISTER’S STORY

ARIFA AKBAR Sceptre, 256pp, £16.99

Arifa Akbar’s sister died of consumption aged 45 in the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead in 2016. Her short life had also been consumed by depression and an eating disorder. The theatre critic for the Guardian has written not only about TB in the time of Covid, she also dissects the ebb and flow of sibling relationships, the wounds that don’t heal, and the bonds that hold them together. It is also a portrait of grief and mental illness. ‘In telling Fauzia’s story, Akbar moves between tenderness and frustration, compassion and helplessness. She grapples with her

Fauzia, aged 7 (left), and Arifa, aged 4

Biography & memoir It is a love letter from one sister to another own part in her sister’s misery,’ said Fiona Sturges in the Guardian. ‘Akbar is wise enough to understand that much of her sister’s inner life will remain unknowable.’ Nonetheless, Akbar has immortalised her sister, ‘vividly and wonderfully, in prose’. Claire Allfree in the Evening Standard agreed. Akbar is ‘exacting on the slippery nature of grief, memory and family history’. It is a love letter from one sister to another that seeks to understand a life that often felt horribly out of reach. Akbar writes to honour in death the sister who so struggled in life, but also ‘to interrogate why her own journey has been so different and what, if anything, she could have done to help’. For Lucasta Miller in the FT, it is not just the ‘exceptional quality of its prose, but the subtlety and searching scrupulousness with which it poses questions about memory itself and the stories we tell about ourselves’.

AN EXTRA PAIR OF HANDS

A STORY OF CARING, AGEING & EVERYDAY ACTS OF LOVE

KATE MOSSE Profile, 193pp, £12.99

‘Good relationships plus money is the care equivalent of the jackpot,’ Madeleine Bunting opined in the Guardian. But even with such advantages, bestselling novelist Kate Mosse admitted that ‘it’s hard’ and ‘often it feels as if there are no good options, only less bad ones’. As Rosemary Goring noted in Herald Scotland, in this ‘slim and poignant work’ Mosse does ‘not hide the physical and emotional toll’. In taking on the care of her parents and mother-in-law Mosse saw it as a privilege rather than a duty, a chance to repay the unconditional love they gave her. The Wellcome Institute invited Mosse to write this timely and important book. We have invested huge resources in medical advances to prolong life, yet far less in imagining how our long, increasingly fragile lives are to be supported. ‘The

care of old people is one of the greatest issues of modern life,’ Kate Saunders acknowledged in the Times. There are 8.8 million adult carers in Britain, most of them women, and ‘without this invisible army society would simply fall apart’. ‘This is a wise and kindly book, all the wiser for its honesty,’ Saunders continued. ‘Mosse warns us that it is a personal story and not a “how-to” book for carers … she is writing about the challenges — and rewards — of becoming a carer of parents who are simply travelling to the ends of their lives. This book is her most personal, a delightful and moving account of a happy childhood, graceful old age and multigenerational living.’ Eleanor Steafel in the Telegraph found the book incredibly moving. ‘Perhaps after this strange year, talking about the pain and the privilege of family, and how to live and die well, hits differently. Perhaps it’s just because it’s a story about love and dignity.’

SUNSHINE AND LAUGHTER

THE STORY OF MORECAMBE AND WISE

LOUIS BARFE Head of Zeus, 333pp, £25

‘Eric and Ernie remain the gold standard for double acts, while also being seen as an unattainable ideal,’ writes author Louis Barfe. Their TV audience reached 28 million at the height of their fame and their national treasuredom has survived beyond their deaths. Although slimmer than Graham McCann’s definitive 1998 biography, this is ‘a thoroughly readable book that offers most of what you need to know about the duo’, wrote Dominic Maxwell in the Times, ‘from their early days as child performers in variety, to the ups and down of their decades on television... Barfe understands the duo’s style and how it was born in their decades of trust in each other, while pointing out that they didn’t like to offer much analysis of their craft in public.’ He also ‘ends with a smart summary of how their reputation has grown over the past 20-odd years of repeats and tributes and television dramas and, yes, books’. Paying due tribute to the writer of their BBC shows, Eddie Braben, who

understood how to develop their comic personae, Barfe is ‘a safe pair of hands’, wrote Johnny Griffin in the Independent, and his ‘research is exemplary’. For John Walsh, writing in the Sunday Times, ‘Barfe is a thorough researcher of media trivia, and one can sometimes feel overwhelmed by details of contracts, fees, recording times, pay rates, pay rises, this producer, those writers, the backstories of every TV executive and harmonica player. However, this is a warm and sympathetic portrait of two pals who conquered the world simply by radiating hilarious friendship.’

REAL ESTATE DEBORAH LEVY Hamish Hamilton, 304pp, £10.99

Real Estate is the third slim volume in Deborah Levy’s self-styled ‘living autobiography’ – the first two having dealt with her childhood in South Africa and her beginning as a writer and the second with the break-up of her marriage and the death of her mother. Now she is approaching sixty and speculating about what she wants from the rest of her life. She travels, and muses, and pitches the idea of a woman who follows her own desires to film executives, getting nowhere. She imagines what she wants from her dream home – balconies overlooking the Mediterranean, a pomegranate tree and an egg-shaped fireplace like the one she saw at Georgia O’Keeffe’s house in Mexico. So far so glossy but Susannah The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 11

Biography & memoir Butter in the Evening Standard noted that Levy was ‘painfully aware that for centuries, women have been real estate, owned by their husbands, not owning their own property’. The dream remains a dream as Levy accepts that what she most values are ‘real humans and imagination. It is possible we cannot have one without the other . . . in this sense, my books are my real estate.’ Catherine Taylor in the FT admired the way Levy’s writing mirrored ‘life’s incautious and uneven trajectories’. Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times found the book lacking the urgency of its predecessor, The Cost of Living, which was ‘essential reading for anyone who has a mother or is one… The deconstruction of the family home, a mother’s death — these are essentially more powerful subjects than literary festivals and writers’ residencies.’

LIVING I WAS YOUR PLAGUE

MARTIN LUTHER’S WORLD AND LEGACY

LYNDAL ROPER Princeton, 296pp, £25

For Lutherjahr (Luther anniversary) in 2017 Lyndal Roper published the widely acclaimed Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. Subsequently, she felt the event was too celebratory, so, as Suzannah Lipscomb wrote in the FT, Roper ‘returns with a sort of rejoinder that raises the tricky and timely question of how we commemorate heroes with flaws’. As such, she continued, ‘Roper’s unflinching and insightful — albeit rather episodic — book is a tale for our times’. Dan Hitchens in the Times agreed. ‘One of the questions of the moment is how we relate to the moral complexities of history, especially to key figures with a dark side. So what better time for a book about Martin Luther?’ Roper’s book, he wrote, ‘proves that a rigorously scholarly work can also be a pleasure to read’. ‘It sees Luther with fresh eyes and shows us why we need to wrestle with his legacy,’ Vincent Evener wrote in Christian Century, while Peter Marshall in the Tablet thought Roper had re-evaluated Luther ‘triumphantly’. Luther was a repellent character, a misogynist, preoccupied with obscenity and 12 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021

Martin Luther seen with fresh eyes

spouting foul language. His virulent anti-Semitism seeped into his Church and his sickening diatribe, On Jews and Their Lies, was displayed at Nazi rallies in the 1930s like a sacred text. Hitchens felt Roper ‘doesn’t quite confront the looming question: how much does [his anti-Semitism] discredit the rest of his thought?’ Can he be excused as ‘a man of his time’ or should he be ‘cancelled’? In his lifetime, the proliferation of Cranach’s portraits of Luther made him a brand. Since 2017 the bestselling Playmobil figurine of all time is a Luther. A pair of Luther socks bears the inscription, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’

THE HERO’S WAY

WALKING WITH GARIBALDI FROM ROME TO RAVENNA

TIM PARKS Harvill Secker, 384pp, £20

The novelist Tim Parks has lived in Italy since the 1980s and here, in the company of his Italian girlfriend Theodora, he retraces the 500-kilometre journey from Rome to Ravenna undertaken in 1849 by the Italian rebel patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, his pregnant wife Anita, who dies at the end of the journey, and his army of 5,000 guerrillas. Garibaldi was retreating from the French after the fall of the Roman Republic, while Parks is writing a travel book. ‘Parks and a companion did it in one month on foot; with a smartphone in hand and small cafés, hotels, and pharmacies in every village, such a trip seems less like a

pilgrimage than a pleasant daily workout,’ wrote Andrew Moravcsik in Foreign Affairs. ‘Far more interesting is his description of the unimaginable courage, suffering, and idealism of Garibaldi’s band of 5,000 ragged soldiers...’ According to Michael Upchurch in the Seattle Times, ‘trying to picture what the 1849 retreat was like was challenging, but Parks did his research and readers will learn a lot’. However, Tobias Jones, in the Times, found that the book lacked the ‘entertainingly sneery’ tone of Parks’s earlier work. It is ‘not just about Garibaldi’s love of Italy or for Anita, but about Parks’s love for his new partner, Eleonora. She is mentioned more than 250 times, almost twice as much as Anita... There’s a moment of danger when the Nespresso machine isn’t working. Parks tried to lather himself into his old self, but there’s none of that hilarious rage and sizzling prose. It’s all weary-weary.’

