WHY I WRITE – JILLY COOPER AN WILSON ON DANTE
September 2021 | £4.95 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 404
Titter ye not!
My comedy lessons with Frankie Howerd – Gary Files Sacred monster – Ferdinand Mount on Winston Churchill End of the road – Mary Killen on the last commuters Prince Harry’s big secret – Sir Les Patterson
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Features 11 Books really do furnish a room Liz Hodgkinson 13 Why I write Jilly Cooper 14 My comedy lessons with Frankie Howerd Gary Files 18 The last thatched cottages Paul Heiney 19 Diana’s first Ford Escort Rod Gilchrist 22 In praise of Dante, 700 years after his death A N Wilson 24 My bombshell – I’m retiring Sir Les Patterson 27 Too much drinking at the Bar Graham Boal QC 28 William Morris, Renaissance Man Fiona MacCarthy 30 My grandfather, Chips Channon Georgia Channon
Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: Wh0 was Horatio Bottomley? Christopher Sandford 12 Modern Life: What is Mercury retrograde? Richard Godwin
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20 Media Matters Stephen Glover 32 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 33 Country Mouse Mary Killen 34 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 37 Letter from America Edward Kosner 38 Small World Jem Clarke 41 School Days Sophia Waugh 41 Quite Interesting Things about ... September John Lloyd 42 God Sister Teresa 42 Funeral Service: Michael Horovitz James Hughes-Onslow 43 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 44 Readers’ Letters 47 I Once Met… Norman Mailer Sean Duncan 47 Memory Lane 62 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 62 Rant: Calling holidays ‘leave’ Penelope Hicks 63 History David Horspool 89 Crossword 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
RIP commuters – Mary Killen page 33 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside
Books 49 Churchill’s Shadow, by Geoffrey Wheatcroft Ferdinand Mount 51 The Sins of G K Chesterton, by Richard Ingrams Dan Hitchens 53 Family Business: An Intimate History of John Lewis and the Partnership, by Victoria Glendinning Valerie Grove 55 Index, a History of the, by Dennis Duncan Frances Wilson 57 Turning Point: A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World, by Robert Douglas Fairhurst A N Wilson 59 Being a Human, by Charles Foster Nicola Shulman 61 Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead Paul Bailey
Travel 80 Dervla Murphy at 90 William Cook 82 Overlooked Britain: Kensal Green Cemetery Lucinda Lambton 85 Taking a Walk: Wordsworth’s slate toytown Patrick Barkham Oldie subscriptions ● To place a new order, please visit our website subscribe.theoldie.co.uk ● To renew a subscription, please visit myaccount.theoldie.co.uk ● If you have any queries, please email help@ subscribe.theoldie.co.uk, or write to: Oldie Subscriptions, Rockwood House, 9-16 Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH
86 On the Road: Jenni Murray Louise Flind
Arts 64 Film: The Last Letter from Your Lover Harry Mount 65 Theatre: Leopoldstadt Nicholas Lezard 65 Radio Valerie Grove 66 Television Roger Lewis 67 Music Richard Osborne 68 Golden Oldies Imogen Thomas Littlebrook 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 Bird of the Month: Hobby John McEwen
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The Oldie September 2021 3
The Old Un’s Notes
AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY
In memoriam: Jonathan Cecil (1939-2011) in 1972
How quickly time flies! It is already ten years since the death, on 22nd September 2011, of the much-loved British comic actor Jonathan Cecil (19392011), once described by the Spectator as ‘one of the finest upper-class-twits of his era’. Upper-class he certainly was – the son of the writer Lord David Cecil. His many distinguished relatives included Elizabeth I’s chief minister, Lord Burghley, his son Robert Cecil (her great spymaster after the death of Walsingham) and three-times Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. Jonathan was no twit in real life. After Eton and Oxford – with Dennis Potter, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett – he trained at LAMDA, where fellow students included Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi. He also reviewed books for the Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement and others, and took a keen
interest in the history of the theatre and music hall. Though he was praised for his ‘straight’ acting, his looks and accent made him a perfect choice for playing dim-witted toffs such as P G Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster and the hapless Captain Cadbury in a 1973 Dad’s Army episode. He also narrated a number of talking-book versions of Plum’s stories, and was praised for giving ‘his now celebrated impersonation of a semi-detached goldfish’ (Sheridan Morley). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography described him thus: ‘A colourful character, often seen
in an immaculate Jermyn Street suit set off by a raffish fedora, he was a bon viveur and a brilliant raconteur, and spent much time at the Garrick Club.’ Stone me! Hancock’s back! Or almost … because it’s not quite the lad himself. Seasoned oldie comedy writers (and Galton and Simpson fans) Simon Hardeman and Spike Breakwell have produced a new ‘radio’ series called Hancock’s Half House. Set in the present, it follows the fortunes of one Terry Hancock, who has
Among this month’s contributors Jilly Cooper (p13) is one of Britain’s most popular writers. She is author of Mount!, Polo and Riders. Her new book is Between the Covers: Sex, Socialising and Survival. She was in the first Oldie issue in 1992. Graham Boal QC (p27) was First Senior Prosecuting Counsel and a judge at the Old Bailey. He was involved in the trial of Jeremy Thorpe, the last appeal of the Birmingham Six and the Guinness trial. Paul Heiney (p18) is a broadcaster and writer who became a farmer, using carthorses rather than tractors. Having now retired from a life on the land, he has returned to his first love, of ocean sailing. Liz Hodgkinson (p11) began her career on a rabble-rousing mass-circulation tabloid. She progressed to The Lady, where she is now a columnist. She is the mother of The Oldie’s Town Mouse, Tom Hodgkinson.
unexpectedly inherited a property in Railway Cuttings, East Cheam – left to him by his apparently illustrious grandfather. Terry’s problems include a dodgy housemate, Sigmund (‘Call me Sig’) James, and a
23 Railway Cuttings revisited: Anthony Aloysius Hancock
nosy – and nasal – neighbour sounding not unlike Kenneth Williams. Ex-stand-ups Hardeman and Breakwell previously worked for the BBC on Week Ending and The News Huddlines, and for Rory Bremner’s show on Channel 4. Breakwell says, ‘Hancock’s Half Hour is still better than pretty much any other comedy you can hear on radio or podcast, and we have both always loved it.’ Hardeman (who plays Terry) adds, ‘We’ve had fun playing with a new character in the Hancock tradition. He imagines himself to be woke, environmental and on the cultural cusp, while not actually understanding any of that.’ The new six-part series will be available as a podcast The Oldie September 2021 5
The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel may have been planet-brained. But he was also almost impossible to understand – as he himself confessed. That’s one of the revelations in Berlin: The Story of a City, a new book by
Important stories you may have missed Bus stop is possibility in Innerleithen Border Telegraph Prince Charles steps in cow pat at Great Yorkshire Show Telegraph
Parrot who went missing near Loch Lomond found in Dalry Ayrshire Daily News £15 for published contributions
NEXT ISSUE The October issue is on sale on 22nd September 2021. FREE SAMPLE COPY If you have a friend who would like a free sample of The Oldie, tell them to call 0800 8565867. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app.
‘Ed Spenks is the poor man’s Ed Spenks’
on Spotify, iTunes and other podcast providers on Tuesdays from 5th October. Go to hancockshalfhouse.com to watch a trailer. Tony Hancock isn’t the only legend to be revived. The Old Un has heard some exciting news from 221B Baker Street. Britain’s greatest sleuth has been reimagined in a new series, The Unexpurgated Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by N P Sercombe. The books reinvent Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories as they were supposedly written and delivered, before savage editing by George Newnes at The Strand magazine. Dr Watson’s ‘original’ versions portray the protagonists’ humanity, told in the bluff, honest and amusing style of an ex-army surgeon. They also reveal how
KATHRYN LAMB
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Toulouse-Lautrec’s FlowerSeller – from A History of Cut Flowers by Randy Malamud
the master detective and his companion celebrate their successes and conduct their personal lives in London at the height of the Empire. We meet Holmes’s parents – a pioneering nuclear scientist, who is building the world’s first atomic bomb in Godalming,
Sherlock Holmes – the lost years. NP Sercombe’s sequel
and a research botanist. Holmes has a sister alongside his cunning brother, Mycroft. Holmes purists will recoil but, then again, the best form of flattery is imitation. The Old Un adores Strange Bright Blooms: A History of Cut Flowers, a new book by Randy Malamud. Malamud writes about the flower girls of the 19th century, including Toulouse-Lautrec’s FlowerSeller, painted in 1894. Flower girls have been plying their trade in Paris’s Marché aux Fleurs on the Ile de la Cité since 1808.
What’s it all about, Georgie? Hegel (1770-1831)
Sir Barney White-Spunner, former Commander of the Field Army. ‘Hegel was an indifferent lecturer,’ Sir Barney writes. ‘He mumbled and his pupils found him very difficult to understand. He said himself that he thought there was only one person who did actually understand him and “even he did not”.’ Silly old Hegel. If he’d been really clever, he’d have known that a little learning is a dangerous thing. It’s best to stop educating yourself when you become unintelligible. As that great philosopher Bertie Wooster once told his valet, ‘I cannot do with any more education, Jeeves! I was full up years ago!’ The Old Un is delighted to hear that his favourite barrister, Rumpole of the Bailey, is also to be
prue leith
Bliss on Toast
Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers
Rumpole of the Bailey by David Hensley. John Mortimer’s daughters are bringing him back – as a woman
revived – by Emily and Rosie Mortimer, daughters of his creator, Sir John Mortimer. The new Rumpole will be a woman. But what will she be called? Horatia – rather than Horace – Rumpole? Here’s hoping she will have a husband version of Rumpole’s wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed. Latin scholars always liked the idea of that name – one of the few examples of a gerundive in English. Please let He Who Probably Won’t Be Obeyed appear in the new programme. What is a Coval? Anyone can have a Coval – a natural high that suddenly appears out of the blue. You can’t predict them, make them or know when they are going to happen. It may be an autumn day; you could be alone or with friends.
The first authenticated Coval was experienced in Great Baddow, Essex, in 1970. Two old schoolfriends felt a strange feeling of wellbeing. It was a sunny day – all seemed right with the world. It must have a name, they thought, walking along Coval Lane. Prosaic activities can herald this phenomenon – making a sandwich while listening to the radio, or dressing for an evening out. Coval-seekers need to be patient, as a Coval cannot be created or replicated. This mysterious mood change is a law until itself – and as old as mankind. Do write to editorial@theoldie.co.uk with your own Covals. In 1914, Princess Mary, George V’s daughter was just 17. And yet she determined to
Ripe Brie, sweet chilli jam and blackberries on toasted rye
send a Christmas present to all those in uniform. A new book, ‘For Every Sailor Afloat, Every Soldier at the Front’: Princess Mary’s Christmas Gift, 1914, tells the moving tale. By 1919, 2.7 million servicemen had received one of the handsome brass boxes, stamped with her profile. The boxes, contained tobacco – little chance of our boys
getting that sort of present these days.
Princess Mary’s Christmas gift, 1914. Allies’ names appear on the box’s edge
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Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
Anything Goes for me and my chums The joy of returning to the theatre with Christopher Biggins and Bonnie Langford
In my neck of the woods, it’s back to normal. How’s it with you? On the bus and the London Underground, I am still wearing a mask, but other than that, everything is much as it was before the pandemic struck – except that my office-worker friends really don’t want to return to their offices for more than two days a week and I am suddenly conscious of how very expensive it is to eat out. I am going to the theatre again and loving it. With my chums Christopher Biggins and Bonnie Langford, I went to a packed-to-the-rafters Barbican and we had the night of our lives at a beyondbelief brilliant revival of Cole Porter’s musical Anything Goes. It is running until the end of October; even if you have to come down from Aberdeen or fly in from Antrim, go, go, go. It’s that good. It will make you feel glad to be alive. I have even started going to parties again. The sparkiest so far has been the Australian High Commissioner’s summer drinks. The only disappointment of the evening was to find that the Australian cultural attaché was not in the least like Sir Les Patterson. There was no dribbling or spitting, which was probably a good thing because we had to come in from the garden to shelter from the rain and were huddled together, unmasked. Our Prime Minister’s father was a fellow guest and told me a story I’d not heard before about how his boy Boris got his name. It’s actually the PM’s second name (his first is Alexander). He has it because shortly before his birth, in New York in the summer of 1964, a chap called Boris showed young Stanley Johnson (then 23 and studying economics at Columbia University) and his then wife (Charlotte, 22) an unexpected kindness. Something to do with helping them get a seat on a Greyhound bus. Charlotte was about to give birth and Stanley told Boris that, by way of thanks,
their baby when it arrived would be named in his honour. Stanley is a man of his word. Stanley also told me that if the baby had been a girl, she would have been called Doris. Coming and going at the party, some people were bumping elbows and a few were offering socially-distanced namastes, but most were back to shaking hands. I gave the actor Simon Callow a proper luvvies’ hug and he rewarded me with a proper luvvies’ story – about the great and joyously eccentric Sir Ralph Richardson and, again, amazingly, it wasn’t one I had heard before. Sir Ralph, then in his late seventies, was appearing at the National Theatre and, during a break in rehearsals, was sitting at a table alone in the backstage canteen. A young actor approached the great man and asked if he could get him a cup of coffee. ‘No, thank you,’ replied Sir Ralph. ‘No coffee – but I’ll take a cup of hemlock if they’ve got one.’ During lockdown, almost everyone I know has been writing a childhood memoir, and many of them are being published this autumn.
‘It’s not me! He’s the one who’s obsessed with breasts!’
I have read an early copy of one of them that I can recommend without qualification: it’s called Will She Do? and tells the story of a girl from a council estate in Tottenham in the 1930s whose father was employed as a gas-meter reader and whose mother was a seamstress and barmaid. The girl is now Dame Eileen Atkins, 87, and it turns out that she is as subtle, honest and brilliant as a writer as she is as an actress. In case no one else does, let me recommend my own boyhood memoir, too. It’s called Odd Boy Out, and between now and November there isn’t a literary festival in the land at which I won’t be popping up to promote it. If you happen to see me at a signing, please come and say hello. These events can be awkward for authors. My very first book was published 50 years ago and I still have nightmares about my first book-signing. It was at Selfridges in London, and the line of shoppers stretched from the table where I was sitting in the book department, through the food department, out into Baker Street and around the corner into Oxford Street. There was a reason for that. I was sharing the table with another first-time author and she sold more than a thousand copies of her autobiography that day. I sold 11 copies of my book: four to my mother, four to my father, two to the deputy manager of the Selfridges book department – for customers who, apparently, had specially asked him to put them by – and, yes, one to my fellow newbie author, the very beautiful Italian lady seated on my left. She was the actress Sophia Loren. Gyles’s childhood memoir, Odd Boy Out (Michael Joseph), is out on 16th September The Oldie September 2021 9
Grumpy Oldie Man
Marks & Spencer – the OAP cult Why do oldies remain loyal to ancient brands? matthew norman
The horror engulfing the southern United States focuses the remnants of my mind on the intriguing matter of misdirected loyalties. In Florida, Louisiana and elsewhere, legions of the wilfully unvaccinated are vacating the planet, out of fealty to Donald Trump. As a draft-dodger who left the missus at home suckling their newborn to court a porn star, the once and perhaps future President isn’t an ostentatiously loyal soul himself. Overlooking this, phalanges of worshippers all over the South, not all necessarily light on chromosomes as a result of familial affections, are refusing a brace of painless injections in befuddled tribute to the mores of a double-jabbed old goat who came so close to succumbing himself. If you imagine that such a deranged mass act of self-sacrifice represents the gold standard of eccentrically misplaced loyalty, fair enough – you have, through no fault of your own, not met my mother. A woman of wide-ranging and fervent loyalties, she is as rigorously true to family and friends as she is to the sovereign, whom she invariably describes as ‘faultless’. Were Her Majesty to ask my mother to serve on the battlefield, in no circumstances – including the monstrously broken right ankle that has illuminated recent months – would she cite ‘bone spurs’ as an excuse to stay at home. My mother is also loyal to the man she knows, with a pride I struggle to replicate, as ‘my Prime Minister’. Any unflattering remark about him is crushed by a curt ‘Don’t be impertinent about Boris. He is my Prime Minister.’ Yet of all my mother’s loyalties, none is quite so perplexing as the one to Marks & Spencer. For instance, while freely acknowledging that it makes no financial sense, she has resolutely declined to sell her shares because that would be disloyal. 10 The Oldie September 2021
Still more curious has been her rigid refusal to contemplate buying home insurance – buildings and contents – from any purveyor other than M&S. For each of the last seven years, when the renewal documents arrive in the post, I have tried to persuade her that she and my father are being charged way over the odds. The briefest odyssey through the internet, I have repeatedly posited, would find countless equivalent policies at dramatically less cost. My father has always concurred with this theorem, but gracefully yielded to the inevitable objection that switching insurers would be an act of treachery, if not technically high treason, against Marks & Spencer. I assume that this is a generational thing; that those forged in wartime, when faith in a great cause was an incontestably crucial factor in national survival, developed an acute sense of loyalty which has dissipated down the generations. A 95-year-old-friend from my local Turkish baths, Lionel, served in the fight against Hitler. When he (Lionel, that is; not, for fairly obvious reasons, the Führer) mentioned the prohibitive premium his car-insurance firm was charging, I suggested a jaunt online to check out alternatives. Were a string of pearls a mandatory accoutrement in the steam room, a scandalised Lionel would have clutched his. He had been with the firm for 20 years, he said tartly, and wouldn’t dream of betraying it. Cast as Lord Haw-Haw in this exchange, I nodded surrender with weary familiarity, and stilled my tongue.
My mother concedes that Australia ‘will be nice when they finish it’
With my mother, that tongue was last week unstilled on my perusal of the latest M&S renewal notice. This quoted the sum of £1,485 to insure the house and the valuables therein. I write the following as a gentle hint to anyone to whom the online comparison site is an alien and possibly unnerving concept. Without any suggestion that a reputable insurer would gorge on the technophobia of a clientele that tends towards the venerable, the disparities in this market are staggering. How staggering? So staggering that my mother was grudgingly prepared to take the home-insurance business elsewhere. ‘Who on earth are Sheila’s Wheels? Are they from Australia?’ was the faintly Lady Bracknellish response, when I passed on the quote. For reasons of unknown genesis, she has something against Australia, although she concedes that it ‘will be nice when they finish it’. Whatever their land of birth, I replied, the only salient point about Sheila’s Wheels in this context is that they – if that’s the correct pronoun; who the hell knows these days? – are offering an insurance policy every bit as comprehensive as M&S’s for the unprincely sum of £210. ‘Don’t talk arrant nonsense, Matthew,’ she said, deploying her best-loved catchphrase. At this, I passed her the laptop, and she inspected the screen. The ensuing internal battle between the dictates of conscience and the saving of almost £1,300 was waged ferociously, if briefly. ‘What are you going to do with the windfall?’ I asked when the last click of the keys had closed the deal. ‘I think I’ll buy some more Marks & Sparks shares,’ said my mother. ‘I suppose the price will halve in a month, but I really must, to make it up to them somehow.’
Books really do furnish a room Lots of new houses tragically don’t have bookshelves. By Liz Hodgkinson
I
t is one of the most painful problems facing many older people contemplating downsizing to a smaller home: what to do with all your precious books. If you’re thinking of moving to a new-build house or retirement home, you’ll probably find there’s no space whatever for any books. Instead, there will be a ‘feature wall’ of garish wallpaper. Very few new homes allow for bookshelves. Although show homes are designed for maximum appeal, with nicely-laid tables, pot plants and artwork on the walls, you will never find any books among the colour-coordinated décor. Whenever I visit a show home, I always ask why there are no bookshelves. They say they make the rooms look too small and crowded. And yet, as novelist Anthony Powell knew, Books Do Furnish a Room. This is the title of the tenth volume (published in 1971) in his sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, and the phrase has passed into the language. Rightly so – what is a home without books? A lifetime collection – dog-eared and annotated – holds such potent memories that getting rid of it is like casting off a family member. Even my old school textbook Latin for Today – whose cover I altered to Eating for Today – has earnt its place among my hoard. The prospect of consigning beloved volumes to the charity shop is so appalling for some retirees that they decide to remain in the too-big family home and not move at all. Often the charity shop won’t even take your adored books – so the rubbish dump is your only option.
The tenth volume in A Dance to the Music of Time
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Kindles and audiobooks have their uses. But for any bibliophile they will never compete with the pleasure that handling and owning a real book brings. With this in mind, Cognatum, a non-profit retirement-home company, makes sure all its developments contain a downstairs spare room that can be turned into a dedicated book room, where there is space for a collection to expand. Book-loving downsizers will always want to add to their library – particularly because in retirement they will have more leisure to read. Cognatum CEO Richard Williams says, ‘Don’t compromise on this, as you will regret it. As people retire from a high-flying career, the textbooks and tomes they have acquired are a tangible reminder of their achievements.’ He cites the example of a recent retiree who moved into one of their developments with 100 boxes of books, and then proceeded to line their book room with Billy shelves from IKEA. ‘This proves that kitting out a book room doesn’t have to be expensive,’ Williams says. When I viewed my present flat, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were a strong reason for my buying it. Since then, my carpenter has built many more shelves and there is no space for more. So the books pile up in odd corners – but no way could I live without being surrounded by them. As the exiled Prospero remarks to his daughter Miranda in The Tempest, he was gratified to be expelled, along with his books – ‘the volumes I prize above my dukedom’. The message is clear: don’t leave your family home unless you can take your books with you.’
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Who was Horatio Bottomley? A century ago, in autumn 1921, a popular English journalist, author, newspaper publisher, financier and maverick politician sued a former business partner for libel. He lost the case and, as a result, was himself put on trial for fraud. This was not the journalist’s first exposure to the judicial system. Over the years, he enjoyed something of a season ticket to the London bankruptcy court, and had already made and lost a fortune several times. It sounds a bit like the story of Jeffrey Archer, with a touch of Robert Maxwell thrown in, but it’s actually that of one Horatio William Bottomley. Born in 1860, Bottomley grew up in a Birmingham orphanage and, after a series of menial jobs, found work as a clerk with a firm of City solicitors. He later put his knowledge of English law to good use in his own court appearances. One contemporary called him intelligent, generous and ambitious, with a charm that could ‘tempt the banknotes out of men’s pockets’. Bottomley went on to use other people’s money to start several newspapers and magazines, including the weekly tabloid John Bull, which survived in various formats until 1964. A scheme to promote Australian gold-mining shares made him wealthy, even though the mines themselves were often no more than a hole in the ground.
TRINITY MIRROR/MIRRORPIX/ALAMY
what is Mercury retrograde? Mercury retrograde is an astronomical phenomenon. Mercury appears to slow its serene progress through the night sky and move backwards for a short spell. This happens three or four times a year. Modern science tells us that this is a trick of perception, caused by the relative trajectories of Earth and Mercury around the Sun. However, it freaked out our ancestors. And it continues to freak out astrologyobsessed Gen Z-ers and Millennials today, who believe that Mercury 12 The Oldie September 2021
Tubby tub-thumper: Bottomley recruits for WWI, Trafalgar Square, 1914
bribed all six jockeys in a race at Brighton to finish in a certain order, a heavy sea mist had rolled in and the suddenly blinded riders had failed to follow instructions. Undeterred, Bottomley reorganised his debts and again successfully stood for Parliament, this time as an Independent, in 1918. Soon he began offering the public Victory Bonds at the heavily discounted price of £1 each, promising subscribers the chance to enter in an annual draw for prizes – up to £20,000, he said – from the accrued interest. The response was overwhelming, and Bottomley would have had his hands full had he ever tried properly to administer the scheme. Instead, he lavished the funds on luxury cars and thoroughbred racehorses, as well as on mistresses, whom he installed in several discreet flats around London. It all went wrong in the end, and Bottomley stood trial at the Old Bailey in May 1922. Even then, he conducted himself with a certain élan, securing the judge’s agreement to a 15-minute adjournment each day, so that he, Bottomley, could drink a pint of champagne, ostensibly for medicinal purposes. Sentenced to seven years, he emerged to launch himself on the London music-hall stage, but failed to prosper in his new role. Bottomley died in a charity ward on 26th May 1933, at the age of 73. Long since estranged from his wife Eliza, he was survived only by his speeches, articles and debts. Christopher Sandford
retrograde portends terrible things here on Earth. Mercury is, of course, named after the Roman messenger god and governs communication, travel, technology and intellect in general. So whenever Mercury goes into retrograde – as it did between 29th May and 22nd June, for example – those who believe in this stuff brace themselves for things to go a bit wrong. Likewise, whenever things start to go a bit wrong, they will log on to www. ismercuryinretrograde.com to see whether those pesky planets might have something to do with it. When the answer is NO, the site helpfully informs you, ‘Something else must be bumming you out.’
You might have thought that our rational, scientific age would have killed such medieval superstitions as astrology. But you would be wrong. Fashion magazines are full of numinous pronouncements on the stars. It is de rigueur on a dating profile to describe oneself as a ‘Capricorn with Virgo rising’ or whatever one happens to be. Celebrities including Rita Ora (Sagittarius), Ariana Grande (Cancer) and – I’m not even joking about this – David Dimbleby (Scorpio) have astrology-themed tattoos. A new generation of astrology apps such as Co-Star are using artificial intelligence and real-time NASA data
In 1906, Bottomley entered parliament as the Liberal MP For Hackney South. One of his election tactics was to recruit men wearing steel-soled boots to march outside his opponent’s meetings and render his speeches inaudible. Bottomley proved to be a thrilling orator, with a rock star’s command of his audience. As he spoke, his voice would get louder and become more passionate. He ranted and raved about the injustices done to the ‘common man’, while failing to mention that he was busy stealing his own small investors’ money. By the end of his speeches, his audiences would often be in a state of near-hysteria. In 1912, Bottomley was successfully sued by one of his mine-stock victims. Unable to pay, and with huge debts, he was bankrupted with liabilities of £233,000 – about £5 million in modern money. He had recently added to his losses: after he’d
to provide hyper-personalised horoscopes. And being so hyperconnected, we are particularly susceptible to the pernicious effects of Mercury retrograde. How many people sincerely believe this stuff is never quite clear, but it’s not hard to see why astrology might hold such appeal. It offers a portal into one of the most fascinating subjects of all: oneself. It gets you off the hook for your bad personality traits. And at a time when identities have become so fraught, it offers a way of connecting with one’s fellow human that transcends class, gender, national, racial and sexual divides. Why be a white cis heterosexual middle-class male when
Planet panic: Mercury
you could be a Cancer with an Aries moon and Virgo rising? It also connects one’s earthly bumblings into a grand celestial narrative. Think of the last line of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard: ‘Everything passes away – suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the Earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?’ The next Mercury retrograde occurs from 27th September to 17th October. You have been warned. Richard Godwin
Why I write – Jilly Cooper As a new collection of Jilly Cooper’s journalism is published, she recalls how she started writing The year 1968 was a miracle one for me. At 31, I was poised to give up my job in publishing, because my husband, Leo, and I were about to adopt a longed-for baby boy. Then, at a dinner party, I sat next to the glorious Godfrey Smith (1926-2017), ex-President of the Oxford Union, great journalist, author of many fine books – one of which, The Business of Loving, was a Book Society Choice. Godfrey was also editor of the Sunday Times colour magazine. During dinner, I regaled him with tales of how
disastrous I was domestically as a young working wife. I cited one occasion when my red silk scarf strayed into a launderette wash – so Leo’s rugger kit came out streaked like the dawn, and he boasted of being the only member of the rugger team with a rose-pink jockstrap. Godfrey laughed a great deal and asked me to write a piece about it, which he published in the mag in early 1969. This was enhanced by a very flattering photograph of me joyfully holding our new baby, Felix. Imagine my excitement when, a week later, Harold Evans (1928-2020), the great overall editor of the Sunday Times,
summoned me and offered me my own column to write about anything I liked. The column amazingly lasted for 13 years through the seventies and early eighties, often chronicling my chaos as a wife and mother working from home, and our lunatic but hugely enjoyable social life. Sunday Times readers did tend to like or loathe what I wrote, with my first column upsetting them so much that Harold Evans was able to fill my column the following week with their furious letters. I am therefore delighted that my dear publishers are reissuing a collection of some of my favourite columns. You will find the selection covers among other things our London life in the sexy sixties and seventies and our move from Fulham to Putney Common. What I love most about the book is that it brings back not only my macho, forthright, funny husband, Leo, who died of Parkinson’s disease in 2013, but also my children, Felix and Emily, as they were growing up, my sweet parents and so many friends and adventures. On the other hand, rereading the pieces, some 50 years later, I wonder: was this really me, so up myself and so utterly obsessed with sex? Did I really dare write that? But I do so hope that readers both young and old will enjoy them. Lots of love, Jilly Between the Covers – The world according to Jilly Cooper: sex, socialising and survival is published on 2nd September (£8.99) The Oldie September 2021 13
In Toronto in 1976, actor Gary Files enjoyed a masterclass in comic timing, instinct and control from Frankie Howerd
Frankie goes to Canada I
have to confess I was desperate. I was working in Toronto and my agent put me up for a new comedy that was to star Frankie Howerd. The 1976 comedy series was originally to be called Oooh, Canada! But they quickly changed that to The Frankie Howerd Show when they realised he had a surprising following among Canadian viewers. Although born and brought up an Australian, I decided I would go to this audition reading as a Canadian – and a berserk one at that. The part was the idiot son of Mrs Otterby with the very ‘end of the pier’ name of Hardin I Otterby. Thanks to my ability with accents, I was able to pull off being an outrageous Canadian idiot lad, and in doing so made the writers laugh. Which got me the role for the pilot. When Frankie arrived to do the pilot, I decided I had to continue to talk like a real Canadian and not in my normal Australian accent at any time, or I might well lose the job. We found out from Frankie later that he’d been through some tough periods by the time he’d got to us – so he was very suspicious of all us locals at the start of rehearsals. But, in a very short time, he came to realise there were no problems with the professionals he was working with, and that none of us was anything but very much on his side. From then on, he was a wonderful and very creative friend who shared his unique talent and comic expertise freely. After I’d made it very clear that my sexual preferences were heterosexual, the subject never came up again, and rehearsing with him was a fascinating exercise in comic control. Although he
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always seemed to be ‘winging it’, he kept in all the funny bits that happened by chance and ad-libs that went on in rehearsal. Once Frankie decided the changes he wanted to finalise, they were fixed very firmly into our scripts. We’d also noticed that he had a surprisingly tatty wig that didn’t quite match his greying hair. In the beginning, it was like the Fawlty Towers sketch about not mentioning the war. One was desperate not to look at the wig, even in passing – which became very hard, especially when he was at speed, doing his thing. But, thank God, after a while we didn’t notice it at all. I remembered him most, from my time in England, in the TV series That Was the Week That Was (1962-63), when he just sat on a stool and talked wittily to the live audience about the political scene. He told us he had no idea what he was talking about, not being at all political. It was simply the fantastic scripts he was getting from a stable of amazing writers such as Peter Cook and John Cleese. His magic was making their words live as his words, with all those special interjections of his… ‘Oooh, no! Listen! Don’t laugh…’ It astonished me that he delivered those killer lines and asides ‘straight down the barrel’ of the camera. In North America, we would rather die than be caught delivering anything straight to camera.
