The Oldie magazine - Spring issue (399) by oldieproduction

BARRY HUMPHRIES ON PETER COOK EXTRA 32-PAGE REVIEW OF BOOKS

Spring 2021 | £4.95 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 399

Disney’s English gentleman Craig Brown on David Tomlinson and Mary Poppins Mayfair lady – Simon Jenkins on London’s richest heiress Joan Greenwood, my dear Mama – Jason Morell Loyd Grossman admires Grinling Gibbons

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Grinling Gibbons, master carver page 18

Features 11 My great Dorothy L Sayers mystery Hilary Macaskill 13 I invented the OAP street sign Yvonne Neville 14 My friend, David Tomlinson Craig Brown 18 Genius of Grinling Gibbons Loyd Grossman 20 The knight who invented champagne Stephen Skelton 22 Peter Cook and me Barry Humphries 24 How to be a newsreader Nicholas Owen 27 London’s richest woman Simon Jenkins 30 Joan Greenwood, my Mama, was born 100 years ago Jason Morell

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: Who was A P Herbert? Rev Peter Mullen 12 Modern Life: What is Fritzling? Mary Killen

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Mary Davies, Queen of Mayfair page 27

32 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 33 Country Mouse Giles Wood 34 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 37 Small World Jem Clarke 38 Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu 41 School Days Sophia Waugh 41 Quite Interesting Things about ... Springs John Lloyd 42 God Sister Teresa 42 Funeral Service: Bill Windham James Hughes- Onslow 43 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 44 Readers’ Letters 47 I Once Met… Peter Ustinov Dan Zerdin 47 Memory Lane 59 Media Matters Stephen Glover 60 History David Horspool 62 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 62 Rant: boring adverts Martyn Hurst 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 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

Joan Greenwood’s kind heart page 30

91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books 49 The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, by Paula Byrne A N Wilson 50 Churchill & Son, by Josh Ireland Miranda Carter 51 Philip Roth: The Biography, by Blake Bailey Maureen Freely 51 The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance, by Ross King Charles Saumarez Smith 53 Revolutions: How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels, by Hannah Ross Jane O’Grady 55 The Screaming Sky, by Charles Foster Richard Davenport-Hines 57 My Phantoms, by Gwendoline Riley Joanna Kavenna

Travel 80 A good man in Africa: in the steps of Denys Finch Hatton Sara Wheeler 82 Overlooked Britain: the stables at Manderston, Berwickshire Lucinda Lambton 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 Oldie book orders ● Please email bookorders@theoldie.co.uk

84 Taking a Walk: On the Wandlebury Roman road Patrick Barkham 87 On the Road: Liz Hurley Louise Flind

Arts 63 Film: Citizen Kane Harry Mount 64 Radio Valerie Grove 64 Television Roger Lewis 65 Music Richard Osborne 66 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 67 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 69 Gardening David Wheeler 69 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 70 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 70 Restaurants James Pembroke 71 Drink Bill Knott 72 Sport Jim White 72 Motoring Alan Judd 74 Digital Life Matthew Webster 74 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 76 Getting Dressed: Catherine Butler Brigid Keenan 79 Bird of the Month: Dunnock John McEwen Advertising For display, contact: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Melissa Arancio on 07305 010659 For classified, contact: Kami Jogee on 07983 097477 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover Gary Wing illustration

The Oldie Spring 2021 3

The Old Un’s Notes Happy 70th birthday, Dennis the Menace! The ultimate naughty schoolboy first appeared in the Beano on 17th March 1951, and he’s been creating joyful mayhem ever since. The Beano – the world’s

Top of the class: Dennis the Menace turns 70

longest-running comic – has been going since 1938. Now the iconic Dundee publication is to disrupt the neoclassical splendour of Somerset House in London, with a major exhibition, Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules, opening in October. According to the show’s curator, Andy Holden, the inhabitants of Beanotown share a sense of rebellion – ‘the Beano spirit of breaking the rules’. Dennis is credited as a proto-punk (helped by the spiked dark hair), while Minnie the Minx attacks the establishment in the form of teachers, parents and policemen. Work by similarly nonconformist Sarah Lucas and Fourth Plinth artist Heather Phillipson will be displayed alongside original comic drawings from more

than 4,000 editions, many never seen before. The exhibition intends to be not only irreverent, but immersive. The organisers say visitors will feel ‘as if they’re stepping inside a page of the comic’ – hopefully without encountering catapults and stink bombs. Who knew that Sir Arthur Bryant (18991985) was such a sexual athlete as well as a prolific historian, who wrote more than 40 books? In a new book, Historic Affairs: The Muses of Sir Arthur Bryant, W Sydney Robinson tells the delicious

tale of wicked Sir Arthur bed-hopping with six women into his 70s and 80s. In old age, Sir Arthur managed to juggle his wife, the Duchess of Marlborough, Alwynne Bardsley (an old friend’s wife), one Lorelei Robinson, Barbara Longmate and novelist Pamela Street. Sir Arthur romped away in London and his country house – the South Pavilion, Wotton Underwood, later home to Sir John Gielgud and, now, to Tony Blair. Naughty Sir Arthur wasn’t only deeply unfaithful; he also got his mistresses to work for him, even while he was betraying them. Shortly after

Among this month’s contributors Mary Killen (p12) is on Gogglebox with her husband, Giles Wood, The Oldie’s Country Mouse. Her latest book is What Would HM the Queen Do? She also wrote How to Live with Your Husband. Loyd Grossman (p18), Chairman of the Royal Parks, presented Through the Keyhole. His latest book is An Elephant in Rome: Bernini, the Pope and the Making of the Eternal City. Nicholas Owen (p24) is a newsreader on the BBC. He has presented the news on the BBC and ITV for 30 years. He was ITV’s Royal Correspondent and Business and Economics Correspondent for Channel 4 Simon Jenkins (p27) was Chairman of the National Trust and editor of the Times and the Evening Standard. He wrote Landlords to London: Story of a Capital and Its Growth and England’s Thousand Best Churches.

Lead in his pencil: Pamela Street, Arthur Bryant. 1979

finding a distressing love letter to Arthur from one of her rivals, poor Pamela sat down and began to type up his life of Ethelred the Unready. Aged 82, he asked Pamela to wear blackcurrant- or coffee-coloured French knickers and a matching camisole. She had to confess he was wonderful at two things: ‘Writing books and going to bed.’ Pamela told him this ‘kind of reputation might be all right at ‘30, 40, 50, 60 or even 70’ but not at 80 – ‘unless you want to get into the Guinness Book of Records.’ After his death, Sir Arthur, the biographer of Wellington, Nelson and Pepys, was exposed by Andrew Roberts as a ‘Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow traveller’. Nothing to admire there but, my God, what energy! The Reverend Jonathan Aitken, vicar, ex-MP and former jailbird, gave a moving address at the funeral of an old prison friend, Ron Groves – aka ‘Grovesy’ – who died in February aged 76. The Oldie Spring 2021 5

fine spot to contemplate Turner’s mastery of pictures of the sea, a subject he painted more often than any other.

Important stories you may have missed Near-naked home intruder lost false teeth in rampage Dundee Courier Farmers and gritters on standby in Derbyshire Derbyshire Times

Man hid 40in TV in trousers Montgomeryshire County Times £15 for published contributions

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‘He just lives in the past’

‘The circumstances in which we met were not ideal,’ said Aitken at the South Essex Crematorium. ‘We both made our mistakes and as result were both guests of Her Majesty. ‘Grovesy kept me and others in stitches with his stories, his quick wit and his exuberant love of life.’ One day in prison, Grovesy introduced Aitken to a Mr Dipper. At the end of their chat, Mr Dipper gave Aitken an exceptionally warm handshake – ‘So warm that he removed my wristwatch without my feeling it or knowing it.’ Grovesy promptly gave Aitken the watch back, telling him to look out in future for ‘dippers’ – or pickpockets. Jonno and Ronno, as they were nicknamed, became fast friends. One day, a paparazzo photographed them together on a bench. Ronno loved it, saying to Aitken, ‘I haven’t led a perfect life but I never got my picture in the News of the Screws until I met you!’

Together, they won the prison quiz, with Ronno declaring, ‘Jonno had the education but I’ve got the brains!’ God willing, J M W Turner’s house, Sandycombe Lodge, Twickenham, will open after the end of lockdown. From 22nd May until 5th September, Turner’s English Coasts will be on show – a fine collection of Turner’s maritime watercolours and prints, lent by Tate Britain. Pre-booking is essential. Turner lived in the house between 1813 and 1826. Overlooking the Thames, it’s a

The sea, Turner’s favourite subject: Ramsgate, c 1824

KATHRYN LAMB

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‘Do you, Narcissus, take ... er...’

Kingsley Amis and The Oldie’s late deputy editor, Jeremy Lewis, star in an intoxicating new book, In Love with Hell: Drink in the Life and Works of Eleven Writers (published on 22nd April). Some of our great boozy writers feature, from Jean Rhys to Dylan Thomas. Also included is Kingers, as recalled by Jeremy. In 1977, Amis was compiling The New Oxford Book of Light Verse in the Oxford University Press

Amis: the three worst words in English – ‘Red or white’

offices, where Jeremy saw him in action: ‘On the dot of 11, Kingsley would look at his watch, peer thoughtfully over his spectacles and say in a surprised voice, as though it had struck him for the first time, “That’s an interestinglooking fridge you’ve got there, Peter [Janson-Smith, of OUP].” The fridge turned out to be chock-a-block with bedewed bottles … and so the meeting would progress, with much popping of corks.’ Cheers! Among Jeremy Lewis’s books was Tobias Smollett (2003). This year marks the 300th anniversary of the writer’s birth (19th March 1721) and the 250th of his death (17th September 1771). As a novelist, he is best remembered for such picaresque works as The Adventures of Roderick

Random (1748), The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) and The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771). When it was first published, anonymously, Roderick Random was believed to be by Fielding. Smollett later accused

‘How about a bit of role-play to spice things up? We could pretend we don’t hate each other’

Fielding of plagiarising parts of it in Tom Jones. In Peregrine Pickle, he satirised Fielding as Mr Spondy, and the book gained considerable notoriety for including ‘Memoirs of a Lady of Quality’, widely recognised as the scandalous Frances, Lady Vane (1715–88). Samuel Richardson said that the memoirs were ‘part of a bad book which contains the very bad story of a wicked woman’ and Walter Scott added that they were ‘a tiresome and unnecessary excrescence’. Smollett was called many names: ‘a profligate hireling’ (Horace Walpole); and ‘arrogant … stiff-necked, thin-skinned, scurrilous’ (W E Henley). William Hazlitt said, ‘There is a tone of vulgarity about all his productions,’ and Laurence Sterne was so incensed by the xenophobic and prejudiced attitudes in Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy (1766) that he lampooned him as Smelfungus – a traveller full of ‘spleen and jaundice’ – in his own A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). Still, Smollett’s works remain popular. In 1944, George Orwell wrote an article for Tribune, called ‘Tobias Smollett: Scotland’s best novelist’.