THREE-MARTINI AFTERNOONS AT THE RITZ

THE REBELLION OF SYLVIA PLATH AND ANNE SEXTON

GAIL CROWTHER Simon & Schuster, 304pp, £20

The reference to martinis in the title of Gail Crowther’s new book is misleading, wrote Vanessa Curtis in the TLS, ‘implying a light-hearted romp through the story of two tipsy and badly behaved friends’. Not so, wrote Curtis, who enjoyed its seriousness: ‘From the intriguing first line of Crowther’s introduction (“In

Sylvia Plath was buried in Yorkshire

Biography & memoir 1950s America, women were not supposed to be ambitious”), it becomes clear that the “rebellion” of the title refers as much to the art as to the life. In fact, the “brief but intense friendship” between the two women, who met for drinks at the RitzCarlton in Boston when they were students at Robert Lowell’s writing workshop in 1959, came to an end when Plath moved to England later that year. From then on, communications continued by letter and the two women never met again.’ In the Sunday Times, Daisy Goodwin noted the similarities between the two poets: ‘They grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and attended the same high school, four years apart. Both had powerful mothers with literary aspirations, both wrote poems that dealt with topics such as menstruation, masturbation, motherhood and madness, both had failed marriages — and tragically both took their own lives.’ Crowther detailed their differences too – Plath ‘neat and self-contained’ and Sexton ‘wilder and more flamboyant’ and Kirkus applauded the way that ‘Drawing on biographies, published letters and journals, and archival sources, Crowther, author or co-author of three previous books on Plath, uses their meetings at the Ritz as a springboard for a sympathetic recounting of the poets’ lives, underscoring their struggles against prevailing images of womanhood.’

WILLIAM BLAKE VS THE WORLD JOHN HIGGS Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 400pp, £20

Interviewed in Mental Health Today, John Higgs talked about William Blake’s depressions. ‘I find it interesting that he recognises his experience as a disease…This feels very modern… It’s a reminder that how these things are perceived changes over time – and that we can go backwards as well as forwards.’ Higgs’s new book is an attempt to take Blake’s brilliant, visionary sometimes eccentric imaginative world and look at it through the lens of today’s understanding. In the Times, Rachel Campbell-Johnston was impressed: ‘Higgs’s prose has a diamond-hard clarity. He knows how to make us relate. The modern-day 14 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021

The Lovers’ Whirlwind, Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta by William Blake, 1824-27

equivalent of the 1780 anti-Catholic Gordon Riots would be a far-right anti-Muslim protest, he explains. Wordsworth and Coleridge are the McCartney and Lennon of Romanticism. Studying the brain to understand consciousness is like studying the insides of a television in a sports bar to understand what is happening in the cup final.’ But Roger Lewis in the Telegraph had some doubts. ‘Though on the whole I find Blake contrivedly giddy and portentous, and the concept that we all live “in a mental model of reality rather than reality itself” is one I can take or leave, I enjoy the mercurial, gnomic epigrams: “Opposition is true friendship”; “Energy is eternal delight”; “Everything that lives is holy”. I agree with the notion that the trouble with heaven is it would be hell, and faced with the regimentation of existence (bills, brown envelopes, insurance premiums, Pilates, governments telling us off) “a sprinkling of chaos is needed”.’

THE SUITCASE

SIX ATTEMPTS TO CROSS A BORDER

FRANCES STONOR SAUNDERS Jonathan Cape, 240pp, £18.99

‘The Suitcase is two valuable things,’ explained Katherine Backler in the Tablet. ‘First: a history of the 20th

century from the point of view of Romania, unfamiliar to most British readers. Second: a study in the meaningful artifice of human experience, in the role of self-creation and of accident in becoming who we are.’ Positioned ‘as a search for her dead father’, this memoir follows her father’s Polish-Russian Jewish family’s flight from pogroms in Lódz, first to Germany, thence to Britain, where he secured a British passport. After settling in Romania, he was again required to flee in 1940, though this time as a British citizen. Saunders ‘vividly captures the horror and absurdity of life in the theatre of conflict, and human versatility’, wrote Backler. Saunders’s father borrowed the new family name from their cleaner, though ‘it had to start with an “S” because that was the initial on the family silver’. The suitcase ‘matters as a representative of all suitcases hurriedly packed by refugees, and everything heartbreakingly unable to fit into them’. For Robbie Millen in the Times, the author’s beautiful writing more than makes up for those moments when this elegant family memoir veers into preciousness. The book started as a series of essays written for the London Review of Books and sometimes it tells. She can be rather pleased with the daintiness of her sensitivity — “I have been deadlocked for months, unable to do anything. Why is he haunting me? Why must I be at his beck and call?” She wibbles too much about the consequences of opening her father’s suitcase. Just open the bloody thing!’

Reading list MICHAEL BARBER on the books our parliamentarians are taking on holiday ‘Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power.’ So wrote Michael Foot, who grew up in a house that contained 70,000 books, wrote several himself, and is arguably the most literate British politician ever to have held high office. I’m sure the Publishers Association would agree with Foot’s assertion (despite its gender bias), which may be why, to mark their quasquicentennial, they canvassed MPs, peers and peeresses for their recommended read for the Summer recess. Sadly, it would appear that those set in authority over us either don’t have much time to read, or are reluctant to show their hand, because out of a total of approximately 1,450 parliamentarians, only 65 replied, three of them anonymously. The Prime Minister, lest we forget, used to be a journalist. Indeed he’s been reported as saying that he still answers to his old employer, the Torygraph. Hence, presumably, his choice of Scoop, which Evelyn Waugh based on his coverage of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia for the Daily Mail. But I wonder if Boris is aware of how contemptuous Waugh was of his colleagues. ‘Only a shit could be good on this particular job,’ he told Lady Diana Cooper, who appears as Mrs Stitch. The Chancellor, a keen football fan, will be studying Twelve Yards, a book about the art and psychology of penalties by Ben Lyttelton, who also wrote Edge: What Business Can Learn from Football, which I assume is already on Mr Sunak’s shelves. His predecessor, Sajid Javid, is said to read Ayn Rand’s novels aloud to his wife, who must love him very much. To take his mind off Covid, the Health Secretary is proposing to grapple with Sino-American rivalry in the Pacific, the subject of Destined for War by Graham Allison, a distinguished Harvard don who believes that Armageddon can be avoided if Washington and Beijing study The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Should Mr Javid bump

into his colleague, Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the Select Committee on Defence, he can exchange notes with him, because Mr Ellwood’s holiday read is 2034, a cautionary tale by a retired American admiral about war at sea in the near future. One of the few men to choose a book by a woman is Tory MP Julian Knight, who describes The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper as a ‘beautiful, faultless examination of the role of women in Ancient Rome with striking parallels for today’. Since the heroine is a Pompeian whore I wonder what those parallels are. I doubt you’ll find them in Fantastically Great Women Who Worked Wonders, an inspiring book the Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will be sharing with her daughter. The author of this, Kate Pankhurst, is kin to the famous

One of the few men to choose a book by a woman is Tory MP Julian Knight suffragette Sylvia, whose biography by Rachel Holmes is what the chair of Penguin books, Baroness (Gail) Rebuck, will be reading. I wonder if Holmes alludes to the link between the purple feather Mrs Pankhurst wore in her hat when storming Parliament and the foundation of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds? It’s explained in Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather by Tessa Boase, the choice of Dame Meg Hillier. Caroline Nokes, who chairs the Select Committee on Women and

Equalities, says her choice, More Than a Woman by Caitlin Moran, would ‘give every man an insight’ – including, presumably, the three chaps who serve on the committee she chairs. She might also recommend they read The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart (see reviews page 22), which explains why women are still taken less seriously than men – and what, if anything, can be done about it. No one has chosen this, though one anonymous contributor selects Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo, whom Ms Sieghart quotes at length in support of her thesis. In fairness, fiction by women is well represented here, with novels by Tracy Chevalier, Maggie O’Farrell, Delia Owens, Margaret Atwood and JK Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith – the last of which, says Sieghart, proves her point! Books that run to a thousand pages had better be vaut le détour. This is certainly the case with Volume 1 of Chips Channon’s Diaries, which the Lord Chancellor, Robert Buckland, plans to read. Chips, the unabashed American arriviste who styled himself ‘the Lord of Hosts’, believed that discretion was a paltry virtue, like thrift. Preferring men to women, and royalty to both, his diaries are unofficial history at its most addictive. A fervent appeaser, Chips hailed Munich as ‘a respectable gentleman’s peace’. But after the fall of France Churchill knew that to defeat Nazi Germany we would have to resort to dirty tricks, the job of SOE, his ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’. Giles Milton’s history of this subversive unit is the choice of the Secretary of State for Scotland, Alister Jack. Nicola Sturgeon, take note. A week is a long time in politics. But in public life the rules of the game don’t alter much, as witness this observation from Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, recommended by William Wagg: ‘there was no knowing what honours might not be achieved in the present days by money scattered with a liberal hand.’ Sound familiar? The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 15

Arts noted that Moyle ‘cheerfully admits’ to occasionally relying on ‘speculation’ but he concluded that ‘a bold outline of the man still makes its impression. Moyle’s Holbein has a certain swagger, appropriate for an artist regarded by himself and countless others as a modern Apelles, the renowned painter of ancient Greece.’