He delivered those killer lines ‘straight down the barrel’ of the camera
Our rehearsals taught me just how he managed that intimate effect. He had a ‘slave camera’ – one that stayed on him only – during the taping of the show. Anything that was funny outside the rehearsed script during taping (say, an unusual reaction from the audience) he immediately reacted to on the slave camera – and got a second laugh. Most of these extras were kept in when the final compilation tape went to air. One memorable moment was over the delivery of a letter Frankie was expecting that was very important to the script. ‘Oooh, I think I hear the postman,’ he said to the slave camera, as the rest of us chatted on in the background. However, the letter flap on the front door hadn’t been used for years and wouldn’t open properly. Still, the props man was determined to keep pushing the letter through. We all shut up and turned to look at this macabre ‘thing’ that was very slowly coming through the flap until it fell, accordion-like, to the floor. Then we all roared with laughter. ‘Keep it in,’ Frankie said, ‘I’ll get two out of that.’ As with all great comedians I’ve come across over the years, there was a lurking sadness – even loneliness, deep inside. Despite his having Dennis Heymer (1929-2009), his manager and life partner, with him, it persisted. I was having my own problems at the time. My marriage of nine years was coming apart and I was living in a huge house with the wife of one of Canada’s finest actors, who was away on tour. I said to her, ‘Please let’s talk for a bit so I can use my own accent – I’m going nuts all day doing Canadian on and off the set.’
Frankie Howerd – ‘A wonderful friend who shared his unique talent freely’
She also gave the roast dinner of the year to Frankie and Dennis and her matriarch of a mother, who was a great Frankie fan. Neither Frankie nor Dennis were cooks – so they ate out all the time. He was forever saying, ‘You know, what I’d really, really like is a home-cooked meal … I’m so sick of restaurants.’ This roast dinner was a huge success as he entertained us all with stories from the biz and also chatted on about an amazing range of serious subjects. It was
surprising to hear there was such a deep-thinking person behind the façade. During the taping, we had a live audience whom he insisted on warming up. He used an old favourite routine from his club work up north in Britain. We had no idea that it would work in Canada – so we were anxious the first time he did it. We needn’t have worried. He’d requested a lady who could only just play the piano, but who nonetheless thought she was quite good at it. He did his own special warm-up routine with her, featuring them both doing his Three Little Fishies song. As she started, he’d go
into a real take to the audience, as if to say, what is this? The audience rolled with laughter as he went on, ‘Oh, isn’t she awful? It’s the management, you see. Poor thing. No wait! … No. It’s not her fault, you know, she’s doing her best. Oh, you can’t belieeeve what I’ve got to put up with!!’ On and on, the poor love persisted in trying to do the song, not knowing what the heck was happening. Naturally we had a different lady at each taping – and they usually ended up joining in the laughter, and forgiving him. Another home-cooked feast was The Oldie September 2021 15
CANADIAN BROADCASTING COMPANY
The Frankie Howerd Show, Toronto, 1976. Top left: Gary Files, left, in green T-shirt, and Peggy Mahon, his love interest, far right. Top right: Frankie as a Pearly King. Far left: Gary and Frankie. Left: Norman Campbell directs, script in hand
made by a young British couple I’d met who were huge Frankie fans. Well into the night, and several glasses of red later, I ran out of steam and lapsed into Oz-speak. I said, ‘Ah, I’m too tired, Frankie. I’m afraid you’ve got an Aussie in disguise.’ He too lapsed … into Frankie-speak: ‘Oooh, you naughty thing. No, really. Not to worry, my boy. Your secret is safe with me.’ And indeed it was, apart from the odd whisper at times – ‘Careful dear, your Oz is showing…’ – with a hearty wink to follow. The series went on and on and was not only getting good reviews but also rating better than a home series called King of Kensington – which must have been galling to the CBC executives as they didn’t renew us after our 13 episodes were over. It had the most amazing following at times. An actor friend, Leslie Carlson, was shooting a drama up in Dawson City and told me that in the local tavern where they went at the end of the day, there we were up on the TV – with all these tough, rough miner types fixated on Frankie Howerd and his adventures in 16 The Oldie September 2021
Toronto. It was sort of exotic for them and a real break from their normal life in the wilds of Canada. On 26th April 1976, Sid James, whom Frankie knew well, died on stage at the Empire Theatre, Sunderland. We were rehearsing at the time. Frankie was very affected by the news and said, ‘What a way to go, eh? … I’d love to go like that.’ Alas, this was not to be. In 1992, Frankie died of respiratory problems after a virus, aged 75. I felt really sad at the news of this death. We’d stayed in touch by phone whenever I was in Britain again. My time with Frankie is best summed up by a journey we made to see our co-star Peggy Mahon (my love interest in the series) doing her jazz-singing act in a tiny bar in Buffalo, New York. After rehearsals, Frankie arranged for a stretch limousine to pick us up after the early dismissal from set he’d wrangled. We were driven all the way to Buffalo – a couple of hours each way. He entertained us with chat there and back. Once in Buffalo, after each jazz set from Peggy, he entertained the amazed bar customers as
well. I don’t think they got all his jokes because of his accent – so exotic for the Yanks – but the applause was terrific as we left to go back to Toronto. It was a gesture of kindness and empathy from a star – yet a fellow performer – for a team who had, thanks to him, over the whole series become as one. We who worked with him learnt so much – and, most of all, he trusted us. The main writers were with us during all the rehearsals and laughed heartily at their own jokes. ‘Is that funny?’ He’d ask us, sotto voce. ‘No,’ we’d often reply, and he’d cut it – or, better still, do a Frankie gesture or comment and make it work. He was always checking his comedy instinct because he often felt North Americans had a different sense of humour from him. When it all ended and we went our separate ways, never to work together again, our own work from then on was enriched by our having worked so closely with this surprisingly inclusive and thoughtful man. All I can still say is: ‘Thanks a million, Frankie!’
The last straw Thatched cottages are an endangered species, laments Paul Heiney – who used to grow thatching straw
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ith great sadness, the imminent death has been announced of the thatched cottage. Weep now, all you chocolate-box illustrators and prepare to look elsewhere for inspiration. Historic England say the thatched cottage has 20 years left, at the most. After that, thatchers will no longer be able to obtain the basic raw material of their craft – straw. If your weekend rural drive takes you past endless fields of golden wheat, you might think we grow enough straw to thatch a city twice over. But thatching straw is special straw, a prince among the common throng of feeble, weaker, shorter straws beloved of modern farming, and it is in increasingly short supply. We have been living under thatched roofs of one form or another for centuries. Until the mid-19th century, it was the most popular roofing in rural areas. Yet now as few as 60,000 thatched properties remain. Once a symbol of poverty, in the late-20th century thatch became a symbol of wealth. But soon all the money in the world will not buy you a new thatch. For a decade, I managed my 40-acre farm in Suffolk along traditional lines, aiming to re-create the very best
In 20 years, the basic material of the thatcher’s craft will be unobtainable 18 The Oldie September 2021
values of Victorian farming methods. Just to make it that bit more difficult, I decided to work the land with horses – Suffolk Punches – rather than tractors. I also decided that a traditional farming year required a traditional harvest festival which, in turn, required a harvest. True to my ambitions, I shunned all modern advances in agriculture, ignored any wheat seed that might actually return a profit, and instead turned my attention to thatching straw. From a modern farmer’s point of view, lengthy straw is just so much trash. Mixed farms no longer exist, so they can’t even use the surplus straw to bed down livestock in the winter. Remember the bilious black clouds that used to loom over the countryside at stubble-burning time? That was rightly banned – so yet another disposal method was lost. The result? The shorter the straw, the happier the farmer and the more desperate the thatcher, and thatchedcottage owners started to think that slates might actually be a good idea. The horses and I worked hard to grow a rare variety of long-stemmed wheat, but harvest presented a problem. It required a binder, a clattering contraption beyond even the wild imagination of Heath Robinson and blessed with a mind of its own. Its job is to cut the corn and tie it into bundles – after which we would all roll home singing, ‘Bringing in the sheaves, we shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves.’ I soon learned that rejoicing would be in short supply. For a start, brand-new binders have not been on sale for well over 50 years. So I resorted to a museum piece with more rust than metal, bought from an old farmer who had last used it the year of the Coronation. He didn’t say which monarch. A binder offers huge scope for
disaster. Three horses are required to pull with all their might to activate a horizontal knife which cuts the standing corn just above the ground. The corn then falls onto a travelling canvas, first horizontally and then vertically, to arrive at the buncher, which gathers it into a sheaf – yet another of the chocolate-box artist’s armoury of rural icons. Now comes the most unfathomable bit of the whole process. When the bundle is of sufficient size, an arm springs up to pass a string round it. Then – and this is the amazing bit – a device springs into action that actually ties a knot to hold it together. But sadly not always. There is no despair to compare to that felt when the knotter fails and the corn falls back to the field, to be picked up later, by hand, under the blazing heat of the summer sun. The string might run out, the weeds jam the cutting knife, or the horses sense the growing hopelessness of the situation and do what all horses do when their master is losing his mind – ignore his rambling commands. The knotter can be described only as a work of genius. To watch it is to marvel at it, but little understanding is ever gained. If mine had gone wrong, I could never have fixed it. I’ve read that the inventor of the knotter was a Canadian who found that his creation grew beyond even his own understanding and, in great distress, he resorted to killing himself. But I was only ever an amateur straw-grower. I take my hat off to those who face this epic annual struggle before being able to declare that all is safely gathered in. Sleep easy all you who are still lucky enough to snuggle down every night in your thatched cottage. And console yourself with the thought that the farmer who grew your straw will be sleeping deeply, too – mostly from exhaustion. Paul Heiney’s latest book is Farewell Mister Puffin (Bloomsbury)
Diana’s first Escort Her royal runabout has been sold for a fortune. Roderick Gilchrist recalls the day he bought the car and roared down the M1 in it
TIM GRAHAM VIA GETTY
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had to laugh when I read that Princess Diana’s old Ford Escort Ghia has just been sold at an Essex auction for £52,000. The last time I saw the royal runabout, I was strapped into the passenger seat, terrified for my life. I was hurtling at 100mph down the M1 in the early hours of the morning in the teeth of a storm, being driven by Lord Rothermere’s chauffeur, affectionately known to all as Maltese Joe. ‘For God’s sake, Joe,’ I yelled above the crack of thunder, ‘You’ll smash the car and we’ll both be killed. Diana wouldn’t want that.’ It was April 1988 and I had just handed over £10,000 of Lord R’s money for the silver Escort with the frog mascot on the bonnet to be offered to Daily Mail readers as a circulation-building prize. Of course the late Lord Rothermere, who owned the paper then, didn’t know any of that. Although at the time I was Executive Editor of the Mail, in charge of news, I had had some success suggesting competition ideas with snob appeal and strong Royal association – catnip to aspiring, middle-class readers. First, at a Sotheby’s auction we bought £250,000 worth of the Duchess of Windsor’s jewels given to Wallis Simpson by Edward VIII before their marriage. Next I bid £185,000 at Bonhams for the American Buick he romanced her in and indeed was driven into exile in on his last trip from Buckingham Palace. The Windsor jewels were a runaway success, putting 100,000 new readers on the circulation every day for the five weeks. The figures were propelled by major stars of the day such as Farah Fawcett, Glynis Barber and Fiona Fullerton. They dragged up in period costume and wigs with the Cartier rocks to look like Wallis, for photo spreads in the paper. The 1936 Buick – we dubbed it the Love Limousine of the Century – had a more bumpy ride than the jewels, breaking down three times after the sale while being driven across Blackfriars
Fit for a princess: Diana and her Ford
Bridge. Unfortunately, this was all photographed gleefully by a trailing rival snapper from the Daily Express, which published pictures of the stalled motor under the larky headline ‘The Buick stops here … and here … and here’. The jalopy proved to be an accident waiting to happen. While it was being filmed for a TV commercial, a giant Klieg light exploded, setting fire to the back of the car. That meant an overnight respray, before TV-am presenter Anne Diamond on her show next morning drooled live over the auto in front of the cameras. ‘Whatever you do, Anne, don’t touch the cellulose on air,’ I warned her. ‘It’s still wet.’ None of these adventures prepared me for the night I was sent north to buy Diana’s car. It had been a present from Charles 40 years ago, in May 1981, before the couple’s 29th July wedding, and Diana continued to drive it until August 1982, after the birth of William on 21st June. David English, then editor of the Mail, excited by all the drama of the jewels and the Buick, wanted me to snap up the Ford before it reached auction. He ordered me to the home of John Gibson, a gas-fitter from Leeds whose council
This was the car Diana drove in her journey from Sloane Ranger to princess
house overlooked the football ground. He had picked it up for £6,000 and wanted to turn a quick profit. In those days, the cashiers of Associated Newspapers dolled out lolly on receipt of a signed chitty. That’s how most reporters drew down their expenses, usually flaunting the greenbacks before jealous printers. I drew £10,000 in one-pound notes because they made a bigger bundle than £20 notes – more impressive, I reckoned, when stacked together for somebody who had never seen so much money in one place. I packed all the cash into an attaché case and set off for Leeds, with Maltese Joe at the wheel. Mr Gibson, surprised by my knock at his door, welcomed me into his kitchen but initially declined my offer of spot cash, saying he preferred to go to auction. I made it clear I wasn’t prepared to haggle and flipped open the briefcase. ‘Look, mate, there’s ten grand there,’ I told him. ‘You’ve got 20 seconds to take it or I’m back down the motorway.’ Mr Gibson’s eyes fell on the cash. He didn’t even answer and just handed over the keys with a laugh. Maltese Joe put his foot down all the way back to London, pushing the needle off the dial. We worked the same glamour trick on the Escort as we had with the jewels and the Buick. We photographed the car Diana drove in her journey from Sloane Ranger to princess, alongside celebrities and aristos such as actress Tracy Ward who had just married the Marquess of Worcester. The frog mascot was a bit knocked about, so we had a shiny new one fitted. These were the golden days of Fleet Street, before the bean-counters took over and focus groups squeezed the juice out of inspired craziness. It’s sad, though, that Diana’s Escort and its frog mascot, a memory-jogger from a more colourful era, is now a static museum piece – in faraway Chile, of all places. The Oldie September 2021 19
Media Matters
The strange decline of GB News
Full of promise, the channel became the dinner party from hell stephen glover Andrew Neil was billed as the key figure in GB News, which launched in June. As I write, the channel’s linchpin has turned out to be Nigel Farage. That says it all. Neil was for many years the BBC’s best-informed and most forensic political interviewer. Though undoubtedly of the Right, he seldom allowed his personal views to intrude. His role as the founding chairman and prospective star interviewer of GB News suggested that the new channel would have a serious core. Farage is the father of Brexit, and a polemicist. He is overflowing with prejudices. I happen to have something of a soft spot for him, not least because he occasionally amuses me. But no one could pretend that he is a journalist or a proper interviewer. And yet it is Farage who presides on GB News for an hour every evening, Monday to Thursday. Two weeks after the launch, Neil announced that he was taking a break ‘for the next few weeks’, and hopped off to his house in the South of France. He is supposed to be coming back in September – after an absence of months, rather than weeks – but many wonder whether he will ever return. The word is that Neil is disenchanted with the direction the channel is taking. He envisaged it as a serious alternative to the BBC which would eschew Auntie’s in-built woke bias without being aggressively right-wing in the manner of Fox News in America. But that is exactly what GB News is becoming. If the Beeb was ever worried about competition from a serious player, it need no longer be. The chief architect of the new channel’s unashamedly opinionated approach is its chief executive, Angelos Frangopoulos, who spent almost two decades running Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News Australia, which he modelled partly on Fox News. At GB News, he quickly fell out with the experienced 20 The Oldie September 2021
director of news and programming, John McAndrew, who had declared before its launch that the new channel would not be ‘a hate-filled, divisive shout-fest’. Only a month after the launch, McAndrew resigned, following presenter Guto Harri’s being taken off air for ‘taking the knee’. His deputy, Gill Penlington, is reported subsequently to have thrown in the towel. Meanwhile, Frangopoulos hired Nigel Farage, along with a couple of right-wing ‘shock jocks’ from Talk Radio. I doubt that GB News will ever become a fully-fledged copy of Fox News, since it is supposedly constrained by impartiality rules overseen by the regulator, Ofcom. Nigel Farage is therefore required to behave himself. He tends to pontificate in a saloon-bar way before interviewing someone who may well hold opposing views. This is generally done in a genial and easy-going fashion, with Farage nursing a pint of beer. He attracts a nightly audience of well over 100,000 viewers – which, although it may not sound a lot, is more than Sky News or the BBC News channel can usually muster at that hour. Farage is quite entertaining but not at all enlightening. The same might be said of the entire channel, though most of its presenters are much less charismatic than he is, and some are embarrassingly
‘Ping’
jejune. Unable to afford camera crews and reporters on the ground, it was always bound to be something of a talking shop. GB News has 6,500 hours a year to fill, which means an awful lot of chat. It can sometimes resemble a dinner party from hell. I expect the channel will survive in its adopted format of Fox News lite. But it won’t be much talked about across the nation. In fact, GB News probably won’t be noticed by 98 per cent of the population. As someone who resents the dominance of the BBC as a supplier of news, and longs for a grown-up rival without our national broadcaster’s cultural and political prejudices, I find that sad. One of Auntie’s irritating foibles is to begin news bulletins with the portentous phrase ‘BBC news has learned’. It is designed to give the impression that the Beeb is the sole possessor of exclusive information. In fact, the story is frequently already plastered over the front pages of that day’s papers. A recent example was the news that all 16- and 17-year-olds are to be offered coronavirus jabs. On the morning of Wednesday 4th August, bulletins on Radio 4 began with the statement that ‘BBC news has learned that that the joint committee on vaccination and immunisation will today recommend that all 16- and 17-year-olds in the UK should be offered the coronavirus vaccine’. In fact, this news had already been on the front pages that morning of the Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and other papers, and had been prominent in their online versions for several hours. Why did the Beeb pretend that it alone had the story? I expect it will soon be declaring that ‘BBC news has learned that the world is round’. Please stop implying exclusivity where none exists!
Dante died 700 years ago. A N Wilson salutes a master of love, poetry – and Christianity
The God behind the Divine Comedy
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n the mud and cold of Auschwitz, the great Italian writer Primo Levi was approached by an Alsatian Jew, who had never read Dante. Could Levi please explain why people spoke of this medieval poet in the same breath as Homer and Shakespeare, as one of the greatest European spirits? Levi recited to him the 26th Canto of the Divine Comedy. It is the passage that describes the encounter with Ulysses. Dante and his guide through hell and purgatory, Virgil, have entered the infernal realms, and climbed down from circle to circle of hell, meeting now the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, now his old tutor everlastingly running on hot sands for the sin of sodomy, here forgers of currency, there corrupt clerics, here men Dante had known, there suicides, there drunkards, there the great villains of history, such as those pagan priests who egged on Agamemnon to perform the ritual killing of his daughter Iphigenia, to get a wind in the sails of the Greek fleet, bound for Troy; or the high priests who condemned Christ to death. But in the 26th book, we encounter Ulysses. This is not the Odysseus of Homer. It is an intellectually and spiritually restless old man, probably best known to English readers as the Ulysses of Tennyson who was inspired by this passage in Dante to write his great poem. Bored by life after his return to Ithaca, Dante’s Ulysses has set off with some of his old piratical shipmates to find the
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limits of the known world. They have sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules and thereby sailed off the edge of the world. The lines that so appealed to Primo Levi are Considerate la vostra semenza: Fatti non foste a viver come bruti: Ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza (Consider your roots. You were made not to live like mindless animals but to follow virtue and intelligent knowledge) The setting in which Levi recited these lines makes many people choose this as an illustration of why Dante is one of the immortals. In a camp where humanity was reduced to sub-animal levels, where the Nazi horror was so great that even Dante in his most grotesque and furious modes could not have imagined it, Levi remembered this inspiring speech. Dante – who died in Ravenna 700 years ago on September 14, 1321, aged around 56 – stretches us. Just as Paolo and Francesca, thrown about by the storms and winds of passion, make us weep at the wrenching sadness of love, so Ulysses, by his proud preparedness to go beyond the limits of the world, stretches our imagination, and our aspirations. Even in hell, in other words, Dante’s poem bids us raise our eyes to the ways in which the human experience can be elevated; ennobled. Exciting as the Inferno is, with its powerful descriptions of the monsters of antique legend, such as the Harpies and the Minotaur, and its satisfying depictions of corrupt clerics undergoing appallingly
obscene humiliations, it is really in the next two books of the poem, Purgatory and Paradise, that Dante’s greatness is revealed. Although he was hugely admired by poets of the Middle Ages such as Boccaccio and Chaucer, his reputation went to sleep for centuries after his death in 1321, and it was really in the 19th century that he came into his own. We begin to see him reviving in the Romantic Age, with William Blake’s and Gustave Doré’s incomparable illustrations. Nineteenth-century humanity, with its tragic sense of the depths to which human wickedness could
sink, and its desire to soar above its own faults, saw him as its poet. Why is he seen as so supreme a poet? First and foremost – technique. That is why it is always worth reading him in the original alongside a translation (if necessary). Into the dense, difficult, taut form of terza rima, he etched his allegorical journey. The boiling-down that this involves and the verbal dexterity in which he is now lyrical, now obscene, now mystic, now furiously satirical would not be so powerful had he not made himself so completely a technical master. Secondly, after the New Testament, Dante is the greatest mouthpiece of
Christianity. In his day, Christianity was, as it always has been, in crisis – with corrupt Popes taking the Church into exile in Avignon, with the most flagrant abuses of the Church seen alongside the witness of St Francis of Assisi and St Dominic. We now live in post-Christian Europe, with fewer and fewer Europeans practising Christianity or even having much interest in it. No doubt those who urge us to look beyond Europe to the human achievements of Africa and Asia are right. Yet considerate la vostra semenza! In all the cultural and ethnic mix, which has characterised the last 50 years,
many of us still recognise that we are, in origin, the products of Christian Europe. For centuries, who we are as human beings has been determined by the story of Christianity, its claims and the collective failure of humanity to live up to those claims. The failure – and the vision – are central to Dante’s whole vision of the world. Thirdly, for Dante, as for Plato, his worldview, even the narrower byways of political life and the question of how we can build a just society are coloured not just by economics and war, but by love. Plato found in the contemplation of human beauty the beginning of a spiritual and intellectual quest that would end not only in the vision of God, but also in the foundation of the Good City – the Republic. At the age of nine, Dante went to a children’s party and fell in love with the eight-year-old daughter of a banker. She was called Beatrice Portinari. He scarcely knew her, saw her only occasionally and would marry, have children of his own, and affairs outside the marriage, some of which he described in passionate poems. But Beatrice remained as an ideal love in his head, and when he began to write the Divine Comedy, imagining his journey through the afterlife – first hell, then purgatory, then heaven, it was Beatrice who would be his inspiration and ultimately (when the pagan Virgil can take him no further than purgatory) his guide. As he emphasised in many of his shorter poems, and above all in the Comedy, love for Dante was not a soppy Madeline Bassett business. (Though, come to think of it, Dante would probably have agreed with Madeline that the stars were God’s daisy chain.) Where he would differ from Madeline would be in the rigour with which he believed that Love is what illumines our reason. Love, by supreme paradox, because it is identical with justice, created hell. Love is what moves the sun and other stars. Love focuses our attention, through its torments and failures in life, on the divinely ordered moral universe. That is why Primo Levi, in earth’s darkest place, where the moral order appeared to have been abandoned for ever, reached out to the greatest European poet of post-classical times, and spoke the words of Dante Alighieri to his puzzled fellow-prisoner. A N Wilson is the author of Dante in Love (Atlantic Books) The Oldie September 2021 23
PRISMA ARCHIVO/ALAMY
Dante, left, crosses the Styx. Virgil, in blue, pushes the sinner Argenti into the water. By Gustave Doré, c 1870
G’day – and goodbye Sir Les Patterson is retiring as Australia’s finest cultural attaché. Fear not – he will still assist the Royal Family and explore new openings
T
o be honest, I haven’t burst into print for yonks, so The Old Fella is the lucky organ to take my latest input, to be perfectly honest with you. First up: g’day and God love you all. You’ve probably heard that I have retired from the cut and thrust of Australian diplomacy – I don’t get half-cut any more and my thrusting is strictly recreational. But what does a statesman like me with an international track record like mine turn his hand to in semi-retirement? I actually showed up the other day at a high-end vocational-guidance joint in Knightsbridge Street, London. I asked the sheila behind the desk if she had any openings I could explore. All she did was stick the ‘Closed for lunch’ sign on the door. She was a delightful member of the opposite-sex community, but pretty green in respect of worldly ways. Now, my signature powder-blue seersuckers are all hand-tailored by Sam in Honkers, and they’re all on ultra-conservative lines, as befits the dignity of my office. Bugger me, this lovely little lass claimed she’d never seen fly buttons before! She probably thought I’m a dinosaur – so I reckoned she wouldn’t be surprised when she came face to face with my pterodactyl! Are you with me? 24 The Oldie September 2021
Fly buttons are history now, and I reckon her boyfriend probably had a strip of Velcro on his generation gap anyway. The jobs I’ve been offered so far include: poetry editor of the Spectator, senior judge of the Turner Prize, transphobia watchdog, opening act on the Tony Blair lecture circuit and my latest – celebrity ghost-writer. That last job has started up already, to be honest. Protocol forbids me to name the author but let’s just say he’s a ginger-haired, royal scallywag married to a very acceptable, diverse sheila and they want to share their journey with everyone. I reckon he’ll love his book when I’ve finished writing it, and there’s a nice little squillion-quid advance up front. I’m not getting the money but there’ll be a generous donation to my offshore charity, LesAid, in aid of suffering cultural attachés in need of rehabilitation. Oprah Winfrey, a seppo* celeb affiliated with the entertainment industry, is writing the intro, which is going to be a ripper. Netflix also want to do a doco on my
It’s all go in Les Land. I’m as busy as a onearmed taxi-driver with crabs
life. So far they’ve interviewed the Dalai Lama, Baroness Bakewell, Richard Branson and the Kardashians. Dave Attenborough is going to narrate it and David Walliams is turning it into a kiddies’ book. It’s all go in Les Land, to be perfectly honest with you, and I’m as busy as a one-armed taxi driver with crabs. I can now reveal to my Old Fella perusers that I kickstarted Women’s Lib as we know it. If I hadn’t put the hard word on Germaine all those years ago, or nearly got the leg over Gloria Steinem, the iconic phrase ‘male chauvinist pig’ would never have been invented. To be perfectly honest, I yield to none in my abhorrence of discrimination in any form. When I hire my personal assistants and my Girl Fridays from the VIP agency, I insist on diversity. I can have an obliging little Filipina on Monday, and a Thai cutie on Thursday, and I’d be a bloody hypocrite if I treated them any differently from Australian sheilas charged with similar duties, to be honest. Now, perusers, here’s the bombshell – my new-found love of diversity springs from a pretty sensational discovery: I might be part-Aborigine. Yes, a respected ancestry website has determined that one of my distant ancestors, on my ancestors’ side of the family, was an inidigenous member of the traditional Funnelweb People, who inhabited the area known today as Bondi Beach.
TIM STORRIER
wildfire and we’ve even got David Cameron on the board, on the strict condition that he hasn’t got the faintest idea what we’re up to. The most successful of them is for a breakfast cereal called Scrunchies. Its setting is a suburban breakfast table with all the kiddies sitting around and a nice old granny pouring tea and saying, ‘Let’s have something different for breakfast.’ The camera pans to the end of the table and there’s a lovely, handsome, smiling Kalahari Bushman, wondering what the f**k he’s doing there. Boy, has that sold a lot of Scrunchies, especially in Botswana. Young women who have worked under me will all vouch for my considerable tolerance and there has been the odd case of gender fluidity in my typing pool. I’m perfectly comfortable with that, to be honest – though, in the past, I might have brushed a few sheilas up the wrong way. I once said something that had the lezzo lynch mob up my blurter, but my tolerance is legendary, particularly to poor bastards who don’t like it plain and simple. I recently had a PA who had been a confirmed, card-carrying todger-dodger for years. I never got a look-in. Then she suddenly Australia’s greatest export: The Member – Dr Sir Leslie Colin Patterson KCB AO, by Tim Storrier changed her mind and by now, thanks to an exotic little massage married a bloke! To be honest, I’m a family man first It’s amazing, isn’t it? That, after all therapist called Jam Yang. and foremost – although my two kids, those years of paddling the pink canoe, Not a word to Lady Patterson, please Craig and Karen, have been a bit of a after a bit of gentle persuasion and half a – though she won’t be perusing this letdown in respect of producing the bottle of gin she’s back on solids. publication, that’s for sure. A woman patter of tiny Pattersons, to be honest. Funny old world. God love you all. can’t watch Embarrassing Bodies and Between you and me, I’ve got another Les read The Old Fella at the same time. little family in Bangkok, where I One of my most successful initiatives sometimes stop over on diplomatic *seppo: an abbreviation of septic tank, is my campaign for ridiculously inclusive missions to get the old rocket polished. Australian rhyming slang for Yank TV commercials. It’s taken off like There must be four or five of those kids The Oldie September 2021 25
Drinking at the Bar Graham Boal successfully defended Jeremy Thorpe with George Carman. But both top lawyers were alcoholics
I
n September 1993, I was admitted to the Priory Hospital in Roehampton, suffering from a serious episode of depression. I was placed under the care of Dr Desmond Kelly, one of the most distinguished psychiatrists in the country. He asked me how I had been dealing with the depression myself and what I did to try to relax. I answered, ‘When I get home and, if I can put off any work I have to do by planning to get up early the next morning to do it, I pour myself a glass of whisky.’ Dr Kelly elicited, by a form of crossexamination of which I would have been proud, that ‘a glass of whisky’ was something of an underestimate. He skilfully dragged the truth about my drinking out of me. He established, both to his satisfaction and to mine, that I was trying to self-medicate and was ‘treating’ my depression by dulling the pain with alcohol. He reminded me that alcohol, far from helping to alleviate depression, is itself a depressant drug. Dr Kelly (now retired) was a worldrenowned expert in the relatively recently discovered condition known as dual diagnosis, or the concept of the alcoholic depressive. Before my feet touched the ground I was transferred to Galsworthy House, the addiction unit at the Priory. What is alcoholism? There are numerous definitions of alcoholism, but the one I would choose is this: alcoholism is a pattern of alcohol use that involves problems controlling your drinking, being preoccupied with alcohol, continuing to use alcohol even when it causes problems to you and those around you, having to drink more to get the same effect, or having withdrawal symptoms. I would humbly suggest that anyone who reads that definition and finds that it, or even parts of it, rings a bell, he or she should perhaps take a close look in the mirror. A much simpler question, but one
Graham Boal QC, George Carman QC and Jeremy Thorpe after Thorpe’s acquittal. The Old Bailey, 1979
that I find helpful, is ‘Does my intake of alcohol cause problems?’ Mine certainly had. The condition certainly has something to do with compulsion and an inability to exercise self-control. As an illustration: if one sees a man – who has already had more than enough – unable to leave the table if half a bottle of wine remains without making sure it is empty before he gets up, then one must begin to wonder if he has a serious problem. On my first morning at Galsworthy House, I attended my first session of group therapy. The man on my left was Oldie contributor Charlie Mortimer, who wrote the book Dear Lupin and has since spoken courageously of his experiences. Charlie, who became a friend, was at that time addicted to a painkiller. As the counsellor went round the group, I heard answers including heroin, nicotine, shopping and gambling as well as my own response, ‘Alcohol.’ The man on my other side at first refused to share his problem. After considerable encouragement from the counsellor and the rest of us he eventually blurted out, ‘OK then, I can’t stop f**king other men’s wives!’