The Old Un wishes a happy 100th birthday to legendary TV producer Derek Granger on 23rd April. He is best known for his peerless Granada production of Brideshead Revisited (1981). His TV career goes all the way back to his producing Coronation Street in 1961. Before that, he was a journalist and drama critic on the Financial Times, where he founded its arts pages. What a packed century of a life! Is there any more nostalgic sound – or sight – than the Wurlitzer, the organ invented by German immigrant (Franz) Rudolph Wurlitzer in Cincinnati in 1853? In 1946, Wurlitzers were so popular that there were 250 cinema organists in Britain. One of the most splendid Wurlitzers survives at the Musical Museum in

Wurlitzers and all that jazz: Chris Barber and the ‘Regal’

Brentford. It was originally installed in 1932 at the Regal Cinema in Kingston upon Thames. And now a charming book has been written about it, The Mighty ‘Regal’ Wurlitzer from Kingston upon Thames. The book’s foreword is written by Michael Ryder and Chris Barber – the great jazz musician, who sadly died in March aged 90. ‘Our Regal Wurlitzer can be found accompanying silent films, playing in concerts, providing prelude music before a film show,’ Barber and Ryder write. Sadly Chris Barber is no more, but the Regal Wurlitzer plays on.

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Sliced Jersey Royals with capers, pickled red onion and herb mayonnaise on toasted oat bread

As our holiday calendars fill up, tour companies and hotels are providing lots of guarantees, from sociallydistanced receptions to refunds on last-minute cancellations. But a Stirlingshire hotel is offering the most attractive promise of all. Gartmore House, an 18th-century mansion in Loch Lomond National Park, guarantees that you and your loved one won’t argue. ‘It’s been estimated that when we’re on a break nearly half of us quarrel at least once a day, and one in ten couples is likely to break up afterwards,’ the hotel’s marketing department says. How are cross words kept out of the estate? By keeping couples apart. You and your spouse might share an en suite, but during the day

you separately go about your individual pursuits, including hillwalking, creative writing, drone photography,

‘I couldn’t find a nailfile – so I brought you some nail polish and lip gloss…’

macramé and upcycling old furniture. By the time cocktail hour looms, you’ll be too exhausted to bicker – or so the theory goes.

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The Oldie Spring 2021 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

The show must go on – even if you’re 96 The joy of old stagers, from Ian McKellen to Maggie Smith

In the run-up to Shakespeare’s birthday on 23rd April every year, I like to remember my favourite Shakespearean performances. Up there with Olivier’s Othello, Peggy Ashcroft’s Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well and Paul Scofield’s King Lear, I always put Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies’s Juliet. I saw her perform only Juliet’s death scene and she was 99 at the time, but her speaking of the lines was so true she might have been 14. Dame Gwen (as she became, aged 100) was a Londonborn actress of Welsh heritage who first played Juliet to John Gielgud’s Romeo back in 1924. When I was writing his biography, Sir John told me that she was his favourite Juliet. ‘Some actors rather go to pieces towards the end or start repeating their old tricks,’ said Gielgud. ‘Others keep on getting better.’ This is why I have high hopes for Ian McKellen’s Hamlet, in the production scheduled to open – pandemic permitting – at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, in June, not long after Sir Ian’s 82nd birthday. According to the play, Prince Hamlet is 30. Michael Redgrave played the part at Stratford at 50. Sir Frank Benson was still playing it on tour aged 72, and at the same age the Australian actress Dame Judith Anderson gave her moody Dane in New York in 1971 – to mixed notices. Given that we now live in an era of colour-blind, gender-neutral casting, age shouldn’t be a barrier to anything. If you are up to it (and, thanks to regular Pilates and a personal trainer, Sir Ian is fighting fit), go for it. I am currently filming Great Canal Journeys for Channel 4 with Dame Sheila Hancock, 88, and given the way it’s going, I think I’d be a perfect Beatrice to her Benedick. I have been lucky in lockdown because I have been allowed to work and much of my work has been more like play. Among other things, I have been travelling in

from my quite crowded West London suburb to a totally deserted West End, where, in the empty Crazy Coqs cabaret room near Piccadilly Circus, I have been filming conversations with assorted theatrical greats. Derek Jacobi, a boyish 82 (and a totally convincing Mercutio when he played the part in his mid-seventies in a Kenneth Branagh production), told me he thought he had probably played Hamlet more times than anyone else alive (I checked: he has) and still has nightmares about the performance at which he ‘dried’, forgetting four lines in to ‘To be or not to be…’. Anne Reid, 85, Jacobi’s wife in the popular TV series Last Tango in Halifax, revealed that, next to Sir Derek, her screen idol had been the ‘unutterably handsome’ Hollywood actor William Holden, whose career was blighted by alcohol. Holden died aged 63, after slipping on a rug while intoxicated and hitting his head on a side table. Most of the actors I know are just getting their second wind at 63. Post-recording, over a glass of wine thoughtfully brought along by Anne Reid for socially-distanced paper-cup consumption, she and Sir Derek wondered out loud what play they might do together on Broadway next year. Their TV series is popular stateside.

‘Carrie, are you wearing my trousers?’

Noël Coward’s Private Lives is a possibility. They know they can’t do it here. Patricia Hodge, 74, and Nigel Havers, 70 this year, are taking it on tour in the UK the moment lockdown lifts. My other recent happy encounters with thespians of riper years have included with the evergreen Virginia McKenna, 90 on 7th June, who told me that of all her films her favourite, alongside Born Free, is the 1957 comedy The Smallest Show on Earth. Another was with the indomitable Thelma Ruby, who hosted her own virtual 96th-birthday party on Zoom, entertaining more than 70 guests from five time zones with terrific tales of some of her leading men, Orson Welles and Tyrone Power among them. Dame Maggie Smith, 86, came round to my place to be filmed in London in conversation with her friend Kathleen Turner, 66, online in New York. Turner, celebrated for Body Heat on screen and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on stage, was in feisty form, recollecting directors she had dealt with in no uncertain terms and those performances when you knew ‘somehow, that everything was coming right’. Dame Maggie was more timorous, claiming still to suffer from ‘impostor syndrome’, not really sure of when it’s going well or why. ‘I never think I’m any good.’ When we were standing in the hallway, getting ready to go into the sitting room to start filming, Dame Maggie put her hand up against the doorway and took a deep breath. ‘I feel like Edith Evans waiting in the wings before going on to play Rosalind at the Old Vic when she was almost 50. Before she made her entrance, Edith would stand in the wings and repeat to herself, “I am young. I am beautiful. And my breasts are firm.” ’ Watch ‘Gyles in conversation’ at www. fane.co.uk/online-shows The Oldie Spring 2021 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Who’d want to steal my identity?

I didn’t mind the crime – but the admin was Hell on earth matthew norman In my elegant part of west London (the crack-dealing tourist quarter of equatorial Shepherd’s Bush), the postal service seems to have taken semi-retirement at best – though nine-tenths retirement feels closer to the fractional truth. For all the exquisiteness of the rhyme, ‘snail mail’ seems apt only if the gastropod in question had the mobility of a 108-year-old with acute rheumatoid arthritis. Weeks and weeks sidle by without the doormat’s being troubled. With the curious exception of insolent demands for income tax, letters take so long to work through the filtration system that it would be no surprise to find them stamped with a Penny Black. The sadness, of course, is that any mail arrives at all. Apart from the Revenue’s impertinent show of greed, the only letters to have pitched up in the last month appeared to have nothing whatever to do with the stated recipient. The only discernible relevance was that the envelopes bore my name and address. What lay within made any sense only in the context of extreme amnesia, and even then barely at all. It is possible that, in early January (according to missives delivered in late February), I took out two mobile-phone contracts with the network known simply as ‘3’. Why, if so, is beyond me. Being neither a drug-dealer nor a sex worker – though it remains early doors on those career options – I find one mobile suffices. Whether even a pusher or a hooker would have wanted to bolster the tally with yet another, this one with Tesco Mobile, I cannot say. But I, apparently, did. Among other letters to dodge the cordon sanitaire was a welcoming note from Next, the fashion chain, with a card enabling the purchase of garments on credit; and an epistle from TSB – with 10 The Oldie Spring 2021

which I have the misfortune to bank – bearing the debit card for a new account. What lies ahead is thrillingly unknowable. But I have hopes of learning that the Soviet nuclear warhead I bought off the dark internet is on its way from its silo in Turkmenistan, and of being firmly advised to have the ceilings raised to accommodate the giraffe newly dispatched from the Serengeti. Assuming that I haven’t become startlingly amnesiac (a dangerous assumption, plainly, since I would have no recollection of that), the diagnosis seems plain. I am the victim of that most engaging modern crime, identity theft. The irony here is that, had the criminal had the courtesy to contact me before using my name and date of birth to unlock this treasure trove, I’d have added my mother’s maiden name to the roster of purloined info to negate any need for theft. I would have put my identity in a ribboned box, and gladly handed it over as a gift. Not a soul in the same postal code as their right mind, and few in their wrong one, would care for my identity. In the event of a prosecution, the foolproof defence against the charge of stealing my persona would be insanity. No 12 good people and true would convict. You’d be lucky, in fact, to convene a jury to hear such a charge.

‘For God’s sake, let me get drunk first!’

But of course there won’t be a prosecution. The notion of even reporting this to the Metropolitan Police lies in the realm of comic fantasy. It’s up there with the annual list of the silliest reasons people ring the emergency services: I’ve run out of baking soda; after drinking 14 pints of Stella, my boyfriend can’t get it up; Philip Schofield’s just come on the telly and I can’t find the remote. Were I to take the satirical step of mentioning this to the Feds, it’s even money the response would start with a snigger. A record would wearily be taken and, a few days later – what the hell am I writing? a few years later – a letter would arrive offering therapy for traumatic stress. All the trauma and every ounce of the stress lay not in the victimhood, but in the misery involved in alerting the various companies. Too often have you read about, and no doubt experienced, the agonies of the call centre to need refreshing about that. Suffice it to say that six and a half hours were required, and that TSB was sufficiently ashamed of itself to stick £30 in my account as compensation. Which account was not specified. On the form book, it will probably be the one opened by my impersonator. The complaint to the postal service about the tardiness, on the other hand, was taken relatively promptly and handled with the appearance of genuine concern. I will be hearing from their investigators shortly, I was told. ‘If they plan to put their findings in writing and post them in the form of a letter,’ I said, ‘I’d be grateful if they would address it to my estate.’ My identity will have been appropriated by death, a rather more effective thief than any mobile-phone hoarder in a Next jacket, long before it arrives.