THE LIFE OF MUSIC

THE KING’S PAINTER

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANS HOLBEIN

FRANNY MOYLE Head of Zeus, 575pp, £35

Hans Holbein created our image of Henry VIII: the ruthless, swaggering, cod-piece-thrusting symbol of kingly authority. But, despite his gloriously vivid portraits of the Tudor court, very little is known about the artist himself. In the Times, Laura Freeman was delighted by the sheer gorgeousness of Franny Moyle’s new biography of Holbein: ‘I take my feathered cap off to Moyle and her publishers. It is an expensive and difficult business getting permissions for reproductions. There is hardly a painting mentioned in the text that isn’t printed in colour and across a whole page. You can count the hairs on Holbein’s beard, peer at every pearl. This is a triumph of bookmaking as well as biography.’ In the Sunday Times, Michael Prodger also praised a ‘vivid, judicious and lavishly illustrated account’. It was a challenge, observed Prodger, for archives are scant and little is known of the greatest of Tudor portraitists: ‘So Moyle builds him up from his context, and what is clear is that Holbein was above all a pragmatist. He worked for the staunchly Catholic More and the reforming Cromwell, as well as Cromwell’s nemesis Thomas Howard; he painted orthodox Catholic altarpieces and frontispieces for Protestant tracts; he would draw the hairs sprouting from a mole on the chin of Lady Rich but omit them from the final portrait; he designed luxury goods for Anne Boleyn and painted the Seymour family, who helped to topple her.’ In the Spectator, Mark Bostridge

NEW ADVENTURES IN THE WESTERN CLASSICAL TRADITION

NICHOLAS KENYON Yale, 360pp, £18.99

As managing director of London’s Barbican Centre, a former director of the Proms, controller of Radio 3 and music critic of the Observer, Sir Nicholas Kenyon is eminently well suited to write a magisterial overview of western classical music. In the Guardian, Fiona Maddocks noted that Kenyon navigated the ‘current muddle’ as to definitions and ‘generously embraces all, reminding us that “western music” began some four centuries before Bach and introducing us to composers, several of them women, born in the 1980s’. Although the ‘transforming power of digital music’ is central to the book, Kenyon begins his story with the silver trumpets found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. For Maddocks, ‘With its myriad threads of history and argument, the book is an open dialogue between past and present, composer, performer and performance.’ In the Times, Neil Fisher thought Kenyon was an admirably confident if slightly-old-fashioned guide: ‘Let Kenyon hold your hand as he travels from ancient Greek theatre music to medieval masses, Renaissance madrigals to Mozart symphonies, and Brahms piano concertos to 20thcentury serialist brain scramblers.’ And in the Literary Review, Matthew Lyons simply loved it: ‘Throughout Kenyon is alert to how contemporaries heard the music of their peers, and how they thought about it – and to how that music is received today. This is always a book about music-in-performance, and about the art of listening. I can think of no higher praise than, at almost every turn, this reviewer wanted to stop reading and listen to the music

Kenyon described – and consistently felt enriched and rewarded for doing so.’

CAST A DIVA

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF MARIA CALLAS

LYNDSY SPENCE History Press, 304pp, £20

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Lyndsy Spence said she was determined that her biography of Maria Callas would show Callas as victim rather than diva. Callas has been the subject of almost 30 biographies, but Spence has obtained access to boxes of her letters that have been sitting unexamined in an archive at Stanford University, California. In particular, the correspondence with her husband and agent, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, shows, said Spence, ‘she was really so subservient and obedient to him, and I started to realise that is who she was as a woman’. She went on: ‘She was such a submissive person and that really contrasts with Callas the diva. And when you’re that way inclined, of course you attract abusers.’ Reviewing the book in the Sunday Times, Daisy Goodwin wasn’t convinced. Spence she thought ‘has done a creditable job of filling in some of the gaps in Callas’s notoriously unreliable story’, drawing a vivid picture of her wildly ambitious mother Litza. ‘Spence diagnoses Litza as having a borderline personality disorder, and it is pretty clear that Callas spent her whole life looking for the sort of unconditional love her mother could not give her.’ But Goodwin felt Callas was more than the victim Spence portrays. Where was the ‘talent, determination and charisma’ that made her such a huge star? Where was the ruthlessness? ‘She was also Callas the

Maria Callas: victim rather than diva? The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 17

Arts consummate artist, who said goodbye to her mother in Mexico at the age of 30 and never saw her again, who married an older man she knew would support her career, and who left him for a billionaire [Onassis] when it was clear her voice was no longer all-powerful.’

idea of success wasn’t the same as other people’s. “I define success by whether I keep the contract I made with the Holy Spirit before I made one with the music business,” she explains. “I never signed anything that said I would be a good girl.” ’

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AND YOU ARE ALONE

MY AMY

THE LIFE WE SHARED

THE BIOGRAPHY OF NICO

TYLER JAMES

JENNIFER OTTER BICKERDIKE

Macmillan, 329pp, £18.99

Natasha Hooper reported on MailOnline that ‘Amy Winehouse’s family feel “betrayed” by her best friend Tyler James and “dispute many claims made” in his tell-all book’. Certainly few people involved in this story come out of it well. ‘The emptiness of rock’n’roll myths has rarely been more starkly exposed than in this horribly sad memoir, a loving yet hellish account of a young woman running herself down into oblivion, dying aged 27 from alcohol poisoning exacerbated by bulimia,’ said Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times. Graham Clark of the Yorkshire Times observed: ‘When she won five Grammys, instead of it being a celebration, Winehouse was lonely and depressed, whilst all those around her were having the night of their lives. She wasn’t comfortable with success.’ Segal wrote: ‘The crisis comes when she’s asked to record the theme for the 2008 James Bond film. Producer Mark Ronson leaves when work is clearly impossible...There’s a bloody meltdown involving a kettle and a kitchen knife. When a psychiatric nurse is called, she’s horrified: “Why isn’t somebody intervening?” she asks, echoing the question triggered by every page. ‘It’s impossible not to be angry as the endgame plays out.’ James himself writes: ‘She’d convinced herself: If I’m not capable of moving, the tour [of Europe] will be cancelled. She drank until she passed out for five days, in and out of vodka unconsciousness.’ ‘Shockingly,’ said Segal, ‘her bodyguards were instructed to carry her, barely conscious, to the airport taxi. The first – and last – show in Belgrade became a notorious, cruelly mocked disaster, a woman who couldn’t even apply eyeliner sent out to perform.’ A month later Winehouse was dead. 18 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021

Faber, 454pp, £20

REMEMBERINGS SINÉAD O’CONNOR Sandycove, 304pp, £20

‘She had hit singles, Grammy nominations, the video nobody could tear their eyes away from until the final tear rolled down that porcelain face. But there seemed to be little of the polished showbiz world about Sinéad O’Connor,’ wrote Sinéad Crowley of RTE. ‘The autobiography is written in a beautifully direct style’, like ‘having a cup of tea with an old friend who has been off the radar for a while and wants to tell you what she has been up to. And it’s funny!’ O’Connor is notorious for ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. ‘She blew up her career,’ said Fiona Sturges in the Guardian. ‘She knew exactly what she was doing. “Everyone wants a pop star, see?” she writes. “But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.” ’ In the Times Will Hodgkinson said: ‘O’Connor grew up... under terrible physical and emotional abuse from her mother after her parents divorced. “She’ll make me take off all my clothes and lie on the floor and open my legs... and let her hit me with the sweeping brush in my private parts,” she writes. “She makes me say, ‘I am nothing’ over and over.” ’ ‘But O’Connor doesn’t do regret, and redemption isn’t required – at least not by her,’ said Sturges. ‘Her

This story of an utterly original musician is ‘poorly written, with a surfeit of ill-chosen words’, Ian Thomson complained in the Observer, but he conceded it ‘nevertheless grimly absorbs from start to finish’. ‘Nico was born Christa Päffgen in Cologne in 1938, a month before Kristallnacht,’ explained Will Hodgkinson in the Times. ‘In 1942 her father was killed after being injured in battle. Nico and her mother had to fend for themselves, living in poverty in bomb-ravaged Berlin. She claimed to have been raped at 13 by a black American soldier.’ The Evening Standard’s Jochan Embley said: ‘At age 16, Nico moved to Paris to model for Vogue. It was here that she got the mononym, christened by photographer Herbert Tobias, and that her mythology began.’ Next came New York and Andy Warhol who, said Hodgkinson, ‘foisted Nico on to the Velvet Underground, hoping her charisma would carry them to success. They don’t appear to have been pleased about it. Lou Reed resented her taking the attention away from him. After a romance with Jim Morrison she resolved to be her own woman, setting her off on her downward slide of under-attended concerts, underfunded recording sessions, heroin addiction and alienation from the glamorous world she once knew. By the 1980s she was living in squalor in Manchester and London, playing shows to punks and goths.’ As Embley explained: ‘Towards the end of the book, as Nico manages to kick the heroin habit, it seems like things are looking up... It makes her death at 49, caused by falling off her bike in Ibiza and suffering a cerebral haemorrhage, especially tragic.’