That broke the ice and we realised that we had a ‘full house’. We were all in the same boat, because the disease or condition is actually addiction: pure and simple. I suspected my father may have had a problem with alcohol; I don’t know that for certain, and I have no way of investigating whether it was in the family. I do remember that, when I was no more than 14, he mixed some very powerful cocktails and that, after guests left, I would go round the glasses, lapping up the remnants. I was introduced to whisky by my mother in my teens, and certainly kept pace with my fellow students at university. In retrospect I now see that, as soon as I went to the Bar, I was a very willing pupil of Roger Frisby, who died a sad, penniless and drinking alcoholic, not only in chambers but also in El Vino, the criminal Bar’s favourite watering hole. My colleague George Carman – we represented Jeremy Thorpe together – was, in my opinion, certainly an alcoholic, and it is without doubt that alcoholism was, and I suspect still is, rife in my profession. There were lighter moments, indeed much laughter, in those rooms. One of these occurred when Charlie Mortimer arrived late for a group meeting and, having apologised profusely, explained that he had been stuck on the phone in a futile attempt to get some sense out of his mother, who (quoting his racing journalist father, Roger Mortimer) ‘had clearly had her head in the Martini bucket all morning and was thus totally unplayable’. When I left the Priory, I started to try to rebuild my life, a long and often painful process and one in which I am still engaged to this day, almost 28 years into my recovery. I hope to die a recovering alcoholic. Graham Boal’s A Drink at the Bar is out now (Quiller, £20) The Oldie September 2021 27
William Morris was a neurotic ball of energy, obsessed with the design of wallpaper, books, kitchens and fields. By Fiona MacCarthy
The Victorian Renaissance Man
W
illiam Morris was many kinds of man: visual artist, poet, political activist, and Marxist theoretician. He was also many kinds of designer. Morris designed numerous, special one-off objects that he either made himself, the design often evolving through the processes of making, or collaborated on with his craftworkers and friends. Morris designed for one-off and small-batch production in his early workshops and for relatively large-scale production runs in later days at his factory at Merton Abbey. To an extent that few people are aware of, he designed other products to be made by subcontractors and sold through his firm’s showrooms. He acted as designer– buyer for his shops in the sense of searching out and commissioning new ranges to be sold alongside Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co’s own products. On a visit to Italy, his travelling companion Edward Burne-Jones complained about Morris’s obsessive ‘merchandising for the firm’. As chief designer and overall controller of the firm’s visual and technical standards, Morris covered a stupendous range. In his neurotically energetic lifetime, his interests and technical knowledge burgeoned outwards to include embroidery, furniture, stained glass, wallpapers and mural decorations; wood engravings, illumination and calligraphy; printed and woven textiles, and high-warp tapestry. At the end of his life, there was the final challenge of book design and type design at his own Kelmscott Press. 28 The Oldie September 2021
William Morris (1834-96) in working smock. Unknown photographer, c 1876
William Morris saw things whole. His view of design was rich, complex and dominated by his reverence for buildings as repositories of history and keepers of the soul. The point of Morris’s acutely detailed knowledge of individual processes and products was his passion for the total architectural mise-en-scène. He liked the completeness of designing for a church or domestic interior. He was as interested in gardens as in houses and, as we see at his own Red House, Morris had great feeling for interflowing spaces. His generous concept of the role of the designer would eventually lead him to envisage whole communities, networks of productive and sociable, semi-selfsufficient, small country towns,
precursors of the early-twentieth-century garden cities. As he expounded so sturdily in a lecture, Art under Plutocracy (1883), his view of art encompassed what we would now think of as total environmental planning: design for ‘all the externals of our life’. Morris argued that art was not merely a matter of painting and sculpture, architecture and ‘the shapes and colours of all household goods’. It also took in ‘the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds’. He saw visual alertness as a basic human function, and the shared appreciation of beauty and design in everyday surroundings and ordinary objects as the means of reconciling the artist with society. In his Utopian novel, News from Nowhere, art has become so deeply embedded in the life of the community of Morris’s new England that it has no name. Morris’s strengths as a designer spring from the exactness of his observation. Even when he was a child exploring gentle, quirky rural Essex, and on his later expeditions as a disaffected schoolboy into the countryside around Marlborough College, his sense of landscape was almost uncannily acute. In a letter written after Morris’s death, his daughter Jenny commented on his facility for grasping the essentials: ‘In half a dozen words, Father could make one see a place exactly.’ The details of known landscapes stayed in his mind for ever and he drew on what became almost a library of
©VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON
Above: Brother Rabbit printed cotton, by Morris, 1880-81. Below: his design for bluebell or columbine printed cotton, 1876
riverscapes and tree forms, flowers, fruits and the little living creatures of the meadows and the woodlands: starlings squawking, robins hopping, kingfishers swooping, sleek and amiable rabbits. They recur in his design work as vividly as they do in his poetry and prose. Morris was often caustic about the vapid, fashionable decorative designs of his contemporaries, citing Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s with particular venom: ‘They appear to me too much made up of goose giblets and umbrellas.’ His own idea of pattern embraced memory and nature, a theme he followed through in his 1881 lecture Some Hints on Pattern-Designing. Morris’s ideal pattern held ‘unmistakable suggestions of gardens and fields’. He reached out for solidity: the real and unmistakable. Again, back in his childhood, he glorified the tactile, clinging to a rag at bedtime, recalling with precision a picture of Abraham and Isaac worked in worsted, a carved ivory junk with painted, gilded puppet figures, and a particular Dutch toy town spread out satisfactorily on the floor. Gradually, as a designer and a design theorist, he evolved a whole philosophy of things, arguing the strengths of well-printed books, splendid tapestries and beautiful and functional kitchens as a bulwark against social alienation and decay.
What is fascinating is the scope of his intelligence. His great originality, a facet of his genius, is the way that Morris moves, apparently without selfconsciousness, between the solid, ‘manly’ worlds of furniture and buildings and the soft, traditionally female textile crafts.
Reminiscing in the 1890s, Morris’s friend and chief collaborator, Edward Burne-Jones, summed up his career with exasperated fondness: ‘When I first knew Morris, nothing would content him but being a monk, and getting to Rome, and then he must be an architect, and apprenticed himself to Street, and worked for two years, but when I came to London and began to paint, he threw it all up, and must paint too, and then he must give it up and make poems, and then he must give it up and make window-hangings and pretty things, and when he had achieved that, he must be a poet again, and then after two or three years of Earthly Paradise time, he must learn dyeing, and lived in a vat, and learned weaving, and knew all about looms, and then made more books, and learned tapestry, and then wanted to smash everything up and begin the world anew, and now it is printing he cares for, and to make wonderful rich-looking books and all things he does splendidly – and if he lives the printing will have an end – but not I hope, before Chaucer and the Morte d’Arthur are done; and then he’ll do I don’t know what, but every minute will be alive.’ This is an extract from an essay by the late Fiona MacCarthy (1940-2020) in William Morris, ed. Anna Mason, (Thames & Hudson, £50), out in August The Oldie September 2021 29
Georgia Channon’s grandfather wrote horrible things in his diaries but she still wanted them to be published, warts and all
A full portion of Chips B
THE CHANNON ESTATE
oth my grandfathers had nicknames. My father’s father, Henry Channon, was called Chips. It is a mystery why he was given this nickname. Did he once live with a Mr Fish at Oxford? Or was he the first person to introduce potato chips or crisps to London? Who knows? My mother’s father, Richard Wyndham, was nicknamed Whips. Unfortunately, we do know why he was called that. He loved whipping ladies. However, according to his brother, Francis Wyndham, he always whipped the ladies gently, so as not to hurt them, Usually they enjoyed it, regularly returning for more. Richard ‘Whips’ Wyndham was a terrible father. He was a talented painter and writer and he travelled the globe, being both. He fought at Ypres in 1914 and never really recovered from it. After the war, even when painting or drinking in the Gargoyle Club, he always seemed restless, as if he was continually searching for or possibly running from
Paul Channon and mother, Honor, 1939 30 The Oldie September 2021
something. He died in 1948 in Jerusalem, where he was a war correspondent for the Times. He often wore Arab dress and was mistakenly shot dead, aged 52. He hardly knew his two children. He once chatted with one of them at a party without realising she was his daughter. His eldest child was the writer, Joan Wyndham. His younger daughter from a different marriage was my mother, Ingrid. My mother’s mother, a Norwegian model named Greta Wulfsberg, was an equally neglectful parent and Ingrid was brought up by her aunt, Violet Wyndham. Chips, in contrast, was totally devoted to my father, Paul Channon (1935-2007), later Conservative MP for Southend West for 38 years and Transport Secretary. He was devastated when, in June 1940, Paul was sent to America to escape the bombing in Britain. My father was four when he and Nanny crossed the Atlantic by boat to New York, where he stayed with the Astors. He told me that he was taken to the White House to visit President Roosevelt. He remembered being delighted because Nanny had to be frisked by security guards. He said that the President asked him if he could sing the national anthem and he sang ‘God Save the King’ and Roosevelt roared with laughter. Chips, meanwhile, missed my father dreadfully. It was in the early war years, recorded in the newly published Volume 2 of the diaries, that Chips and my grandmother, Honor Guinness, saw their relationship disintegrate. Honor was a strong-willed woman who loved sport and new, exciting projects. It is easy to see why she became bored by Chips’s cycle of drinks, dinners and weekends. She studied Greek at Oxford and, in 1958, she and her sisters
financed and oversaw the building of the Cipriani Hotel in Venice. She owned racehorses, helped design and build a small yacht and, in her early sixties, she bought the first plot of land on Mustique. She was brave and independent – but she was not maternal. Chips got custody and brought up my father. Publishing the unexpurgated edition of Chips’s diaries has been a fascinating but complicated project. Some of the diaries were written in spidery handwriting in hardback exercise books; some on flimsy foolscap paper. Some paragraphs were scribbled out by Chips’s boyfriend, Peter Coats. A number of the diaries were stolen and later found in a car-boot sale and sold back to my father. Chips’s writing needs hardly any correction. His grammar, spelling and punctuation are consistently good. It seems inevitable that he must have been blind drunk when he wrote some of it. But there is never much apparent difference between his drunk and his sober writing. The language doesn’t seem to change or get overblown when he writes after a long lunch or a big party. The original publication of the diaries was heavily redacted for many reasons. My father didn’t want to offend anyone who was still alive. This included Honor. The terrible break-up of their marriage is hardly referred to in the early edition, for obvious reasons. Honor was also concerned that my father’s political career might be damaged by some of the content. The writing concerning Chips’s sexuality and ‘marriage’ to Peter Coats was also severely cut and Chips’s pro-German views were toned down. For this latest publication, we handed editorial control to Simon Heffer, who
Left: Chips in 1943. Above, from left: unknown; Chips and Lady Honor Channon; her sister Lady Brigid Guinness and Prince Frederick of Prussia (later her husband). Kelvedon Hall, Essex, 1939
has done an outstanding job. The reviews of the diaries have been incredible and I hope that some of the diaries’ content may contribute to history. The comments about Chips’s character have not been so good. This is understandable as some of the things he writes are unacceptable: he is seen as a snob and a social climber; he makes antisemitic and racist remarks; and, until war breaks out, he thinks Germany and the Nazis are going to save everyone from the Communists. I personally was nervous about the inclusion of some of these abhorrent thoughts. However, the very wise Simon Heffer explained that we cannot, or at least we should not, try to rewrite history. We cannot pretend that these views didn’t exist or weren’t expressed. That would be deceitful and insulting. Although I wanted to protect Chips from the reaction to these views, I knew that later he realised how wrong he had been about Nazi Germany. He became great friends with members of the Jewish community such as Leslie Hore-Belisha and the Amery family. I saw that Simon was entirely correct: we had to be honest. So we published Chips’s innermost
thoughts, warts and all. Many of them were superficial and society-obsessed and some of them were just plain repulsive. Those are the bald, ugly facts. But they are not the only facts. Chips was more than that. Chips was not a monster – he was a flawed character who, at some points in his life, held some monstrous views. Chips was not just a superficial snob. He was properly loved by many people. He was a staunchly loyal friend. He had profound, lifelong friendships, not society acquaintances that faded away with time. He was kind and generous, helping those whom others had ostracised. He was witty and wonderfully wicked and he was fun, but he also worked hard in his constituency (Southend and then Southend West, which he represented until his death
He is seen as a snob and a social climber; he makes antisemitic and racist remarks
in 1958, aged 61), unlike many MPs of the time. He was passionate about writing and had three books published, with The Ludwigs of Bavaria (1933) receiving very good reviews. But perhaps most important of all to me was the fact that he was an exceptional father – certainly not a given in those times. He simply adored Paul and, from when Paul was young, Chips and Peter took him everywhere with them, to galleries, dinners and the theatre. When they had weekends at Kelvedon, Chips’s Essex home, the young Paul was always included and would play bridge and mingle with the great and the good and the not so good. Gore Vidal once said, ‘If that boy isn’t gay, I will eat my hat.’ A friend’s father told me that, in 1956, he and my father were posted to Cyprus to complete their National Service. Their train left at five in the morning and the only parent waving off their son from the platform was Chips. There is no doubt in my mind that, throughout his childhood and up to Chips’s death, my father felt nothing but kindness, love and support from him. You don’t choose your family. Clearly, there are aspects of Chips’s character that I cannot condone. But the fact that he was such an unusually warm, ‘hands-on’ father, who helped mould the wonderful, kind, honourable man who was my dad, makes me proud. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 2): 1938-43, edited by Simon Heffer, is published on 9th September (£35) The Oldie September 2021 31
Town Mouse
The Handy guide to going out in style tom hodgkinson
When it comes to creating a good life, my hero is the great management guru Charles Handy, who recently celebrated his 89th birthday. Handy’s wife died three years ago. He then had a stroke, which paralysed his left side. But he still maintains a healthy mix of country and town life, shuttling, with his carer, between a flat in Putney and a cottage in Norfolk. Here he writes and reads in the morning and plays croquet and meditates in the afternoon. Handy came to fame in the 1970s with his books, Gods of Management and later The Empty Raincoat, in which he told corporate types to attend their soul as well as their bank balance. Handy’s manuals sold millions of copies, and led to lucrative speaking gigs at Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm which has since morphed into the awkwardly named Accenture. As well as his books and public speaking, he’s found time for plenty of grand jobs. After Oxford, where he ran a stationery-printing business, he worked – fairly miserably – at Shell, and then fairly happily at the London Business School. From 1977 to 1981, he was 32 The Oldie September 2021
Warden of St George’s House at Windsor Castle, where his boss was Prince Philip, and from 1987 to 1989 he was Chairman of the Royal Society of Arts. Although he works in the corporate field, he’s really a philosopher and a creative thinker. I first met him in 1994, when I interviewed him for my recently launched magazine, the Idler. At the time, he was spending three months of the year at his place in Tuscany with his wife, Liz, ‘doing very little’, he said. He spent the other nine months in London, where he dashed about making money by telling middle managers to get a life. He very much approved of idling and thought people should do more of it. I found him kindly, avuncular, modest and generous and we became pals. Recently he’s been reflecting on his impending death with characteristic humour and honesty. He told me, ‘I woke up, feeling pretty weak, I must say, and pretty sure that I had a heart attack coming on, which I’d been warned would happen. So when my cleaning lady said to me in a sprightly way, “How are you this morning?”, I said, “I think it’s the day I’m going to die.” And she said, “Never mind!” ’
Charles was not amused by this breezy comment. At first, he was furious. He had just made the most important statement of his life and she had dismissed it as inconsequential. But then he reflected that she was right. He says, ‘It is part of the great scheme of things, like the walnut tree I grew 50 years ago, which grew and flourished and dropped its nuts all over the floor, and now it’s wilting and fading and weakening, just like me, and soon will go.’ I drove up to his Norfolk cottage for lunch over the summer to find him in excellent form, self-effacing as ever. I asked him about the circumstances of his stroke. ‘I was in a car with some friends,’ he replied, ‘and they said I started blabbering nonsense.’ ‘How could they tell the difference from the normal you?’ I teased – producing a massive gale of laughter. His carer, Margi, makes his meals and watches telly with him in the evening. ‘We’re running out of shows about sex and intrigue in high places,’ he said. He is visited often by his son, Scott, head of drama at Eton. His daughter, Kate, an osteopath, lives in the downstairs flat in Putney. ‘They both used to consider me a failure because I didn’t live in Notting Hill,’ he says. After lunch, Mrs Town Mouse and I visited his wife’s grave in the churchyard a few moments from his house. There’s a sign next to it saying ‘Reserved’. Handy thinks of himself as a Stoic. Like the first Stoics, he believes in a great scheme of things, which the ancient Greeks called logos or ‘the system’. Christians call it God and others call it fate or, like his housekeeper, the great scheme of things, of which we are a part. The great events of our life are dictated by the great scheme. How we respond to them is up to us, he says. It depends on our character and it shapes our character. Contemplating his imminent demise has proved a positive experience. He says, ‘Pondering my life and saying goodbye to all the people and things I loved has been remarkably pleasant and, yes, enjoyable. Somehow, once you accept the inevitable, it becomes much easier.’ Death also means no more responsibility, he thinks. He no longer has to worry about anything – even about paying off the overdraft. Somebody else will have to do that. He says, ‘I shall be in a box in the ground, not far from where I’m sitting now in my much-loved Norfolk countryside.’ There are worse ways of ending up.
Country Mouse
Wiltshire’s rail commuters hit the buffers Mary Killen
In the late 1920s, Evelyn Waugh was staying with the Sitwells at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire. Standing on the terrace, Sir George Sitwell stood silently, gazing out across the valley. Eventually, he turned and spoke to Evelyn ‘in the wistful, nostalgic tones of a castaway, yet of a castaway who was reconciled to his own company. Ignoring the settlement in the mining valley nearby, its streets packed with terraced housing, Sir George declared, “There is no one between us and the Locker-Lampsons.” ’ The story used to resonate, not only with snobs who found themselves ‘marooned’ in the country, but also with artsy former Londoners who were desperate for intellectual communion with others on their wavelengths. And for these former Londoners too, even in the Home Counties, there was invariably no one between them and a single soul mate 30 miles away. Yet country life has changed since Giles Wood – my husband and the customary occupant of this page – and I swapped stimulation for space, fresh air and lower outgoings 30 years ago. We were in the privileged position of being able to work from home, since Giles was, in theory, an artist and I a writer – so we didn’t need to go into London. I, however, with my insatiable social appetite, actually did need to go there to satiate it and so I did, at least one night a week. When we first came to Wiltshire, businesspeople had to live in the city, except at weekends. Forty years ago, one man commuted from Pewsey Station into London. He was known as ‘the commuter’ and was the laughing-stock of the village. Two decades later, preCOVID, when inner-London traffic had got so bad that it took as long to get into Mayfair from Pewsey as it did from, say,
Balham, suddenly Pewsey Station platform was standing-room only. Meanwhile, Faversham in Kent, with its 500 buildings listed by English Heritage, has been colonised by artists and musicians who were formerly ‘swinging Londoners’. The last train to Faversham leaves London at 11.25pm – so the vieillesse dorée who have colonised the town can have their social cake and eat it. Just before COVID, 40 per cent of property sales in our local town Marlborough went to Londoners. Since COVID, the demand is so high that the local paper no longer runs its weekly property section. If anyone local is thinking of selling their house, they already know someone who will buy it from them. Marlborough, which already had a Waitrose, has become dramatically more fashionable with a Rick Stein restaurant, whose public-spirited landlord let them off the rent, costing £200,000-a-year, when they couldn’t operate during COVID. We have the
‘Soon we’ll return to being between pandemics’
White Horse Bookshop, an Oxfam bookshop, two schools (which offer classical concerts to the townspeople) and a jazz and literary festival. A luxury cinema is being built in the shell of an old Methodist chapel, where cinemagoers will loll back in first-class airline-type seats with a glass of wine in their hands. No longer any need to take the treacherous A345 to the freezingly air-conditioned cinemas in the Swindon Hellplex. The cinema was the only thing missing in Marlborough; now, in theory, there’s no need ever to go to London again. Moreover, whom would we see there, now so many have relocated to the country to work from home? We live in an urbs in rure. My husband’s hermit status is endangered. With the new influx, there will soon be too many people between us and the ‘Locker-Lampsons’. Will these relocators ever go back? Taking a straw poll of myself, I will certainly go back when COVID is fully over. I attended three London parties in July. At each one, the atmosphere was positively euphoric – almost like an evangelical church service. An uber-oldie interested in socialising will do well to own a London dwelling with a spare bedroom than to live in the country, beautiful or not. There will always be other oldies passing through London with a need for somewhere to stay overnight. Still, a chartered surveyor we know advises those who own commercial property to think again before assuming that working from home is the future. He warns of arrogance. Yes, the better-off may well enjoy working just as efficiently from their spacious country houses. Why commute if you don’t need to? However, although working from home is a nice idea, it doesn’t take account of human nature. Anyone with office experience knows presenteeism trumps competence. The complacent classes on their high salaries may prefer to work from their pools in Farnham, Surrey, but the junior, more dynamic employees don’t want to work in their suburban bedsits. They want the space of the office and the ‘vibe’ of central London and they want to socialise – even if flirting is now banned in the workplace. These juniors will work as many days as possible in the office. There they will band together and plot the overthrow of their smug-married seniors working from rural homes. Giles Wood is away The Oldie September 2021 33
Postcards from the Edge
Pray for those in peril on the sea
TOBY MORISON
Mary Kenny admires the Dover Christians helping migrants who cross the Channel in frail dinghies
It’s understandable that there’s so much concern about the record number of migrants and asylum seekers who have crossed the Channel this year. By July this year, the numbers had reached over 9,000 – more than in the whole of 2020. Yet I consider it a compliment to this country that so many migrants want to come to Britain. They have paid large sums with their life savings to make the journey, in frail dinghies. I doubt that most are motivated by benefits and free housing – migrants are often ambitious people, who seek work and a better life. The strenuous efforts they have made to embark on the journey amount to a kind of Darwinian survival test. People may blame the French for not controlling the flow, or the government authorities for not regulating the system properly. But some Brits have genuine compassion for those who risk their lives, and sometimes their children’s lives too, to get to these shores. At Dover seafront, near the East Docks, there is a poignant memorial stone: ‘In memory of the many victims who have lost their lives seeking sanctuary in the UK,’ with a quote from Pope Francis: ‘Every migrant has a name, a face and a story.’ (There is also a wall memorial remembering the 58 young Chinese people who were found dead in a lorry nearby, having just crossed the Channel on 18th June 2000.) These were erected by a local faith group of Catholics and Anglicans, called Seeking Sanctuary, who are advocates of help for migrants. It was launched six years ago by a Deal councillor, Ben Bano. Ben says that the Dover church parishes – although in a Brexit constituency – have been very supportive. ‘Most people understand that it’s an issue of humanity.’ The demography of migration seems to me to be inevitable. Developed western societies have low fertility and are short of workers: poorer, war-torn 34 The Oldie September 2021
nations have high birth rates and are willing to take almost any risk to find a better life. We have all learned a lot from the long experience of COVID lockdowns, and evidently a lot of people have learned to drink more liquor. British deaths from the demon drink hit a record rate of 7,423; a 20-per-cent increase on the previous year. The tally for 2021 is expected to be higher. This is a subject on which I could write a PhD thesis, suggesting that the Rev Ian Paisley wasn’t entirely wrong in dubbing alcohol ‘the devil’s buttermilk’. The booze nearly drove me demented, and familial proximity to the problem is the greatest burden of my life. I know so many stories about death, and self-destruction, by alcohol. Yet we used to joke about it – ‘Brahms and Liszt’! When you come to realise what wretched problems are caused by indulgence in the bevvies, you start to understand why all those fiery Methodists waged war against the depredations of Gin Lane. And why American feminists led the introduction of Prohibition – their strategies including taking an axe to the local tavern. I have seen two striking, classic films about the dangers of the bottle: one is Leaving Las Vegas, a despairing
chronicle directed by Mike Figgis in 1995, and starring Nicholas Cage. It features a screenwriter who deliberately drinks himself to death, and it’s starkly comfortless. The other is Billy Wilder’s 1945 The Lost Weekend, with Ray Milland. It depicts the despair and torment, and also the ruthlessness and cunning, of the dipso state (it also depicts Jane Wyman – aka Mrs Ronald Reagan I – in a stunning leopard-skin coat). A sunnier Danish drinking movie, Another Round, came out earlier this summer, making the pitch that Churchill won the war on liquor, and boozing together bonds friendships. Elderflower spritzer does the job just as well! I see that full-on Brexiteers want to revert to imperial measures for everything, replacing litres and metres with pints and yards. Surely there’s space for a mix-and-match approach? In Ireland, metric is official, and distances given in kilometres, but people still talk about miles, and chaps being six feet tall. Newborn babies still come in pounds, and dieters still hope to lose stones. The human mind can easily run on parallel tracks. Caroline Nokes, Conservative MP for Romsey and Southampton North, 49, says that almost every woman she knows has received unwanted sexual attention from men. She was appalled when a man approached her and said, ‘You’re stunningly beautiful – can I take you out for a drink?’ Some of us would have been thrilled. Time changes all perceptions, and eventually Ms Nokes will come to appreciate Dorothy Parker’s rueful observations on the subject of male attitudes: ‘Some men break your heart in two/Some men fawn and flatter/Some men never look at you/And that cleans up the matter.’ So, so true!
Letter from America
A tale of two atrocities
Twenty years after 9/11, the terrorist horrors are eclipsed by the pandemic edward kosner I was shaving before going to work that glistening morning 20 years ago, when my all-news radio station suddenly broke in to report that a small private plane had crashed into one of the 110-storey World Trade Center towers at the foot of Manhattan. I walked into the bedroom, turned on the TV – and witnessed an infamous moment in American history rivalling the firing on Fort Sumter that opened the Civil War, the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that triggered World War II, and the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and John F Kennedy in 1963. It was no private plane, of course, but two jet liners commandeered by Saudi Arabian terrorists and turned into lethal missiles which levelled both towers, murdering 2,996 souls and maiming 6,000 others in the first attack on the continental homeland since the British burned the White House during the War of 1812. A third plane, probably heading for the White House or the US Capitol, plunged into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the American military. Courageous passengers on a fourth hijacked jet rushed the terrorists, and the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field, killing everyone aboard. In the stunned aftermath, America experienced a unifying moment unmatched since the defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan a half-century before. Confident news seers proclaimed that American life would be marked for ever by an enduring sense of insecurity. Were they right? On September 11th 2001, I had other things on my mind. I was the editor-inchief of the New York Daily News. As I rode downtown to the News Building just three miles north of the steaming, reeking pit that became known as Ground Zero, I knew that publishing the next day’s paper would be the greatest test I’d ever faced in a journalism career that had begun 43 years earlier as a kid rewrite-man on the New York Post, barely a mile from what had been the iconic Trade Center towers.
The day after: the front page of the Daily News, edited by Edward Kosner
I had endless doubts. Could the staff even get to the newsroom? If they did, could we produce a paper by nightfall? If we managed to transmit the pages to the printing plant across the Hudson in New Jersey, would enough printers show up to run the presses? If they did print the million papers we planned, how could they be distributed with all the bridges and tunnels to and from Manhattan closed? Still, two things I was certain of. The front page had to be a picture of one of the planes approaching or hitting the towers. And the headline – the ‘wood’ in tabspeak – had to be ‘IT’S WAR’. The News reporters, columnists and photographers trooped into the office, many caked with ash from the rubble of the collapsed towers. Fired with adrenalin, over the next 12 hours we turned out an 80-page edition. All that was missing was that picture of a plane attacking the towers – and then, at the last minute, it showed up. The presses rolled, the Governor opened the George Washington Bridge for our delivery trucks and those million Daily News copies were snapped up by shaken readers. Now, two decades later, how accurate
did those cocksure predictions of the impact of 9/11 turn out to be? My headline, ‘IT’S WAR’, was certainly prescient – as I write, President Biden is withdrawing all but a handful of troops from Afghanistan, invaded by the US a month after the WTC attack. More than 2,300 Americans died in the war and nearly 20 times as many were wounded. The Iraq War started in 2003 and lasted eight and a half years, leaving more than 4,500 Americans dead and nearly 32,000 wounded. Combined, the two wars cost nearly $2 trillion and both could charitably be said to have ended in stalemate. For a time, 9/11 forged unity in America unmatched since the Second World War. But that ended in recriminations over President George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq, prompted by Saddam Hussein’s phantom weapons of mass destruction. Conflict over the Iraq War propelled the political rollercoaster that led to the election of America’s first (literally) African-American President. And many believe the backlash sparked by that unprecedented choice thrust the malign Donald Trump into the White House. The result is a nation so polarised that Washington often seems on the cusp of paralysis. And what of the facile notion that 9/11 for ever deprived Americans of their sense of security in a nation bound by two great oceans and two friendly neighbour nations? True or not, that’s irrelevant now. The great COVID-19 plague, which has cost more than 600,000 American lives so far and shut down the country for months, destroyed for ever any sense of personal safety anyone here – or around the world – may ever have had. In that sense, September 11th 2001 now looks smaller in the rear-view mirror than it first appeared. Besides the New York Daily News, Edward Kosner was the editor of Newsweek, New York magazine and Esquire The Oldie September 2021 37
Small World
Why do my eyes look like nipples?