When Hilary Macaskill found a fragment of a lost poem, she became a literary sleuth

n the first lockdown, I received a commission from my daughter for a ‘non-urgent project, if you are searching for meaningful activity’. Reading the preface to a post-Second Word War edition of Strong Poison (1930), a Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L Sayers (1893-1957), she’d come across an extract of her 1942 poem ‘Lord, I Thank Thee’ that echoed her own mixed feelings about the pandemic. The first lines were: If it were not for the war, This war Would suit me down to the ground. What she wanted was the complete poem. I scoured our innumerable collections of poetry, and then looked online, using these words, but they

The poem turned out to be twice as long and twice as relevant and witty as I had thought cropped up only in collections of quotes. I eventually discovered the poem had been published as a pamphlet in 1943 by the tiny Overbrook Press in Connecticut, with a print run of 100. (Copies are occasionally available for around £150.) It is in 17 libraries: 16 in America and just one here. By the time we were allowed to travel to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, I thought, the pandemic would be long gone, the poem irrelevant. Little did we know… Later, in an idle moment, I searched again, trying another phrase from the poem: ‘the hygienic people who eat prunes’. Eureka! Astonishingly, on my screen was one solitary result: a link to Hilltop News, the student newspaper of the Birmingham-Southern College, Alabama. The poem, taken from a recent book,

London Calling (1942), was included for its ‘refreshing attitude toward war’. It was a glorious discovery. The deprivations Sayers wrote of were familiar to us all. Her glee about absence of travel and dress code resonate with many: I have always detested travelling, And now there is no travelling to do. I need not feel that I ought to be improving my mind By a visit to Rome, the Pyramids, the Pyrenees… and I need not buy new clothes, Or change for dinner, Or bother to make up my face… I reinstated (from the extract in the preface of Strong Poison) missing lines in this bowdlerised version, which delicately omitted reference to the improving influence of breakfast ‘upon the skin and the bowels’. Mission accomplished, I presented my daughter with the poem in its entirety. Or so I thought. The search, and Sayers’s appreciation of the compensations of war, made a good story. I told it to friends, while occasionally still searching for London Calling. Then a friend sent an email: London Calling, a book edited by Storm Jameson of ‘essays, stories and poems in praise of Anglo-American relations by a number of renowned British authors’, was in the Oxfam online shop – £25! Reader, I bought it. Two days later, it was in my hands – a fat hardback crammed with writing designed to engage the sympathies of Americans at an important juncture during the war. Robert Graves and T S Eliot were among the contributors. Most thrilling, though, was ‘Lord, I Thank Thee’, which turned out to be twice as long and twice as relevant and witty as I had thought. The complete poem! My job was done.

N W ! O D CK CK BA LO IS R R U E O FF O

My great Dorothy L Sayers mystery

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who was A P Herbert? Winston Churchill called him ‘The funniest man in England and perhaps the wisest’. A P Herbert, who died 50 years ago, employed the English language as if he had invented it all by himself. Comedy was never more succinct: Holy Mother, we do believe That without sin thou didst conceive May we now in thee believing Also sin without conceiving. He was born in 1890 in Ashtead, Surrey, and proceeded to Winchester and New College Oxford where he took a Starred First in jurisprudence. From there, he went on to service as a naval officer and then at Gallipoli, where he was injured. At once he wrote The Secret Battle, in which he criticised military executions for deserters. Montgomery called it ‘the best story of front-line war’. Herbert combined writing articles for Punch for £50 a time with being the Independent MP for Oxford from 1935. He took the political job seriously and promoted the Matrimonial Causes Bill which simplified divorce procedure. He was also a fierce opponent of Frank

CHRONICLE/ALAMY

what is... Fritzling? Josef Fritzl (born 1935) is the jailed Austrian monster who imprisoned his daughter in an underground cell and had seven children by her. But Fritzling has nothing to do with that sort of unspeakable, criminal abuse. Oh no! Fritzling is perfectly legal and even currently encouraged by the authorities, a factor that makes this pop-up syndrome even more chilling. It is best described as ‘domestic tyranny lite’. Lockdown has provided the ideal conditions for Fritzling to flourish. 12 The Oldie Spring 2021

Buchman’s quasi-fascist Moral ReArmament movement, yet found time to write libretti for musicals, including Blithe Spirit. He was a regular contributor to the Observer and Vanity Fair while taking on charity work at Oxford House – ‘scrubbing floors, washing dishes and running errands,’ he said. He loved the Thames and for most of his life lived beside it at Hammersmith, where he moored his boat, Water Gypsy, and worked alongside Magnus Pike in the River Emergency Service. During the Second World War, Churchill asked him to join his intelligence staff but he replied quietly, ‘No thank you, sir, but I’m quite happy where I am.’ He helped plan the 1951 Festival of Britain, which started 70 years ago on 4th May on the South Bank. It attracted millions of people from all over the world to wonder at such attractions as the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon. A P Herbert, 1937. Left: the Skylon. Seventy years ago, he helped plan the 1951 Festival of Britain

It happens when a previously mildmannered man – (female Fritzls make up only a tiny percentage of enthusiasts) – embraces lockdown restrictions with overt enthusiasm. Fritzl interprets the rules with draconian inflexibility. No, he tells Mrs Fritzl, her ‘outside exercise bubble’ is restricted to only one person – not a series of single people. No, she should not walk to a neighbour’s garden to take a cutting. ‘It’s against the law. If everyone bends the rules, then we’ll never beat the virus.’ Fritzl revels in the postponements and cancellations of weddings and is delighted when funerals become Zoomerals. He

In the 1960s, he urged the national press to ‘refrain from witty derision of the literary exertions of Harold Wilson and the maritime activities of Edward Heath’. Just hark at the rhythm of that phrase! Always the precise; as Eliot said, ‘The complete consort dancing together’. No one used understatement to such devastating effect. Or elegant rudeness: ‘The portions of a woman which appeal to a man’s depravity are constructed with considerable care.’ And he had a fine eye for the best things in life: There’s alcohol in plant and tree It must be nature’s plan That there should be in fair degree Some alcohol in man. He wrote a book about sundials and more than a hundred Misleading Cases – short dramas on the absurdities of the law. One disputed whether on a flooded road the traffic should follow the rules of the highway or of the river. These hilarious satires were so perfectly achieved that even professionals were beguiled into thinking they were actual transcripts of court proceedings. One case considered the question ‘Is marriage lawful?’ while another claimed to introduce the Bookmakers Bill. Herbert died almost 50 years ago, on 11th November 1971. In its obituary notice the Times said, ‘He did more than any man of his day to add to the gaiety of the nation.’ Reverend Peter Mullen

always grumbled about dinner parties. Now he grumbles about Zoom drinks. Fritzl hated Claps for Carers – it allowed smiles to be exchanged. With the shopping, Fritzl appoints himself Quartermaster. He decrees that it’s safer if he alone buys the food. He will be the one to decide what will be eaten and when. Suddenly, there’s a lock on the larder door. He is not extravagant. ‘Turnips in; avocados out!’ smirks Fritzl. At first Mrs Fritzl quite enjoyed someone else’s taking on domestic chores – especially with the one-way systems in supermarkets and the fact that chatting between shoppers was discouraged. But

she doesn’t actually like corned beef or mouldy, sprouting potatoes from a sack. The novelty quickly wears thin. ‘Who’s that knocking?!’ yells Fritzl, arming himself with a poker when Amazon Grocery, instructed by Mrs Fritzl, drops off luxury products to outwit him. One Mrs Fritzl realised things had gone too far when her husband stopped a lifelong friend from dropping off some hens for her coop. Fritzl pre-empted the

pleasant, outdoor handover with a pompous letter citing an obscure countryside regulation against poultry transportation during lockdown. This Mrs Fritzl says, ‘It all came to a head when he stopped me from slowing down the car to talk out of a window to a neighbour I passed in the lane.’ Fritzl tapped into a syndrome described by Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny. What gets the dictator going is

Assumed Compliance from the public. There is something in human nature that welcomes the strong. Once dictators start throwing their weight around, a large percentage of the population is only too grateful to obey orders and stop having to think for themselves. Domestic Fritzling appeals to only a few women. The most extreme variant is Annie Wilkes, in Stephen King’s Misery, who imprisons her favourite writer, Paul Sheldon, after an accident. She hobbles his legs to keep him prisoner. Female Fritzling-lite saw one woman hide the scissors to prevent her husband from taking back control of his hair. It grew six inches while barbers were closed. Another fattened up her husband by an impressive two stone. In both cases, the men were way too popular with other women. Lockdown provided a rare opportunity to see off romantic rivals – especially when the decline in looks was posted on social media. Why do I know so much about the behaviour of Fritzls? I’m married to one – Giles Wood, The Oldie’s Country Mouse. Mary Killen

I invented the OAP street sign It was my lifelong love of cartoons that first drew me to The Oldie. Imagine my delight in finding one of my drawings in the March issue. I refer to the sign picturing the grumpy old pair crossing the road with the story of a suggested replacement sign picturing a jolly old pair dancing across the road. This is not the first time the design has come in for criticism. When it first appeared in 1981 – and sporadically since – there have been letters in the press from irate old people. Of course not all old people are slow, bent and frail, but some of them are not optimally fleet of foot or keen of sight and sound. The sign must alert drivers amongst traffic and other distractions and it must be immediately understood. The reality is that you have 30 seconds to decide what it means. There is no room for subtlety. I reckon by the time you ‘get’ the dancing couple, you could have flattened them. How did I come to design the sign? At the time I was Research Assistant with Dr Bernard Isaacs (later Professor of Geriatric Medicine, Birmingham University). When I used my cartoons to

illustrate some of our work he quickly saw benefits. He always believed the points he was making were better remembered by his students when visual humour was involved. When the Scottish Office asked him for advice on useful signs, he had me submit drawings for no smoking, nil by mouth, wheelchair access and the road crossing (the only one accepted). I was delighted when it was adopted throughout Britain and parts of Europe. At no time did I receive any payment, but I suppose my reward is that I might just have saved a life here or there.