Forgotten authors

L SAUERWCIN

As a child, WILLIAM COOK met Leon Garfield – but both were hopelessly tongue-tied Never meet your heroes. As a wannabe writer, I learnt that lesson early on. I was ten years old, and my favourite writer was Leon Garfield. Imagine how thrilled I was when my mother arranged for me to have tea with him! My mum was friends with Philippa Pearce (author of the children’s classic, Tom’s Midnight Garden) and Philippa was friends with Garfield, so a date was set for high tea, at Philippa’s lovely country cottage, near Cambridge. I arrived giddy with excitement, hoping some of his literary magic would rub off on me. Fat chance. Garfield was perfectly polite, but the occasion was excruciating. I was hopelessly tongue-tied, and so was he. Looking back, the fact that this successful author was so shy in the presence of a pre-pubescent fan makes me like him even more, but I didn’t feel that way at the time. Back then, I would have been far more impressed if he’d rattled off a few jolly yarns about the inspiration for his stories. I didn’t know then, as I know now, that such glib urbanity is usually the mark of a second-rate writer, and that his reticence was a good indication that his writing was first rate. Leon Garfield was born a hundred years ago, in Brighton. He went to Brighton Grammar School, and then on to Regent Street Polytechnic to study art, but his studies were curtailed by the Second World War. He served in the Royal Medical Corps and, while on active service in Belgium, he met the love of his life, the children’s author Vivien Alcock, who was serving as an ambulance driver. They married in 1948 and adopted a girl whom they named Jane, after Jane Austen. After the war he worked as a lab technician at London’s Whittington Hospital, writing in his spare time. Only in the 1960s, in his forties, was he able to pack in the day job and write fulltime. Garfield never set out to be a children’s author. His first novel, Jack Holborn, was intended for adults, but when an editor suggested he adapt it for younger readers he did what he was told. Jack Holborn was a hit and, for better or worse (better in

Leon Garfield: a wry voice

the short term, worse in the long term), his subsequent novels were marketed as children’s fiction. In fact, they occupy an odd no-man’s-land, midway between the two genres. This was one of the reasons I loved them (I never felt he was talking down to me) but it may explain why, since his death, in 1996, aged 74, his subtle books have largely disappeared. Garfield’s stories were well reviewed and won lots of prizes. Several were adapted for the screen (Black Jack, one of his finest novels, was brilliantly filmed by Ken Loach). They must have sold pretty well, I suppose, but none of my schoolfriends had ever heard of him, and so reading him felt rather secretive, even slightly illicit. Maybe his other readers felt the same. His best books are set in Georgian (or sometimes Victorian) England, and often follow the fortunes of a wide-eyed lad who stumbles into a

None of my schoolfriends had ever heard of Garfield, and so reading him felt rather secretive, even slightly illicit

grown-up world of criminality and intrigue. His young protagonists begin by dividing this world into goodies and baddies, only to discover that the goodies aren’t that good after all, and the baddies aren’t entirely bad. His novels are primarily adventure stories but they’re also painful rites of passage, in which a child is thrust into adulthood, and learns to see adults as they really are. The debt to Dickens is quite clear (it’s no surprise that Garfield wrote an ending to Dickens’s unfinished final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood) but his stories are far more than mere pastiche. Garfield has a wry voice that’s entirely his own, ironic yet compassionate, and his descriptive powers are superb. How about this description of snowfall in 18th-century London? ‘The worn old streets were gone; the blackened roof tiles were gone; the mournful chimneys and the dirty posts wore high white hats – and the houses themselves seemed to float, muffled, in a sea of white. Never, in all its life, had the town looked so clean; it shamed the very sky, which was of a dirty, yellowish grey.’ When I dug out my beloved Garfield books, to reread them for this article, I realised, with a mortal shiver, that I’m now the same age that he was when I met him, 55. When we met that sunny afternoon, his best work was already behind him. I wonder if he knew that at the time. When we parted, after an awkward half hour, he gave me a copy of his latest book, The Ghost Downstairs. I think it might amuse him to know that of all his books which I’ve cherished for nearly half a century, that beautiful first edition, with its handwritten inscription on the inside cover, is the only one I can’t find. The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 19

Miscellaneous

Monty Lyman maintains there is little evidence that painkillers work in the long term

THE PAINFUL TRUTH

THE NEW SCIENCE OF WHY WE HURT AND HOW WE CAN HEAL

MONTY LYMAN Bantam Press, 286pp, £20

In The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, a doctor, though not a pain specialist, examines the chronic pain that is becoming a ‘silent pandemic’ in the UK. Chronic pain is pain that lasts for 12 weeks or longer, despite getting treatment. ‘It ruins socialising, your sex life, your daily functioning. It is the highest cause of work-related absence.’ Backs are the worst affected, followed by joints, muscles, and headaches. Conventional medicine has regarded pain as a ‘detector’, warning you not to do more damage to the affected part. Lyman maintains that this is a serious misconception, encouraging the sufferer towards inertia when moderate exercise might be more helpful. The fact that pain thresholds differ so substantially between individuals and even according to each individual’s state of mind suggests that the mind is both the locus and the source of pain and that retraining it can be helpful. There is little evidence that painkillers work in the long term, while they certainly have side effects and cause addiction. Medical students are insufficiently focused on the potential of mental therapies in this area. James McConnachie in the Times was persuaded by Lyman’s case, and praised the writing – ‘he has the good doctor’s gift of finding the right metaphor’. He was impressed by the 20 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

instances Lyman provides of perplexing control experiments, the power of placebo or increasing the patient’s sense of comfort and even experiments with Virtual Reality. In the Daily Mail Shaoni Bhattacharya described the book as ‘accessible and well-written’ and similarly accepted the important role of healthcare staff in creating positive, comforting environments. However, while she found the book strong on diagnosis, she thought the author ‘could have devoted more space to potential solutions’. One such solution struck both reviewers as novel and interesting: Lyman recommends one specific, demanding activity that combines social interaction, goal-orientated concentration and fine-tuned cross-body motions in a unique way. It is knitting.

A VERY NICE REJECTION LETTER

librarian – this experience fed into a memoir Reading Allowed which sold more than his last three novels combined. This second memoir is made up mainly of tranches from Paling’s diaries, detailing such standard humiliations of the writing life as sharing book signings with a more famous author. Or having to listen to a crass put-down at a school reunion. His tone is modest as he suggests, in passing, that all writers are flawed – otherwise they would get on with the business of living, ‘rather than watching other people live and writing about them’. Thomas Hodgkinson in the Literary Review described the diaries as ‘a completely authentic account of what it’s like to be merely reasonably good’. The volume made him consider the oddity of how when ‘contemplating a line of work, we tend to imagine what it would be like to be hugely successful at it’. Neil Armstrong in the Mail on Sunday thought ‘everyone who is convinced they have a book in them should read it’. Jackie Annesley in the Times noticed that despite the book’s title ‘there is little evidence the publishing world of today bothers with such social niceties as rejection letters. Paling’s selection in the appendix are all pre-Nineties.’ She enjoyed the book but thought it a shame that the author had never pursued a living as a columnist or satirist ‘because this seemingly is where his real talent lies’.

THE SOCIAL INSTINCT

HOW COOPERATION SHAPED THE WORLD

NICHOLA RAIHANI Jonathan Cape, 304pp, £20

DIARY OF A NOVELIST

CHRIS PALING Constable, 240pp, £16.99

Chris Paling is the author of eight works of fiction and is what publishers describe as a ‘mid-list novelist… someone who showed early promise but failed to hit the sales or prize jackpot’. He points out that ‘there is no such thing as a low-list novelist’. He worked for many years as a Radio 4 producer, writing his novels on his daily commute from Brighton. Then in 2007 after a serious illness he took redundancy and embarked on a new career as a

Almost half a century since the publication of Richard Dawkins’s most famous work, The Selfish Gene, Nichola Raihani, a professor of Evolution and Behaviour at UCL, has written a riposte. Where Dawkins had proclaimed that ‘we are born selfish’, Raihani insists that her researches lead her to conclude that ‘togetherness is wired into us’. Indeed, human beings must cooperate to survive if our enormous brains are going to receive the large number of calories they require. Jon Turney reviewing The Social Instinct on the Artsdesk enjoyed the book’s range: ‘We learn much along

Miscellaneous the way about social insects, meercats and naked mole rats, human pregnancy and birth, the menopause and grandmothering, and mating habits.’ In the Times, Dan Hitchens enjoyed the ‘memorable’ details from Raihani’s field work among cooperative communities of pied warblers and cleaner fish, among others. However, Hitchens found the book ‘bogged down’ by ‘Darwinitis’, by its ‘fairly rigid application of Darwinian logic’ and an insistence that all human behaviour should be interpreted in terms of how it helps us reproduce or survive. In an interview on the Royal Society of Biology website, Raihani stressed the biological imperative of cooperation: ‘We, as individuals, are actually massive collectives of genes, cooperating inside genomes and cells all working together.’