The recruitment-agency ‘angel’ offered me a job as a bank supervisor – as long as my body behaved itself 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… ‘It’s a shame there’s not a nicer word for nipples,’ my Great-Aunt Jessie once told me. Jessie was known widely as ‘the donkey lady’. As a robust but very small teenager living a street away from the beach, I was often called on by her to road-test a troublesome donkey before she could designate it tourist-friendly. If I left only partially bitten (‘Gum, no teeth,’ said Great-Aunt Jessie), then the donkey would soon have the offspring of every coal miner east of Mexborough on its back for the summer season. We had a cousin, Jinny, who was also known widely as ‘the donkey lady’ on account of her face. The 1970s could be both confusing and cruel. Whereas Jessie may not have been the best at domesticating donkeys, she was spot-on about the sometimes blunt descriptions of the human body: words that sound ‘slangy’ but are in fact the proper medical word. I can remember my recent shock when, in the X-ray room, a radiologist ordered me to put on a cricketer’s box to protect my ‘gonads’. I unconsciously pulled a contorted Kenneth Williams face of disgust at the coarseness of language. But, lo and behold, gonad turned out to be the correct medical term. The one great thing about being ‘jobless, hopeless and shiftless’ (© my mother) was that it gave me an excuse to buy a new laptop/netbook/computer light enough to just about carry. Since Microsoft Millennium Edition (my previous go-to system), things have moved on apace and my new laptop is all very Logan’s Run. The most fascinating and futuristic feature is facial-recognition software. Like a cyber-pet, this cute computer knows who I am and unlocks its screen on sight of my ‘extremely unique face’ (© my father). When the weather recently turned clammy, I vacated my job-searching HQ (the boxroom) for a mid-morning strip 38 The Oldie September 2021
wash. As I re-entered shirtless, I suddenly saw the computer screen unlock itself, before it had even seen my face. I relocked the computer, backed out of the room, re-entered again and confirmed that the computer was unlocking the minute it had sight of my chest area. The computer was confusing my two nipples and my navel for my face. As it would be for a single man of any age, it’s distressing to know that the greatest computer-programming minds have determined that the most accurate physical description of me on any future dating website should be ‘nipple-eyed and navel-mouthed’. For certainty, I got the computer to take another facial-recognition photo, which it would use to identify me, but this time I wore a pair of reading glasses. Then, shirt off, I wandered back into the room. No matter how often I offered the computer a full view of my bare chest, it remained stubbornly locked. In the final part of my experiment, I took out a black marker pen (permanent, as it transpired), drew a very convincing pair of spectacles around my nipples and re-entered. Immediately the computer opened, on sight of my bare but now bespectacled chest. Before I could reflect on this, I had to whizz out to meet my recruitment-agency ‘angel’, Lacey, who was coming all the way from the distant city of Hull to get me on her books.
She had specifically come for a face-to-face so she could see my official certificates and police check for working with minors etc. I’d photographed all these documents and put them onto my new laptop, which I casually but smugly held under my arm with the same pride with which come City sorts carry flat-faced dogs. After a brief chat, Lacey assured me she could get me in work, within the day. To seal the deal, she asked that I present her with pictures of all my certificates. I opened the computer and presented my face – but it stubbornly stared back at me, refusing to unlock. Suddenly, with horror, I remembered I had changed the photo identifier to one where I was wearing specs, when, as a bachelor of this and every parish, outside my parents’ house I’m a full-time contact-lens-wearer. Lacey had come a long way. She batted her strangely long and fake eyelashes impatiently, the increasing whiplash beat sounding like the approach of an avian predator’s wings. ‘Look – you get work, I get paid,’ she said. ‘So it’s extremely important that you show me your police-check documents, live, while we’re both present. Otherwise, the other 45 applicants for this role will beat us to it, and then it’s wasted both our times. Can’t you find some way to unlock it?’ Suddenly, I had an idea. I think there may be a small part of the brain that discerns whether an idea is good or bad. I don’t think I’ve got that bit. Minutes later, as a kindly janitor provided Lacey with a reviving glass of water, I tried to explain that, on my recent ‘comprehensive interview skills’ course, in the INTERVIEW DON’Ts section there was no specific entry reading, ‘DO NOT strip to the waist and present your spectacled chest area to a nearby IT peripheral.’ In stranger-than-true-life fashion, Lacey was just happy to see my credentials on screen. Perhaps bonusdriven more than shamed by my body, she got me the job – covering for a bank supervisor. Just when I thought I was going to have to go back to donkey-baiting.
Sophia Waugh: School Days
Ghastly night at the Prom I’ve never really had a summer holiday before. That might seem silly, given that we all know teachers have the longest and best summer holidays of any profession in the land. What I mean is I’ve never experienced the summer holiday entirely as other teachers do. I’m spoilt. My parents had a house in France which they gave to me as a dowry – the only way they could give it to only one child under French law, and also a method very appealing to my 19thcentury sensibilities. So, come the summer, I usually hightail it out of England on the first ferry after we break up, drive down through France for ten hours, and then become another person for six weeks. For those six weeks, I do not think about school (except on exams-results day), my colleagues or lessons. This year, of course, it is different. This year easyJet kept cancelling my flights, Macron didn’t want me, Johnson didn’t want me to come back and the Dulux colour chart of rules for travel changed hourly. I threw up my hands and decided to be a normal summer-holiday teacher. Our holiday began with the Year 11 Prom at a local golf club. Last year, it was cancelled. This year, it was postponed into the holidays. To give us our due, no one was bothered. My tutor group, and
my lovely teaching set, were on the way out. So I put on some heels and a frock and joined the young. Many of them had never sat down at a formal dinner before, and there was none of the etiquette observed by the old. Rather than boys and girls sitting next to each other, they separated themselves into tables. They were glued to their iPhones so that they could record, rather than remember, the proceedings. Dinner was golf-club classic – something by the name of pâté, or something by the name of soup, scrunched-up nachos with melted cheese, followed by a carvery with three different types of meat but only one gravy (a crime against cooking) and Eton mess (more scrunched-up things). It was when I was queuing at the carvery that I recognised trouble. Many of my boys had come up to me to thank me for our years together and given me big hugs. Probably against the law, but there were no police there. Then one of my naughtiest boys, who’s had some difficult moments, came up and I noticed how very hard he was finding it to balance two potatoes on his plate. Five, in fact, as I saw three on the floor at his feet. He too hugged me, at which point I realised quite how drunk he was. Obviously, they cannot buy any drinks at the Prom, but we all know about the ‘pre-drink’ culture of the young. He
certainly knew about it. Potatoes rolling around, meat by now also on the floor, he hugged and thanked and hugged and dropped food. Other students started filming him – always a bad sign. Staff members of the club evicted him and one other boy who was similarly over-refreshed. So two drunk teenagers were roaming around the countryside while we were frantically looking for them. All ended well, but you have to question a system that takes responsibility for the students, charges them £25 for screwedup nachos and only one gravy and then sends them out into the dusk. My next experience of being a teacher in the holidays was an English Department outing to see Macbeth in the open air, performed by The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The setting was a Victorianised medieval castle, over which God kindly provided a rainbow. But we know what a rainbow means. As Birnam Wood moved towards Dunsinane, a monsoon unleashed itself on us. My line was that as long as the actors kept going, we should stay put. We couldn’t hear them. We could barely see them, but we knew what was happening – didn’t we? By the time we left, we were soaked through. So – drunk teenagers, Macbeth, rain… It turns out that summer holidays for teachers are much like the rest of the year.
Quite Interesting Things about … September September isn’t mentioned anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. Being born in September increases your chance of getting into Oxbridge by 12 per cent. In the first century AD, most ships in the northern hemisphere stopped sailing in September and
didn’t sail again for seven months. September is the ninth month and has nine letters in its name. This coincidence occurs in no other month. Because of the changeover from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, September 1752 was only 19 days long.
There are more pop songs with September in the title than any other month. Hitler invaded Poland on 1st September 1939. The Great Fire of London began on 2nd September 1666.
19th September is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. JOHN LLOYD For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia
The Monument to the Great Fire of London The Oldie September 2021 41
sister teresa
HISTORIC COLLECTION/ALAMY
The agony and ecstasy of Etty Hillesum Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed is a stirring book by the Rev Patrick Woodhouse. He tells the story of a young Jewish Dutch woman who goes from being a crazy, mixed-up kid in her mid-twenties to someone of heroically understated goodness in a mere two and a half years. She was born in 1914 to exceptionally disparate parents. In her diaries, she describes her mother as ‘a model of what I must never become’. The chaotic way in which she was brought up left her stuck in a rut of exaggerated promiscuity. It took her a while to realise that chaos has, at its heart, the void of despair and that eroticism had betrayed her. She was highly intelligent and very well-educated, but this did not stop her being a mess. With no religious education and no inclination for organised religion, she allowed self-discipline and love for others to lead her, via the Nazi occupation of Holland, straight to God. Her unhealthily chaotic lifestyle was cured by an unorthodox psychotherapist, whose methods we would today find unacceptable. But they helped Etty to
Etty Hillesum (1914-43) in 1939
gain a sense of security. She realised that she was not mad but needed selfrestraint in order to reach maturity. Her diaries begin on 9th March 1941 and continue until 13th October 1942. Then her writing carries on through letters sent from the Dutch transit camp at Westerbork. From here, she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died on 30th November 1943. What come across are not only her
kindness, her courage and her love of beauty – she waxes lyrical over the wild lupins in the hell of Westerbork – but her absolute refusal to join the bandwagon of the very specific hatred the Jews had for the Nazis. She realises that if she allows this loathing to get hold of her, there will be no way out of an abyss of darkness. Etty describes the result of her lack of evasion as meaning, metaphorically, that she fastens her share of the fate of the Jews tightly onto her back so that it becomes part of her own body. But the assimilation goes further because this, the destiny of the Jewish people, is so deeply rooted in her that she feels as though she is growing out of shape because of it. Woodhouse writes, ‘As one ponders the image of this young, Jewish woman picking up and strapping to her shoulder a burden so heavy and ugly that its weight and outline deform her as she walks through the streets, for the reader of the New Testament it is difficult not to catch a glimpse of another Jew, on another street, bearing the burden of a destiny which “deformed” him.’
Funeral Service
Michael Horovitz (1935-2021) Vanessa Vie, partner and soulmate of the poet Michael Horovitz for the last 11 years, played the anglo-saxophone at his funeral in Kensal Green Cemetery. ‘Michael told me he once wanted to learn to play the saxophone, and failed,’ she tells me. ‘The kazoo was an easier option … easier to blow… Eureka! The anglo-saxophone was born. ‘It became his trademark, a mixture of a saxophone and a kazoo. He used it as a lyre to accompany his poems and jazz improvisations. And, of course, he used it when performing with me in a duo. We were each other’s muse.’ Michael organised − and performed at − the Wholly Communion poetry event that filled the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, featuring Allen Ginsberg and other poets. 42 The Oldie September 2021
Karyl Nairn recalled meeting him at the First International Poetry Day there, a cultural alternative to the 1996 Olympic Games. ‘In the 1960s, he was dubbed the world’s worst-dressed poet and he spent the rest of his life trying to live up to that. Mysteriously, when Michael wore his mismatched, bright colours, they never clashed. And those fluffy pink hats were misleading. There was nothing fluffy about him. He had a fierce intellect and an iron will.’ ‘There were many Michaels,’ said his son, Adam, himself a poet. ‘There was the refugee child, youngest of ten siblings, who escaped Nazi Germany when he was two.
‘Though he was not a practising Jew, having (as he once joked to me) practised quite enough as a teenager, the faith he was raised in acted as a bedrock to all his adventures in life. He put his faith in poetry, and in people, in the beauty of languages and how it can effect change. ‘His was the Judaism of Woody Allen and Leonard Cohen, Chagall and Kurt Schwitters, Harold Pinter and Mel Brooks. ‘We had not seen each other during COVID, for nearly 18 months before his accident – the longest time in my adult life that we had been apart. The last time I saw him, on the penultimate day of his life, he clutched my hand and said, “I hadn’t realised until now how much I missed you.” ’ JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
The Doctor’s Surgery
It’s good to wake up and smell the coffee I have three cups in the morning – there’s little proof it’s bad for you theodore dalrymple
The world is full of hazards – so full, in fact, that it often seems a miracle that anyone survives as long as they do. But, as someone once said, whatever happens must be possible, and survive most of us do – for a time, at least. Hidden hazards may lurk in all that we consume, but consume we must. It therefore comes as a great relief when some comestible of which we are fond receives the medical nihil obstat, as it were. Caffeinated drinks and, in particular, coffee, have long been suspected of causing cardiac arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms), a risk that compounds with age. An American study using British data – therefore bound to be both accurate and true – has shown that these fears are exaggerated; in fact, completely unjustified. On the contrary, it appears that moderate coffee-drinking may protect (slightly) against the development of such arrhythmias. The idea that drinking coffee is bad for
the heart arose because of the presumed physiological effects of caffeine itself, and because one small study, now more than 40 years old, found a connection between coffee-drinking and arrhythmias. This was the slender basis on which cardiological societies have long suggested the avoidance of coffee, and the advice has entered popular lore, at least among those who pay any attention to such matters. All subsequent studies have failed to demonstrate a connection, but it is always easier to get something into mythology than out again. The authors correlated the incidence of arrhythmias with a self-reported coffee consumption of between no cups of coffee a day and six cups, among 386,258 people, with a mean age 56 years, who lived in north-west England, had no previous history of arrhythmia and were followed up for 4½ years. In essence, what they found was that for each additional cup of coffee drunk, the incidence of arrhythmia declined by
‘I told you the beavers would be a problem’
three per cent. It would be unwise to conclude from this, of course, that if you drank enough coffee, you could exclude the risk of arrhythmia altogether. I mention this only because some people are inclined to suppose that if a little bit of what you fancy does you good, a lot of it must do you much better. Moreover, I stress, to avoid any misunderstanding, that this study was conducted on people who did not have an arrhythmia to start with. For the sake of completeness, I should point out that about 4.4 per cent of the subjects developed an arrhythmia in the 4½ years of follow-up. As is always the case with such studies, there are caveats: for example, that the self-reporting of coffee consumption might be inaccurate. But since when the people were asked about it they had no idea that the information would be used in this way, they had no motive for misrepresenting their consumption. In addition, the results were analysed according to whether the respondents were genetically fast or slow metabolisers of caffeine. While those who were fast metabolisers tended to drink more coffee than the slow, presumably to obtain the same psychological effects, it remained true that fewer of those who drank more coffee, whether fast or slow metabolisers, developed arrhythmias. Again, it might be argued that the results would have been different if the follow-up period had been longer – 15 years, say – but there is no positive reason to think so. Coffee has also been shown, statistically, to be associated with reduced risks of cancer, diabetes, inflammatory and Parkinson’s disease – but I would not be quite frank if I claimed that that is why I start my day with three cups. Nor would I change my habits if the above results were reversed, and the opposite were found. Coffee is not medicine. The Oldie September 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
Anne Robinson’s nuns SIR: Julia Ross Williamson (Letters, July issue) complains – again – about my harmless anecdote about Farnborough Hill Convent where we were both boarders. Accounts may vary. This includes my view that the nuns too often passed on their fault-finding and pickiness and only a few of us escaped with our sense of irony intact. Anne Robinson, Gloucestershire
Nott correct SIR: Re: Sasha Swire’s father (July issue, page 33): Nott, not Knott. Yours, Roger Scowen, Hampton, Middlesex
I guarded Speer, too SIR: The article ‘I guarded Albert Speer’ (July issue) is inaccurate in the writer’s claim to be ‘the last person alive who regularly spoke with Speer in prison’. I am 85 years old and served with the Royal Scots in Berlin from 1957 to ’59. We rotated with the other Axis powers and Russia in guarding Speer, von Schirach and Hess. Just thought you might like to know. Alan Booth, Los Angeles, California
Spandau supermarket SIR: Following the recent article on Rudolf Hess (I Once Guarded, August issue), I am reminded that there was concern that Spandau Prison might become a sort of shrine to the Nazi past. As soon as Hess died, the prison was razed to the ground and construction of a large NAAFI was started. Given the sharpness of the soldiers’ and airmen’s minds, we were not in the least surprised that the new edifice was immediately dubbed Hessco. David Greenway, Group Captain, Anna Valley, Hampshire
‘We reserve this area for people who begin every response with “So…” ’
elaborate cuisine and, like him, would have blamed holidays abroad for the influence of what she called ‘foreign muck’. She loved a song, performed by Bernard Cribbins, that described the perils of a package holiday, and included the words: We ordered steak and chips. They brought us something stewed. It smelled like it was off, And looked like something rude. O tempora, o mores! Yours, David Culver, London SE9
Itchy bottoms SIR: Valerie Crossley’s article (August issue) brought back uncomfortable memories. Worse than our swimming costumes’ accentuating our lumps and bumps, the wool made our bottoms itch for hours after we had taken them off. I still recall my mother’s voice in seaside boarding houses at supper time saying, ‘For goodness’ sake, sit still, William.’ William Wood, Maulds Meaburn, Cumbria
Bernard Cribbins on food
Fish scales
SIR: My late mother would have heartily agreed with Ray Connolly’s views of
SIR: Theodore Dalrymple ponders as to whether 175 grams of fish is too much for
44 The Oldie September 2021
one person. I wouldn’t have a clue, and I suspect many if not most of your readers would feel the same. Just over six ounces of fish, however, I would consider to be about right for one. Regards, Alan Haile, London SW6
The Royals in India SIR: The magnificent illustration of Queen Victoria’s L&NWR Saloon from Christopher Valkoinen’s book Railways: A History in Drawings brings to mind a visit to the National Railway Museum in New Delhi, which exhibits the saloon cars of the Prince of Wales and the Maharajas of Indore and Mysore. These are kept locked but, for a very reasonable fee of Rs 50 per family (about 50p), one can have a private view of the three saloons, and very impressive they are, too.
The Prince of Wales’s Saloon, built for his visit to India, 1875-76
Well worth a visit. Yours faithfully, David Shamash, South Fawley, Berkshire
No thanks, Matthew SIR: Poor Matthew Norman (August issue). Even his one word of Portuguese is incorrect. The word for ‘thank you’ in Portuguese depends on the gender of the person offering thanks. As a male he should say, ‘Obrigado.’ ‘Obrigada’ is used only by females. Most people now use the shortened version ‘Obrigad’. Philip Blackshaw, Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire
54-year-old Smarties SIR: Further to articles in your June and July issues, I have a larger-sized, metal-capped tube of Smarties made into a pencil case by my four-year-old son and labelled ‘to mummy and daddy’. It was a Christmas present in 1967 and now holds my crochet needles. Margaret Stancliffe, York
Voice of speedway
Limited edition: Speed-Track News
SIR: I was interested to see your article on speedway (August issue) because, in the late 1940s, I was permitted to go inside the track each Saturday at Belle Vue Speedway in Manchester to take photos. At the time, I was about 20 and, with high expectations, produced a magazine called Speed-Track News which I sold at the entrance to the track on race nights. Unfortunately it was not a big seller and I produced only two issues. Hope they are of interest. Regards, Tony Keeley, Knypersley, Staffordshire
Venerable Swede SIR: Roddy McDougall’s contribution (August issue) about the golden age of speedway unearthed a memory of a jingle I wrote in the 1970s about a world
‘What do you mean you’ve gone off them?’
speedway champion of the time: If your name was Bernt Persson (a Swede) Would you choose to do speedway at speed? And ride a big bike? Is that what you’d like? Then you’d be asking for trouble indeed! Not up to the literary merit of T S Eliot’s Burnt Norton, I’m afraid. John Layton, Wellingborough, Northants
back memories of a wonderful walk recommended by one of the young gillies. Uniquely for me, I was able to watch a pair of sea eagles hunting along the length of a loch running down to the sea. I was similarly transported by Tom Hodgkinson’s recollections of Cornwall’s Elephant Fayre during the 1980s. We went most years and enjoyed a hugely varied series of cultural events. Ah! Poly Styrene fronting the X-Ray Spex – what a performance! It was sad when this wonderful festival ended, allegedly spoilt by the irresponsible actions of the now-forgotten Peace Convoy. Yours sincerely, Steve Welton, Old Somerby, Lincolnshire
Weeley rocks! SIR: I was at the Weeley Festival (a big Faces fan). Did ELO also play? I went with my boyfriend, now a journalist, who wasn’t/isn’t nearly as dishy as your writer John (August issue)! My memory is of the fire that spread in the cornfields and destroyed many tents, and the appeal for clothes for those left without any possessions. Years later, I discovered that my (by then different) boyfriend had been one of those unlucky individuals. He had to get back to Sunderland without shoes and wearing very ill-fitting clothes. Wish I’d taken photos to help with the diminishing memory. What a great simple time we had underneath the stars listening to the music. Happy days! Jill Martin, London E9
Memories of the eagles SIR: What a delight to read your July issue and find reference to two of my most memorable holiday experiences. David Profumo’s mention of Amhuinnsuidhe Castle brought
Cheap car insurance SIR: I have just seen Alan Judd’s column in your June issue and believe I may be of assistance to his Tonbridge reader, in obtaining substantially more advantageous motor insurance. Like him, I am a member of the IAM – 55 years – and, at the age of 78, have just secured an excellent renewal deal for my two cars with Aviva. I have a brand-new Mazda CX-30 AWD, petrol hybrid, and a little-used Mercedes SLK 280, with only 31,000 miles on the clock since I collected it from the factory in Bremen, in 2006. Living in north Wiltshire, for the two cars I now pay only £609, fully comprehensive with named drivers and multi-years protected NCD; mileage limited to 8,000 pa for the Mazda and 2,000 for the Merc, which suits me admirably. William Harmer, Hullavington, Wiltshire
Lady Hartwell memories? SIR: I am researching for a memoir of my mother, Pamela Berry (Hartwell) (1914-82), and would be most grateful to hear from any Oldie readers who have in their possession letters from her that they would be prepared to share with me. Harriet Cullen, London SW10 harrietcullenuk@yahoo.com The Oldie September 2021 45
I Once Met
Norman Mailer In April 1965, Norman Mailer and his wife Beverly were in the UK to promote his book An American Dream and to visit friends Diana and Lionel Trilling in Oxford. His biographer relates that, in a letter to Diana Trilling, Mailer wrote that the novel was either ‘an extraordinary piece of crap’ or ‘the first novel to come along since The Sun Also Rises which has anything really new in it’. Mailer was enjoying the argument over the novel’s merits ‘because no vice of mine could be greater than my desire to create a sensation and be forever talked about’. I was at Teddy Hall, Oxford, and sharing a house with David Dodd and Michael Palin. David was a huge fan of Mailer. We knew he was coming to Oxford. How could we find him? Mailer was giving a talk at the Mayfair Theatre. We decided to try our luck. Could we ambush him there? His talk was completely booked out – so we lay in wait for him in the foyer. Sure enough, his publishers and publicists came through talking to one another, leaving Mailer on his own and ripe for the picking. Within seconds, David’s enthusiasm had extracted Mailer’s Oxford address. David and I knocked on the Trillings’
door. Could we show the great man round Oxford? A long shot – but it worked. One very wet afternoon, David, Michael and I collected Norman and Beverly Mailer and showed them Oxford’s highlights. Michael remembers a fight for pavement space alongside the great man and being elbowed out by David and spending most of the walk with Beverly – delightful company, but not the real thing. Mailer was on great form. We ended in Magdalen College at the deer park (the name of his 1955 novel), which amused Mailer. We visited the rooms of Stan Sanders, an African-American Rhodes Scholar from Watts, LA. Mailer was clearly impressed with Stan. Mailer was short and pugnacious, while Stan was a six-foot-five gentle giant, an All-American football star whom the Chicago Bears tried to sign. Conversation flowed. Mailer recounted that he was staying at the Savoy, as was Bob Dylan, on Dylan’s first visit to London. Yank at Oxford: Norman Mailer (1923-2007)
The press had asked Dylan why he, the young rebel, was staying at a place like the Savoy. Mailer exclaimed, ‘Dylan didn’t know what to say… I knew what to say: “YOU GOTTA KNOW WHAT THE ENEMY IS UP TO!”’ – a phrase I have never forgotten. On delivering the Mailers back to the Trillings, Mailer signed copies of his book. Mine reads: ‘To Sean Duncan, with respect to his umbrella, Norman Mailer.’ It had been very wet. An American Dream was the start of Mailer’s most productive and celebrated decade, with five consecutive books being nominated for the National Book Award, Armies of the Night winning it and the Pulitzer. Mailer appeared on the cover of Life. As for us guides, David Dodd went on to Berkeley and later taught criminology and died far too young. Stan went on to Yale, became a lawyer and sometime mayoral candidate in LA and was best man at David’s wedding. I went to Bar and Bench in Liverpool. As for Michael Palin, the rest is history! Sean Duncan
PETER J HOLLOWAY
Unexploded bomb sent me to paradise
One night in October 1940, during a heavy raid on London, a string of bombs obliterated most of the street where my family were living. The bomb that should have sent us to kingdom come failed to explode as it hit the garden about 20 feet from our Anderson shelter. The bombdisposal squad arrived the next day, and we went to live in the London Underground, awaiting evacuation. My brother was ten and I was five, so he was responsible for me. Most evacuees went with their schools, but we
were classed as miscellaneous and eventually joined others locked into a train compartment at Waterloo Station. There was one adult with a loaf of bread, some water and a bucket. The train pulled out during an air raid – the last we were to experience. Our guardian, Mrs Ansty, said that we were going to the West Country.
Brothers Peter and Stanley in a Devon quarry, 1941
We pulled into Dartmouth next day. An official allocated children to various addresses and my brother Stanley and I were separated: the worst moment of my life up till then. I went to the home of two elderly ladies, and my brother was taken across the River Dart to a different address. The next day, I ran away and got onto the ferry to cross the river, searching for him. I didn’t have the penny for the fare and somebody took me to the police station. I was eventually reunited with Stanley. A few days later, we were taken to a village in the Heddon Valley, where a home had been found for us. The billeting officer took us to a beautiful cottage at the end of Bodley Lane in Parracombe – Lorna Doone Country.
Our foster parents were the lovely Mr and Mrs Hagley, who had no children of their own. We were soon developing what was to become a lifelong love of the countryside. The valley was one huge adventure playground with trees to climb, a river with trout, a lane leading to the beach, a quarry and a thousand things to do that fired the imagination. In later life we gave thanks for the bomb that failed to explode and our good fortune in having such a wonderful childhood, which we never forgot. By Peter J Holloway, Brighton, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie September 2021 47
Books Sacred monster FERDINAND MOUNT Churchill’s Shadow: An Astonishing Life and a Dangerous Legacy By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
GARY WING
Bodley Head £25 ‘I dislike the father and dislike the son,’ said President Theodore Roosevelt. Both Lord Randolph and Winston possessed ‘such levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle and an immoderate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety, as to make them poor public servants’. Winston’s book about his father was ‘a clever, forceful, rather cheap and vulgar life of that clever, forceful, rather cheap and vulgar egoist’. How startled Teddy would have been to learn that young Winston was to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and that a century later, long after his death in 1965, a passionate Churchill cult was still growing on both sides of the Atlantic. He would find the White House full of busts of Churchill and presentation copies of his works. President after President claimed to be inspired by Churchill’s example: Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Reagan, Clinton, both Bushes. After 9/11, Winston’s grandson hailed Rudy Giuliani as ‘Churchill in a baseball cap’. Both Bibi Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat (despite Churchill’s notorious loathing of all Arabs) modelled themselves on the figure with the fat cigar who now glares out at us from our slippery new fivers. After watching Darkest Hour, the former Governor of Arkansas tweeted ‘in @ realDonaldTrump we have a Churchill’. Winston worship is one of the most fascinating phenomena of our times. That posthumous afterglow is what Geoffrey Wheatcroft started to write about, as what Keynes called ‘a historian
of Opinion’, attempting to see Churchill through the eyes of his contemporaries and of posterity. But then he saw that those opinions can be properly understood only if we understand the events that sparked them. So three-quarters of this fascinating book has turned out to be a biography and the last 100-odd pages the history of the cult and its dangers. Wheatcroft claims that his is not a hostile account, or consciously ‘revisionist’ or ‘contrarian’. And it’s perfectly true that almost all the facts and anecdotes recorded here are also to be found in Andrew Roberts’s massive, hero-worshipping tome, which is twice as long. Quite a few of them feature too in Boris Johnson’s bestselling The Churchill Factor, about which it would be kind to say that, like much of Churchill’s own oeuvre, it must have been largely ghost-written – were it not for the clunking asides that pepper the work and which can be only the author’s own.