When Dr Isaacs collaborated with our Chief Nursing Officer to write a book on geriatric-nursing practice, they asked me to illustrate it in my usual way. He called me to his office one day to give me the good news that the publishers had accepted my drawings. The bad news was that they had rejected the text! That was somewhat embarrassing for me – but they took it in good part, and once the text had been rewritten, the book was published. I fervently believe in the efficacy of humour and often use it to defuse ageism. Yvonne Neville

Signs of the times: the dancing-oldies proposal and Yvonne Neville’s 1981 original The Oldie Spring 2021 13

After an unconventional, tragic youth, David Tomlinson, the Mary Poppins star, became a lovely, anarchic charmer. By Craig Brown

My friend, the real Mr Banks

CRAIG BROWN

ged seven, I bought my first LP. It was the Mary Poppins soundtrack. Though I played it a thousand times, I never took to the treacly, goody-two-shoes Feed the Birds. When it came on, I would pick up the stylus and skip straight on to my favourite track, Let’s Go Fly a Kite. It was sung by Mr Banks, who begins the film huffing and puffing as a starchy pillar of respectability and ends it having opted for a life of mischief and merriment. Thirty years later, I was the restaurant critic for the Sunday Times. One afternoon, my answerphone was flashing, so I pressed the button to hear the message. Out boomed the voice of Mr Banks, complaining, in the strongest possible terms, about the food and service at a fashionable restaurant in Covent Garden. The restaurant was called Orso, but Mr Banks mischievously changed its name to Arsehole. He ended his message by suggesting we have lunch. How could I possibly refuse? Like his alter ego, David Tomlinson was a man who got the better of convention. When he was 18, he was informed by his solicitor father that he had found him a job with an oil company, just as he had found his elder brothers jobs in the City: ‘ “You will be working at Shell-Mex,” he told me. ‘The idea of putting on a stiff collar and tie every day and catching the early train to London to work in an office appalled me. ‘I plucked up courage. I had already made up my mind and that bolstered me. I had plans of my own. “I’d like to be an actor,” I said. ‘ “Be an actor?” my father said. “Good God, you can’t even speak.” ’ 14 The Oldie Spring 2021

Despite his father’s harsh judgement, David managed to conquer a stammer and soon became known for what he liked to call ‘my dim-witted, upper-class-twit performances’. Happily, there is currently a revival of interest in his life and career: a couple of years ago, Miles Jupp took a play about him, The Life I Lead, to the West End, and now Nathan Morley has written a terrific new biography.

At Oldie of the Year awards, 1999. Below: Tallulah and Silas Brown (rear); Frances Welch (Craig’s wife), David and Audrey

I suspect David’s portrayal of Mr Banks owed something to his bossy father, who lived an outwardly respectable life while secretly juggling two entirely separate families. For decades, he would spend the weekends with his wife and sons in Folkestone. During the week, he would tell them he was staying at his London Club, while in fact he was living with his mistress and their seven illegitimate children. David’s brother first realised something was awry when his double-decker bus stopped unexpectedly in Chiswick, and he found himself gazing through a first-floor window at his father sitting up in bed in a strange house drinking a cup of tea. Years later, when their 86-year-old mother was on her deathbed, she silently passed a letter to David and Audrey. At that moment, her husband – David’s father – entered the room. ‘I’ve just been showing David that letter,’ she said. ‘What letter?’ he asked. She then handed him a letter he had written to his mistress from the trenches in the First World War: he must have accidentally placed the letter to his mistress in the envelope addressed to his wife, and vice versa. So for 60 years she had known of her husband’s double life, but had never mentioned it. ‘The marriage was important to her,’ David wrote in his autobiography. ‘So, I suppose, was this supreme act of oneupmanship on her deathbed.’ There must surely have been an element of his father in the characters David so often played: respectability in jeopardy, pomposity out of its depth. In real life, as his good friend Griff Rhys Jones has pointed out, David was ‘an

MOVIESTORE COLLECTION/PA IMAGES ALAMY

Tomlinson, as an undercover journalist, with Carol Marsh in Marry Me! (1949)

anarchist in patrician clothing’. Unlike his father, and the characters he played, he found it impossible to dissemble. His best friend, Robert Morley, once said that you knew where you stood with David because he always said exactly what he thought. His son Jamie agrees: ‘He was unable to hide what he thought if he did not like something or did not rate somebody. He could be charming. On his best behaviour he was wonderful. He was terribly funny if he wanted to be… He could behave appallingly. Normal people wanting to say something have that wonderful safety mechanism. They think, “I don’t think I should say that.” ’ David had no such safety valve. He enjoyed cocking a snook. He once accosted the secretary of his club,

Boodle’s, on the stairs. ‘I do admire the way you are always so pleased with yourself,’ he said. ‘How do you manage it? Do you go to evening classes?’ David approached Griff Rhys Jones in Burlington Arcade to laugh at his coat. This led to a firm friendship. ‘Thereafter I bobbed in his not inconsiderable wake around London,’ says Griff, who recalls his disarming candour. ‘After a performance in Farnham, he greeted the distinguished actor and playwright who had particularly invited us to see the play with a sympathetic “So brave.” ’

For 60 years, she had known of her husband’s double life, but had never mentioned it

David admired performers like Max Miller, Peter Cook and Peter Sellers, who seemed to dance on the borders of mayhem. Early in his acting career, he watched from the sidelines as Laurence Olivier played Coriolanus at the Old Vic. As the curtain fell, he saw Olivier raising two fingers to the audience and blowing what David described as ‘a raucous raspberry’. Ten years later, when they were appearing in a film together, he asked Olivier why he’d behaved like that. ‘You must always have a modicum of contempt for the audience – not too much – just a little, and don’t ever forget that none of them can do it as well as you,’ Olivier replied. Robert Morley behaved with similar diablerie. If he was tired after a day at the races, he would happily come on stage, sit down on a chair and remain seated for the rest of the show. The Oldie Spring 2021 15

PA IMAGES/ALAMY

Returning from holiday with his wife Audrey and six-year-old son, Henry, 1968

The two friends were once directed by the intense 25-year-old Peter Brook, who might be said to have pioneered the modern idea of the director as God. ‘Not in our view an attractive man – and, good heavens, wasn’t he young,’ wrote David in his autobiography. Morley claimed that Brook kindly took their coats when they arrived for rehearsals and helped put them back on at the end of the day. ‘We had to give him something to do, after all.’ Needless to say, Brook came to loathe Morley’s notably unsolemn performance – winking, casting funny looks at the audience, popping in and out of character and ad-libbing to his heart’s content. David relished stories involving inappropriate behaviour. His regular luncheon partner Beryl Bainbridge described him as ‘a man cast in the same mould as Dr Johnson, one who observed the absurdities of life yet still loved his fellow man’. David once told me of a time he was having dinner with Mr and Mrs Walt Disney. When Walt left the table for a minute, Mrs Walt took advantage of his absence to hiss, ‘I don’t know why Walt wanted to make Snow White. He’s always hated dwarfs!’ 16 The Oldie Spring 2021

It was this sense of mischief that attracted him in his old age to the worlds of Private Eye and The Oldie. He became friends with Richard Ingrams, with whom he once shared his worries about Auberon Waugh. ‘I’m concerned about Auberon Waugh and Princess Di,’ he wrote to him, at a time when Princess Diana was busy courting prominent journalists. ‘Robert Morley always said she was utterly brainless and I believe she flirts with the boys but doesn’t let them get their leg over. If you have difficulty with this low slang, I can translate. Now that’s no good for anyone. Poor Will Carling. We might save AW. Do you agree?’ Reading this letter in the new biography, I recalled Alexander Chancellor chuckling after Auberon Waugh had told him he might take a condom along to his meeting with Princess Di, ‘on the off-chance’.

‘I’m concerned about Auberon Waugh and Princess Di,’ he wrote to Richard Ingrams

David’s cheeriness was hard-won, the product of resilience. He had married in New York in September 1943, when he was 25, after a whirlwind romance with a beautiful American widow. ‘I was the luckiest fellow in the world,’ he recalled. But within weeks he had been called back to Britain to continue his work with the RAF, forced to leave his wife behind, while her visa was sorted out. At the beginning of that December, she checked into a room on the 15th floor of a hotel on West 57th and threw herself out of the window, together with her two little boys. It later emerged that she had a long history of depression. David later married Audrey Freeman, an actress and dancer. ‘I was truly smitten,’ says Audrey. ‘He had immense sex appeal. He didn’t know it and laughed when women were suggestive. I thought it terribly funny.’ Theirs was a long and happy marriage. Their eldest son – now a judge – found out about David’s first marriage only after he had stumbled on the marriage certificate. David never mentioned it directly: ‘I remember my dad saying to me there will be times in life when something will happen and you cannot imagine that you’ll ever recover. He said that humans have this incredible ability to take shock and trauma, and it’s almost like they analyse it and dissect it and bit by bit you come through it. And I think he was trying to tell me, “Believe me, I know about trauma.” ’ David thought that he resembled a disappointed spaniel. Noël Coward said he looked more like ‘a very old baby’. He never lost his theatrical sense of fun. When my children were small, and addicted to watching Mary Poppins on video, we went out to lunch with David and Audrey at the Lighthouse restaurant in Aldeburgh. Over pudding, he began singing, ‘Let’s go fly a kite…’ while everyone in the restaurant looked on, entranced. He died aged 83, in 2000. He had told his family he wanted the words ‘David Tomlinson, an actor of genius, irresistible to women’, engraved on his headstone. Private Eye’s resident obituarist E J Thribb commemorated his passing in a poem of uncharacteristic warmth. So. Farewell then, David Tomlinson, Noted British character actor. Let’s go fly a kite, Up to the highest height. Yes, that was your catchphrase – And where you are going now. Nathan Morley’s Disney’s British Gentleman: The Life and Career of David Tomlinson (The History Press) is out now

What a divine carve-up The great sculptor Grinling Gibbons died 300 years ago. His career was boosted by the Great Fire and the Restoration, writes Loyd Grossman