WHITE SPINES

CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK COLLECTOR

NICHOLAS ROYLE Salt, 176pp, £9.99

Novelist Nicholas Royle is a book obsessive’s obsessive, with a collection of 959 Picador paperbacks dating from 1972 to 2000. Bookblogger BookMunch was impressed: ‘How obsessive can you be? Nick has reserve collections of

Picador books that are either the wrong size or colour, the B and C list. A trainspotter of the earlier meaning, Nick is obsessed with recording his acquisitions. But he is not interested in monetary gain from his collecting. He is a keepercollector, a hoarder of the tribe.’ Fellow blogger The Quick and the Read also approved of his thriftiness. White Spines ‘explores the bookshops and charity shops, the books themselves, and the way a unique collection grew and became a literary obsession. Above all, it is a love song to books, writers and writing.’ Ian Samson in the Spectator also warmed to the unpretentiousness of Royle’s grand project. ‘It’s not exactly a history of Picador, though we certainly learn a lot about the imprint, launched by Pan Books in 1972 by Sonny Mehta. Nor is it exactly a memoir, though there are plenty of details about Royle’s time as a student and his work for Time Out, his teaching and his running of his own small press, Nightjar. There’s mention of a divorce, a new relationship and children — all subtly tipped in, or interleaved, in chapters about various Picadorrelated matters, including descriptions of book covers.’ White Spines is, wrote Alexander Larman in the Critic, ‘idiosyncratic and enjoyable’.

Library of an obsessive: Nicholas Royle’s Picador shelves

GUARDED BY DRAGONS ENCOUNTERS WITH RARE BOOKS AND RARE PEOPLE

RICK GEKOSKI Constable, 240pp, £18.99

Complicated trade: hooking a rare book

Rare book dealer, Rick Gekoski, takes the reader into the mythical and vanishing world of hunting for literary treasures, which has sustained him for 50 years. He describes dizzying encounters with DH Lawrence, William Golding, Graham Greene, Sylvia Plath, among many dragons, with whom he negotiates, and who keep guard over his finds. Rare books is a complicated trade, and property is a vexed issue – who owns what, and what can be done with it. ‘Where there’s muck there’s brass, and with brass people are brazen,’ observed Roger Lewis in the Times. On the whole the people Gekoski meets are ‘pretty seedy and self-seeking’, but they offer ‘a wealth of quirky and diverting stories, and you feel he could keep entertaining his readers for ever’. Gekoski is ‘wonderful company on the page, with a fine flair for storytelling and an eye for fascinating eccentricities among his colleagues and customers’, said John Banville in the Irish Times. ‘Gekoski lets us in on the intricacies of the trade with candour and insouciance.’ ‘The great strength of Gekoski’s outlook,’ agreed Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday, ‘is that it combines a relish for commerce with tremendous joie de vivre.’ While he ‘includes a certain amount of slightly peevish score-settling… for the most part Guarded By Dragons is fresh and fun and bursting with good stories.’ Gekoski has now retired from book-selling. He finds the internet has taken the romance out of rare books: the thrill of the chase has gone. The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 21

Current affairs THE AUTHORITY GAP

WHY WOMEN ARE STILL TAKEN LESS SERIOUSLY THAN MEN, AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

MARY ANN SIEGHART Doubleday, 384pp, £16.99

GRIFFITH COLLEGE

Sieghart opens her book with the story of Mary McAleese, president of Ireland, on an official delegation to the Vatican in 1999. The Pope (John Paul II) walked past her outstretched hand and instead held out a hand to her husband, standing beside her, and asked: ‘Would you not prefer to be President of Ireland rather than married to the President of Ireland?’ It is the first of many such anecdotes in a book which argues that the wrong attribution of expertise and power is wasteful of available resources and harms men as well as women. It seems not to have occurred either to Sieghart or to her reviewers that the Pope was perhaps just being courteous to the less important person in the room. Vicky Price in the Literary Review twinned the story of the Vatican reception with the recent snub offered to Ursula von der Leyen when President Erdoğan of Turkey and Charles Michel, president of the European Council, took the only two chairs available at a meeting. ‘Von der Leyen’s treatment is proof that the authority gap remains very real, whatever one’s seniority,’ added Price, in case anyone was tempted to think the problem had been solved between

Mary McAleese, ex President of Ireland 22 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021

Sieghart finishing the book and it appearing in print. The voices of powerful women punctuate Sieghart’s data with accounts of being what the author calls ‘mandermined’ and ‘manderestimated’. Nesrine Malik in the Guardian wished that ‘the authority gap could have been demonstrated more through a less elite cohort’. James McConnachie in the Sunday Times was struck by the volumes of rape and death threats received by women in public life. Sieghart explains this as men ‘trying to impose a steep tax on entering the public sphere’. McConnachie was persuaded that this was indeed the case: ‘The intentions are betrayed from the threats’ pathological focus on mouths, on cutting out tongues, choking and oral rape.’

NICE RACISM

HOW PROGRESSIVE WHITE PEOPLE PERPETUATE RACIAL HARM

ROBIN DIANGELO Allen Lane, 201pp, £17.99

Nice Racism follows DiAngelo’s previous book, White Fragility, a concept she coined a decade ago. Here she makes the claim that nice, liberal, progressive whites cause more harm to black, Asian and minority ethnic people than out-and-out nasty racists do. There was no doubting the views of most of the (black) reviewers of this book, viz Danzy Senna in the Atlantic, who described her as ‘heroically, for an ample fee, taking on a job that Black people have been doing for free over the centuries’. Indeed, she goes on, ‘everything DiAngelo notices about whiteness has been noticed by Black writers before her’. For Ashish Ghadiali, in the Observer, DiAngelo ‘assumes the role of an omniscient narrator of antiracist truth, which grates’. There’s a deep internal contradiction, he noted, in the wealth that she, as a white person, has ‘accrued as an authority on anti-racism’. Clive Davis, in the Times, admitted that part of him was ‘tempted to cheer her on. After all, her main target is the smug, right-on liberals who can’t help mentioning that they have a Black Lives Matter poster in the front window of their rather expensive home.’ But for him the ‘schadenfreude lasted only so

long’, as the ‘missionary zeal’ of this white academic was ‘even more off-putting’. ‘She is the kind of person who, if invited into your home, would soon be inspecting your wedding album to check how integrated the guest list was.’ The only dissenting voice was Koa Beck, in the Guardian, who considered the book ‘highly instructional, with pertinent questions for white readers who consider themselves sufficiently “woke” ’. For her, DiAngelo had brought ‘scrutiny, racial theory and first-hand experience’ to the subject, which is that it is ‘in places like the Democratic National Convention, the “feminist” book club, the liberalidentified workplace, where you will encounter some of the most profound racism you’ve ever experienced. It’s in these spaces that we see white supremacy at its most unadorned.’

AMONG THE MOSQUES

A JOURNEY ACROSS MUSLIM BRITAIN

ED HUSAIN Bloomsbury, 352pp, £18.99

Ed Husain’s account of Muslim Britain received a mixed reception from reviewers. His identification of increasing extremism in many British mosques lit touch papers in the Daily Mail. According to Jawad Iqbal, who interviewed him in the Times, Husain ‘encountered many liberal, progressive Muslims championing causes such as LGBT rights. But he also identified serious problems. In town after town, he found mosques that discriminated against women and taught a highly literal interpretation of Islam. Husain also came across books by authors banned in parts of the Middle East for being extremist, and mosques that conducted Islamic marriages without legal registration and the protections that come with it. “There are large numbers of people in activist sections of Muslim communities who think creating a caliphate [a state under a single Islamic ruler] is a good thing,” he tells me.’ Husain, now a professor at Georgetown University, knows something about Islamic extremism having been a member of a hardline Sunni group as a student. In an interview with the New Statesman, he reflected that Daily Mail headlines

Current affairs were only half the problem. ‘As well as rebuking those on the right who portray all Muslims as intolerant, Husain warns that the left’s insistence that all is well among Britain’s Muslim community is deeply problematic because “all is not well”.’ In the Literary Review, however, Sameer Rahim was underwhelmed by the book which he thought showed the unbalanced ‘zeal of the recovering extremist’. Rahim thought his arguments lacked rigour. ‘Husain takes the temperature of Muslim Britain by visiting mosques in ten cities across the UK at Friday prayers. There are 3.4 million British Muslims, divided by culture, theology and class as well as temperament, and many rarely attend Friday prayers since they are either working or not especially religious. But the small sample size does not stop Husain drawing sweeping conclusions. While his title alludes to VS Naipaul’s Among the Believers, Husain is unable to match the novelist’s magisterial prose or penetrating insights. Instead, his book careers painfully from the risible to the frankly sinister.’