But the same material is presented here without varnish or extenuation, and often to deadly effect. Churchill did have a terrible start. Jenny and Randolph were a ghastly couple – selfish, spoilt and immoral, alternately bullying and neglecting the boy. No wonder he set out on adult life with an unappeasable determination to prove himself and become a great man. But not every resentful go-getter burns Afghan villages with such relish; or shares the ‘keen aboriginal desire to kill several of these odious dervishes’, as Churchill writes to his mother from the Sudan; or says at the height of the slaughter in the trenches, ‘I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world can give me.’ In war, he favoured the most ruthless means available. As early as October 1917, he was recommending to the Cabinet that they drop ‘not five tons but five hundred tons of bombs each night on the cities and manufacturing
The Oldie September 2021 49
establishments’ in Germany. In later trying to shift the blame for the bombing of Dresden, he was sliding out from under a policy that he had been instrumental in pushing through as soon as he became Prime Minister. Wheatcroft fully accepts the necessity of ruthlessness in confronting Hitler, including the destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir. Churchill’s role in 1940 was no myth, and Wheatcroft is as enthusiastic as anyone about the great speeches which still have the power to move us to tears, not least the quieter ones such as the wonderful funeral tribute he paid to his bitter opponent Neville Chamberlain, who had for his part recognised Churchill as ‘a real man of genius’, though at the same time ‘a brilliant wayward child who wears out his guardians with the constant strain he puts on them’. If he was ruthless, it cannot also be denied that his modern critics do have a point in calling him a racist. To say that he was an old-fashioned imperialist is to underplay his views, which were extreme even for his time. He hated Indians – not just Gandhi; he despised Islam as much as he despised the Arabs. He denied that any great wrong had been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia ‘just because a stronger and higher-grade race had come in to take their place’ – all of which was part of his fashionable taste for eugenics. He wasn’t much more indulgent to his fellow countrymen. He sent troops to subdue the Welsh miners; he sent the Black and Tans to terrorise the southern Irish, after threatening to send warships to Belfast to bring the Ulstermen to heel. In the General Strike, he was the most bellicose of ministers (though characteristically generous after it was over). It is scarcely surprising that, even in 1945, he was not really a popular hero. He never won a plurality of the popular vote, even in 1951. At his funeral, the crane-drivers had to be paid overtime to bow their cranes as his coffin passed. Nor was he an infallible strategist – to put it mildly. Wheatcroft records the mournful list of doomed amphibious operations that Churchill pushed through against military advice, from Gallipoli to Dieppe. He reminds us too of the repeated misjudgments that belie Churchill’s reputation as an unheeded prophet: ‘I do not believe we shall see another great war in our lifetime’ (March 1932); the armies of the future would have ‘great prepared lines of fortifications which it will be very difficult for the other army to break through’ (1938); ‘this is not a war of vast armies,
firing immense masses of shells at one another’ (February 1941). At one time or another, Churchill derided the relevance to modern warfare of the submarine, the tank and even aircraft. But there is one prophecy that haunts us to this day, one legendary warning which is the ultimate foundation of the Churchill cult, and which this book is really all about. Churchill puts it with scorching force in The Gathering Storm and also in his famous Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri: ‘Last time I saw it all coming, and cried aloud to my own fellow countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention. Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind. There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe.’ But what timely action? Wheatcroft reminds us, as Robert Rhodes James did before him in Churchill: A Study in Failure, that Churchill reacted to the occupation of the Rhineland only with disapproval. Neither then nor earlier or later did he call for pre-emptive military force. As for British rearmament, which was proceeding at quite a rate throughout the period, was it better to rearm quietly or to rearm noisily, as Churchill had at the Admiralty in the years leading up to 1914, with no better deterrent effect? And, shameful as Munich was, Churchill himself acknowledged that it gave the Allies the moral high ground, in the marvellous speech he gave to the Commons on the Sunday that war was declared: ‘In this solemn hour, it is a consolation to recall and dwell upon our repeated efforts for peace. All have been ill-starred, but all have been faithful and sincere … in our own hearts this Sunday
‘I’ve invented this thing called the dog kennel – all we have to do now is domesticate a wolf’
morning there is peace. Our hands may be active, but our consciences are clear.’ Ever since, Wheatcroft insists, the lessons of Munich have been misread again and again: in Korea, in Vietnam, at Suez, in Iraq. By standing up against a dictator, Churchill still warns us from the grave, we can avoid great evils, perhaps without a shot being fired. It is a consoling mantra masquerading as grim realism, because it so often relies on optimistic assumptions that have no basis in fact: that the dictator will back down, or that his people will rise up against him, or that the Americans will rush to the aid of their British ‘cousins’. These are all ways of dodging the tragic dimensions in life, and part of Churchill’s undoubted greatness was that he usually didn’t. Churchill’s Shadow is a wonderful revisioning of the sacred monster which, curiously, leaves you more in sympathy with him, because it never tries to gloss over his enormous faults, while giving full play to his amazing qualities. Whatever else, it should plant in all of us a determination never to use the word ‘Munich’ again, except to refer to a nice rococo city in southern Germany.
Chesterton revisited DAN HITCHENS The Sins of G K Chesterton By Richard Ingrams Harbour Books £20 Invited to give a reading at the Catholic Poetry Society, G K Chesterton sat in miserable silence, unable to remember a single poem. ‘Will you recite The Donkey?’ someone asked. ‘Don’t know it,’ came the doleful reply. He brightened only when an audience member produced a volume by Chesterton’s friend Hilaire Belloc. ‘Ah! That’s real poetry.’ Perhaps no writer of Chesterton’s stature has exhibited such a complete lack of literary vanity. He dismissed his writing as hackwork, was bemused when admirers quoted his words back to him (‘I may have written something of the sort’) and had not a trace of the writer’s usual vices, envy and backbiting. This humility, combined with his gifts for friendship and personal kindness, has moved some Catholics to propose him as a candidate for sainthood. But the Church has so far refused – quite rightly, as far as Richard Ingrams is concerned. In this short but ambitious book, Ingrams aims to undermine the generally accepted story of Chesterton’s life as one of childlike innocence. And it all goes back to that man Hilaire Belloc. For all his brilliance, Belloc was The Oldie September 2021 51
capable of the most poisonous bigotry. During the Dreyfus affair, almost the entire British press was united in indignation at such a flagrant injustice – except Belloc, on the grounds that Dreyfus was Jewish and must therefore be involved in an international conspiracy. When stories began to emerge about Belgian atrocities in the Congo, Belloc alone sided with King Leopold II: after all, the King was Catholic – so the coverage had to be unfair. On the other hand, Belloc declared war on the chocolate magnate George Cadbury, a kindly philanthropist who campaigned for social reform, treated his workers with exceptional gentleness and respect, and bankrolled the Daily News, Chesterton’s employer. Cadbury was a Quaker, you see, and therefore – Belloc concluded – motivated solely by greed and moral puritanism. Belloc managed to bewitch not only Chesterton’s journalist brother, Cecil, who became a full-time acolyte, but G K himself. Chesterton changed his view on the Dreyfus case, from outrage to feeble both-sides-ism. He hysterically denounced Cadbury, which meant leaving the Daily News. And he abandoned some of his oldest friends in public life when Belloc began including them in his conspiracy theories. Next, Belloc and Cecil plunged into the Marconi affair – a genuine scandal, where government ministers engaged in insider trading. Yet the pair somehow managed to commit (and be convicted of) libel, by inventing a Jewish plot between the main actors. Chesterton regarded this embarrassing episode as a moral triumph for his friends, not to mention ‘one of the turning points in the whole history of England and the world’. As Ingrams shows, Chesterton’s loyalty to Belloc and Cecil defined a good deal of his political engagement. It led him to look sympathetically on antisemitism. As editor of the New Witness, he published – and later defended – a grotesquely hate-filled diatribe penned by Cecil’s wife. It led him, after Cecil’s death, to devote much of his energy to keeping alive his brother’s old paper. And it led him to adopt a variety of strange positions – opposing National Insurance, downplaying Mussolini’s crimes – which intruded a permanent element of confusion into his otherwise lucid prose. Sometimes more than confusion: Ingrams has found sentences in the Autobiography that actively distort the historical record. The Sins of G K Chesterton is no hatchet job: it takes for granted that
Chesterton was, for the most part, a man of profound integrity. Precisely because Chesterton loved truth, Ingrams speculates, ignoring it caused him tremendous, unconscious stress; hence his near-fatal breakdown in 1914, and his final illness in 1936. For Ingrams, the whole story is a ‘heroic tragedy’. The Devil can turn even our virtues against us – and, in Chesterton, humility was sometimes twisted into something very different: an absurdly low estimation of his own gifts, combined with deluded hero-worship of other people’s. If Chesterton had realised that his own mind was far mightier than Belloc’s and Cecil’s put together, perhaps he would not have wasted so much effort on their pet causes. What does intellectual humility mean? As with a thousand other things, Chesterton himself put it best: ‘A man who really has a head with brains in it ought to know that this head has been gratuitously clapped on top of him like a new hat. A man who by genius can make masterpieces ought to know that he cannot make genius.’ Chesterton’s fans have sometimes assumed that such beautiful books could have been written only by a saint. The author knew better. In that sense, refusing to canonise him is its own kind of tribute.
Britain’s corner shop
VALERIE GROVE Family Business: An Intimate History of John Lewis and the Partnership By Victoria Glendinning William Collins £20 It already feels like a world ago that I last wandered through the haberdashery section of John Lewis, confident that one would never be knowingly undersold. The nation’s favourite department store is now in limbo. Its CEO, Dame
‘I don’t know, really – I suppose I just expected more from heaven’
Sharon White, is closing stores and moving into the property sector, building 10,000 rentable homes. So Victoria Glendinning’s ‘intimate history’, inspired by a moment of curiosity under Barbara Hepworth’s Winged Figure in Oxford Street, could hardly be more timely. Behind every great Victorian store stood a diligent, thrifty young man (named Harrod, Heal, Liberty, Gamage, Whiteley, etc) at a high-street counter. The original John Lewis, born in 1836, was apprenticed to a draper in Shepton Mallet, Somerset. Glendinning lived nearby – so her narrative is laced with an occasional dig at the ‘1970s architectural statements gifted to the town by the Showering family of Babycham fame’. John Lewis grew up to be cultivated (opera, theatre, Lord Byron) and steadfast. His first sweetheart, Nelly Breeks from Cumbria, was too good for him (the Breeks family thought) but he never forgot her, and built her memorial, even though she had ended her days in Mrs Theobald’s House for Inebriates. Lewis paid promptly and banked every penny. He did not advertise (quality and service spoke for themselves) and went to prison rather than succumb to his landlord Howard de Walden over the restoration of his side of Cavendish Square. When a fellow draper, Peter Jones, died, having just lit his grand shop with electricity, John Lewis strode along to Sloane Square with £20,000 in his pocket and snapped it up. He married the daughter of another Somerset draper, a Girton girl who opted for motherhood and was crushed by it. They bought Branch Hill Lodge, Hampstead, and renamed it Spedan Tower – apparently after a kindly aunt, Ann Speed – and gave their first son the same peculiar name. John Spedan Lewis and his brother, Oswald, both tall and handsome, went to Westminster School and were destined to tussle with their ageing father – who lived to be 92 – over boardroom matters. The hero of the story is Spedan, who threw his energy into the shop’s unique selling point – the paternalistic notion of ‘partnership’. After William Whiteley was shot dead in his shop in 1907, leaving £1m in his will to provide retirement homes for his staff, the Lewis brothers decided to create a country club for their senior salespeople. Spedan had read William Morris and perceived that if shop workers were happy and exuded cheerfulness, they would be more productive. ‘This was and remains obvious,’ as Glendinning says. Hence those smiling, helpful assistants. The Oldie September 2021 53
The John Lewis Partnership provided a pension scheme and perks: clubs (am-dram, music, arts), entertainments, a pottery, a Lake District holiday hotel, a castle on Brownsea Island and a magnificent golf course at Cookham. Spedan began recruiting Oxbridge graduates – one of whom, Beatrice Hunter of Somerville, became Mrs Spedan Lewis. ‘I wish he weren’t so rich but no doubt I will get used to it,’ she wrote piously. Profit-sharing made the partnership morally acceptable. Spedan, unlucky in his children (a son died at nine, a daughter drifted away), ‘lived and breathed the Partnership’. He lectured and wrote proselytising books on ‘Partnership for all’, keeping three secretaries busy seven days a week, taking dictation. They were rewarded with riding and driving lessons, and outings to Glyndebourne, where Spedan was a keen patron. (During Glyndebourne’s wartime closure, he sat impresario Rudolf Bing at a desk in Peter Jones, advising ladies on how to spend their clothing coupons.) One of Spedan’s shrewdest moves was buying up the shops owned by a Mr Waite and a Mr Rose, offering ‘wholesome food in clean surroundings’. North London still mourns its indispensable John Lewis offshoots John Barnes and Jones Brothers – though both still thrive as the sites of gigantic Waitroses. So this engrossing tale of a shopkeeper and his family, from expansive entrepreneurship to the pandemic-related crisis of today, reflects our social history, as well told as it can be by a first-rate biographer with a name as dependable as her subject’s. By chance, this book arrived on my doormat along with a card. ‘You’ve earned a reward, Valerie,’ it said. ‘Your shopping at John Lewis in the last 90 days would have earned you 1,091 points – if only you’d paid with a Partnership Card.’ Too late!
Book of books FRANCES WILSON Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure By Dennis Duncan Allen Lane £20 As with any work of non-fiction, I began this one at the end. A quick glance through the index is the best way of finding the flavour of a book. But, because the publisher sent me a proof and not a finished copy, the index had not yet been compiled and, instead, beneath the word ‘Index’ on page 281 was a message for the reader:
‘The good news is you’ll have a condition named after you’
Indexes: necessarily produced late in publication cycle, 235; initial absence of, in books where the omission is striking, 199; author humbly seeks early readers’ indulgence for lack of, 281. It’s a witty idea in a book packed with easy wit and erudition. Dennis Duncan gives us not only a history of the index, but an essay on human folly. For example, when William F Buckley gave a complimentary copy of The Unmaking of a Mayor to his friend Norman Mailer, he included a personal message. Knowing that Mailer, a terrific narcissist, would turn straight to the back, Buckley scribbled ‘Hi!’ next to the entry ‘Mailer, Norman, 259, 320’. The index was invented at the turn of the 13th century. Its purpose was to provide a road map through the words and thus save us precious time – and by the middle of 16th century, Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote a whole book in the form of an index because, as he put it, these days ‘many people read only them’. In the 18th century, Dean Swift complained that lazy readers ‘are the men who pretend to understand a Book, by scouting thro’ the Index, as if a Traveller should go about to describe a Palace, when he had seen nothing but the privy’. An index, as Isaac D’Israeli nicely put it, provides ‘the nerves and arteries of a book’, which makes indexes sound more authoritative than they are. A good index has personality, but the best are utterly arbitrary. My mother, a deep and serious reader, compiled her own indexes because she trod her own path through a book and rarely wanted what the indexer thrust in her way. Many indexes are meat and two veg but some, says Duncan, are miniature narratives, while others are literary performances, and he provides glorious examples of both. Indexes can also be a
form of mockery or satire, and they make excellent objects of disdain. For example, look up the historian Edward Augustus Freeman in the index to J Horace Round’s Feudal England. You will find not a dispassionate finger pointing to a number of pages but an intellectual fist fight in which Round tears into the ‘scholarship’ of his rival: ‘Freeman, Professor: unacquainted with the Inq. Com. Cant 4; ignores the Northamptonshire geld-roll, 149’ – and so on and so forth. Let loose in the index, J Horace Round’s otherwise civilised tone turns sarcastic, but behaviour of this kind is not unusual in history books. ‘Let no Damned Tory index my History,’ said Macaulay of his History of England, fully aware that that rogue index was a lethal weapon. A good index, as the art historian William Heckscher put it at the Society of Indexers’ first international conference in 1978, should ‘pride itself on being the child of imagination’. Bernard Levin agreed. Seeing that the index to Ian Ker’s life of Cardinal Newman contained nothing but a list of numbers (‘Wiseman, Nicholas 69, 118-9, 129, 133-4’ ad infinitum), Levin let rip in the Times: ‘What’s the use of wasting space on idiocy of that order? How dare the publishers print it under the noble and meaningful heading “Index”?’ ‘Most biographies,’ quipped John Updike, ‘are just novels with indexes’ but some novels themselves have indexes. The index to Samuel Richardson’s seven-volume Clarissa - written by Richardson himself – ran to 85 pages and contained moral disquisitions on subjects such as duelling (‘An innocent man ought not to run an equal risk with a guilty one’) and adversity (‘the state of trial of every good quality’). The Oldie September 2021 55
Henry Mackenzies’s The Man of Feeling, an 18th-century novel reprinted in the 19th century, was given an ‘Index to Tears’, which mockingly recorded every time a character wept (‘Dropped one tear, no more, p 131). This is a terrifically rewarding and also timely book because everybody today is mired in indexes. When we search the web, Duncan soberly reminds us, we are searching only ‘Google’s index of the web’.
Poor Mrs Dickens! A N WILSON The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Jonathan Cape £20
The 1851 census was taken on 30th March. This latest book by one of our most beguiling Victorian scholars is by way of being a census of Britain at the time of the Great Exhibition, 170 years ago, seen through the prism of the greatest English imagination of the time. This momentous year found Dickens starting to write Bleak House. In both cases, we feel there is a turning point. With the erection of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, Britain was celebrating its arrival as the most successful technocratic, commercial nation in the history of the planet. With the writing of Bleak House, with its two unreliable narrators, many readers have felt that the oeuvre of Dickens changed, and that the modern novel has arrived. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst constructs this Dickensian micro-history around such contentions. We see the novelist – prematurely aged, but as energetic as ever – pouring out journalism in his periodical Household Words; plotting Bleak House; producing and acting in yet another play with Bulwer-Lytton; attending his father’s horrific deathbed; burying an infant daughter; undergoing the famous water cure at Malvern; continuing to busy himself with charitable work, especially at Urania Cottage, the place he and Angela Burdett-Coutts had established for the rescue of ‘fallen women’; and starting to recognise that his marriage was in poor shape while fathering his tenth child in 13 years … poor Mrs Dickens! Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has already written one of the very best books on the novelist – Becoming Dickens – and also what will indubitably be seen as the definitive book about Alice Liddell, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. These were near-impossible acts to follow. But
‘The Painter on the Route de Tarascon’ by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. From Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence by Martin Bailey (Frances Lincoln, £18.99)
this book is beautifully written and packed with wonders and insight and I shall definitely be rereading it before the year is out. Moreover, by the author’s holding the magnifying glass aloft and allowing the sun to focus on one spot, 1851, the leaf catches flame. Yet while Douglas-Fairhurst convinced me that Britain was changed by the Great Exhibition and, to a lesser extent, that Dickens’s fiction was palpably different after Bleak House, I am less sure that 1851 represented such a violent turning point in Dickens’s life as, say, 1857, when he met the 18-year-old actress Ellen Ternan. That, after all, was the year when his midlife crisis precipitated the end of his marriage and he resolved to undertake the hectic schedule of public readings which were such a drain on his health, and such a
distinctive part of his art and personality. It was on the podium, enacting the murder of Nancy or the trial of Bardell vs Pickwick, that Dickens the man of theatre, Dickens the writer, Dickens the man of masks most fully ‘came out’. This cavil, however, is in no way a criticism of this book, which can be read and richly enjoyed regardless of whether you think this year was indeed a crucial turning point. Douglas-Fairhurst shows that, little as the novelist himself liked it, the Great Exhibition, with its almost grotesque plenitude of curious exhibits, was a ‘Dickensian’ phenomenon. He likened the exhibition to a badly organised bazaar and, much as he admired Joseph Paxton, who created the Crystal Palace, he deplored the arrival of so many foreigners in Hyde Park. He was a tireless campaigner for better The Oldie September 2021 57
sanitation in the capital – so the amount of filth the visitors were likely to excrete was never far from his thoughts. No one who loves Dickens can fail to address the ways in which our greatest novelist can make us cringe. His xenophobia and racism cannot be denied, and Douglas-Fairhurst does not try. He sees nothing sinister in Dickens’s obsession with rescuing ‘fallen’ women, and perhaps there wasn’t anything. But he can see that Dickens’s attitudes to women are generally hard to stomach. An especially fine chapter begins with a splendid picture of Amelia Bloomer, the American journalist wearing her eponymous outfit. Since the very phrase Women’s Emancipation had the writers and cartoonists of Punch in stitches, presumably it amused its readers, too. Douglas-Fairhurst reminds us that, as late as 1876, the New York Times had an editorial that noted ‘a curious nervous disorder peculiar to women’ was ‘an abnormal and unconquerable thirst for trousers’. Dickens was no feminist and considered the very idea of women giving lectures, for example, to be ridiculous. He told readers of Household Words that he would be ‘disturbed’ if his wife attempted the task. Compare and contrast George Eliot’s first full-length novel Adam Bede in which Dinah Morris, the Methodist preacher, mocked at first for her pious oratory, eventually becomes Adam’s wife and even earns the respect of the vicar, Mr Irwine. In 1858, George Eliot received a fan letter from Dickens, for her Scenes of Clerical Life. It began ‘My Dear Sir’. Although they had met frequently when, as Marian Evans, she was editing the Westminster Review (1850-54), neither writer made much impression on the other. Evans/Eliot thought Dickens ‘disappointing … not distinguishedlooking in any way… neither tall nor short’. At this point, I wanted DouglasFairhurst to remind the reader that his height was five foot eight.
Prehistoric lawyer NICOLA SHULMAN Being a Human By Charles Foster Profile £16.99 Charles Foster is a novel version of the superhero – those guys who turn at night into agents of the law with magic powers. Being an agent of the law or, at any rate, a lawyer, is his day job but, in the holidays, he changes his judicial livery for something quite else.
‘I feel you’re someone I can share my dashed hopes and thwarted dreams with’
His last book was about living as a badger. Now he has turned his attention to time travel, returning in succession to the Upper Palaeolithic era (40,000-35,000 years ago), the Neolithic (12,000-3,500) and the Enlightenment (about 350). By far the longest part of the book is the part where he lives, as far as is possible, as an Upper Palaeolithic man. He sets up camp in a wood in Derbyshire, accompanied by his 13-yearold son, Tom. Though in earshot of a major road, they will try to be true to the spirit of the Upper Palaeolithic, according to Foster’s conception of it. So a tarpaulin is OK because ‘no rightthinking Upper Palaeolithic man would turn up his nose at it’. Killing is necessary, but acceptable to the right-thinking UPM only if performed with the respect due to the prey: in this case, a visiting hare. Climbing into a hawthorn tree, they throw stones at it. They miss. Tom goes off to find some squirrels and his father solves the problem in his own way, by entering into an eight-day fast. This kills, so to speak, two hares with one stone, obviating the need to be a decent hunter and, through the psychic effects of the fast, closing in on his central conviction about the Upper Palaeolithic: that the shamanic experience was at its heart. Which is where the magic powers come in. What evidence is there for this? Principally, the human and animal figures in the European cave paintings, which he interprets as representing shamanic beings, ‘just as they assumed or abandoned the animal forms necessary to travel into the spirit world’. For Foster, the Upper Palaeolithic is a time when human consciousness, in the
dawn of its pristine awakening, was able to inhabit, not merely to describe, the co-occupants of its world. And, because UPMs could ‘become’ a tree, or a bird, or a caribou, they held such things in equal regard to themselves. In a cave on the margin of the Severn sea, father and son sit by the fire, watching a bestiary of animals rise and set like constellations on its walls. When they are doing something right, Foster senses the approving presence of an Upper Palaeolithic friend he calls X, with his own son in tow. As they move on to the Neolithic, the parameters of the research change completely. In Foster’s world view, the Neolithic is us. For him, the gap between the first farmers and ‘states, fast food, hedge funds, the subjugation of women, boardroom sycophancy … status, surplus, markets … epidemics of infectious disease’ is one merely of time. The control of fire led to the control and othering of the whole natural world. Once you can draw a straight line, it is a mere hop to the Sykes-Picot Agreement or, indeed, to this kind of direct linkage of distant actions to ultimate consequences. Hence, his investigations into the society of 12,000 years ago can be satisfied by a trip to a modern abattoir and to a fox hunt, where the master ‘sits back in her saddle as in a boardroom chair’. He also visits Meg and Burt on their smallholding in Wales and harries them through the night about ‘acquisitiveness and the relationship between the birth of farming and the birth of avarice’. His inner badger is alive and well, it seems. ‘You’re a fascist, you know that?’ says Meg. As for the Enlightenment, this consists of having dinner with some Oxford The Oldie September 2021 59
dons at the college where he is an associate fellow, and becoming exasperated at the small-mindedness of the academic outlook. Meg isn’t quite right. From his book, it seems that Foster is more of an oldfashioned misanthrope. You can’t help noticing that his fastidious palaeolithic experiment lacks an essential ingredient of that era. Real palaeolithic men lived in tribes. There would have been other men, children and women (notably absent from his utopia) to negotiate. If there is a precedent for Being a Human, it’s that great Enlightenment satire Gulliver’s Travels. Foster shares Swift’s moral outrage and revulsion at humanity’s material grossness. As with Gulliver, each journey is just a reflection of his own place and time. Being a Human doesn’t tell you more than any other work of speculative anthropology about the conditions of life in the deep past, but it tells you a lot about the interesting Charles Foster. And that’s enough.
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH
New York state of mind PAUL BAILEY Harlem Shuffle By Colson Whitehead Fleet £16.99 Colson Whitehead writes historical novels about the kind of people most historians tend to ignore, through either ignorance or deliberation. The limitlessly resilient Cora, the central character in his masterly The Underground Railroad, could be considered an amalgam of every brave black woman who has fought her way out of slavery, were it not for the fact that she exists as a unique individual on the page. Great names are mentioned in Whitehead’s fiction, but only as background figures. He shares the distinction with the insufficiently lauded E L Doctorow – author of Ragtime and Billy Bathgate – of being interested, almost to the point of obsession, with the news behind and beyond the front-page headlines. When you stop to consider it, that’s really our news in the main. His latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, opens in 1959 and comes to a surprising close in 1964. At that time, Blacks were called Negroes in polite usage, and so it is here. We meet the book’s seriously flawed hero, Ray Carney – a dealer in secondhand furniture, radios, washing machines and TV sets – as he bustles around New York City on a typical day,
on the very first page of what will become a complex narrative. Ray is a man who intends to make a good life for himself and his young family. He has already established a reputation for fairness and decency with the store he has opened near Harlem’s 125th Street, which is attracting a reliable clientele. He has married, some would say above his means, the beautiful, wellspoken Elizabeth Jones, whose parents, Leland and Alma, take regular delight in reminding their ambitious son-in-law of his lowly origins. Ray’s drunken father was a hood, not of the very worst kind, but bad enough. The memory of Big Mike Carney is an inspiration to the boy he abandoned to better himself and his loved ones at any cost. The bane of Ray’s existence is his feckless cousin Freddie, a charming junkie who worships Debbie Reynolds and whose need for a fix lands him and, as a consequence, Ray in sometimes spectacular trouble. Freddie disappears for long periods and Ray wonders and worries what he is up to before receiving the inevitable phone call or visit from Freddie that puts previous troubles in the shade. Ray finds himself becoming a fence for stolen goods like jewellery and expensive watches and, soon enough, his business starts to thrive. His store takes on the appearance of a salon, with new, up-todate furniture on offer at competitive prices. He has an extension built. He rents an apartment on Riverside Drive. It becomes apparent, as the story progresses, that Colson Whitehead has a particular gift for nuance, even as the events he is describing threaten to be extreme. Ray somehow retains his essential goodness, not least in his dealings with Freddie, for whom he feels an unwavering, if exasperated, affection.
They were fatherless boys together, in the bad times, finding happiness wherever they could, and that is one memory Ray can’t shake off. Harlem Shuffle would be a different book without the presence of this hopeful, unlucky chancer, who forms a friendship with a white drop-out named Linus Van Wyck, from an excessively wealthy family with a mansion on Park Avenue. They become inseparable, and Whitehead makes it clear, without emphasis, that Linus is enamoured of Freddie and sexually attracted to him. They are companions in blissful distress, living in poky hotel rooms. They hatch up an improbable scheme, which they nearly pull off, to avail themselves of the Van Wyck realty millions, causing Ray to face the greatest and most dangerous challenge of his compromised life. A short review can only hint at the subtle strengths of this exceptional novel, which is rich in detail of the way a section of American society lived half a century ago. Harlem Shuffle can be read on many levels. Freddie and the enigmatic strong man Pepper might almost be characters in one of the surrealist crime novels of the magisterial Chester Himes, the supreme chronicler of Harlem’s underworld. Whitehead is never judgemental, which makes his depictions of class – that perennial blight on human affairs – absolutely convincing. Everything you wanted to know about 20th-century tastes in furnishing can be found in these pages. Elizabeth Carney works for a travel agency which tells its Negro clients which streets in which American cities it’s safe for them to walk along before a cop who is desperate for promotion arrests them for loitering with intent. This is a historical novel with a living pulse.