CHRIS LOADES/JESUS COLLEGE/ALAMY

s unlikely as it sounds, the 17th-century woodcarver and sculptor Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) is much in

the news. Among the adornments of the chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge, is Gibbons’s large and elaborate funerary monument to Tobias Rustat (1608-1694), Yeoman of the Robes – whatever that is – to Charles II and great benefactor of Jesus College, the University of Cambridge Library, the Royal Hospital Chelsea and St Paul’s Cathedral. Alas for Rustat, a portion of his fortune came from investment in the slave-trading Royal Africa Company. Those who are currently keen to right what they regard as historical wrongs are now demanding that the Rustat monument be removed from its place of honour. This one will run and run. The Chapel is Grade I listed and the removal of the 18 The Oldie Spring 2021

monument will require the granting of a ‘faculty’ – the C of E equivalent of planning permission, often a lengthy and opaque process. The monument is of

historical importance both to the pull-it-downers and to the keep-ituppers, but few on either side would say that, in itself, it is of great artistic merit. It certainly shows Gibbons’s shortcomings as a sculptor in marble. Gibbons was once praised as ‘the English Bernini’: a comparison as silly and unfair as calling Cliff Richard ‘the British Elvis’. Gibbons was no Bernini, in terms of the Italian’s genius at carving and boldness of conception. But there were things Gibbons could do that Bernini couldn’t. Today we are still awestruck by the finesse and delicacy of Gibbons’s work, particularly in limewood. More happily than we note the travails at Jesus College, we are about to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Gibbons’s death on 3rd August 1721. I and many others hope it will give us Top: overmantel from Cassiobury House, Hertfordshire. Left: Rustat monument

KUMAR SRISKANDAN/NATIONAL TRUST PHOTOLIBRARY/ALAMY

an occasion to praise and promote British excellence in craftsmanship. Prince Charles, with his long and energetic interest in craft, has agreed to be patron of the anniversary, which will include events, exhibitions and prizes. Thanks to his unusual and euphonious name, Gibbons has a great deal of recognition today, even among those who are not decorative-arts connoisseurs. Along with his slightly later contemporaries Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Chippendale, he is one of the most famous of British craftsmen. This is a good and useful time to ponder the status of craftsmanship as opposed to artistry: a distinction that, in a hierarchical society like ours, is of some importance. Charles Robert Ashbee, a key figure of the late-19th-century Arts and Crafts movement, tried to define how craftsmanship was somewhere between ‘the independence of the artist – which is individualistic and often parasitical – and the trade-shop, where the workman is bound to petty commercial and antiquated traditions’. Such fine distinctions are increasingly irrelevant as we begin to realise that great works of art are often created by a complex web of relationships between artists, patrons and craftsmen. The Romantic myth, fostered in particular by the experience of the Impressionists, of the artist working alone to realise his or her distinct vision, is demolished by scholarship. Great art is as much of a team effort as winning the FA Cup. Gibbons, the most technically adept woodcarver of his or indeed any other age, was blessed, like most great successes, with excellent timing. He came to the fore in the opulent, showyoffy context of the Restoration, a time when the Court needed to make grandiose statements and the City of London, thanks to the Great Fire, needed rebuilding.

Master carver: Grinling Gibbons by Godfrey Kneller, c 1690

He was doubly blessed thanks to a wacky, memorable and alliterative name and thrice blessed because of his compelling back story. Who isn’t enthralled by a humbleobscurity-to-great-fame trajectory? It’s been one of the key tropes of art history ever since Vasari described the youthful Giotto’s discovery as that of a young shepherd boy drawing his beloved sheep with a sharp stone. In Gibbons’s case, we have his discovery reported by the diarist John Evelyn who came across the woodcarving prodigy in ‘a poore solitary thatched house’ in Deptford and whisked him off to the court of Charles II, from which he never looked back. Or so Evelyn claimed. However it happened, the young Gibbons was soon immersed in Court patronage, thanks to the support of Hugh May, the architect in charge of modernising Windsor Castle, and the King’s favourite portraitist, Peter Lely.

Not necessarily Gibbons’s finest – but certainly his most notable – work was for Christopher Wren at St Paul’s Cathedral, for which Gibbons and his workers carved in wood and stone. There, Gibbons was part of the great team who helped make the self-taught Christopher Wren England’s most celebrated architect. I am thinking particularly of the relatively unsung Christopher Kempster, the Cotswold quarryman and stonemason whose skill ensured that St Paul’s is still standing. Indeed, St Paul’s is an object lesson in the blurry threshold between art and craft. Would Wren’s dazzling conception be quite so inspirational were it not for the beautiful and flawless workmanship of the army of craftspeople who actually got the place built and furnished? Contemporaries could criticise Wren for his adoption of the Baroque style, with its – to them – unpleasant hints of Papacy and absolutism. Paradoxically, Gibbons, Dutch-born (although of English parents) and -trained, consistently charms with a thoroughly English sensibility. After being discovered by Evelyn in Deptford in 1667, when Gibbons was 19, he was prolific in his English work: from Wren’s City churches to St James’s, Piccadilly, Petworth House, Westminster Abbey, Hampton Court and the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. We might even say that his minute and loving observation of flora and fauna, no matter how forced into Baroque compositions they are, strikes an especially strong chord with us now, as the house-arrest mentality of the pandemic has produced a renewed appreciation of natural beauty. Grinling Gibbons: Centuries in the Making is at Bonhams, London (3rd to 27th August 2021), and Compton Verney Art Gallery, Warwickshire (September 2021 to January 2022) Wooden art: far left, St James’s, Piccadilly, reredos; left, the Carved Room, Petworth House, West Sussex

The Oldie Spring 2021 19

The modern glass bottle was created in 1630 – thanks to a Gloucestershire visionary. By Stephen Skelton

The knight who invented champagne

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

ottles have been made ever since man first discovered how to create glass and blow it into different shapes. Early glassmakers soon found that you could fashion glass into a container that held a liquid. That container could be seen through and could be fashioned so that the neck narrowed and the mouth of the bottle could be sealed with a plug of some sort: a bottle! The beauty of glass is that it is made from simple, easily-found materials – sand, lime and ashes from certain plants – and with the use of a heat source such as dry timber. Glass can be shaped into useful objects, containers of one sort or another, that are completely watertight and can be seen through. Also, glass is inert and, because it has been heated to at least 1,000°C, is not affected by most corrosive liquids; more importantly, it doesn’t taint or affect the liquids it holds. Early glass, which dates back to 4,000 BC, was seldom clear and was often coloured and formed into small, decorative beads used in jewellery. Glassmakers realised that if a blob of glass was gathered onto the end of a hollow iron rod – called a pontil or punty iron (from which we get the term ‘punt’) – and blown into ‘holloware’, its uses multiplied. Early bottles were mainly for holding precious oils, unguents, holy water and – surprisingly – urine. Early physicians set much store by the colour of urine. So ‘urinals’ – clear glass bottles into which the patient could urinate so the contents could be inspected – were one of the first practical and widespread uses for glass. For those who wanted to move liquids from one place to another, the vessels of choice were, at first, amphorae or wooden 20 The Oldie Spring 2021

A lot of bottle: Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-65) by Sir Anthony van Dyck, c1640

barrels. Amphorae were in use for many centuries to transport liquids such as olive oil, fish sauce and especially wine. They came in all shapes and sizes, often with pointed bases, which made

standing them up in the sand easier. Also, they could be stacked up to five high in the hold of a ship. Wooden barrels, which appear in Egyptian tomb paintings made over

LES ARCHIVES DIGITALES/ALAMY

5,000 years ago, were also used to transport and store a wide variety of products, both liquids and solids, but especially wine. Until the end of the 16th century, wine was transported in barrels from the winemaker’s cellar and sold via a vintner to inns and taverns, where it would be drawn off into pottery jugs for pouring into customers’ tankards and mugs. The houses and palaces of the wealthy could afford to employ a bouteiller (from which we get the word butler), in charge of running the household and bottling the wine. Bottles at this time were more like decanters – used for taking wine from a barrel and serving it at the table. In the later-16th century, glassmaking started to change, thanks to the English navy. Many industrious Huguenots, escaping religious persecution, were leaving France and Holland and setting up home in the Weald of Kent and Sussex. Here they made traditional waldglas (forest glass); with its light green colour, it was suitable for rustic windows and glassware for the table. However, with the demands for timber from both glassmakers and iron-smelters increasing, the Crown realised it had to legislate to protect precious timber needed for both ships and buildings. Between 1585 and 1615, acts were passed that at first tried to restrict the use of timber for smelting and heating furnaces and eventually banned it altogether. This almost immediately led to the adoption of coal as the source of heat in furnaces for both glass and iron. Furnaces therefore moved from the middle of the forests to sites accessible from the sea to which colliers (ships) brought their fuel, or to places well served by rivers (and later canals). This move meant that furnaces became bigger and better – brick-built with tall chimneys, providing much-needed draught to increase temperatures around the crucibles, and removing sulphurous coal fumes from the working area. In short, glassmaking went from a semi-rural craft to a proper industry – the start of the Industrial Revolution. For bottles, the change from wood to glass was hugely significant. With hotter furnaces, more consistent heat and better lehrs – the annealing ovens which temper glass as it cools down, the main method of making sure glass is strong and sound – glass bottles strong enough to be used for both transporting and storage of wine started to become a reality. Admiral Sir Robert Mansell, the man who took charge of most of the glassmaking in England in 1615, and licensed others to run glassworks, was behind many of the developments in glass at this time.