THE CHIEF WITNESS

ESCAPE FROM CHINA’S MODERN-DAY CONCENTRATION CAMPS

SAYRAGUL SAUYTBAY AND ALEXANDRA CAVELIUS, TRANS CAROLINE WAIGHT Scribe, 320pp, £16.99

Sayragul Sauytby, a member of the Muslim Kazakh ethnic minority, was a doctor born to a Kazakh herder and bred in China’s north-western province of Xinjiang. In 2016 the authorities cracked down on the Kazakhs and Uighurs, destroying homes and holy places and herding them into ‘re-education’ camps. In a short lull in political controls, her husband and children fled to Kazakhstan, while she was forced into one of the camps and ordered to teach Chinese culture and language to the inmates. Temporarily released, she bribed her way into Kazakhstan to join her family, and they eventually gained political asylum and a new life in Sweden, where she has written what Publishers Weekly described as this ‘harrowing’ account of life in the camps, in which ‘Muslim detainees

Sayragul Sauytbay: successful struggle

were force-fed pork, beaten for speaking their native languages, subjected to medical experiments and even “disappeared” for organ harvesting’. Edward Lucas in the Times described her life as a testament to the power of stubbornness – in her ‘seeking an education and career in her remote rural birthplace; in pursuing professional success in the face of Chinese chauvinism; in retaining her sanity in the camp; and in her successful struggle to prevent her extradition back to China’. She admits that her memory has fragmented under the strain and she ‘sometimes confuses events, dates and places’. This, says Lucas, sometimes ‘makes her story less convincing than it could be’. Michael Sheridan however pointed out in the Sunday Times that ‘Facts about what is going on in Xinjiang are notoriously hard to pin down’, and ‘It is only through accounts such as this that the world can sift the evidence for itself.’ Lucas described how Sauytbay’s ‘health is ruined, menacing phone calls tell her to shut up and the authorities send her sister and mother to the camps to underline their point’. ‘It’s my fault,’ she writes. ‘No,’ Lucas emphatically concludes. ‘It’s not.’

THE PERFECT POLICE STATE

AN UNDERCOVER ODYSSEY INTO CHINA’S TERRIFYING SURVEILLANCE DYSTOPIA OF THE FUTURE

GEOFFREY CAIN PublicAffairs, 304pp, £20.85

‘Have you ever seen the movie Minority Report?’, asked the website Wbur, referring to the film about ‘a

special police force in the future that does what’s called “preventive policing”, using psychics and technology to predict who will commit a crime’. According to investigative reporter Geoffrey Cain, China appears to have developed a version of this with its vast surveillance system used against ethnic minority Muslims in Xinjiang. The mass database is called the IJOP — the Integrated Joint Operations Platform — which, Wbur continued, ‘is a police platform that nudges officers when it believes someone is prone to committing an act of terror. The person is then visited by the police.’ The Public Affairs website described the book as a ‘riveting investigation into how a restive region of China became the site of a nightmare Orwellian social experiment – the definitive police state – and the global technology giants that made it possible’. Edward Lucas in the Times likened the high-tech surveillance model to the ‘telescreen’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four,

Maysem committed the almost unforgivable sin of studying abroad ‘a device that (rather like a modern mobile phone) pumped out propaganda, but could also monitor behaviour’. Cain’s central witness, wrote Lucas, is a likeable, studious young woman called Maysem, who committed the almost unforgivable sin of studying abroad, in Turkey. ‘Although a loyal Chinese citizen and from an impeccably Communist family, she ends up in a re-education camp, where she undergoes mental and physical torture aimed at breaking her spirit.’ Even more sinisterly, Lucas pointed out, is that, ‘Having fine-tuned the system on the Uighurs, the country’s Communist bosses are now extending it to the rest of the country.’ Lucas, while criticising Cain’s ‘plodding, jerky prose’, also believed he should have probed further, by examining how far the ‘Beijing regime is turning this system outwards, capturing data about foreigners to track our movements and predict our thoughts and deeds’. Throw away that Huawei phone now. The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 23

Disease Fiction much that would enrich the average person’s understanding of the story and thought it ‘so good that the book will be read for long after the pandemic is over’. ‘Vaxxers is an excellent and readable account of lab life,’ he said, ‘describing not only the Covid-19 vaccine research itself but issues such as obtaining supplies and publishing results, which apply to science more generally — though rarely under such pressure as Gilbert and Green describe.’

THE PREMONITION A PANDEMIC STORY

MICHAEL LEWIS Allen Lane, 320pp, £25

VAXXERS

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE OXFORD ASTRAZENECA VACCINE AND THE RACE AGAINST THE VIRUS

SARAH GILBERT AND CATHERINE GREEN, WITH DEBORAH CREWE

ARNE MÜSELER

Hodder, 352pp, £20

Laboratory scientists make unlikely public heroes and heroines; but in the age of Covid that’s just what has happened to some of them. Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green – two eminent but unassuming vaccinologists – found themselves the objects of a standing ovation at Centre Court on the first day of Wimbledon. They were two of the key figures in the development of the AstraZeneca vaccine – and their book on the subject, delivered in almost comparably record time – reads like a ‘biomedical thriller’, thought the Guardian’s Mark Honigsbaum. They tell their story in alternating chapters, and ‘are at pains to point out that they are not “big pharma” but two ordinary people who managed to pull off an extraordinary feat while dealing with the everyday stresses that come with being full-time mums and breadwinners in a notoriously insecure and poorly paid field’. The FT’s Clive Cookson was broadly in agreement. Though he groused (as perhaps the FT might be expected to) that their narrative scanted the business aspect of the vaccine’s development, it contained 24 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

Michael Lewis – author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball and The Big Short – is a marquee name in American longform journalism; a man who can make a Hollywood-friendly, ripsnorting human narrative from subjects as apparently unpromising as baseball statistics or complex financial instruments. Here he turns his attention to America’s pandemic year and, said Dominic Green in the Spectator, the result ‘reads like the script of a gripping movie’ but misses the big story in an attempt ‘to fix the narrative of an American catastrophe when the facts aren’t fixed’. This is a story of heroes and villains, said Green: ‘Meet the “Wolverines”: Carter Mecher, “the redneck epidemiologist”, can’t see a bureaucratic box without thinking outside it […] and leads a team of doctors, veterans of Iraq, MERS, Ebola and Zika, who work “behind the scenes” and save America while there’s still time.’ ‘Lewis is unashamedly and, at times, cornily earnest about what he refers to at one point as this “rogue group of patriots working behind the scenes to save the country” ’, thought the Guardian’s Mark O’Connell, adding: ‘I did find myself questioning whether […] he’s encountering the formal limits of the kind of pacy, thriller-ish style he favours. At times, in fact, the book can seem less like a work of narrative journalism than an exceptionally vivid script treatment.’ Christina Patterson, writing in the Times, affirmed that ‘Lewis’s usual approach is to take a group of characters to flesh out a complicated

theme and turn it into a gripping story. And he’s done it again here.’ She did not disapprove: ‘The descriptions are punchy, the dialogue snappy. Lewis is a master of his form. He’s an expert, in fact. It’s just a shame that the voices of the experts in his book were ignored until it was too late.’

UNTIL PROVEN SAFE

THE HISTORY OF QUARANTINE

GEOFF MANAUGH AND NICOLA TWILLEY Picador, 416pp, £25

The first quarantine was 650-odd years ago – when in 1377 Dubrovnik shut its doors to travellers from plague-infested areas. This is the starting point for what the Guardian called a ‘brainy but accessible book on the history and future of quarantine’ (whose name, incidentally, is from the Italian quarantena, aka 40 days). When Covid came along, it was to such precedents that 21st-century governments turned. Reviewing the book in the Wall Street Journal, Roger Ekirch wryly quoted the Center for Disease Control’s Martin Cetron: ‘The truth is, our most urgent modern biologic threats have required us to roll back to our 14th-century tool kit.’ Ekirch thought that though neither of the book’s journalist authors have any track record as historians or scientists their story was made ‘compelling’ through the depth of their research and their perspicacious argument ‘that quarantine, a mighty yet dangerous weapon, must be used “more wisely in the future” ’. After all – with more than 20 per cent of the world’s population having been under some sort of lockdown by April 2020 – the political ramifications of quarantine as a disease prevention tool are considerable. Ekirch noted that quarantine – which presumes you’re infectious until proved otherwise – ‘turns on its head traditional Anglo-Saxon law’. Yet the book ranges further than that, said Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times, noting that it ranges into considerations of pest control and agricultural blight, space travel and even the storage of nuclear waste; not to mention the abuse of medical quarantine as a tool of political and racial oppression. Hard not to agree with Lord Byron: ‘Adieu, thou damned’st quarantine, / That gave me fever, and the spleen!’