The Oldie September 2021 61
Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff
Public faces in private places
ALAMY/TOM PLANT
It was lockdown, and I needed some human company. So I decided to throw a party. But who should be asked? My first thought was Sir Roger de Coverley: he would get the guests onto the dance floor. And, being fond of a reel, he would bring some friends who would set the pace. Paul Jones would mix everyone up, and could be joined by Fergus McIver and several others from north of the border. All would be welcome. Major Ian Stewart, the Duke of Perth and indeed the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh would add to the fun, as would BrownEyed Mary and Texas Tommy. More than music would be required, though. I would put Jack Daniel and Tom Collins in charge of the drinks. For the soft-drinkers, poor things, there would be some Dr Pepper. As for the children, they could have Shirley Temples. The wine would be supervised by ‘Three-bottle’ Marie-Jeanne – no, not Mary Celeste (likely to empty the room), nor Mary Rose, who would probably come with her brother, Peter Pomegranate, each rather abrasive. Instead, we would ask Kate Maclaren and Peter Ross. Both being sharp, they are a good pair to have attached. Kate is very attractive and Peter quite colourful. Stupidly, I got into a bit of a muddle with the Jacks. In handing over control of the bar, I confused Jack Daniel with Jack Russell, who has a reputation as
Calling holidays ‘leave’ I hope we’ll soon be going on holiday after this pandemic. But will we? People don’t go on holiday today. They go on leave. Why? The only ones who go on holiday are children. They never refer to Christmas leave – thank goodness! Everyone else seems to go ‘on leave’. Why? Does it sound more important? What’s wrong with the word ‘holiday’? Being an oldie, I 62 The Oldie September 2021
something of a scrapper. Tom Collins must have thought I was barking (I can imagine his thank-you letter). Luckily, I sorted things out without too much damage. It turned out that Jack R was actually more interested in the Melba toast than in the booze. When someone tried to remove the toast rack, he was heard to shout, ‘Not on your Nellie!’ Then he sank his teeth into my ankle. Meanwhile, Jack Tar had taken a nautical turn and gone off to seek a tarpaulin (he said it was in his genes), while Jacky Howe, our local sheepshearer (though he comes from Australia), was accused by someone of being a wife-beater. Fortunately, Jack Robinson, not always the quickest man around, suggested it was time to eat, and all the Jacks moved off for a John Dory and a few fillets of Bessie Braddock, supplied by my Cockney fishmonger. It was getting late, but people were still arriving. They’d come from all over, and some had had difficult journeys. The airports were scarcely operating, it seemed. Martin Marauder and Enola Gay had both had a terrible time with JFK and then Charles de Gaulle. Miss Veedol and Piccadilly Lilly had fared little better with John Lennon. The trains were chaos too. After two cancellations, the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe said he had been obliged to travel with Oliver Cromwell. Luckily, old
can remember Cliff Richard, in the 1960s, singing ‘We’re all goin’ on a summer holiday’ – great stuff! The word ‘holiday’ is from ‘holy day’, when Christians were expected to attend church. Gradually, the words became one and the meaning shifted to mean a day of recreation. In the meaning of ‘holy day’, the words are found in the Lindisfarne Gospels (c 950). In the poem Cursor Mundi (1300) is the first reference to ‘childir on an halidai’. The origin of ‘going on leave’ is military and is slowly taking over. The first reference to ‘leave’ as a holiday is positively modern when compared with ‘holy day’. Edmund Burke in 1771 commented, ‘He has got a
Edgcumbe had left his Cavalier King Charles at home. Colonel Bogey may have envied him: he missed his train and had to come on foot – a pity, since John Deere could have given him a lift. The ladies had evidently suffered less. Violet Copper and Holly Blue, although both prone to fluttering, looked lovely. Nelly Moser is inclined to cling rather annoyingly, but Alice Fisk is a star, Barbara Jackman looked well and Miss Bateman was keeping the little group in order. In the other room, some foreign friends were having a good time. Frau Dagmar Hastrup was getting on well with Josephine Bruce and Papa Meilland (almost puce – does he overdo the port?), while Sarah van Fleet, always a bit prickly, looked on. I realised I should stir things up. I introduced the dashing Tam o’ Shanter to Mrs Lovell Swisher, but I fear she was too upright for him. David Brown (didn’t he do well in the Bond films?) was probably not quite right for Lady Hillingdon (rather slack in the neck). And perhaps it was a mistake to think that Mickey Finn would be amusing for Mrs Sinkins: her divine scent makes her more suitable for a ‘nose’ than a ‘throat’. The biggest boo-boo, though, was with Mae West and John Innes. I thought these opposites might attract. But they didn’t – not each other, anyway.
leave of absence,’ and the phrase is found in a military dictionary of 1802. Then there is the word ‘vacation’, ultimately from Latin. It’s used in England’s universities but is in more general use in America and someone from England would be unlikely to say, ‘I am on vacation.’ Then the verb ‘to
SMALL DELIGHTS Hearing the ‘whoosh’ of water as the blocked drain unblocks. JAMES CRAWSHAW, BATTLE Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
vacate’ can be tricky. ‘I’m going to vacate by the sea’ doesn’t ring happily! But there is one horror with the word ‘holiday’ – ‘Happy holidays!’ in Christmas cards. People don’t write ‘Happy holidays!’ on summer postcards, only in Christmas cards – ugh! Of course Christmas has become a general holiday. Don’t demote it further by excluding the word ‘Christmas’, or if your religion doesn’t support Christmas, choose a blank card showing some holly and write something bland like ‘Looking forward to seeing you.’ So – don’t go on leave unless in the military and, when Christmas comes, avoid ‘Happy holidays’. PENELOPE HICKS
History
What a carve-up!
Why do historians love slicing history into 100 pieces? david horspool The luxuriantly coiffed Scottish TV historian-archaeologist Neil Oliver is a man of mystery. How does he keep that barnet so clean in the salty, muddy, windswept environments he favours? What does he store in that satchel he always carries? What possessed him to join Andrew Neil’s Fox TV Mini-Me, GB News? His latest book, The Story of the World in 100 Moments, prompts another question. When did we start dividing history up like this, as if the past was a sort of hit parade? What will be Number One? 9/11? COVID-19? The prime suspect is Oliver’s fellow Scot the former director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor. A glance at the British Library catalogue confirms that, before MacGregor published his A History of the World in 100 Objects as a companion to the Radio 4 series, this was not a popular formula. Before MacGregor, you find only two titles: A Metrical History of New South Wales: 100 years in 100 verses (1888), which doesn’t really fit the bill; and the true ancestor, George Hecht’s 1919 book, subtitled A History of the War in 100 Cartoons. Post-MacGregor, there are another 65 titles in the catalogue using the formula. They extend from the narrow – A History of Dumfries and Galloway in 100 Documents – to the all-encompassing A History of the Universe in 100 Objects (both 2012). So is this really just a 21st-century phenomenon? Well, it’s certainly true that publishers like a sure thing. We can put much of the trend down to market forces, or a desperate attempt to sex up rather dry material. A History of the Music of Bristol Cathedral in 100 Objects, anyone? But, faced with the vastness of history, historians have always had to chop it up. One of the first was the 6th-century Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus (Humble Dionysius), who came up with
Tale of the century: Neil Oliver
the distinction between BC and AD. In his time, dating in the West was still done by Roman consular year. It was a few centuries before his idea was widely adopted, and it has faced secular opposition more recently. Hence the introduction of BCE, Before the Common Era, which just happens to begin at the traditional year of the birth of Christ. But, for sheer impact, Dionysius’s historical division puts MacGregor in the shade. Not every historian chops in the same way. J H Hexter, American historian of Britain’s Tudors and Stuarts, made a distinction between ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’. All historians have to make generalisations, and all historians have to give specific examples. But some, Hexter argued, are more inclined to yoke things together (the lumpers), while others prefer to point out the differences between them (the splitters). Marxist historians, Hexter thought, liked to draw as much as possible into
A 6th-century monk came up with the distinction between BC and AD
their theory of historical materialism. They were lumpers par excellence. While their theories could explain a lot about the past, they couldn’t really cope with individual agency, the importance of thought, or the sheer variety of past experience. Though the heyday of Marxism has passed, it would be wrong to say we’re all splitters now. Splitting appeals to the general, non-academic reader. We like our history manageable and are drawn to individual stories – even if they’re about objects, not individuals – and are less excited by theories. But not all of us, and certainly not so many among Continental readers of history. The popular version of lumping sees history through a single lens, or offers a solitary key: cod, perhaps, or work, or the Winchester repeating rifle. In France, and then worldwide, one of the bestselling history books of recent years has been the economic historian Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. Despite its title, it updated Marx by looking at economic inequality from the 18th century to our own: the last word in lumping. Piketty, unlike MacGregor, has not spawned many imitators. That may be to do not with history – but with art. Poets have (nearly) always thrived on the artificial constraints of their practice, from the 14-line sonnet to the 17-syllable haiku. Perhaps the real progenitor of MacGregor and co is not a history book, but the poet Wallace Stevens’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1954). In choosing to divide history up, historians have brought it a step closer to poetry. That may not please the lumpers, but it’s hard to argue with the sales. Neil Oliver’s The Story of the World in 100 Moments (Penguin) is out on 16th September The Oldie September 2021 63
Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT THE LAST LETTER FROM YOUR LOVER (12A)
NETFLIX
Kingsley Amis was a nightmare to watch films with. ‘He wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t say that. He wouldn’t wear that,’ he’d say, ticking off the mistakes, particularly in period films, where the opportunities for smug corrections multiply. Kingers would have had a field day with the howlers in The Last Letter from Your Lover, the story of a forbidden love affair in 1965, based on the 2008 Jojo Moyes novel. It’s a rollicking good story, as you’d expect from the bestselling Moyes, who sold six million copies of Me Before You (2012). All seems well-matched between dashing sixties plutocrat Lawrence Stirling (Joe Alwyn) and his superglam
wife Jennifer (Shailene Woodley) – until she falls for Anthony O’Hare (Callum Turner), a sensitive journalist sent to profile Stirling. Their love affair is doomed until, 40 years later, another young journalist (Felicity Jones) stumbles on the story of their romance and attempts to piece it together through their letters. As she does so, she falls for her fellow sleuth, the newspaper librarian (Nabhaan Rizwan) – a perilous profession these days. One of the first howlers in the film is the idea that a newspaper would have as big and as well-staffed a library as this one does. Kingsley Amis would have forgiven that one – not least because Jojo Moyes was herself a journalist on the Independent for a decade and so would have taken liberties, knowing the truth – which is different to making mindless errors. What destroys the credibility of the film is the voices and, by extension, the acting of the principal actors.
Criminal acting: Shailene Woodley and Callum Turner 64 The Oldie September 2021
Callum Turner, 31, looks terrific as a young hack – he is a model, as well as an actor. But no hack – in 1965 or now – talks the way he does. You can hear the joins between his modern London accent and an attempted posh ‘olden days’ accent, and any charm his looks convey is destroyed by the resulting voice. The effect gets worse when the late Ben Cross plays the older Anthony O’Hare, still mulling over his youthful affair. I always thought Cross, who died last year, aged 72, was the flattest actor in Chariots of Fire (1981). But at least he could do a perfectly decent receivedEnglish accent, despite coming from a similar, working-class London background to Callum Turner. So, when you first hear Ben Cross’s Anthony, you wonder what happened in the intervening years that made his accent change so much. A session with Professor Henry Higgins? The problem isn’t class, though – it’s an acting problem. An actor’s most natural gift should be impressions of other people – that’s their job, really – and the voice is the quickest route to a good impression. If you can’t raise or lower your voice a few notches on the English class register, how are you going to manage playing someone from the Bronx or Sicily? Dominic West’s Baltimore accent in The Wire seems ever more impressive – even Americans thought he was American. Romantic films are as fragile as comedies. If you don’t laugh at a funny film, it’s a disaster. And, if the heartstrings don’t tremble in a romance, it’s a failure. It doesn’t matter how good-looking the actors are or how lovely their clothes and houses are, with the right number of buttons and the right kind of curtains. (All this is done well here.) If actors can’t conjure up charm through their voices, then it’s an untrue romance.
GARY SMITH
THEATRE NICHOLAS LEZARD LEOPOLDSTADT Wyndham’s Theatre Now, where were we before we were so rudely interrupted? Ah yes, champing at the bit to see Tom Stoppard’s new – and possibly final – play, whose 2020 run was stopped for the obvious reason in March of that year. Now it’s back for a new run. Leopoldstadt follows the fortunes, or rather misfortunes, of the Merz and Jacobowitz families in Vienna from 1899 until 1955. I think it is rather cute and possibly deliberate that the play opens in the year that Wyndham’s Theatre opened, too. Stoppard and his director, Patrick Marber, have an association with the place. The families are well-to-do bourgeois; haut-bourgeois, really. But even though some of them have married outside the faith and one has converted to Catholicism, they are unmistakably Jewish. For the first few minutes, a Star of David sits on top of their Christmas tree before it is discreetly replaced with something more conventional. This opening scene, in which everyone bustles about in the approved theatrical manner, is grandly opulent in spectacle. The word for the décor – candles and gilt and exquisite furniture and a grand piano – is, I believe, ‘ravishing’. Children scamper about or play with tasteful toy trains. Maids come and go, laying out neatly wrapped presents. Vaguely but non-intrusively expository dialogue is declaimed. And, from up in the gods, your correspondent quickly gives up trying to work out who on earth is who. Actually, it’s not too hard in the end, but the initial impression is overwhelming, especially because of the children. Children are hard to tell apart at the best of times, and from far closer distances. But here they are the children of Gretl and Eva and Wilma and Hanna and Hermann and Ludwig and Ernst and Kurt… A fair amount of time in the play is spent on explaining their relationships. Which is not a complaint, considering that one of the main strands of the play is about identity. And identity is a matter of life and death when the Nazis come calling, as they do in one particularly chilling scene, set on Kristallnacht. The point about the play being called Leopoldstadt is not only that it is the Jewish district, but also that the Merz and Jacobowicz families don’t actually live there. One cannot simply wish away one’s heritage by moving into a better part of town. And also: by the final act, the family tree has undergone some vicious pruning. The
Viennese whirl: Hermann Merz (Aidan McArdle) in Leopoldstadt
earlier abundance serves to place the ensuing scarcity in sharp relief. The play has an autobiographical whiff, or resonance with Stoppard’s own story (he discovered he was Jewish only relatively late in life). But I wonder if I would have worked out that it was by him if it had been presented anonymously. Leopoldstadt very much appreciates the local culture: namechecks are given to Freud (plenty of times), Mahler, Schoenberg, Riemann (the mathematician), Arthur Schnitzler (an edition of one of his plays ironically serves to expose a character’s infidelity) – but they remain off-stage. A younger Stoppard would not have been too shy to drag them out from the wings and give them a speech or two, if not a starring role. He has not disdained to put Joyce, Tristan Tzara or even Byron on stage in the past. There is little of his trademark cleverness – or clevercleverness. But, this being Stoppard, there is not a moment of stupidity for its entire, uninterrupted two hours and 20 minutes – unless one counts the opening of the 1928 section. That’s when one of the young women does the Charleston and says, ‘I want to go to America!’ – in case we wondered what year it was or where the Charleston came from. But here the Stoppardian voice is muted, and given to telling, in mostly unadorned fashion, the story of the first disastrous half of the 20th century, as seen from a particular perspective. However, as with all plays that seek to do the Grand Historical Sweep, there is a feeling that detail has been sacrificed to scope; that this is a play that wants to be an epic film, or one that feels a little constrained.
Somehow, its 140 minutes seem to pass by in something of a rush. But then this could also be a testament to Stoppard’s stagecraft. Between him and Patrick Marber, I reckon, there is a greater repository of theatrical intelligence and experience than you could get from any other two people working in the medium. This is not a hectoring play. It doesn’t come with any message – beyond the sobering message of history, or the message that, as Freud said, barbarism is not as far from the human surface as we would like, which after all is what his essay Civilisation and Its Discontents has to tell us. That could have been an alternative title, or subtitle, for Leopoldstadt. But then, any work that looks long and hard at history could be called that.
RADIO VALERIE GROVE One of Radio 4’s virtues is in confronting subjects we’d rather not think about. In a recent edition of Helen Lewis’s The Spark – in which people find solutions to social problems – the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh questioned why, with him having advanced prostate cancer and facing intolerable pain, ‘The law insists I must suffer.’ A more common unthinkable is Alzheimer’s. The disintegration of the mind was dreaded by the late Jonathan Miller, since his author mother died with it at 55. The subject of memory, what it is and how it defines us obsessed Miller since he first practised as a doctor. He had devised a television series called Memories Are Made of This, but could never get it commissioned – one The Oldie September 2021 65
of the many professional slights that so wounded him in later years. Meanwhile, his family, noticing the first signs of the onset of his dementia, knew that if he had been able to recognise it, he’d definitely have wanted it to be recorded. So they allowed his friend Richard Denton to film the increasingly speedy diminution of that prodigious mind and fast-talking brain. Denton captured how a vast repository of knowledge, scientific and artistic, disappeared – including the blackly funny moment when Dr Miller wiped his wife, Rachel, the GP, from the slate. ‘Married? I never married anyone!’ ‘You did. You married Mum,’ said son William. When Miller junior, author of Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad and Other Grown-ups, approached the BBC with this fascinating material, they still turned it down. But he did manage to achieve ‘a precious hour on Radio 4’. The resulting Archive on 4 – recording the confusions and repetitions, the increasingly tragic oblivion – reflected just what riches the TV boys had turned down. How any programme gets commissioned – the labyrinthine contortions and compromises people go through to create what later proves an obvious hit – made a hilarious series last year. It has just been re-run (and is available on Sounds.) What’s Funny About… gathered together the people behind programmes such as Blackadder, Goodness Gracious Me and The Thick of It. There really is no better company than actors and broadcasters reminiscing: The Oldie’s John Lloyd on how Stephen Fry made funny lines funnier; Meera Syal on the genius of such sketches such as ‘I could murder an English’; and Armando Iannucci on getting the highest-ever count of F-words in a single half-hour (to hear this, I had to tick a box saying I was over 16). In our cancel-culture climate, given the terrorism of the Twittersphere, one can see how such programmes as The Kumars at No 42 were doomed. No one who met Piers Plowright, the inspirational radio-documentary-maker, ever forgot his handsome looks, his good humour or his hat. When Plowright was interviewing, ‘Ordinary people came out with things that stop your heart,’ said Simon Elmes on Last Word. Please may we hear a repeat of Nobody Stays in This House Long which won the Prix Italia in 1983, in which Plowright recorded a genteel Edwardian couple leaving their Kensington home after 55 years, sorting their things. ‘Here’s an opium pipe,’ said the old gent. ‘And this wonderful stamp collection. Do boys collect stamps now?’ 66 The Oldie September 2021
I enjoyed Markie Robson-Scott’s childhood memory: ‘My grandmother used to eat our pets. She ate our rabbit, two summers running, and the next summer she ate Donald Duck!’ This was in Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s book British Summer Time Begins. It was on Radio 4 Extra, a refuge of this summer when our incredible success in Olympics and A levels made us all incredibly proud and was so incredibly surreal. My other refuge was the New Statesman podcast on corrupt and useless politicians, in which Ian Hislop ranted to Iannucci about spads – ‘just mates’ – and cronies. By summer’s end, weren’t we all shouting at the wireless?
TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS The elephant in the room with Morecambe and Wise is homosexuality, or rather the fear of being mistaken for a homosexual: ‘Hey, gerroff! I’ll smash your face in!’ is a frequent threat. The embracing and fighting, the lapel-grabbing and face-slapping, and the rapprochements: it was Eddie Braben who’d noticed how intertwined the comedians were, with a friction that seemed more like a marriage. They share a flat, they share a bed, and they were obsessively interested in genitalia and a fear of castration: ‘I’ve got one’ – ‘Haven’t we all’; ‘He must have a party piece’ – ‘I haven’t looked’; ‘Hitchcock?’ – ‘He might have – I didn’t ask.’ In the classic scripts Braben wrote, capturing Eric and Ernie’s weird domesticity, the suggestion of homosexuality is enough. A trace, a vestigial clue to what lies beneath. What we see is not what we are seeing – that pipe that is not a pipe, as Magritte would say. And Eric kept a pipe with him in the bedroom scenes ‘for the masculinity’, as he once told an interviewer. ‘I basically always make it as mannish as possible by smoking a pipe. Have you ever met a queer with a pipe?’ (Graham Chapman?) In The Lost Tapes,
based on a BBC canister found in the attic, and unseen since October 1970, the comedians went through their familiar paces. Jokes about Ernie’s baldness (‘You can’t see the join’), ventriloquist gags, silly policeman routines. Watching a hospital sketch, where pipe-puffing Eric comes to visit a prone Ernie, Ben Miller, a talking head, remarked perceptively, ‘You can see how lonely he’s been without him.’ By and large, however, Derek Griffiths, Jonathan Ross and Bonnie Langford went in for a lot of forced laughter. The lost tapes would have been better off remaining lost. More elephants, more rooms, in Sex/ Life, a soft-core series, which Gyles Brandreth freeze-frames. The glaring, unmentioned suggestion here is, despite decades of feminism and equality and empowerment, that what women want is the same as ever it was, ie to be defined by their need for a jolly good seeing-to from glowering hairy he-men, who loom from the shadows, saying, ‘Let me take you for a ride!’ In this programme, the peculiarly christened Billie Connelly is tired of being a mother, and tired of her nice, responsible husband, a Wall Street investment banker called Cooper. Instead, she is tempted by ‘gamechanging sex’ with an Australian record-producer, going by the name of Brad. Brad and Billie have midnight swims in a twinkling rooftop pool, where what ensues George Melly used to call yodelling in the cavern. There was another clinch in a railway tunnel. Billie’s justification for adultery – or, as dramatised here, rampant selfishness – is that ‘traditional sexual monogamy is unheard of in the animal kingdom’, which will surely come as news to Catholics and penguins. When watching Baptiste, I wondered if I’d had a stroke, I was so foxed by the structure. One minute, Tchéky Karyo was sporting a bushy beard; then he wasn’t. Fiona Shaw was in a wheelchair; then she wasn’t. Then she was, and the big beard was back. Plus Fiona was now rainswept and swearing, glaring at everyone with resentment. No wonder, as, ostensibly the Ambassador to
Best of friends: the Morecambe and Wise bed scene, inspired by Laurel and Hardy
Ian Baker
‘Why can’t you be like other men and evolve?’
Hungary, she received no support from the intelligence services when her husband was killed and her children kidnapped. Her embassy also seemed to contain no staff – all she had was Tchéky’s address and a lot of pluck. I wish she’d told him his French accent and ridiculous limp would have been exaggerated even for Inspector Clouseau. Fiona Shaw is one of my favourites – I love her Irish Ascendancy voice and poise. But she has never been in anything half-decent. The overrated Killing Eve; various Agatha Christie thrillers; Three Men and a Little Lady … can’t somebody adapt a few Elizabeth Bowen or Molly Keane novels with her in mind? For an author whose keynote was clean brevity, six episodes devoted to Hemingway were more than enough. The bullfights, guns, marlin-fishing and cheerful extermination of wolves, bears and lions; the endless self-dramatising. We were told about it all. Hemingway was always suffering from concussion
– so he’d not have had a hope with the narrative shape of Baptiste. Two facts emerged to tickle me. One, his mother dressed him up as a girl, which explains the over-compensating machismo. Secondly, an ex-wife, Martha Gellhorn, settled in Chepstow, which is where my sister Angharad owns and runs an award-winning jam factory – the Preservation Society.
MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE If you haven’t yet heard of The Oldie music column’s award for Conspicuous Bravery in the Staging of Rare Repertory, it’s because I’ve only just thought of it. There were two contenders for the award: David Pountney’s Grange Park Opera production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Maid of Pskov, also known as Ivan the Terrible, and Garsington
Opera’s revival of Handel’s musically glorious but little-known and rarely performed Amadigi. Like Rinaldo and the Water Music of 1717, Amadigi shows the 30-year-old Handel at the peak of his early powers. It’s the libretto’s less-than-skilful reshaping of this popular 16th-century Spanish romance, Don Quixote’s favourite reading, that has long seemed problematic. That and the minimalist cast: an alto castrato (Amadigi, our dauntless hero), a contralto (his ill-fated rival) and two sopranos (a flame-haired temptress and her saintly antitype). ‘But what’s not to adapt and enjoy?’ seems to have been the cry of director designer Netia Jones and conductor Christian Curnyn. The show was a triumph. As was the May 1715 première, before the initial run was cut short by the threat of a Jacobite invasion. ‘No Opera performed, the Rebellion of the Tories and Papists being the cause, the King and Court not liking to go into Crowds in these troublesome times,’ it was said. In the summer of 2021, it was not only the court that was reluctant to ‘go into Crowds’. Which is why I’m offering a further award to an event that took place against particular odds – the Hampshirebased Grange Festival’s staging of a dazzling and properly moving account of what is arguably Rossini’s greatest opera, La Cenerentola. Shortly after the season was confirmed, the festival was hit amidships by the withdrawal of its resident orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony, over concerns about crowding in the pit. The solution – to pre-record the orchestra – looked problematic. That this wasn’t the case was due to the sophistication of the sound system and the presence on the rostrum of that well-practised master of the pre-Puccini Italian repertory David Parry. (Would that Parry had been on hand for Garsington’s staging of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory, about which the less said the better.) In this age of text-led ‘director’s opera’, we’ve largely lost sight of the fact that the most important person in the production of any opera is the conductor. The glory of Grange Park Opera’s revival of Ivan the Terrible was the musical direction of St Petersburgborn Mikhail Tatarnikov. It helped, too, that the company had managed to smuggle a couple of Russians past the UK Border Force. Mariinsky Theatre star Liubov Sokolova sang the old nurse, without which few Russian dramas are complete, whilst Evelina Dobracheva was the The Oldie September 2021 67
opera, the powerful crowd scenes apart, lies in the music’s unfolding of that dichotomy within Ivan’s character. As Valery Gergiev, conductor of a fine 1994 Philips recording, has observed, the opera is first and foremost an exploration of the spiritual life, and what happens when that life is denied. Incidentally, the first statue of Ivan the Terrible was raised not in Stalin’s time, but in Vladimir Putin’s in 2016. Something to do with that 450-yearold Lithuanian feud, perhaps?
GOLDEN OLDIES IMOGEN THOMAS LITTLEBROOK MARLENE DIETRICH AT 120
Hear no evil: Olga (Evelina Dobracheva), Ivan the Terrible, Grange Park
eponymous maid of Pskov, love-child of the young Tsar Ivan. It’s Ivan’s discovery of his long-lost daughter that tempts him (before her death in a botched insurrection) to call off the destruction of Pskov as payback for the city’s contacts with the hated Lithuanians. The opera was brought to London in 1913, with the great Russian bass Chaliapin as Ivan. It was a sensation both musically and for the smallness of the audiences it attracted. Edwardian England was wary of the Russians and mystified by them, though Sir Thomas Beecham put the blame on English taste. The rich, he opined, supported grand opera out of habit; the self-improving poor out of curiosity. Beyond that, ‘a meat tea, followed by a visit to the pictures or the music hall’, was the nation’s entertainment of choice. Things don’t change. Even with Grange Park Opera’s 750-seat Theatre in the Woods operating at a loss-making 50-per-cent occupancy, this was the one production in an otherwise sell-out season where tickets remained available even after a well-reviewed first night. David Pountney’s decision to sharpen our sense of Tsar Ivan by playing him as Joseph Stalin was plausible enough. In reality, Stalin’s private view of Russia’s founding Tsar was that he was a sanctimonious bigot who wasn’t ruthless enough. As he told filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, he had little sympathy with a man who, after a spell of genocidal slaughter, would retire for a period of prayer and repentance rather than getting on with more killing. The greatness of Rimsky-Korsakov’s 68 The Oldie September 2021
The year was 1954 and I was 21 and loving my job as personal assistant/ secretary to the actor-manager Donald Wolfit. Marlene Dietrich – the 120th anniversary of whose birth is in December – was been 53 and at the height of her fame. She was in London to do a season of 100 nights at the Café de Paris. The management had arranged for a different celebrity to introduce her each night. On that never-to-be-forgotten night, it was Donald’s turn and he took with him his wife, Rosalind, and me. I wish I could remember what I wore. I can’t imagine that I had anything adequate to the glittering occasion. We took our places at a prominent table just at the foot of the famous curved staircase, down which she would glide. I still have the menu. There didn’t seem to be a choice.
‘Most beautiful woman I’d ever seen’
‘There are two certainties in life, Evans: death and tax avoidance’
We dined on ‘Tranche de foie gras truffée, Consommé froid au tasse de Xeres, Filet de sole Dieppoise, Contrefilet de boeuf rôti Caprice, and Coupe de fraises et framboises Maria mignardises’. When coffee had been served, the lights dimmed. Donald rose and made his suitably theatrical speech of introduction. She may have been 53 and have already made the same entry many times that season, but the moment of Marlene’s entry was one of pure drama and pure glamour. She appeared at the top of the staircase, lit by a golden spot and apparently wearing only a sprinkle of sequins which gathered and swirled into a long slender skirt. She sang Falling in Love Again, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, Lili Marlene and The Boys in the Backroom. All the favourites. She was the epitome of glamour and the audience loved her. Afterwards, we were invited back to her dressing room. Her fair curls were now swathed in a towel, and a dressing gown covered the sparkles. She insisted on making us a pot of tea. While we drank it, she told us about her day. She had been shopping for shoes in Oxford Street with her daughter. It had been very crowded and they hadn’t found what they wanted. She was easy company and we stayed chatting for some time. She wasn’t the glittering icon any more – more a comfortable housewife – but she was still the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Rachel Johnson is away
David Foggie’s Figure study of a young girl in a green dress with yellow floral ornamentation, oil on panel, c 1920, from the Liss Llewellyn collection
EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST
©LISS LLEWELLYN
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle 11th September to 26th February 2022 To pick a small nit at the outset, the title of this admirable show could mislead. It is not an examination of one portrait of one artist, but a fascinating display of the ways in which a generation of artists saw themselves and one another. I am an admirer of the husband-andwife dealership Liss Llewellyn, which has organised this exhibition. They have spent 30 years working directly with artists and visiting their studios, and the show is a distillation of that long experience. Their judgement and taste in modern British art is impeccable, but my faith was shaken for a moment when I received what I had been led to believe was the catalogue. It contains over 380 paintings and drawings – enough for three shows at least. Had they been infected by Tate Exhibition Giganticism?
Luckily not. The publication is in fact more of an accompanying book of illustrations and very brief essays. And the show consists of a manageable 85 portraits, self-portraits and linked works by 20th-century British artists, illustrating their muses, studios, friends and ‘allegories of creation’. Many of these artists knew one another as friends, lovers, teachers and pupils. I am a collector of portraits and self-portraits of the English watercolour school – generally rather earlier than these. But particular attraction is common to them all: a portrait may be not only of an artist one admires, but by another, often a friend. Here, for instance, are a powerful, humorous pencil portrait of Winifred
Knights by Colin Gill and studies of him by her. They all probably date from a 1921 walking tour in Italy. There’s also one of Knights sleeping by her fiancé (they never married) Alfred Mason, and a Knights self-portrait as Little Miss Muffet. There is Frank Brangwyn by William Belleroche and vice versa, and a Belleroche of the dining room in a house he shared with John Singer Sargent. Many of these artists are very well known; others less so, but certainly worth rediscovering. Percy Horton (1897-1970) and Charles Mahoney (1903-1968) are chiefly remembered as teachers, and they were good ones, but they also deserve to take centre stage for their own work. Liss Llewellyn has an excellent record as champion of such overlooked figures, and also for promoting women artists – despite current orthodoxy, not always the same. Alongside Knights and others is Evelyn Dunbar, who had been a pupil of Mahoney. This is the dealership’s second collaboration with the Laing this year, following a show of 50 watercolours, pastels and prints by women. The Oldie September 2021 69
Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER ACE ACERS There’s a Japanese maple for everyone. Pleasingly, there’s one for gardeners in every location – those with rolling acres to decorate; those living in restricted quarters with little more than a narrow ledge on which to balance a china bowl. Equally pleasing is the plant’s acceptance of little or no attention. Some endure as much fuss as a pampered brat at the hands of an over-devoted governess. The granddaddy of Japanese maples – for purposes here on in Acer palmatum and A japonicum – was J D Vertrees (1915–93). The entomologist and nurseryman, proving the point that vast tracts of land are unnecessary, once nurtured America’s largest collection of these distinctive and highly ornate trees in a mere one-and-a half-acre arboretum, in Oregon. His Japanese Maples, first published in 1978, is now in its fourth edition and belongs on every tree-fancier’s bookshelf, however short. It’s one of the few ‘encyclopedic’ books you’ll want to read in bed, where list-making pen and paper can be dispensed with as you’ll probably want each and every one of the 400 or so cultivars he so richly yet cogently describes. Along the way you’ll pick up a bit of Japanese – beni, deep red; shiro, white; hōgyoku, jewel. My own collection of A palmatum varieties numbers no more than 30, to most of which I have bade farewell, as we have sold up and are moving on. They’re too big to relocate. However, I am taking ten or more with me. They’re of a similar vintage but diminutive, less than a foot high. They’re grown as bonsai – a Japanese word describing ‘tray planting’, the art of cultivating and training a plant to create
the illusion of a dwarfed and aged tree. The Chinese word is penjing or penzai, often practised in a more elaborate fashion to mimic minuscule landscapes. These few examples, beginning now after a dozen years’ confinement to show interesting gnarled fissures and warty branches, have sentimental value as well as portability. I couldn’t forsake them. I started them in 2008 while recovering from intense radio- and chemotherapy. Too fatigued for any proper gardening, I could just manage the above-mentioned china bowl, a few ounces of compost, some grit and a teaspoon. Since then, I’ve also collected a host of books on this ancient form of husbandry, some referencing the craft in obscure sacred texts. Beware, though: bonsai can be addictive. And I haven’t even mentioned the exquisite and sometimes costly paraphernalia, which includes surgical-quality scissors and secateurs, coils of variously gauged copper wire and the very trays, or china bowls, that have an aesthetic beauty of their own. Maple nurseries proliferate or, rather, nurseries that sell maples proliferate. Specialist growers are not necessarily deemed essential – some of mine came from the likes of Tesco and Morrisons. Of the palmatums that I am abandoning
Autumn leaves: A palmatum varieties
many can be found again. I can’t imagine a garden without ‘Osakazuki’, thought to have the most intense autumn colour of all maples. I planted one as a companion to the almost identical ‘Ichigyōji’, as intensely yellow or gold in autumn as ‘Osakazuki’ is crimson. It’s not my trick, but one learned from Vertrees, who reminds us that many Japanese writers suggest planting both together ‘on a rise or hillside, or near a pond to allow the full glory of [their combined] fall brilliance to be appreciated’. They work equally well as side-by-side bonsai companions, their container set on a mirror to mimic a sheet of ornamental water. Put Vertrees on your Christmaspresent list – he’ll light the touchpaper of a stimulating and satisfying pastime, however challenged you are for space. Or energy.
KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD MEDLARS I am sometimes asked why our clifftop house in north Cornwall is called after a fruit – the medlar – which would have little chance of growing successfully on this exposed, windswept coast. The short answer is that the house’s name is Medla – probably taken from a place in the hills of West Bengal. But that’s another story. Medlar trees (available from Pomona Fruits) can be planted from late November through the winter. Grafted on to quince or hawthorn rootstock, they will grow to a height of about 10-15 feet and, since they are self-fertile, one tree will happily produce fruit on its own. Nottingham and Dutch are the best-known varieties, the latter having the larger fruit. Provided that your soil is not too chalky and is well-drained and that a sunny, sheltered site is chosen, medlar trees should not give any problems. The Oldie September 2021 71
Annual pruning in winter is advised until the fourth year, when a reasonable crop can be expected. However, the fruit may be secondary to the beauty of the tree, which will have a spread greater than its height, producing single white flowers in early summer with leaves turning red and russet in autumn. Medlar fruits struggle to ripen on the tree in this country and are better suited to a Mediterranean climate. But they can be picked when still hard in autumn and stored, with the hollow head downwards, until they have ‘bletted’, which describes the process of softening until overripe (blet in French). In previous centuries the fruit was kept in damp sawdust until the flesh was soft and brown, when it was sucked out from the skin. The better option today is to make the fruit, both firm and softened, into jelly. Medlars have been described, not very convincingly, as looking like bronze rosehips. With their mottled skin and tailed calyx protruding from the head of the fruit, they can look more like giant brown beetles. I have read that a medlar tree planted at Hatfield House in the reign of James I was still standing a few years ago. I wonder if it survives today.
ELISABETH LUARD
COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD PASTRY PYRAMID SCHEME Weighing scales and sugar thermometers are out. Handfuls and pinches are in. You heard it here first (don’t you always?). No-recipe recipes are on trend in the cookery section of the New York Times. Resident food columnist Sam Sifton discusses ingredients and method but fails to deliver exact quantities or numbers the dish will feed. The idea has proved so popular – readers’ complaints of lack of culinary discipline are disregarded – that the non-recipes are now available between hard covers. The method works well for the basics. Take choux pastry, a very forgiving recipe. In theory, the idea is daunting. In practice, it’s easy as pie. Once you’ve prepared the basic dough, classic choux-pastry recipes are: profiteroles (cream-stuffed choux buns); éclairs (piped fingers of choux pastry, stuffed as above, finished with chocolate or coffee icing); pets de nonne (‘nun’s farts’: choux-pastry fritters dusted with sugar); the Burgundian gougère (a ring of choux pastry flavoured and studded with cheese); and the basic mix makes delicate little dumplings when poached in broth. But the glory of the choux tribe is the croquembouche, the traditional French wedding cake since maître pâtissier Marie-Antoine Carême first came up with 72 The Oldie September 2021
Transfer to a baking rack to cool. Then stuff with sweetened, whipped cream, crème pâtissière or vanilla ice cream. Trickle with melted, caramelised sugar and pile in a pyramid. Or serve un-caramelised with hot chocolate sauce – dark chocolate melted with a little water.
RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE MILDREDS, SOHO, LONDON FISHERS, LEITH, EDINBURGH the recipe for a tall pyramid of choux buns stuck together with caramelised sugar. It’s light, easy-going and perfect for anyone obliged to delay a wedding for reasons we don’t mention. And, when the moment comes to cut the cake, all the bride has to do is crack the pile with a silver hammer, sending choux buns skittering in all directions. So much more fun for the wedding guests than a slab of fruitcake. Basic choux pastry To prepare enough profiteroles for a wedding croquembouche (or a decentsized party), you’ll need half a pack (125g) butter, 2 mugfuls (300ml) of water, 10 rounded tablespoonfuls (250g) plain flour and four middle-sized eggs. Roughly chop the butter and put it in a heavy saucepan with the water. Bring to the boil and remove from the heat as soon as the butter melts. Sprinkle in the flour one spoonful at a time, beating till perfectly smooth with no visible pockets of flour. Set the pan back on the heat and beat the mixture until it’s solid enough to leave the sides clean – a few minutes. Allow the dough to cool to finger heat. Beat in the eggs one by one (easiest in a mixer), beating thoroughly between each addition. At first, the dough will seem reluctant to accept the egg. Persist – it becomes easier as each one is added. By the end, the dough should be smooth and shiny but firm enough to hold its shape. Preheat the oven to bread-baking temperature (350°F/180°C/Gas4). Rub a couple of baking trays with a little butter (not necessary if you’re using non-stick trays). Using a teaspoon and a damp finger, drop little blobs of dough on the trays, allowing plenty of room for expansion. Bake for 35-40 minutes, till well puffed, prettily browned and crisp. As soon as you take them out of the oven, slip a knife into the sides to let out the steam, or the pastry is likely to soften and collapse (no matter – you can still stuff them). If the innards are still a little doughy, scoop out excess dough with a sharp teaspoon.
One of the highlights of The Oldie’s calendar is the judges’ lunch for the Oldie of the Year awards (TOOTY). Not all the judges could make it last month, but a discreet table was booked in the wholly indiscreet Academy Club, in Soho. Panic! Lucy, the manager, told us they had been forced to close that day because half their staff had been carried off by the pingdemic, and there weren’t enough left to boil and serve an egg. So we were forced to find shelter elsewhere. Bang opposite is Mildreds, London’s premier vegan restaurant, and the obvious solution. Gyles Brandreth, our eats-nothing-with-a-face chairman, was thrilled with the change of venue. So Maureen Lipman, Rachel Johnson (in hot pants), the Editor and I followed in his wake. Mildreds was started in 1988 by Diane Thomas and Jane Muir. Tired of the beige look of most vegetarian dishes, they struck out for colour. And in January last year they went 100 per cent vegan. Vegan restaurants may be more of a recent phenomenon − although the Vegan Society was formed in 1944 – but there were 34 vegetarian restaurants in London in 1914. War rationing saw their numbers expand: 83,000 adults, registered as veggies, could swap their meat coupons for more eggs and dairy. There was no rationing at our table on that hot July day. To save time, Gyles insisted we order and share all the starters. The highlights were the Roman artichokes and basil polpette pappardelle, but then I never got close to the mango ranchero nachos. Then we were each allowed our own choice of main course, and the menu was lit up by two very meaty words: BURGERS (as a heading), under which there appeared a couple of ‘chick’n’ options. What sort of culinary appropriation was afoot? ‘Chick’n’, we were told, was a plant-based derivative – surely it’s not beyond the wit of vegans to come with their own names. Best of all, why not name dishes after famous vegans, just as the Edwardians immortalised Dame
Nellie Melba? In 50 years, our grandchildren could be ordering a Rusk à la Morrissey in a (Barry) White sauce. While in Edinburgh, I thought I’d look up my token Scottish friend, Fergus. Things are tough across the border: his cellar is down to its last 3,000 bottles and he has only 312 days of shooting this year. After the dinner he cooked on an open fire, I thought the least I could do was to enliven his diet of defrosted elk by taking him back to Auld Reekie for lunch. Fergus eschews the luxury that is petrol. So we were forced to take the Tesla, which his delightful children had charged overnight on the farm treadmill. We parked in Aldi to subsidise his rum punches on Mustique, and wandered down to Fishers, the star of Leith’s quay restaurants. Edinburgh has become my favourite British city: the space, the hills, the New Town. And I do dare say it … the Englishness of it all. If only they could eliminate half the tartan and shortbread shops. There can’t be that many Japanese tourists claiming kinship with Highland clans. Summer came early. So we sat outside watching the locals fill the pub terraces. Our two exceptional waitresses, who served us our salt-cod brandade, sea bass and Chablis, bathed us in warmth and hope. Edinburgh service is the best in the land. In addition to the nurturing, Miss Jean Brodie accents there seems to be a genuine auld-lang-syne belief in welcoming strangers, even Sassenachs. Empowered, Fergus and I waved goodbye – but only after he had plundered Aldi for some reduced-price, possibly vegan WD40. Fishers Leith, 1 The Shore, Edinburgh EH6 6QW; tel: 0131 554 5666; two courses: £30; www.fishersrestaurants.co.uk Mildreds, 45 Lexington Street, London W1F 9AN; also Camden, Dalston and King’s Cross; tel: 020 7494 1634; mains: £13; www.mildreds.co.uk
DRINK BILL KNOTT HIC! HACK’S HOCK What happened to hock and Moselle? In Raymond Postgate’s The Plain Man’s Guide to Wine (the 1960 vintage), the author – ‘not to be mincing about it’ – declares that the best of these ‘Rhenish’ wines ‘are the finest white wines in the world’, with ‘an astonishing floral bouquet, which is unparalleled’. He spends five pages extolling their virtues before mentioning Riesling, and then in relation to the wines of Alsace, ‘still most usually marketed under the names of their grapes’. Alsace rather
stole a march on the rest of the Old World in putting the grape variety on the label. Whatever the reason – perhaps it was the tidal wave of Liebfraumilch that engulfed Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, alienating serious wine-lovers – our historic penchant for the finest wines of the Rhine and the Mosel has dwindled alarmingly over the last few decades. Our attitude to sweetness in food and drink has always puzzled me. Crab, fresh peas or beans, strawberries, tomatoes, peaches, even lamb: describe any of these as ‘sweet’ and it is a term of approbation. Not with wine; not any more. But, as David Motion, owner of The Winery in Maida Vale, proved to me over a recent lunch, German Rieslings do not have to be sweet, or even ‘off-dry’, the modern euphemism for ‘medium’. David is a man on a mission. A former pop producer who still dabbles as a composer, he took over the Winery in 1998, started importing wines directly from Germany and has been selling a higher and higher proportion of dry – trocken – wines ever since. David’s best-selling Riesling is made by Gerrit Walter, who was an intern at The Winery in 2009. His Walter Riesling Trocken 2019 (£10.99) is a great introduction to the joys of dry Riesling. Grown on vertiginous terraces beside the Moselle, its racy, green apple acidity has a hint of slate from the local soils. Other favourites – it was a long lunch – included Christine Huff’s intense and complex Rabenturm [Ravens’ Tower] 2011 from Rheinhessen; the ornatelylabelled Victoriaberg Hochheimer 2020 from Joachim Flick, which celebrates Queen Victoria’s love of hock and her visit to one vineyard in particular; and J B Becker’s gloriously honeyed – but still bone-dry – Riesling Spätlese 1998. Lunch also demonstrated that Riesling is the finest of food-friendly wines, matching happily with langoustines, vitello tonnato and pasta with truffles. The Winery is a sweetshop for grown-ups, one in which most of the sugar has been turned to alcohol. Should you not be able to visit, they will happily take phone orders and deliver to your door. David is a genial evangelist whose shop is a little cathedral, a shrine to a style of wine that we used to love and will, I hope, love again. Reaching for the bookshelf, I will leave the last word to the great John Arlott. He wrote, in 1982, that ‘a good hock is never better than when it is drunk, reflectively, relaxedly, and most happy in the open air of a summer evening’. The Winery, 4 Clifton Road, London W9; tel: 020 7286 6475; www.thewineryuk.com
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 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. However, if you wish, you can buy cases of each individual wine. Cava Brut Reserva, Bodgeas Sumarroca, DO Cava, Spain 2018, offer price £12.49, case price £149.88 Classic, bone-dry, vintage cava with nice weight and length. Knocks spots off cheap Champagne. Fabrizio Vella Catarratto Organico, Terre Siciliane, Italy 2020, offer price £8.75, case price £105.00 Crisp, delicious, grapefruittinged white in the modern Sicilian style. Terrific value. Côteaux Bourguignons, Albert Fontaine, France 2020, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Summer red that takes a slight chill very well: 100 per cent Gamay with bags of ripe cherry fruit.
Mixed case price £124.92 – a saving of £28.95 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER
Call 0117 370 9930
Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 4th October 2021.
The Oldie September 2021 73
SPORT JIM WHITE TIGER’S TALE When the pandemic-postponed Ryder Cup takes place at the Whistling Straits course in Wisconsin, it will be a very different kind of contest from those stretching back to 1997. It is unlikely to feature any contribution from Tiger Woods. He has played or vice-captained in nine of the last ten cross-Atlantic golf competitions (he was absent in 2014 with back issues). But this time the complications from a catastrophic car accident in February seem certain to keep him away. He still requires crutches to aid his walking. And the last thing Woods has ever wanted is for the world to see a hint of weakness. The suggestion is he will absent himself, even from watching from the sidelines. And it would seem, at least from this side of the Atlantic, that America will have little cause to miss him. It is one of the oddest quirks of sport that the finest golfer of his and many a generation has one of the worst records when it comes to the game’s most significant team tournament. The eight times he has been capped by the USA in Ryder Cups he has made little contribution of note. At the last Ryder Cup, at the Golf National in 2018, he lost all four of his matches. Across 37 rounds he has played in the competition, he has won 13, lost 21 and halved three. That is the equivalent of Lionel Messi invariably scoring an own goal for Argentina or Virat Kohli being bowled for a duck every time he bats for India. And his record is even worse when examined in detail. In the singles part of the contest, he has done all right: of eight matches, he has won four, lost two and tied two. But with a partner he has been a liability. In the foursomes, his record is won four, lost nine and tied one; in the fourball, it is five, ten and zero. At his peak, this was a sportsman who epitomised absolute self-absorption. He was brought up not to demonstrate concern for anyone else, to concentrate wholly on himself. When he was dominating the game in the nineties and early 2000s, the idea of subsuming himself into the team ethic or helping a partner was anathema to his very being. At the height of his powers, Woods was a toxic presence in the dressing room, universally loathed for the manner in which he treated his fellow professionals with contempt. Let’s just say this was not a team player. Yet Steve Stricker, the USA captain for September’s challenge, has lamented 74 The Oldie September 2021
Woods’s likely absence. To have him there, just as one of the vice-captains, as he was in 2016, would have been of huge benefit, Stricker reckons. The younger generation, he says, driven to take up the game by his genius, revere him. How they would benefit from his being there, giving them the benefit of his experience. This is the irony of Woods. Perversely, in the years since his ignominious fall in 2009, as he has become less potent as a player, he has become a more outgoing, generous, giving colleague. It may have been a proposition that would have been greeted with hollow laughter at his peak, but many now talk of him as a future Ryder Cup captain, perhaps as soon as 2023. A player who, despite his brilliance, could barely win a hole when playing in the Cup and regarded the whole thing as an inconvenient diversion from the real business of winning things for himself could ultimately end up as captain. There have been some sizeable turnarounds in the history of sport, but that might just be the biggest.
MOTORING ALAN JUDD TOP MARQUES Depending on how you define a birthday, Gordon Keeble is either 57 or 61. There are said to be 90 in the family – a remarkable survival rate, given that there were only ever 100 (or 99, if you exclude one made later from spares). They were, of course, cars – the product of an eager young start-up company founded by John Gordon and Jim Keeble. Their elegant, Bertonedesigned, Corvette-engined four-seater prototype caused a sensation at the 1960 Geneva Motor Show. Put together in three months, it did 70mph in first; 140mph flat out. That was going some in 1960. Production began in 1964, followed by liquidation in 1965. They ran out of money: a strike delayed the supply of steering boxes. I’ve only ever seen one, parked in Hastings. I left a note on the windscreen offering to buy it, but never heard. Building cars is a complicated, capital-intensive business with small profit margins. Motoring history is littered with the tombstones (radiator
Electric dream: the Tesla Model 3
grilles?) of optimistic start-ups, many dying even younger than Gordon Keeble. But might we now be in a more benign era for automotive interlopers? Tesla is the big new baby, of course, with its Model 3 the UK’s bestselling new car and a VW Golf-rival Model 2 due in 2023. Priced at about £20,000, this is a deliberate move down from premium sector to top-end popular which will – certainly should – keep traditional car-makers awake at night. Backed by the might of Elon Musk, Tesla is no financial minnow threatened by capital starvation. It’s here for the foreseeable. Ditto, I hope, Ineos’s Grenadier, the chemical conglomerate’s modernised version of the old Land Rover Defender. Prototypes are undergoing off-road trials in Austria as part of a 1.1 million-mile durability programme and they’ll soon be taking deposits for first sales next March. Although their annual sales target is a relatively modest 30,000, they too are another newcomer, already thinking long-term. They talk of hydrogenpowered successors which, given their core-business experience with hydrogen, is unlikely to be pie in the sky. Meanwhile, there’s a (very) new kid on the block. On 8th July, a two-seater sports car, the Vertige, was launched by Wells Motor Cars Ltd at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. It’s the work of Warwickshire-based Robin Wells and Robin Hall, who designed and built it over five years. They aim to sell just 25 a year – all bespoke – with the first seven already ordered and paid for. Just as the Grenadier replicates and updates the traditional Defender, so the Vertige (French for vertigo) harks back to the guiding principle of Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus. His mantra was ‘simplify, then add lightness’ (not a bad guide for life). It aims for technical simplicity and driver involvement. With its striking dihedral doors – gull wings that open upwards rather than outwards – it weighs in, fully fuelled, at 850kg. Its naturally aspirated Ford 2-litre Duratec engine block is mated with a six-speed manual gearbox, offering 0-60mph in 4.8 seconds and 140mph top speed. It costs around £45,000, and most parts are UK-sourced. Why do it? Because, says Robin Wells, his ideal car didn’t exist so he decided to make his own. It was a gruelling business, made possible by 3-D printing and computer-aided design (CAD). Will it do? I haven’t driven it but it’s compact and stylish. And the uncluttered interior, with its hand-stitched leather, Alcantara dash and instrument binnacle that adjusts with the steering wheel, looks a pretty good place to be.
Walking Tour with Harry Mount
Ancient London Thursday 14th October 2021 On a walking tour of the City of London, we will see the Roman wall, the Guildhall amphitheatre and the Mithraeum, London’s finest Roman temple. Along the way, you will learn the classical orders of architecture and the history of English Gothic from Harry Mount, architectural historian and editor of The Oldie. Includes lunch (and wine) in Middle Temple Hall, the best Elizabethan building in London. 12.45pm
Meet Harry Mount at Temple tube station
1pm
Two-course lunch in Middle Temple Hall
ALAMY
The Emperor Trajan statue at Tower Hill
2.15-4.30pm See the Roman wall, Guildhall
amphitheatre and Mithraeum
Middle Temple Hall
Tickets are £135 (inc VAT) per person, including lunch with wine. Limited to 24 people. Guarantee a place with Laura by emailing reservations@theoldie.co.uk or calling 01225 427311 (Monday-Friday)
The Oldie September 2021 75
Matthew Webster: Digital Life
Don’t get copyright wrong If you are involved in running a website of any size, you should be alert to copyright traps, especially as they relate to images. There are litigious copyright-enforcers hunting for you if you break the rules, and they are becoming more and more numerous and active. It’s all too easy to trip up: copying a picture from a news website is easy, and then sticking it into your own website is a doddle. It makes your website look better and probably illustrates a point being made in the text. The trouble is it’s almost certainly copyright infringement, and the big news websites in particular are fed up with their stuff being copied onto countless blogs and websites without either payment or attribution. You can see their
Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk
sites.google.com/new Google Sites allows you to create and run a simple website for free, using a template of your choice – extremely useful for clubs. It’s recently undergone a huge facelift. worldcams.tv/list We can’t travel, but we can see what’s going on – live webcams from around the world. Many have sound.
point. So they are increasingly making use of companies that specialise in finding breaches of copyright and then trying to impose fines and fees. It works like this: you, as the owner of an image, give the enforcer a copy of it, and any others you own. The enforcer then uses robots to scour the internet, worldwide, to find occasions when your images have been used. If it finds some, and if you have not given permission, it starts a process of trying to gain compensation for you – and no doubt takes a percentage of the proceeds. They’re not lawyers; they’re more like debt-collectors, and their methods bear close comparison – endless letters and emails, phone calls and ultimately letters from lawyers. Sometimes they will threaten huge penalties. I have seen letters suggesting that they will seek up to £150,000 in damages, but offering to settle ‘amicably, out of court’ for one per cent of that amount. They hope, I imagine, that many will settle for the £1,500 fine to make the bother go away. I run the village website, which acts as a repository for accounts, minutes of meetings and so on, as well as galleries of pictures of village events. It is hosted (very cheaply) by a local charity that provides services to community groups, and which is in turn funded by local councils and similar. They host over 500 websites like ours – those of clubs, associations, parish councils and village halls. All worthy stuff – but the chap who runs it tells me that even they have seen
these enforcers at work. The problem usually arises because one of the websites they host has unwisely used images that have been lifted from other websites without consent or fee. He tells me that when the sort of small sites they host are approached, it is usually with a demand for ‘compensation’ of four or five times the amount that would have been charged if a licence had been sought in the first place. I looked nervously through our website. There are many pictures of village events there, all taken by parishioners. I think their permission to use the pictures is implicit, as they sent them to me to be included, but I must admit that hitherto I have not sought explicit permission. In future I shall. It is also worth knowing that, if you are simply looking for generic pictures to enhance a site, there are many sources of excellent pictures that can be used freely – unsplash.com, pixabay.com or pexels. com, for example. I have a lot of sympathy for copyright-owners. The law is perfectly clear, and we should pay to use images that others have created – or at least obtain their permission. So please don’t pinch pictures, cartoons or graphics from other websites; you are just asking for trouble. And a polite request will often produce permission for no fee, especially if your site is not commercial. Anyway, it’s good manners. You wouldn’t borrow a camera without asking, would you?
Margaret Dibben: Money Matters
Funerals to die for Funeral arrangements are changing. Funeral directors, crematorium operators and firms selling prepaid funeral plans are being forced to improve the way they treat customers, through two separate changes to regulations. Buy-before-you-die funeral plans sound a good idea – you pay for your funeral ahead of time. So, when prices go up (as they steadily do), you believe you’ve bagged a bargain. But many bad 76 The Oldie September 2021
plans have been sold by rogue traders using high-pressure selling tactics that trap customers into unsuitable products. Even with good ones, it’s easy to miscalculate what you have bought. A standard plan costs about £3,500. But this won’t pay for flowers, burial plots, headstones, the wake, catering or, in some cases, even the full price of cremation or burial. It will, though, include a sum to pay commission and administration fees.
A basic funeral now, according to Sun Life, costs on average £4,184 – burials alone are £5,033 and cremations £3,885 – and the total cost of a send-off is £9,263. The unscrupulous operators make up a small minority of the industry but still need to be stamped out. Most planproviders voluntarily join the Funeral Planning Authority, which has its own code of conduct. Another drawback to funeral plans is
‘Sorry I’m late – I was hibernating’
the lack, at present, of consumer protection. Customers get no compensation if the provider goes bust and have no access to the Financial Ombudsman Scheme. This will change because the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is going to regulate the market. It will introduce a ban on commission payments to intermediaries, a ban on cold-calling and new standards for advertising. Any firm that has not been vetted and authorised will have to stop
trading; continuing in business will be a criminal offence. Unfortunately, the new regime won’t start until 29th July next year and the time delay gives rogue firms a window in which to push as many sales as they can. So – as with any product – ignore any cold calls you might get. Incidentally, if you have been responsible for a prepaid funeral taking place under COVID restrictions, be sure to ask for a refund for any
services included in the plan that could not be provided. Separately, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has investigated the funerals business because it suspected that some funeral directors were not treating customers fairly. Comparing costs is confusing, because prices are not always clearly set out and, even when they are, there is no uniformity. Lack of transparency can lead bereaved families to pay more than they need. The CMA concluded that people organising funerals do not, owing to their distress, compare prices as they would when buying other items. Instead, they often pick the first funeral operator they find. From 16th September, funeral directors must display a standardised price list at their premises and on their websites. This must include the headline price of the funeral, the cost of individual items and charges for additional products and services. Last June, they were banned from paying incentives to hospitals, hospices or care homes to recommend their own funeral parlour. Nor must they solicit for business through coroner and police contracts. You’ll be able to compare funerals calmly before you need one – so you can make the best choice.
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The Oldie September 2021 77
The Hobby by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd Britain has been the seasonal home of the hobby since time immemorial. ‘When things were looking bleak for the Western Powers in the last war, Field Marshal Alanbrooke took a short leave to this country. He did not attend conferences at the War Office or with the War Cabinet. He retired to a wood in southern England and watched and filmed a pair of nesting hobbies,’ wrote Henry Douglas-Home on the final page of his bird memoir, The Birdman. Like the osprey, the hobby (Falco subbuteo) is a summer migrant, but can arrive as early as February and depart as late as November. Hobbies breed from late May to July in southern England and across Europe, as far north as Finland and into Russia, before returning, like most of our summer migrants, to Africa, favouring the plains of East and South Africa. About 2,000 summer here. The long – in flight, sickle-shaped – wings, especially of the tiercel (male), can make it look like a large swift. Songbirds, insects and beetles are its quarry; sometimes even swifts, swallows and martins – which, to take on the wing, demand exceptional speed and agility. The ornithologist James Fisher (1912-70) called the hobby ‘the finest interceptor of all British birds’. It is often seen over water, a favourite hunting and drinking haunt for the insect-dependent swift and swallow tribes, and has a taste for dragonflies. Carry Akroyd describes one hunting in Cambridgeshire: ‘On a really windy day, we were walking along a sunny drain side in the sheltered lee of the birch wood at Holme Fen. Obviously all the dragonflies were doing the same thing and a hobby was repeatedly going past us up and down over the drain, catching them.’ The name comes from the French verb hober, ‘to stir’, which is indeed what a hobby creates when hunting. One of its names is ‘riphook’, as well as
‘hobby’ and ‘robin’, diminutives of Robert. When Thomas Helton translated Don Quixote (1620) he interpreted the Spanish for hobby, alcotán, as ‘robin ruddock’. Dulcinea in the novel leapt astride her mount as lightly as a hobby perches: ‘Then said Sancho: “By Saint Roque! Our mistress is as light as a robin ruddock and may teach the cunningest Cordovan or Mexicanian to ride on their jennets.” ’ Peter Adolph (1916-1994), inventor of the flick-and-kick table-top football game, Subbuteo, first wanted to call it The Hobby after the bird but, when Waddingtons refused, they settled for its species epithet, ‘subbuteo’.
In his foreword to the first volume of David Bannerman’s The Birds of the British Isles, Alanbrooke wrote, ‘I sometimes doubt whether I should have retained my sanity … had I not had an interest capable of temporarily absorbing my thoughts, and of obliterating the war.’ It was a revelation when he read Viscount Grey’s Fallodon Papers with regard to the First World War, that ‘the continuance of the beauty of Nature was a manifestation of something great and splendid which not all the crimes and follies and misfortunes of mankind can abolish or destroy’. The Oldie September 2021 79
Travel On the road – at 90 As she enters her tenth decade, the travel writer Dervla Murphy tells William Cook about the joys of journeys in old age
‘B
y 2021, I’m likely to be either dead or dotty,’ declared Dervla Murphy ten years ago, in her heartfelt book about Gaza, A Month by the Sea. After talking to her on the telephone from London (unable to visit her in Ireland due to pesky COVID), I’m pleased to report that she was wrong. The Queen of Travel Writers is still very much alive, and still as sharp as ever. She turns 90 on 28th November, but her writing is curiously ageless. In her early books, written in her thirties, she seemed wise beyond her years. Her later books (like A Month by the Sea, which she wrote when she was 80) exude the energy and vitality of a woman half her age. Naturally, old age can be restrictive for a travel writer but, as Dervla has discovered, there are plus points too, especially in developing countries. ‘From the age of 60 onwards, when you’ve got grey hair and some of your teeth are falling out, it makes it much easier in many circumstances to be accepted.’ She was born in Lismore, County Waterford, in 1931 – she still lives there today. ‘I was fortunate enough to be born in one of the most beautiful corners of Ireland, and why would one want to live anywhere else?’