Glass on a pontil before blowing: from Diderot’s Pictorial Encyclopedia (1751)

At his glassworks, by the river at Newnham on Severn, Gloucesteshire, Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-65), a man with fingers in many pies, both intellectual and scientific, is said to have ‘invented’ the modern glass bottle in around 1630-32. This claim was made before the Attorney-General in 1662 by four of Digby’s glassworkers, contesting the claim of another glassmaker attempting to secure a patent for bottle-making. Digby’s bottles, the so-called ‘shaft and globe’ bottles, were dark green, almost black, with a deeply punted base, thick walls and a ‘string rim’ around the top which enabled a cork or other stopper to be securely tied down. These ‘modern’ bottles, made in hot, coal-fired furnaces and properly annealed to give them strength, were robust enough to take the pressure of a light secondary fermentation. Not long after the Attorney-General had conducted his ‘long and serious consideration and examination’ into

Copycat: Dom Pérignon

bottle-making, several very significant papers were read to the recently formed Royal Society. Papers written by three different members all discussed the addition of sugar to bottled wine and cider to make it ‘brisk and sparkling’. This was the first mention of a way to make an alcoholic drink sparkling by adding sugar to the bottle – today called the ‘traditional method’ (or méthode champenoise). This was several years before Dom Pérignon, often (falsely) credited with inventing sparkling wine, took up his post as cellérier at the Abbey of Hautvillers. So Sir Kenelm Digby is today credited as the man who gave the world a proper sparkling-wine bottle. He is ‘the knight who invented champagne’. Today, glass bottles are still by far the most common container for selling alcoholic drinks. While plastics, aluminium cans and bottles, bag-in-box, bag-withoutbox, lined paper cartons of various shapes and even ‘bottles’ made of cardboard (flat enough to fit through a letter box) can be found, glass accounts for 90 per cent of all wine and spirits sales. Its original virtues are powerful: glass is inert, doesn’t taint the contents, is sterile and needs only a quick rinse before being filled; and it can be fashioned into myriad shapes, colours, sizes and designs. It can also be recycled – although it isn’t as much as it could be. Some products almost define themselves by the shape and design of the bottle. Think of Coca-Cola, Orangina, Glenfiddich, Mateus Rosé and Dom Pérignon champagne – all characterised by their bottle shape. Cheers! Stephen Skelton’s The Knight Who Invented Champagne is out on 1st April The Oldie Spring 2021 21

Establishment reject Sixty years ago, a dazzling, young Peter Cook recruited Barry Humphries for his new comedy club – and it was a disaster

ou must try to imagine Soho in the early sixties. At Jimmy’s tiny Greek restaurant on Old Compton Street, you could get close enough to a beguiling art student from St Martin’s to light her Nelson filter, and you could eat very well for two shillings and nine pence. Or, instead, you could lash out on Dover sole at Wheeler’s or on goulash, seated near Michael Foot, at Victor Sassie’s Gay Hussar. At the Mandrake Club on Meard Street, you might spy Tom Driberg MP’s crinkly coif bent in intimate colloquy with a handsome young visitor from East Berlin. Or you might ascend those steep stairs to the Colony Room Club and eavesdrop on a little sibilant bitchery from the first man in all London to wear black leather from head to toe, Francis Bacon. He was already famous for his Popes in midlife crisis, and his smudgy depictions of confused men committing their unnecessary lewderies on tripods and billiard tables. By night, Soho pullulated with tourists, pimps and whores. Curtains in the upper windows of old Georgian houses blushed crimson, and doorbells labelled ‘Model top floor’ winked lasciviously. Painted waifs from some northern city in their Dolcis stilettos tottered from Murray’s Cabaret Club to the Peeperama in Frith Street, clutching their Dannimacs to conceal their exiguous finery. Into this milieu, 60 years ago, sauntered the young and aloof Peter Cook, who was already the star of Beyond the Fringe, London’s first ‘satirical’ revue. Satire was the fashion. A few years later, a Sydney newspaper 22 The Oldie Spring 2021

tsar with a khaki face, called Rupert Henderson, came to London to recruit expatriate Australian talent for a TV show on his network. It would be our answer to the Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller revue at the Fortune Theatre. In an office off Fleet Street, he ‘pitched’ it to me. ‘You gotta understand this satire thing, Mr Humphries,’ he said. ‘The idea is you say the opposite of what you mean.’ I must have looked a bit slow on the uptake. ‘You might say, f’rinstance, that you like the Prime Minister – but you really don’t,’ persisted Mr Henderson patiently. ‘But will it be funny?’ I enquired. ‘Buggered if I know,’ was the gnomic reply. I felt that if a job had been in the offing, my obvious inability to grasp the nature of satire had blown it for ever. I didn’t get the job. Peter Cook was riding high. He owned Private Eye. He was Lord Gnome, and he had a circle of besotted admirers, myrmidons, and satellites. Even those who knew Peter well would agree that he was profoundly unknowable. He always wore the impenetrable armour of jocosity; everything was a joke, uttered in a funny voice, so you never really got near him. He had that schoolboy habit, perhaps no longer observed, of tossing his head to flick back an unruly forelock. His posture was undulant, his smile beguiling. Cook was not an actor. He was an inspired university wag giving an impression of a comedian – only doing it better. There was something almost paralysed about his performance that was funny in itself.

He had two comic voices: a lugubrious Cockney and an implausible posh, based on the posh and mock Cockney of old radio comedians which, in turn, derived directly from the music-hall tradition. Dud and Pete, and their later incarnation the coprolingual Derek and Clive, were the last great music-hall act. And the best. In October 1961, Peter Cook and his business partner Nicholas Luard opened the Establishment Club in Greek Street. A strip club called the Tropicana was gutted and the interior totally rebuilt by Sean Kenny, the hottest scenic designer in the West End. It was Sean who did the constructivist sets for the musical Oliver in which I performed for 18 months, first as the undertaker and then, later, in three revivals, as Fagin. It was my first West End theatrical engagement, and a near-death experience. On one matinée, the revolving and ever-changing set caught me unawares and I was jammed between Fagin’s kitchen and Mr Sowerberry’s undertaker’s shop in a relentless vice of Brutalist timber. Luckily, the warning sounded and the show stopped as I was extricated from Kenny’s dangerous mise-en-scène. The new interior of the Establishment was also Dickensian-expressionist. It was rather dark and forbidding, with an uncomfortable resemblance to Dr Caligari’s Cabinet. There was a bar at which the satire-curious jeunesse dorée of London perched until midnight. This far-off time in the early sixties is best described by Juliet Nicolson in her marvellous new book, Frostquake. I can report only what I saw – not seldom though the bottom of a glass.

Hello, goodbye: Barry Humphries at the Establishment, 1962. By Lewis Morley

The girls who lounged like odalisques at the Establishment bar favoured modified beehives, pink pearl lips by Rimmel, pearlised, pastel eyelids and heavily mascaraed eyes by Max Factor. False eyelashes were not yet the thing. Before Neatawear tights, they still wore stockings and suspender belts under their Young Jaeger dresses (I’m told) and they smoked Rothmans, or Disque Bleu if they were richer or more sophisticated. ‘Soopah’ was their universal epithet of approval. In my presence, Peter Cook once uttered the sixties equivalent of ‘Pshwah!’ when someone said of a famous comedian that he combined comedy with affection. Peter thought we could do without the affection. He was a lowbrow in music, not faintly bookish and loved baseball and, later, golf. He was a new kind of dandy. In the affluent years he wore suits by Tommy Nutter, shirts from Cecil Gee and ties by Mr Fish. He paired this ensemble with Adidas trainers, then an anomaly.

A natural impresario, he invited Lenny Bruce to perform at the Establishment. At the time, Bruce was addicted to various stimulants and accelerants which, along with his brilliant, if scabrous material, resulted in his abrupt repatriation to NYC. Another great comedian Peter sponsored was Frankie Howerd. By 1962, Howerd was considered vieux jeu. But Cook saw him speak at a charity lunch, recognised his genius, and hired Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, the best comedy-writers in the land, to fashion some new material for him. His subsequent successes and his later fame were all due to Cook. He was less fortunate with me. Beyond the Fringe went to New York and rejoiced in a transatlantic success. I was working in a show on Broadway, and so I saw a lot of him and his pretty wife, Wendy. As far as it was possible, I suppose I entered the inner court of his friendship. It was while we were in New York that

Peter recruited me for a gig at the Establishment on the strength of some Australian gramophone records of my character monologues. My morale soared. But my brief season at the Establishment proved to be a disaster. I realised too late that, in my short time in England, I had never done my Australian Schtick, as it’s apparently called. As a comedian, I was totally unknown. My regional monologues came across as terribly old hat and out of step with the satirical mode, and there were no impersonations of the Rt Hon Harold Macmillan, the then Prime Minister, in my ‘act’, assuming I had one. The pianist, hired in a hurry, couldn’t read music, and the audience, longing to be shocked by some new political impertinence, were baffled and soon bored by my implausible appearance as a Melbourne Housewife, obsessed by her home, its decor and her family. To make matters worse, on the first night, the female London editor of the Australian Women’s Weekly, always a Big Sipper, turned up with vine leaves in her hair and cheered me loudly from the back of that long, dark and unsympathetic room. Her raucous support made matters worse. A few lukewarm reviews appeared in the press, bookings tailed off and Nick Luard politely curtailed my engagement. I had always feared that I wasn’t funny – and the Establishment seemed to prove it. Superstitious, like most theatre folk, I had consulted Phyllis Naylor, a famous astrologer, some weeks before. She told me I’d soon get a letter with good news. On my last melancholy night in Greek Street, after the dismal show, the barman handed me a telegram. It was from Spike Milligan, offering me the lead role in his new show. Might I be available? The Club’s official photographer was a tall, imposing, Chinese man called Lewis Morley which I claimed was a name derived from his real Chinese name: Loo Mor Lee. Lewis (who took the photo on this page) and I became close friends and his photographic record of the Establishment and its habitués has become a historic chronicle of that remote epoch. It was Morley who took the celebrated portrait of a nude Christine Keeler, sitting backwards on a chair. ‘Ah Christine!’ I once said to Peter Cook. ‘Did you ever…?’ ‘Of course!’ came the inevitable reply. The Oldie Spring 2021 23

Paxo’s fake news Jeremy Paxman has said ‘any fool’ can read the headlines on TV. Nicholas Owen, a newsreader for 30 years, begs to differ

t was a fairly quiet day for stories – not much to get excited or anxious about. I was in what was then called the BBC News 24 studio, to present for a few hours. Most of what I read out was scripted, and it was just a matter of sounding sensible and hoping that the words on the autocue matched the words on the scripts and, most important, those coming out of my mouth. Suddenly in my earpiece came the producer’s urgent voice: ‘Nick, we hear Boris Yeltsin is dead. Go with it.’ There was no help from any script nor from the news-agency reports constantly updating on the computer screen on my desk. The BBC had Yeltsin’s demise to itself. My job was to do what journalists like me love to do. To break some news. That day in 2007, I could remember only three things about Boris. He was the first democratically elected President of Russia after the collapse of the USSR. He once stood on a tank to defy some rebels, though I wasn’t sure why or when. And he was a big-time drunk. So, for quite a long time, I recycled those sparse recollections while telling viewers, ‘We are just hearing this,’ and ‘We’ll be bringing more as we get it.’ That was OK. The trouble was I began to have a nagging doubt. I had got the right bulky Russian, hadn’t I? Was I thinking of Gorbachev, that fellow with the red splodge on his nearly bald head? I ploughed on, a few more dribs and drabs of memory coming to my aid – until eventually confirmation came from Moscow, and the world stepped in to offer its thoughts and fill the airwaves. The episode was an example of what the boss of ITN, where I worked so happily for 23 years, told me made a good newscaster. ‘A well-stocked mind’ was essential. He said that if things on air were not going to plan, ‘Tell ’em.’ Be straight with your audience. With Yeltsin, my brief