Fiction

SHOULD WE STAY OR SHOULD WE GO LIONEL SHRIVER Borough, 266pp, £18.99

Lionel Shriver, a writer of strong opinions, known for her pro-Brexit, anti-lockdown journalism, once again challenges our views in this novel about a suicide pact. Kay and Cyril Wilkinson have witnessed the slow dementia of Kay’s father. When they turn 80 they plan to take back control and drink of the hemlock to spare themselves, their children and the NHS the burden of their old age. ‘That’s when the fun starts,’ said Louise R Brown in the Spectator. David Grylls in the Sunday Times agreed. He enjoyed the ‘mingling of comedy and horror’, as Shriver ‘gleefully’ constructs 12 possible outcomes of the central situation. ‘Through the potent spell of Shriver’s language, horror gets alchemised into amusement. Fiery phrases spit and crackle. Disgust expands and bursts into belly laughs.’ Alex Preston in the FT enjoyed its unconventionality too: ‘there’s something bracing about reading a novelist so admirably heartless, watching her pull the legs off her characters … her books are fun, smart and … unlike anything else you’ll

Lionel Shriver: strong opinions

read’. He described it as a novel of ‘riotous, occasionally bilious satire that asks how long we want to live and how we wish to die’. But Walter Kirn in the NY Times found comfort: ‘It’s about marriage. The persistence of relationships. For whatever direction the Wilkinsons’ lives take, or history takes, they always end up together, chattering, spatting and laughing, drinks in hand. It’s a charming notion, circuitously stated.’ Not so, concluded Brown in the Spectator. ‘Shriver is a writer who wants us to accept that death and decline can outmanoeuvre our best laid plans.’ (Perhaps Covid and Brexit can too.)

ASSEMBLY NATASHA BROWN Hamish Hamilton, 112pp, £12.99

Assembly documents the experience of a young black Oxbridge-educated British banker, and takes place over the course of a couple of days as she deals with promotion at work, a cancer diagnosis, and arrives at the country house of her boyfriend’s parents, where a lavish garden party is being prepared. All the narrator’s relationships are

tainted by assumptions based on the colour of her skin. Her boyfriend’s rich complacent world gains liberal credibility from the fact of her association with him, while at work one colleague ‘speak-shouts his thoughts re “Fucking quotas”.’ It is her recognition that she will never win against the cancer of racial prejudice that compels Brown’s heroine not to battle the literal cancer taking over her body. Holly Williams in the Observer hailed Brown as ‘a significant talent, who brilliantly illuminates the entrenched inequalities of our time’. But she wondered why there was ‘no consideration that there’s any other way to live besides ambitiously ascending the career, class and property ladders... the narrator’s death wish can read like a melodramatic device. Why not drop out rather than drop dead?’ Several reviews remarked on the book’s relationship to Mrs Dalloway, and on it being extremely short but not slight. Sara Collins in the Guardian described how ‘text that is sparse on the page expands on consumption; it swells like a sponge in the mind’. Brown’s style – proceeding by way of single paragraph vignettes – was also compared to that of Jenny Offill and Patricia Lockwood while Desirée Baptiste in the Times Literary Supplement read a homage to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Assembly’s depiction of ‘a tiringly surreal world, booby-trapped to shrink our heroine’.

BARCELONA DREAMING RUPERT THOMSON Corsair, 224pp, £16.99

Barcelona Dreaming consists of three long stories, linked both by place and time – they are set in Barcelona in the first decade of this century – and also by major characters in one story re-appearing as a minor character in the next. In one story a divorced British expat falls in love with a young Moroccan sex worker she finds crying in the car park beneath her apartment. In another a former jazz musician has a weirdly plausible dream that he is employed to give English lessons to Barcelona’s Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho. The third concerns a translator of literary fiction, and a wonky love triangle. The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 25

Fiction

Sagrada Família in Barcelona

Michael Eaude in the Literary Review described Thomson’s depiction of the city as full of ‘nostalgia for a recent past, just before the economic crash and the campaign to deny Catalonia an improved statute of autonomy’. He compared the novellas to ‘Graham Greene’s “entertainments”: highly readable, polished stories that do not aspire to be great literature but are not so light or frivolous as they may at first seem’. Nicholas Wroe in the Guardian reminded readers of the fabulist strain always present in Thomson’s work. In an interview Thomson has referred to these stories as ‘loveletters’ to the city where he lived for some years. Wroe remarked that ‘it should come as no surprise that a Thomson love letter is not so much a starry-eyed document as something sharper, stranger, more unsettling and, ultimately, more revelatory’. Damon Galgut in the Times Literary Supplement struck a warier note, with the observation that Thomson’s ‘relentlessly descriptive approach can be flattening, according everything the same glancing weight and value’.

together like neighbours on a London street or regulars in a pub, which is where most of his characters cross paths’. ‘Confinement of many kinds’ is a recurring theme, decided Louie Conway in Vanity Fair, sometimes physically, as in the opening chapter, in which a woman trying to observe her neighbours’ house party through a dent in the wall ends up caught in the cavity in between. School librarian Maria is similarly stuck, ‘hounded by the twin soul-sucking forces of work and domestic ennui’, while Tommy’s weekends are ‘festivals of debauchery no less routine than the monotony of his working week’. Most of the characters are ‘connected by their lack of power’, said Mesure — ‘financial, social and political’. Harry, landlord of the Camberwell local that props up the narrative, ‘can’t even choose which pints to pull’, the decision being in the hands of the property company that effectively owns him. John Self, writing in the Times, described Ridgway as ‘one of Ireland’s best writers’ and A Shock is ‘like Finnegans Wake, only readable’. His ‘pinpoint descriptive writing’ aside, what holds the book together ‘are the people, a bunch of slightly messed-up but deeply loveable characters’ whom you can’t help but root for. ‘Seeing and understanding other people is, after all, what fiction is all about.’

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD QUENTIN TARANTINO Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 400pp, £8.99

A SHOCK KEITH RIDGWAY Picador, 288pp, £16.99

Nine years after his previous book, Hawthorn & Child, the Irish author Keith Ridgway has once again written a novel that ‘shuffles together London lives, this time over nine discrete sections, characters colliding, connections multiplying, images repeating,’ wrote Justine Jordan in the Guardian. Susie Mesure in the Spectator described it as a ‘collection of nine interlinked stories, jostled 26 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2021

of the Atlantic’, explained Madeleine Feeny in the Evening Standard. Animal is Taddeo’s first novel and is a depiction of female rage at its rawest, and a visceral exploration of the fallout from a male-dominated society. It is a ‘propulsive, fiercely confident debut’, thought Jennifer Haigh in the New York Times. It has ‘a killer opening’, wrote Claire Lowdon in the Times, and quoted it: ‘I drove myself out of New York City where a man shot himself in front of me.’ The ‘man is Vic’, continued Lowdon, ‘the ex-lover and much older boss of our beautiful, promiscuous narrator, Joan, a “depraved” woman now in her mid-thirties’. Reviewers were divided whether Taddeo’s novel lived up to expectations. Lowdon thought the book had been ‘rushed out without due care from its author or editors’. ‘Animal is not an easy or, at first, a coherent novel’, believed Bethanne Patrick in the Washington Post, ‘with some thematic overlap between the novel and Three Women’. She concluded: ‘The lesson here is that women do not have to be bound by the desires of men. That women can and should dictate their own stories on their own terms.’ And Beejay Silcox in the TLS wrote: ‘It is at once repellent and riotous, electric and tedious, slyly brilliant and about as subtle as a brick: a grotesque novel of power to reflect our culture’s grotesqueries of power.’

Keith Ridgway: one of Ireland’s ‘best’

ANIMAL LISA TADDEO Bloomsbury Circus, 336pp, £16.99

Lisa Taddeo is the author of Three Women, which was a huge publishing success a couple of years ago. The book was an ‘intimate investigation into the sexual and emotional lives of three women in America, and was a number one bestseller on both sides

‘In the Seventies,’ says Quentin Tarantino, ‘movie novelisations were the first adult books I grew up reading.’ No surprise then that becalmed by lockdown, he should make the leap from auteur to author, or that the paperback edition on sale now, complete with back-page ads for hard-boiled reads like Serpico, should resemble what Variety calls ‘something that would have sat on a rusting metal rack in a drug store in the ’70s’. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a buddy movie set in 1969 with a schlock-horror climax that owed something to the Manson murders. In the Washington Post, Charles Arrowsmith said that while cynics

Fiction

Quentin Tarantino: explosive dialogue

might think that Tarantino had simply ‘repackaged’ the story, it was in fact ‘a distinct experience, rangier, sexier, bloodier. More wistful, and somewhat more oblique in meaning, it expands the film’s world, even as it comments on it.’ Arrowsmith thought Tarantino’s ‘explosive dialogue, with its blend of streetwise and formal cadences, is almost as effective written down as read aloud …. And although the brio with which he imitates period idiom produces the occasional absurdity … on the whole it helps to create an authentically pulpy atmosphere.’ But Private Eye’s reviewer was unimpressed. Having noted that Tarantino ‘has no ear for prose at all’ he – or she – complained that his ‘conversations go on FOR EVER. You think his characters ramble on about nothing in his films, but here the dialogue doesn’t have a cinematic budget to hem it in, let alone the editorial blue pencil someone should surely have wielded.’ The Guardian’s Rob Doyle admitted that Tarantino was ‘no Henry James … But as in his films, his insatiable enthusiasm for pop culture trivia is infectious and thrilling.’ In the Evening Standard Katie Rosseinsky said, ‘This novel won’t change your stance on Tarantino; it will simply entrench it. This contrarian probably wouldn’t have it any other way.’