80 The Oldie September 2021
Her parents were Dubliners, who moved there when her father got a job as Lismore’s librarian. Dervla inherited his love of literature. An avid reader from an early age, she loved Biggles and Just William. ‘I never felt sorry for myself as an only child until I watched my three granddaughters growing up, and then I realised how much I’d missed by not having siblings.’ Her mother was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. When Dervla was 14, she left school to care for her. For this bookish teenager, that sacrifice could have become a tragedy, but she finished her education in her father’s library, and spent her free time cycling round Ireland. For an aspiring travel writer, it was an ideal apprenticeship. ‘For any child, I think it’s an advantage being brought up in a really beautiful rural area, surrounded by natural beauty – that’s such a good start.’ Confined to Ireland throughout her
‘When you’ve got grey hair and your teeth are falling out, it’s easier to be accepted’
childhood, she learnt to relish every journey, however local, and to appreciate every detail. Getting to know her homeland developed her writer’s eye. Her parents died fairly young, in quick succession, soon after Dervla turned 30. Ever since she was a child, she’d dreamt of cycling to India, and now she was free to go. ‘The speed at which you are travelling is natural. It’s about the same speed as in the old days, if you were riding a good horse.’ Her diary of this epic bike ride became her first book, Full Tilt, published in 1965. Though she was attacked by wolves and bitten by a scorpion and survived all sorts of other mishaps, what makes the book so appealing is its intimate and friendly tone. In India, Dervla worked in a refugee camp for displaced Tibetan children (recounted in her second book, Tibetan Foothold) and then set off for Nepal, which resulted in another book, The Waiting Land. Her account of her most intrepid journey, In Ethiopia with a Mule, was published in 1968. ‘One gets something very valuable from slow travel – my major journeys have been on foot.’ It was her fourth book in as many years. Then her travels were interrupted by the birth of her daughter, Rachel. Dervla
Ageless in Gaza: Murphy and, below, her Palestine book, written when she was 80
was unmarried, and resolved to bring Rachel up on her own – a brave decision in those days. ‘That was really unheardof. I suppose it would have been considered a local scandal, except that I was so happy about it I didn’t notice.’ She took a five-year break from travelling and then, when Rachel was five, they went to India together. In 2005, in her seventies, she travelled to Cuba with Rachel and her three granddaughters. She’s renowned as a fearless traveller who ventures off to far-flung places, but one of her best books was located a lot closer to home – A Place Apart, her perceptive and compassionate book about Northern Ireland. Her father came from a Republican family (as a young man, he was interned for three years in Wormwood Scrubs) and when Dervla was a child, her parents hid a young IRA man on the run. Yet A Place Apart wasn’t remotely partisan. Written during the worst days of the Troubles, it was also surprisingly optimistic.
‘I’m naturally optimistic – I was born optimistic,’ she says. ‘That’s not necessarily an advantage, because it can so easily lead you into being unrealistic. But my life experience has taught me that, on the whole, you can trust human beings.’ Subsequent events have proved her right. When the book was published, in 1978, the Troubles looked intractable. Today, though things are far from perfect, the situation is far, far better than it was. ‘Since the Good Friday Agreement, the younger generation have been able to see another way forward.’ She’s also heartened by the ways in which the Republic of Ireland has changed. ‘A lot has been lost along the way, but the advantages have been huge,’ she says. ‘When I was growing up, there was even no such thing as contraception. That was as illegal as homosexuality in Ireland.’
Despite all the suffering she’s seen, she’s never lost what she once called her ‘irrational faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature’. As the Anglo-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim says, her writing is distinguished by ‘her love of people, her descriptive powers, her honesty, her unswerving dedication to social justice and her dislike of any kind of religious fanaticism’. She’s deeply concerned about ecology (‘If we don’t do something about climate change, and do it fairly quickly, the suffering will be incalculable’). And she’s horrified by rampant consumerism (‘Very few people can escape the consequences of indiscriminate capitalism’). But her writing is unencumbered by ideological cant. In all her encounters, it’s her profound concern for humanity, rather than any political creed or dogma, that shines through. Like a lot of Irish writers, she has a complex relationship with Britain. She was immersed in English literature as a child: everything from Dickens and the Brontës to Sherlock Holmes and P G Wodehouse. She cycled to Stratford-upon-Avon as a young woman, on a sort of Shakespearean pilgrimage. But, despite her love of English writers, she hasn’t spent much time in England since. Her travels take her further afield, and betweentimes she’s back in Ireland, writing up her latest adventure and preparing for the next one. During her long life, even the remotest places have been transformed, and her early books now read like dispatches from a lost world. ‘The younger generation won’t be able to experience that sort of travelling in the same way,’ she says. ‘I’m glad I was born when I was – the places I have seen, in the circumstances that I could experience them, no longer exist.’ She feels sorry for her granddaughters, now that so many of the places she explored have been destroyed. ‘I just wish they could see what I have seen.’ As she reaches 90, her ability to travel is now a lot more limited, yet her literary voice will remain boundless, for as long as she remains alive. ‘To me, writing was not a career but a necessity,’ she wrote, 40 years ago, and all her success hasn’t changed her attitude in the slightest. Happy birthday, Dervla. Here’s to the next book, and the next ten years. The Oldie September 2021 81
Overlooked Britain
Paradise, by way of Kensal Green lucinda lambton London’s first great necropolis hosts a perpetual party of 19th-century luminaries
Nothing could be more enlivening than a walk round Kensal Green Cemetery in London, the capital’s first great necropolis, founded in 1832. Whatever your passion, with all those who are buried here, the inventors, writers, entertainers etc – every one of them of them of top-notch interest – the very essence of their roots and shoots can be joyfully relished within these walls. Surrounded by the scrunching cityscape of the Harrow Road, it suddenly appears; a vast tract of Arcadia, a place that makes your spirits soar to screaming delight. Trollope lies here, as does Sir Charles Locock, who delivered all Queen Victoria’s children. Blondin the tightrope-walker is buried at Kensal Green; so too is W H Smith – with a marble book atop his grave. Charles and Fanny Kemble, father and daughter thespian stars, are here, as well as John Smith, harpist to Queen Victoria! Greeting you, among the bulgingly mature chestnut, ash, plane, holly and beech, is a Gothic spire to Feargus O’Connor (1794-1855), the charismatic Chartist leader. He died insane, and crowds of 50,000 came to his funeral at Kensal Green. Here is a Gothic canopy, sheltering the remains of George Augustus Frederick Percy Sydney Smythe, 7th Viscount Strangford (1818-57). He was believed to be the last man to have fought a duel in England, when in 1852 he exchanged shots with his political rival in Canterbury. Described by Disraeli as ‘a man of brilliant gifts, of dazzling wit, of infinite culture, and of fascinating manners’, he was the model for the hero of Coningsby. He died aged 40, worn out by dissipation, brandy and water, and a
delicate chest. ‘Poor George,’ lamented Lord Lyttelton at the time; ‘he was a splendid failure.’ Your next goal is the stone slab surrounded by railings, to William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63), author of Vanity Fair, The Luck of Barry Lyndon etc. Dwell for a moment on his funeral, which took place here in 1863. Dickens was one of the chief mourners, as were the painters Millais and Frith. George Cruickshank the caricaturist was also there, as were Browning and Trollope. According to a contemporary account, there were occasional melancholy interruptions of weeping but ‘more obtrusive were the cracks of sportsmen’s rifles from the neighbouring fields, causing the horses to champ their bits in noisy restlessness’. It must have been a mighty coffin as Thackeray was over six feet three inches tall and his vast head housed a brain weighing 58½ ounces. With the path becoming ever more rural in its roughness and the trees ever more enveloping, you turn right onto an even tinier, grass path. There you find a block of marble to Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859), along with his father, Sir Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1849). Brunel senior designed the Thames Tunnel, while his son was responsible for the triumphant design of bridges, steamships and railways. The Great Western, passing hard by the cemetery, is in thundering earshot of his final resting place. Your next stop should be the newly restored four-poster-bed-like canopy sheltering the remains of William Mulready RA (1786-1863). With his face carved from his death mask, he lies on a wonderfully ‘woven’ stone mat of straw,
From left: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Wilkie Collins, Charles Blondin, Dr James Barry 82 The Oldie September 2021
on a fringed bier, beneath which are carved scenes and implements of the artist’s life. The son of an Irish leatherbreeches-maker, he was to design the first one-penny prepaid envelope, as well as becoming an artist and prolific illustrator. Now for a quite tremendous treat – the Egyptian mausoleum to Andrew Ducrow (1793-1842), a showman of dazzling appearance and ability, who, while dressed as a Roman statue, would ride or drive as many as nine horses at once. He was famed too for ‘poses plastique équestre’; striking attitudes as Zephyr, Mercury or a Yorkshire fox hunter, while controlling horses at the gallop. He died in 1842, a few days after his favourite horse, John Lump. His hat and gloves – of stone – lie at the door of his extravagant mausoleum.
STEPHEN BURROWS/ALAMY
Here you might sense a most magical magnet beneath your feet, drawing you downward to those who lie in the catacombs below. Think, for example, of George Polgreen Bridgetower, a violinist to whom Beethoven dedicated the Kreutzer Sonata. Then there is Sir William Beatty, Nelson’s surgeon at Trafalgar, who lies a stone’s throw from Thomas Wakley, the medical reformer who founded the Lancet. Augusta Leigh – Bryon’s half-sister – lies nearby. There they all are, in rotting coffins, studded with gilt-headed nails,
stilts and yet again with his manager on his back. That same poor fellow was then pushed across in a wheelbarrow. Blondin’s final flourish was to stop halfway along this perilous progress, set down a stove and cook and eat an omelette! Next left and along on your right is the pink granite tomb of Anthony Trollope (1815-82). Having left school barely being able to write, he became a clerk at the post office, where he worked in tandem with writing for the rest of his life. Here lies the man who, as well as
Barry was in fact a woman, who spent her entire life as a man in the army. She entered as a hospital assistant and rose through the ranks, becoming a surgeon – with all pre-anaesthetic horrors – and rising as high as Inspector General. Lord Albermarle described Barry as ‘the most wayward of men; in appearance a beardless lad … there was a certain effeminacy about his manner which he was always striving to overcome. His style of conversation was greatly superior to that one usually heard at the mess table in those days.’
resplendent with red, purple and brown velvet. Row upon row of fancifully formed plaques, their rust glistening like jewels, reveal the names of every occupant. Above ground again and on down Centre Avenue. Turn first right onto a grassy path and go 18 plots down on the left, where you find a cross to Wilkie Collins (1824-89), author of The Woman in White, The Moon Stone, as well as No Name and Armadale, to name but four of his miraculously mysterious creations. He is buried with his mistress – the inspiration for The Woman in White. Return to the main path and you see the memorial to Blondin the tightropewalker. Charles Blondin (1824-97) walked over the Niagara Falls on his 1,000-foot-long rope in 1859. He was then to walk it blindfold, then on
becoming a writer of renown, invented the letter box. A tiny and tempting detour is to walk 22 plots to the south. where you’ll see the gabled stone over the body (although not the head, which is in Lincoln’s Inn Fields) of Charles Babbage (1791-1871), who in 1812 first thought of ‘calculating numerical tables by machinery’. Between 1820 and 1822, he devised his ‘analytical engine’ – with perforated cards – and so invented the computer. To discover a ‘first’ in any field is exhilarating enough; here in Kensal Green there are almost as many as there are blades of grass! Next head for the quite ordinary headstone honouring Dr James Barry (1795-1865), concealing the most extraordinary life of all. For ‘James’
Remarkably, Barry was often accused of breaches of discipline. ‘He’ had a quarrelsome temper and even fought a duel when stationed at the Cape. It was said that the servant who waited on ‘him’ for years had not the slightest suspicion of ‘his’ gender. Look back at this cemetery from afar, at the great swathe of countryside cutting through the chimneys – by day, green; by night, jet-black – and ponder on the people who lie within its walls. I have never been in any doubt that there is a perpetual party going on – a glorious and glittering party of 19thcentury luminaries. If there is life after death, you could find no more vibrant a collection of characters than those gathered together at Kensal Green. The Oldie September 2021 83
Taking a Walk
Wordsworth’s slate toytown
GARY WING
patrick barkham
I had not taken a walk in the Lake District for 20 years. I arrived to the soundtrack of dark warnings that England’s most majestic Alpine landscape had become a giant car park and litter bin – its mountain tracks eroded by 4WDs and mountainsides wrecked by sheep. Would it be strippe dof its World Heritage status? The reality was a landscape under some strain and undergoing change. Some of this will be for the better, as Cumbrian farmer James Rebanks’s writing makes plain. There are native trees where, 20 years ago, there was none, for instance. Granted the most wonderful gift – a sunny day liberated from children – I soon realised that the main prerequisite for a good stroll in today’s Lakes isn’t mountain boots or Nordic walking poles, but a place to park. We nabbed the penultimate spot outside Rydal Church at 7.55 am, to begin the Fairfield Horseshoe, the most obvious yet finest circular ridge walk in the land. I was striding out with two novices – my wife, Lisa, and our fourth child, Betty the miniature dachshund. So my ego was slightly bemused when I found myself lagging behind both lolloping Lisa and scuttering Betty on the steep initial clamber up Nabs Scar. When we paused and turned round after a mere 20 minutes’ slog, Lake Windermere and Ambleside, a toy town in slate, were already spread out below us. Boats made little comets of white water on the lake. Cuckoos’ calls echoed from the deep green valleys. On the ridge now, this walk delivered what so few earth-bound trudges can: a feeling of almost flying. Alongside us, meadow pipits hopped from rock to rock and skylarks rose up and song-clashed like rival MCs. Cotton grass waved in the breeze. As we continued a gentle ascent, other lakes revealed themselves one by one: Coniston Water and Easedale Tarn, and then the great sweep of Morecambe
Bay to the south and whispers of North Wales beyond. Fairfield may be the 15th-highest peak in England but its summit is large, flat and devoid of any vertiginous charisma. There are no selfie-friendly crags, which may add to its appeal. I was led to believe that the fells were now overrun with trippers but, on this summit, and on this day, there were no hordes of disposable-barbecue-burning barbarians. The number of walkers seemed about the same as when I was last here in the 1990s.
There were many more, however, of another kind of mountain climber. Today’s fells are swarming with perky collies, bog-swimming Labs, frenzied spaniels – and Betty, who received more adulation than them all. Her four-inch-high legs were trotting at least 12 steps for every one of mine, but she never once panted like I did. ‘She was a greyhound when she began,’ joked a walker at the summit. Given Betty’s lack of familiarity with the fells, I did not risk letting her off the lead, especially when I saw how she grabbed and enthusiastically chewed every stray tendril of sheep’s wool she passed. But, shortly after admiring the discipline of an off-leash Cockapoo, we glanced back to see him haring after sheep, chastened owners hurrying after. If rewilders don’t drive the sheep from the fells, this new generation of doggy climbers might. The gentle descent was a joy, the sun shone all the way and, six hours later, we reached Rydal again, exhilarated by the air, exercise, space and peace. To my surprise, this stupendous stroll had not turned the novices into Wordsworthian Romantics. ‘I still don’t get this walking up a hill and back down again,’ harrumphed Lisa. And Betty? Despite her impressive hiking debut, I divined her verdict the next day when I treated her to another peak and spent two hours battling a paw-dragging, altitude-shy sulk more commonly associated with my human children. We walked anticlockwise round the ten-and-a-half-mile Fairfield Horseshoe, against the recommendation of Alfred Wainwright, doyen of Lake District walking. This was because we spotted promising-looking ‘falls’ on the map on the final descent that might’ve offered an end-of-walk swim. Unfortunately the stream was fenced off, but I still recommend anticlockwise, getting the toughest ascent out of the way first and finishing at Wordsworth’s gaff for tea The Oldie September 2021 85
On the Road
Jenni Murray’s headlines The broadcaster tells Louise Flind about lovely Bette Davis, disgraceful Martin Bashir – and saying goodbye to Woman’s Hour
What was it like leaving Woman’s Hour? I felt, come on – you’ve worked for the BBC for so long: for Woman’s Hour for 33 years. You’re nearly 70. If you don’t make a change now, you never will. In the last programme, I was not going to cry when I said goodbye – but I did. I got the loveliest cake from Mary Berry and lovely flowers.
Allowed. I’m sure I’ll eventually get used to someone else presenting Woman’s Hour. My favourite used to be The Archers.
What were your high points of Woman’s Hour, and low points? I looked back at my 1987 diary to the September date when I started and on the second day it said ‘Bette Davis – posh hotel’. In this elegant hotel, she sat on a sofa – tiny, immaculately dressed with long red fingernails, very fierce. I started talking to her about her book and about how she’d worked in a military canteen. Immediately she warmed to me and, at the end, she repeated that famous line from All About Eve (1950): ‘Fasten your seatbelts – it’s going to be a bumpy night.’ And Joan Baez – whom I’ve interviewed twice – who I have worshipped since I was a teenager, and Hillary Clinton.
Do you work on planes and trains? I’ve still got my old Blackberry, which I can write easily on with my fingernails.
What’s your opinion of the Martin Bashir scandal? Well, what a disgraceful young man he was. Are you still angry with your mother? I think I’ll always be angry with her and always love her to death. Do you think the media are more obsessed with weight than they used to be? Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I’ve suffered from obesity and can’t comprehend why journalists don’t examine in any proper scientific manner why some of us become obese. What are your favourite radio programmes? And least favourite? I love Tim Harford, who analyses statistics and is very funny. I also try to catch Laurie Taylor who does Thinking 86 The Oldie September 2021
Are you a traveller? When I was young, my father worked abroad a lot and going to the airport and getting on a plane was exciting. I quite like this country, actually.
Where did you go on your honeymoons? The first time, we’d just come back from a year in France and we went straight back to university. The second time, we didn’t go anywhere. Do you have a daily routine? Less now than I had doing Woman’s Hour. I still wake up at 5.30, and back then I used to get up, shower, take the dogs out. Now I wake up at 5.30 and think, ‘Ah, lovely,’ and go back to sleep. Are you brave with different food abroad? Oh yes, I’ll eat anything. The strangest thing you’ve ever eaten? I didn’t actually eat it, but when my father was working in Turkey I went to a barbecue and a great reward was a sheep’s eye. What’s your favourite food to cook? In London, I go to Marks and Spencer and buy noodles, vegetables and either some strips of beef or king prawns and a lovely, thin, soupy thing – Japanese. I do a quick stir-fry. Best and worst experiences in restaurants when abroad? In Montpellier when I was a student,
there was a restaurant on the beach with white tablecloths and they did the most incredible moules marinière, beautiful French bread and chocolate mousse and chips – absolute heaven – and local rosé. Do you have a go at the local language? When I came back from university, I was so bilingual that I dreamt in French and people assumed I was Swiss because I had that slightly flat accent. I studied German at school and never, ever used it. But in Spain with the children and some friends, in a villa, there was a rather grumpy German couple next door. One night, they got furious because of the noise and out of my mouth came a whole stream of impeccable German and my husband said, ‘Oh, I thought you’d forgotten your German.’ Top travelling tips? Travel as light as you possibly can. Is there something you really miss when you’re abroad? My three chihuahuas and my cat. What’s your favourite destination? I love the South of France and sitting by the sea with one of those great platters of fresh seafood and a nice glass of rosé. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? We went to Scarborough for one week and to Blackpool for another every year with my grandparents. In Scarborough, I learnt to swim in the North Sea. What are you up to now? My memoir – Fat Cow, Fat Chance – comes out in paperback in September. I really want people to read that book because it will change their perception of obesity.
Genius crossword 404 el sereno 7 clues lack a definition. The wordplay will give you the correct grid entry. Each of these may be followed by the same word; this word is the solution that must be entered in 23 Across. Across 1 Money-grabbing mother with international group of celebrities (11) 7 Academic losing name for good (3) 9 Inscriptions originally put on sailor’s bones (5) 10 Players a team drop? (4,5) 11 Evidence of humour by head of sociology (9) 12 Specific meaning of hearing, perhaps (5) 13 Brilliant writer covering end of winter that’s bitter (7) 15 Leave film unfinished (4) 18 Waste time about instruction to printer? (4) 20 Not a different South American port and lake! (7) 23 See preamble (5) 24 Tragically ruined tale without a break (9) 26 With no mistake, merrily gloss over this sort of logic (9) 27 Left fool after golf (5) 28 Need shortly required for this resinous substance (3) 29 Going by air, principal performer has time for such a promising beginning (6,5)
Down 1 Maybe pen letter from Athens possibly wasn’t about Spain (4,4) 2 Managed to find, describing heirs oddly missing (8) 3 Feeling sorry about decision to abandon pound (5) 4 A quote’s come up about cold and practising selfdenial (7) 5 Covers of course after batting second (7) 6 New game underpinning rising skill (9) 7 Condescends to plan, demoting son to last (6) 8 Birds sing after the baobob tree blooms at last (6) 14 Gambler getting high in happier circumstances (6,3) 16 Where French reaction to joke comes after British fuss (8) 17 Maiden taken in by the madness of Orestes (8) 19 Essay written about popular Italian (7) 20 Books chap about to settle (7) 21 Part of speech is elegantly cut (6) 22 Raised vessel found in Baltic – oddly quite the opposite (6) 25 Flies off the handle seeing pay that’s right for women (5)
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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: 22nd September 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 404 1
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Genius 402 solution Down 1 Yarn, filament (6) 2 Tactically (13) 3 Extinct bird (4) 4 Away from the ski slopes (3-5) 5 Obsession; reverie (13) 6 Older, superior (6) 11 Getting away (8) 14 Twits (6) 16 One by one (6) 18 Ticklish irritation (4)
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G in this puzzle stood for Garment Winner: Lavinia Newell, Brewood, Staffordshire Runners-up: Paul Appelbe, Altrincham, Cheshire; Margaret Lusk, Fulwood, Preston, Lancashire
Moron 402 solution Across: 1 Pose, 3 Toffees (Post Office), 8 Ignore, 9 Attain, 10 Innuendo, 11 Lair, 12 Geyser, 15 Second, 17 Fled, 19 Progress, 22 Ordeal, 23 Catnap, 24 Feather, 25 Trim. Down: 1 Pagan, 2 Shoguns, 4 Orators, 5 Fatal, 6 Edition, 7 Keen, 13 Enlarge, 14 Repulse, 16 Curator, 18 Dwelt, 20 Once, 21 Swarm. The Oldie September 2021 89
Competition TESSA CASTRO Say you hold as a defender ♥J109 and you must follow suit twice. Being equals, they can be played in one of six ways: ♥9-then-♥10, ♥10then-♥9, ♥9-then-♥J, ♥J-then-♥9,♥10-then♥J, ♥J-then-♥10. However, if instead your holding is ♥J10 doubleton, you can play them in one of only two ways: ♥10-then-♥J, or ♥Jthen-♥10. So from declarer’s perspective, it follows that if a defender plays, say, ♥10-then♥J, they are about three times as likely to have ♥J10 doubleton as they are ♥J109. Dealer South North-South Vulnerable North ♠ 10 9 5 4 ♥KQ853 ♦K9 ♣4 2
West ♠ J8 ♥9764 ♦84 ♣A K 10 9 8 South ♠ AKQ ♥A2 ♦QJ632 ♣Q J 5
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♠ 7632
♥ J 10 ♦ A 10 7 5 ♣7 6 3
The bidding South West North East 2NT Pass 3♣(1) Pass 3♦ (2) Pass 3♥(3) Pass 3NT end (1) Stayman, asking for four-card majors. (2) No major. (3) Showing his fifth heart (and implying four spades – otherwise why use Stayman?). West led the ten of clubs – preferring to keep back the ace-king to retain communication with partner. The Nevadan declarer won the knave and cashed the ace-king of spades, pleased to observe the fall of West’s knave. He cashed the queen (West discarding a diamond), then started on hearts, his main hope being a 3-3 split. However, when declarer cashed the ace of hearts, East played the ten; and when he crossed to dummy’s king, East played the knave. Declarer judged East did not begin with knave-ten-nine, with which he had six possible ways to follow suit. He also disregarded the possibility that East could have played the ten and knave from knaveten-low and the suit was three-three all along. Deciding to play for West to have nine-low of hearts remaining, and therefore leaving hearts, at trick seven declarer cashed the ten of spades. What could West discard? Unable to let go a heart (dummy’s suit would run), or a club (declarer could afford to force out the ace of diamonds), West discarded his remaining diamond. No good either. Reading the ending perfectly, declarer exited with dummy’s club. West could cash his four clubs, but at trick 12 held nine-low of hearts, dummy holding queeneight. He led the low heart but declarer finessed dummy’s eight, winning the last trick, his ninth, with the queen. Game made. ANDREW ROBSON
IN COMPETITION No 270, you were invited to write a poem called The Hall. Heather Oxley began, ‘Our halls are gateways to our outside selves.’ John Oldershaw’s narrator started in medias res: ‘ “It’s the hall that sells the house!”/ Said Mr Valentine, holding a clipboard in his hand.’ Hilary Adams had a problem of decoration: ‘Perhaps I should have chosen Orange-rind,/To complement Banana in the hall.’ Several chose the hall through which Bede’s sparrow flew in the winter. Basil Ransome-Davies marked the electric moment for Dylan at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Max Ross’s church hall had cups of tea and salmon-paste sandwiches: ‘It would be nice if paradise/ Had the welcome of an old church hall.’ Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below (including Con Connell, who had to curtail his villanelle in obedience to the 16-line limit), each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to D A Prince. Behind the door – the front door – lies the hall Waiting: arrivals and departures and Their different rituals. Neighbours, of course, Go round the back (the kitchen door) to hand A bag of plums, say, or return a child. The hall, its polished tiles and hatstands, not For them but suited visitors, who ring Expecting due subservience, who’ve got Good reason to disturb the lock and bolts – Perhaps the vicar coming to extend The Sunday pressure, or a doctor called To welcome in new life or ease an end. The hall admits them all to halfway space Where rites of passage move them quickly on To other rooms, to tea or bedside fears; The standing room between now here, now gone. D A Prince [The Leas Cliff Hall in Folkestone] A ziggurat sprung from the cliff, Angled epitome of Deco, Where through the evening air, salt-stiff, You may catch memory’s echo. Here, in my cool teenage rig – Or so I thought – poised on the brink Of manhood, I saw my first gig (And necked my first illicit drink). The palm court orchestra that graced Its heyday bowed to circumstance; The PA parodied that taste At the Thursday pm tea dance.
There, on the last of its nine lives, Silent a year now, still it stands And, much diminished, yet survives On wrestling, panto, tribute bands. David Shields You cannot have a favourite piece of art. Moods shift and plunge – a churning waterfall. What shapes the canvas cannot shape the heart. I will not take it down, though we’re apart, Your portrait – that’s still hanging in the hall. You cannot have a favourite piece of art. It once held pride of place, a counterpart To its paired twin, now on a distant wall. What shapes the canvas cannot shape the heart. I didn’t need to be astute or smart To guess that I was riding for a fall. You cannot have a favourite piece of art. The hall’s a thoroughfare; at each day’s start My glance towards the portrait says it all. You cannot have a favourite piece of art. What shapes the canvas cannot shape the heart. Con Connell An open door, to light and warm! Inside, a drunken earthbound swarm. A blazing fire, such noise and smell – Is this what humans know as hell? Men, uproarious, sing and shout – How long before a fight breaks out? The serving girls become fair game, The young boys too may fear the same. I sparrow on, my darting keeps Me safe from grasping, flailing reach. A blessed draught, the other side, Another door, still open wide! The portal where my freedom lies, Under crisp, cold wintry skies. Ne’er mind the wind, the snow, the rain, I’ll take my chance outside again. Martin Brown COMPETITION No 272 The Prime Minister had trouble with his umbrella recently. It’s a strange device. Please write a poem called The Umbrella. Maximum 16 lines. Please send entries by email (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 272’, by 23rd September. The Oldie September 2021 91
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Ask Virginia
virginia ironside HRT boosts sex appeal
Q
I would just like to thank you for your advice to Barbara, in June’s issue, to ‘get help for your own sexual problems…’ Post-menopause, I had lost all desire for sex and when also it became painful I told my husband and thought, with some relief, that that was that: no more for me! However, after reading your advice, I decided to try HRT and, my goodness, are we both glad that I did! It’s only been two weeks but it’s like rolling back the years! So, thank you again and if there are any post-menopausal women reading this who think they’ve just gone off sex completely, please give HRT a try! Name and address supplied I’m thrilled to hear this! But, before everyone rushes out to give it a go, it’s not always a magic bullet – though well worth trying, as you’ve found out. There are also ways of taking HRT other than orally, which affects your whole body. There are hormonal creams and gels, and even, if you prefer, little pills you can insert inside yourself which are less invasive of the system. Not to mention soothing, lubricating jelly which can ease some of the ouch-making in later life.
A
Betrayed by my best friend
Q
I feel so betrayed. I’ve found I have secondary cancer and probably won’t last until Christmas. I was very distressed to discover this, as you can imagine. However, I’ve really wanted to keep the news from my children because I know how upset they’d be. So I told my best friend and swore her to secrecy. Now, however, I find that she’s told another
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mutual friend. I can’t tell you how betrayed I feel. The news will now spread like wildfire. What can I do? Shall I confront her? My world was shattered anyway at the news, but this discovery has made everything even worse. The one person I thought I could trust has betrayed me. Name and address supplied I can imagine how you feel and I feel so sorry for you. But remember that a secret shared is no longer a secret. You should never have told your friend. To be quite honest, the person who broke this secret in the first place was you yourself. You told her because you couldn’t bear the burden of suffering the knowledge all by yourself. Perhaps she has told this other person because, like you, she couldn’t bear the burden of this secret on her own. Perhaps, also, she wanted to support you and felt that the more other of your friends knew about what was going on, the kinder and more understanding they would feel towards you. Rather than simmer with rage about your friend – a rage that is surely directed more at the cancer than at her, anyway – tell your children. They love you. They would also feel betrayed, in a different way, if they found out after you’d died that you hadn’t seen fit to confide such crucial information – information that will affect them deeply – in them above all.
A
Long walks to freedom
Q
Reading the letter about blisters, and sympathising after a similar walk in London recently, I wondered whether lockdown hasn’t so much fattened my feet as softened them. For nearly 18 months now, I have hardly walked anywhere. Confined to my local
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area, I have mostly cycled – good for my health but soft on the feet – or very occasionally used my car. So I blame soft feet, not fat feet. The remedy: go for more walks. Jeremy Colman, by email Thank you. Dr Denis Durno from Aberdeen also wrote to say that, during a painful walk in Tuscany, he’d asked the tour guide for a remedy for the blisters everyone was enduring. He suggested placing zincoxide tape straight onto the affected part of the foot or heel. ‘As if by magic, the discomfort is immediately resolved. The other advantage of zinc-oxide tape: it is easily torn without the need for scissors. A simple and effective cure, in my experience.’
A
Limited power of attorney
Q
May I make it clear that, even with a power of attorney (P of A), one cannot move someone against their wishes unless they are in no condition to express a view. Their wish may be clearly not in their best interests, but that is not relevant. All that is relevant is their capacity to understand what is proposed. If that is so with P of A, it will be even more the case without it. No doctor would back a move in a situation where the person is just unsafe. As I understand it, mental capacity is the key. Phil Symmons, by email Thank you. I’ve found that a relief to know and I hope others will, too.
A
Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.
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