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memories were interspersed with my admitting we didn’t know much, asking for forgiveness while we found out. That was an example of ‘rolling news’ – the most fun for a presenter. You could never be sure what was happening next. It helps answer the eternal question: ‘Do you write your own scripts?’ For rolling news, you can’t. You go in the studio for your allotted hours, and mostly you read out what has been written by some hard-pressed producer. The presenter can have much more direct input when it comes to the fixed big bulletins on the BBC and ITV. I was lucky to front all of them on various occasions. There is the time to mull over the scripts, and at least have a say in how they are worded. The headlines are the shop window, and bulletin-presenters normally write those. So I can’t agree with Jeremy Paxman, who recently said, ‘Newsreading is an occupation for an articulated suit... Any fool can do it.’ Television journalists tend to be bright, sharp people. So disagreements about the content of bulletins are bound to surface. My thought was always to reserve strong, divergent opinion until it really mattered. Only a handful of

The face of the news: Richard Baker (1925-2018)

times did I fall out with an editor over either a bulletin or a segment of the 24-hour programming. Can you keep your own emotions out of newsreading? Of course you should. I very rarely found it difficult. One story did test me. After Jamie Bulger was murdered, aged two, in Liverpool, in 1993, I was presenting for his funeral. His coffin was tiny. Walking behind, staring up at the coffin, was his father, tears streaming behind his spectacles. That had me on the edge of tears. No one actually teaches you how to ‘do’ the news. I was incredibly fortunate to pick up the essentials of the craft from some superb practitioners. I began on TV in the Newcastle newsroom of the BBC. The main man was Mike Neville, a one-time actor who was a supremely good presenter. At ITN in London in the early 1980s, the main presenter was the late Peter Sissons. Neither actually taught me anything. I studied them carefully and tried to learn. I also recalled the premier newsreaders of the past. As a youngster fascinated by current affairs who always wanted to be a journalist, I particularly admired Richard Baker (1925-2018). After he retired, ‘Dickie’ Baker was on the Tube one day. A man, somewhat startled, said, ‘It is you, isn’t it? Ah, don’t tell me. You are – mmm, er…’ ‘Actually, I’m Richard Baker.’ The man frowned. ‘No, no. That’s not it…’ I know the feeling. I’ve been mistaken for Jon Snow, or my pal John Suchet. Newsreading was the perfect way to round off my 55 years in journalism. I’d reported everything from local news to big business stories during seven years at the Financial Times. I was ITN’s Royal Correspondent in the turbulent 1990s. I treated every story as important – that’s what a broadcast presenter has to bring to the screen. If I didn’t show I was interested, how could I expect the audience to be ?

Streets paved with gold: Grosvenor Square, first developed in 1725. Picture by Thomas Bowles (1712-53)

Mayfair lady Tragic heiress Mary Davies owned a huge slice of London. Her estate was a model for building beautiful cities, says Simon Jenkins

GALLERY OF ART/ALAMY

t was the grandest of larcenies. The year was 1701 and the lady was clearly unwell. She had arrived one night at a Paris hotel with a small retinue of servants and a Catholic monk. A doctor was called, who over the following week regularly bled her and gave her emetics and opium. Soon she was weakened, ranting and deranged. Her servants were mostly sent back to London. Then one evening the monk’s penniless brother, one Edward Fenwick, whom the lady had hardly met, arrived, entered her room and spent the night in her bed. The following morning it was announced that the monk had married them, with two well-rewarded servants as witnesses. She was now Mrs Edward Fenwick. She never saw her ‘husband’ again. The lady was Mary, 34-year-old widow of the recently deceased Sir Thomas Grosvenor and heiress to a vast estate across the western outskirts of London.

Mary Davies, 1665-1730

On her return to London, Mary denied utterly any knowledge of a marriage. Her frantic family rushed her north to the Grosvenor family home in Cheshire,

fighting off suggestions she be certified a lunatic. Meanwhile, Fenwick began issuing rental demands on Grosvenor properties along Millbank. Four years of litigation followed, with all London agog. Finally, the Fenwick marriage was declared null and void and Mary was to spend the rest of her life under guardianship. But her trustees and eventually her infant son were able to resume development of manorial farmland from what is now Pimlico north through Victoria and Belgravia to Mayfair. It was to be the richest urban estate in Britain. London never belonged to monarchs or, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, to bishops. It had no need of defensive walls and moats, or anything to stop it spreading wherever the market went. Those owning its surrounding land needed only to wait for the gold dust of bricks and mortar to fall into their laps. One such was an infant girl named Mary Davies, descendant of a wealthy court The Oldie Spring 2021 27

official, Hugh Audley, who had amassed 500 acres west of London, which passed to Mary during the plague of 1665. Mary’s practical mother waited until the girl was seven and ripe for the marriage market. She was paraded in Hyde Park, virtually with a price on her carriage. Lord Berkeley led the bidding on behalf of his ten-year-old son, but he was outbid and, in 1677, the girl went to the 21-year-old Sir Thomas Grosvenor, to whom she was married in St Clement Danes at the age of 12. She was delivered to his house on maturity when she was 15. At first all went well. The couple had three sons and a daughter and divided their year between the Grosvenor land in Cheshire and a house at Millbank, on the Thames, where building was begun.

She herself is honoured only in Davies Street in Mayfair. Mary Davies was not alone. Heiresses were the honey round which the bees of London’s estates market hovered. There was Henrietta Holles of the Portland, Rachel Wriothesley of the Bedford, Eliza Sloane of the Cadogan and Elizabeth Spencer of the Compton, all swept up by young aristocrats eager for money. Other inheritances followed, with Portman, Ladbroke, Holland and Fitzroy all leaving their mark, or at least their names, on the metropolis. That private property should be embodied in those who own it is not surprising. We all have stuff and, all things being legal if not equal, we like to pass it on to those we choose. When that property is also a city it can

HERITAGE IMAGE/ALAMY

Earl of Bedford’s Covent Garden with Inigo Jones’s St Paul’s (1633). 1820 picture

But in 1700, Sir Thomas died suddenly and Mary began to lose her mind; this led to the disaster in Paris. After the court case, she spent most of the rest of her life in Cheshire. As the property market boomed, her family were in 1725 to begin work on what was to be the grandest residential estate in London, Grosvenor Square. The rest is history. Leo Hollis has written a thorough and readable account of the Mary Davies saga, at times almost as a thriller, set in the glamour of Restoration London. We dodge from the plague and the Glorious Revolution into matrimonial rights, lunacy acts and 99-year leases. The life of this otherwise inconsequential woman is meticulously recorded, and all for the incubus of an inheritance which she barely seemed to comprehend. Her descendants were to put their names – and those of their country villages, such as Belgrave, Eaton and Eccleston – on a swath of west London. 28 The Oldie Spring 2021

clearly be problematic. What in the country is a matter of acres and cows, in London was one of squares, terraces, brickyards, kilns and people. In the 18th century, London was growing without limit and at the whim and to the profit of just a dozen or so families. Hollis seems alternately fascinated and appalled by this state of affairs, and that it should so dictate the fate of one small girl. That Mary was a victim, not least of her mother, is plain but, at least in the outcome, a sort of justice was done. What is not clear is what harm was done to London. The owners of the great estates that drove London’s growth, at least until the coming of the railway, were motivated by status and money. They were responding to a soaring demand for houses outside the pestilential and crowded streets of the City of London, but they mostly treated their estates as they did their rural ones, whose quality and value

needed guarding for their heirs in perpetuity. Most were, at least initially, responsible developers. They built round a London invention (albeit borrowed from Paris): the city square. This was in effect a microcommunity, often gated, surrounded by a grid of streets, mews, courts and alleys, with properties for rich and poor. The spaces between the estates, such as St Giles and Soho, were among the poorest parishes in London. All was not ideal. The market boomed and went bust. The Crown Estate at Regent’s Park was wracked by bankruptcies. Terraces had to replace intended villas. The Ladbroke Estate was a commercial disaster. The Grosvenors received less rent from Pimlico’s builder, Thomas Cubitt, than from the previous market gardens. The state did attempt some control. Stuart monarchs, at least prior to the Great Fire, sought to curb building. When the Earl of Bedford wanted to build over Covent Garden in 1630 for a ‘fine’ of £2,000, the Star Chamber dictated its extent, design and even the architect, Inigo Jones. Building heights and materials were regulated by law. You can tell the date of an old London street by the depth of its window reveals. The story of London planning control is one of endless missed opportunities, but that is not the fault of the market – estate London was the envy and admiration of Europe. Hollis is clearly unsettled by his story. He ends his account of a fascinating chapter in London’s history with the view that the estate system was somehow wrong and that London should have grown ‘on common land and to the common good’, rather than for private profit. He applauds Jeremy Corbyn’s desire to make it ‘easier for a community to own and manage property for the benefit of the group’. I have seen what ‘community management of property’ has given London, and it is mostly ugly and in the process of being demolished. We treasure and preserve what remains of the great estates. Yes, the benefit of all should be the determinant of London’s appearance, and private profit is too often its enemy. But that requires public control, not ownership. London’s best face today is a legacy of a market responding to public taste. It is that taste that has declined. Leo Hollis’s Inheritance: The Lost History of Mary Davies – A Story of Property, Marriage and Madness (Oneworld) is published on 6th May

Jason Morell remembers Joan Greenwood, his dear Mama, 100 years after she was born

A kind heart and a voice like champagne

y mother could stop a black cab at a hundred yards. I witnessed her doing it in 1978, across the entire width of Trafalgar Square. Time froze and everything went into slow motion as her diminutive form hurtled, me panting in her wake, past the fountains, up the steps towards the National Gallery, as her one bellowed utterance ‘TAXI’ – part command, part plea – richocheted off pavement, statuary and architectural masonry, hitting its chosen target with military precision. The taxi screeched to a halt, my mother announced our destination, flung herself with Bacchic abandon across the back seat and proceeded to rifle through her vast black crocodile handbag.