TOKYO REDUX DAVID PEACE Faber, 480, £16.99

The third in David Peace’s Tokyo trilogy of crime novels got a distinctly mixed response from critics. Tokyo Redux concerns what the Japanese

call the ‘Shimoyama incident’: the death of Shimoyama Sadanori, the first head of JNR (Japanese National Railways), whose body was found dismembered by a locomotive in 1949. For the Guardian’s Tanjil Rashid, it was, like its predecessors, a brilliantly strange and vivid portrait of post-war Japan, an ‘allegory of transformation’, and ‘metaphors for the way historic violence haunts a city in search of a new identity, a tension that imbues everything with “the stench of the past, the noise of the future”.’ In the Observer, Anthony Cummins was also full of praise. ‘Although you don’t need to have read the first two books to enjoy Tokyo Redux, it lands harder if you have, not least during an eerie sequence revisiting the protagonist of Tokyo Year Zero. Peace can be an uneven writer, but he’s somewhere near his best in this powerful, overwhelming novel, in which genre excitement steadily gives way to the uncannier frisson of being plugged into a current of secret knowledge.’ But Peace’s prose style didn’t work for Michael la Pointe in the TLS who found it ‘excruciating’ – an odd mixture of underwritten and overwritten which conveyed little of the atmosphere of Tokyo itself. Houman Barekat in the Times thought it verged on ‘hammy’: ‘Some motifs recur so frequently one starts to wonder if he’s doing it for a bet: a handkerchief is produced, and a face wiped, on no fewer than 35 occasions, and there’s a remarkable amount of sighing – I counted 77 instances.’

LAST DAYS IN CLEAVER SQUARE PATRICK MCGRATH Hutchinson, 240pp, £16.99

‘It’s not until you read a novel by Patrick McGrath you remember how boring most books are’ was the opening sentence of John Self’s review in the Times. McGrath’s tenth novel is a ‘passionate, tempest-tossed memoir by Francis McNulty – a poet

‘McGrath is unfailingly deft in his handling of trauma and deceit’

nearing the end of his life in London in 1975 – made up of equal parts what he’s telling us and what he isn’t. He tells us of an apparition who visits him, in the form of General Franco – himself dying – that recalls to Francis his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War,’ explained Self. James Walton in the Spectator thought: ‘McGrath’s prose is as

General Franco: an apparition from the past

unshowily affecting as ever and Francis himself a memorable portrait of raging against the dying of the light that never lets us forget how inexorably the light dies anyway.’ But he thought the novel, though not a long one, could have been ‘considerably shorter’. In the Guardian, Nicholas Wroe wrote: ‘McGrath expertly deploys some of his trademark elements, as with the double-edged naming of Cleaver Square… and is unfailingly deft in his handling of trauma and deceit… By its conclusion, Last Days in Cleaver Square manages to pull off the impressive trick of being narratively coherent and satisfying, yet still true to the messy businesses of memory, ageing, guilt and how to tell the story of a life.’ ‘And for all the brilliant comic touches,’ thought Miranda Green in the FT, ‘Catholicism weighs heavily on this novel, injecting it with the torment of a soul unshriven: McNulty muses on his need for absolution as he recounts his Spanish adventures to a young journalist come to flirt and cajole a story out of him.’ The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 27

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Children’s books EMILY BEARN on books for all ages In recent years the gay parent has become a familiar feature in children’s fiction – and now the gay grandparent is gradually becoming part of the landscape too. Grandad’s Camper by Harry Woodgate (Andersen, 32pp, £12.99) is one such example, telling the uplifting story of a little girl who helps her grandfather embrace life again following the death of his handsome soul mate Gramps. (‘Your Gramps was quite the adventurer! He was tall and handsome and excellent at so many things.’ ) Grandad hasn’t used his camper van since Gramps died, but his granddaughter has a plan to cheer him up. And in a story that will resonate with many a parent, The Sea (Thames & Hudson, 32pp, £9.99) by Piret Raud depicts the sea as a conscientious but exhausted mother to her huge brood of mischievous fish. (‘The sea taught all her fish how to read … And she talked at length about how good it was for them to be educated fish.’) When Mother Sea reaches the end of her tether, and goes away without them, the fish must rethink their ways. For readers of seven plus, Journey to the Last River (Frances Lincoln, 128pp, £14.99) by Teddy Keen is the second thrilling voyage for the Unknown Adventurer. This time, his travels begin when he discovers a map of the Amazon, showing a river that has been

Help is on hand in Grandad’s Camper

mysteriously rubbed out. (‘I would mention the area’s name, but I can’t. All I can say is that this map would lead the two of us on an expedition into the heart of the unknown.’) And fans of boarding school fiction should not miss How to Be Brave by Daisy Johnson (Pushkin, £304pp, £7.99), in which our heroine Calla and her rebellious comrades must pit their wits against a dastardly headmistress. Combining the high-jinx of Malory Towers with the mystery of Agatha Christie, this is a story that should appeal well beyond its targeted readership. And The Ice Whisperers (Puffin, 416pp, £7.99) is a sumptuously imagined debut fantasy by Helenka Stachera, telling the story of a young girl who is sent to Siberia to live with a mysterious uncle. While exploring his scientific workshop, she finds herself transported into a magical land which she must save with the help of a long-lost sister,

born 40,000 years ago. This year marks the 50th anniversary of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, by one of Britain’s best loved children’s writers, the late Judith Kerr. Based on Kerr’s early life, and her family’s escape from Nazi Germany, the anniversary edition of this cherished story (Harper Collins, 304pp, £12.99) contains Kerr’s original line drawings, and coincides with a new audiobook read by the author’s daughter. The Book of Stolen Dreams (Usborne, 384pp, £12.99) is a superb children’s debut by the screenwriter David Farr, telling the story of two children who must rescue their librarian father when he is captured by villains in pursuit of a book possessing the power of immortality. (‘I have always taught you to have a strong moral compass. You must use it now to save your father.’) And where would we be without Ladybird Books, instructing us on Everything Under the Sun (Ladybird, 256pp, £25)? In this bumper volume by Molly Oldfield, we find answers to 366 questions posed by children around the world, on subjects ranging from the Eoraptor dinosaur to the common cold. Concise and beautifully illustrated, this would be the perfect present for the child who wants to know everything in very little detail.

Paperbacks Fans of Elena Ferrante (author of the Neapolitan Quartet) can cheer: she has written a stand-alone novel also set in Naples, The Lying Life of Adults (Europa Editions, trans Ann Goldstein, 322pp, £8.99). Kathryn Bromwich in the Observer explained that the narrator, Giovanna, tells her coming of age story, ‘charting her development from the sweet girl who adores her parents to a sulking, aggressive teenager who finds pleasure in self-abasement and making those around her uncomfortable’. She continued: ‘What immediately distinguishes this book from its predecessors is its focus on the upper echelons of Neapolitan society in the early 1990s.’ Alex O’Connell in the Times had a few reservations: ‘The 30 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021

story is compulsive, but the characters are more cartoonish than in the Neapolitan Quartet…The writing can be overcooked – characters break off to talk about theology – and the metaphors can teeter into absurdity… Yet if you are a Ferrante fan, you cannot help but submit to find out whether the darkness of adult deceit and family feuds gives way to Neopolitan sunshine.’ Lara Feigel in the Guardian thought the book ‘astonishing’ and ‘deeply moving’. Anthony DePalma ‘follows the lives of Cubans living in Guanabacoa, a district of Havana near the city’s marina’, in The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times (Vintage, 368pp, £9.99), wrote James Bloodworth in the Times. His subjects

span six decades: from Fulgencio Batista’s overthrow and the early days of the revolution to the post-Castro leadership. ‘DePalma has written a moving and rich account of a people who are often treated — by admirers of the revolution and anti-communists — as historical flotsam in a struggle between states and ideas.’ Mick Brown in the Telegraph was also enthusiastic: ‘DePalma is a terrific reporter, with a novelist’s eye for detail. He uses the extraordinary trust he has gained from his subjects to paint a vivid, deeply sympathetic picture of Cuban life, and the quiet fortitude of its people, faced with the daily round of food shortages, power cuts and limitations, great and small, on freedom.’

The Oldie magazine - October 2021 issue 405

Articles inside

Taking a Walk: The joy of Devon’s fake lake Patrick

Crossword

On the Road: Giles Coren

Overlooked Britain Edinburgh’s Café Royal

I’m an old youth-hostel fan

Bird of the Month: Tufted

Drink Bill Knott

Getting Dressed: Catherine Llewelyn-Evans Brigid Keenan

Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson

Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Music Richard Osborne

Television Roger Lewis

Film: The Servant

History

Making Nice, by Ferdinand

Media Matters

The Magician, by Colm

The Amur River: Between Russia and China, by Colin

Readers’ Letters

The Doctor’s Surgery

Small World

Letter from America

Showbiz doesn’t pay

Postcards from the Edge

Kim Philby: a traitor and a

Town Mouse

Country Mouse

My brush with the Grim

Gothic style, from churches

How bankers lost their credit

I was scammed

Julius Caesar and family

I hate sticky tables

I was the Krays’ lawyer

My dream cricket team

Brian Glanville, king of football writers

Grumpy Oldie Man

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

The Old Un’s Notes

Bliss on Toast Prue Leith