As Gwendolen Fairfax, with Jack Worthing (Michael Redgrave) in The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) 30 The Oldie Spring 2021

‘It’s Joan Greenwood, isn’t it?’ exclaimed the traumatised driver. ‘Probably,’ growled my mother in bored, Cleopatran mode as she extricated the inevitable, vital cigarette, lighting it and inhaling those sustaining fumes in one fluid movement. Like many of the most commonplace actions – entering a room, licking an envelope, or sitting down – she lent even this an arresting, heroic panache. My remarkable mother, Joan Greenwood – whose voice was likened to the sound of someone gargling with champagne; the voice Variety described as ‘one of the wonders of the modern world’ – was born on 4th March 1921 and died in February 1987, just before her 66th birthday. I blame the cigarettes. To me, she was ‘Mama’, with the stress on the second syllable. Her birth (and death) place was Chelsea, when it was properly rackety and bohemian. Her father was the artist Sydney Earnshaw Greenwood and her mother Ida Waller, whose ambitions as an actress had been quenched by marriage and respectable relatives. My grandfather’s studio was next door to the great sculptor Jacob Epstein’s. Consequently the families were close. Peggy Jean, Epstein’s daughter, was Mama’s first friend and playmate. Epstein made a bust of my mother when she was ten, a gilt, bronze version of which is in the Fitzwilliam Museum. In 1948, when she was 27, and in the first full flush of fame, he executed another. I don’t think he sculpted anyone else twice. As a child, she was allowed to read anything and everything. So she did,

hidden behind a curtained alcove in the studio, sucking Farrah’s Harrogate toffee. She would emerge only when my grandfather played Caruso on the gramophone, to sit under a table and sob, because it was so sad and beautiful. At 16, she left school and went to RADA. Her two voice teachers had diametrically differing views about her. Their contrasting reports were unhelpful: ‘She has a light pixie-like appearance, which is, unfortunately, marred by the lower tones in her voice’; ‘She has deep, resonant lower tones, which she must do her best to cultivate.’ The resulting confusion found her spending hundreds of pounds on vocal training throughout her young adult life, until the renowned voice coach Iris Warren said, ‘That’s the voice you’ve got. Leave it alone.’ The combination of apparent physical fragility and vocal oomph was her trademark, along with talent, beauty, brains and bravery.

EVERETT COLLECTION/TCD/PROD.DB/ALAMY

As Sibella, with Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price). Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

She left RADA at 17, went straight into the West End and didn’t stop working. Thank God, because her parents had run out of money – and art, as usual, wasn’t paying. I suspect, from that moment on, she supported them entirely. In 1938, she encountered my father, the actor André Morell. My father’s education had stopped at 14, when he was apprenticed as a motor engineer. The amateur-acting bug hit him in 1934, at 25 and, four years later, he was at the Old Vic, playing leading Shakespearean roles. He had finally been able to afford his first tailor-made suit when he strode into his agent’s office to find my mother reading a script. He flashed what he considered an impressive smile at her and marched into their mutual agent’s inner sanctum, only to be told, ‘Her name’s Joan Greenwood, she’s only just 18 and you keep your hands off.’ Mama merely thought, ‘What a disgustingly over good-looking,

overconfident young man – how dare he smirk at me like that?’ He pursued her on and off for 22 years, hoping against hope. They finally eloped to Jamaica in 1960, and were married until his death (those bloody cigarettes again) in 1978. In 1942, Mama was discovered by Leslie Howard for his film The Gentle Sex, a high-end propaganda piece about the Auxiliary Territorial Service. Her bloom into stardom began. The British film industry, for indeed there was such a thing then, was in a renaissance, providing opportunities we can only look back on as a strange, lost dream. Between 1942 and 1955, she made 19 films, a good handful of which are some of the most beloved and enduring Britain has produced. Three are Ealing comedies. The most celebrated is the brilliantly black-hearted Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), in which an impoverished Dennis Price murders his way to a dukedom, slaughtering Alec Guinness repeatedly, in eight different incarnations.

My mother played Sibella, Price’s mistress and nemesis. She’d never done anything quite like it before, and in the public imagination it in some senses defined her, as a mocking, wilful, witty, ruthless, sophisticated siren. Her enormous eroticism was heightened by her apparent obliviousness to its effect. The film also marked the beginning of her lifelong friendship with Alec Guinness, with whom she made four films, including her last, Little Dorrit, released a few months after her death. Alec had himself narrowly escaped death at her hands in Ealing’s The Man in the White Suit when she nearly ran him and an entire camera crew over by accidentally putting a car into violent reverse, despite a strenuous effort to do the opposite (very like my mother). One of her chief joys on Kind Hearts was the hats. Ealing was a world brand, but it had a typically British budget – ie nearly non-existent. She and the costume designer, Anthony Mendleson, delighted in creating increasingly extravagant pieces of millinery out of airy nothings, ribbon remnants and pipe-cleaners, as Sibella’s headgear extends and expands with her increasingly monstrous demands and blackmail. In life, my mother was indifferent to hats; on set, she appreciated their impact. After this first zenith, including The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) and Whisky Galore! (1949) – which Ealing’s legendary head Michael Balcon sold to her as an opportunity for a holiday on the Isle of Barra – she made an international career in France (she spoke impeccable French), in Hollywood and on Broadway. She also re-established her London stage roots with a definitive, notorious Lysistrata, and an acclaimed Hedda Gabler. In 1962, Laurence Olivier invited her and my father to join him as leading members of the prototype National Theatre company, at the first Chichester Festival, where I was conceived. I had the best nine months of my acting career to date in the maternal womb. On stage, I was in Chekhovian love scenes with Olivier and Michael Redgrave. In the film Tom Jones, I shared a bed with Mama and Albert Finney and participated in high-comedy scenes with Edith Evans. For this, and much else, I have to thank her. Happy centenary, dear Mama. May we all gargle champagne in your honour. The Oldie Spring 2021 31

Town Mouse

The lesson of lockdown: we’re social animals tom hodgkinson

Aren’t you looking forward to being sociable again? The return to social life makes me think of the opposite – people who sought isolation, like medieval anchorites and anchoresses, the mystic visionaries who spent their entire lives in a hole in a church wall. The cell had a window to the street on one side and a window to the church on the other. Some of these lunatics, such as Julian of Norwich (1343-after 1416), became quite famous. You can imagine the captions when these lockdown ladies appeared in the Medieval Mail: ‘Anchoress cuts a spiritual figure as she poses in TINY stone cage where she has lived for 35 years.’ ‘Divine: Julian of Norwich nails utility chic in sweeping beige dress, bare feet and cosy wimple.’ In the 18th century, it became fashionable for landed families to employ a hermit and keep him on the premises to gawp at. At Lulworth, Dorset, a supposed holy man lived alone in a hermitage, though he was relatively free compared with the wall-dwellers of the Middle Ages: one story relates that he was sacked when discovered down the pub.

32 The Oldie Spring 2021

Being paid to do nothing lost its appeal after a while. Lately, we’ve all had a bit of a taste of the hermit’s life. And most of us have found it to be bloody miserable. Life should be lived, not avoided. Loneliness is a problem, a disease – and it can kill. In Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships, a new book by the foremost scientist on friendship, Robin Dunbar, cites various studies showing that loneliness depresses the immune system. ‘Friends are genuinely good for you,’ he says, ‘even at the physiological level.’ This is obviously true. The other day, a friend called to ask if I wanted to eat a sandwich by the canal for lunch. It was not the most luxurious meal ever eaten but, to us, it was bliss. He said he’d enjoyed aspects of lockdown but had now had enough. We met feeling low and parted feeling massively cheered. I could feel any malignant viruses being repelled from me by powerful bonhomie. In Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse (1918), Johnny lives in fellowship with a large group of other town mice, while Timmy Willie appears

to subsist in rural isolation, like a hermit. He can do what he likes and does not need to wear a smart frock-coat to dinner like his cousin, but isn’t his life a bit bare and empty? Dickens had a burning hatred of hermits, expressed in his 1861 short story, Tom Tiddler’s Ground. It was based on his real-life encounter with James ‘Mad’ Lucas (1813-1874), a famous Victorian hermit. Lucas’s family had become rich following the abolition of slavery – slaveowners had been given compensation by the government. But rather than attempting to do good with this fortune, Lucas locked himself in a single room on his family estate, let his hair grow long, lived in filth alongside rats and generally behaved like something out of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. People came to visit Mad Lucas from far and wide, admiring his anchorite sensibilities. Charles Dickens, however, felt his self-isolation, far from being an act of extreme holiness, was in fact a sign of monstrous egotism and vanity. ‘I know you like to be seen,’ he says to Lucas – also known as the Hermit of Redcoats Green – in the story, when the two meet. Dickens christens him Mr Mopes and continues in similar anti-hermetic vein: ‘It is my intention to sit here through this summer day, until that summer sun sinks low in the west, and tell you what a poor creature you are.’ He calls Mr Mopes weak. ‘I weak, you fool?’ the hermit responds. ‘I who have held to my purpose, and my diet, and my only bed there, all these years?’ The dynamic writer’s objection to Mad Lucas and his way of life is that mankind is made to be sociable and active. Dickens goes on, ‘We must arise and wash our faces and do our gregarious work, and act and react on one other, leaving only the idiot and the palsied to sit blinking in the corner.’ Some of us are feeling a tad apprehensive about arising from our anchorite cells and corners to wash our faces and do our gregarious work. It’s all a bit daunting. Life has been quite easy when we’ve been locked down. There aren’t so many responsibilities – like when you’re in prison. But what’s the most feared punishment in prison? Solitary confinement. Those who live alone have suffered most under lockdown. All their social-support mechanisms have been cruelly taken away. Even if we’re a bit nervous, most of us will rush back into the arms of the crowd with great joy – whether we’re town mice or country mice

Country Mouse

I’m a night owl, Mary’s a lark and that’s why it works giles wood

A recent sojourn in my widowed mother’s home on Anglesey offered the opportunity to clear an archive of my father. He was a prolific letter-writer and jotter of the details of the minutiae of his life. I was reminded of the extraordinary fact that my parents’ marriage seems to have survived any number of extramarital liaisons, on both sides. (Fortunately, there is hardly anyone left alive to take offence at this revelation.) And yet the marriage endured. Puzzlingly. Was this due simply to the fact that, in their day, the social stigma of divorce was enough to deter them from separating? I think not. As I sifted through the archive, I realised the relationship’s longevity was directly linked to the fact that they didn’t see very much of each other. My mother was an early riser who would head immediately into the garden, weather permitting, where she stayed throughout most of the hours of daylight. By contrast, my father, who composed love letters, played the blues and did some of his worst paintings in the middle of the night, rose at two o’clock in the afternoon. He was also in the habit of taking a siesta between 6pm and 9pm. Their only overlap of consequence was when my mother, a graduate of the Constance Spry Finishing School at Winkfield, would serve them both a 1950s-style dish of something like chicken fricassee at 10pm. With one ‘identifying’ as a night owl and another as a lark, they had clearly done well by not fighting against these natural propensities, instead turning them to their advantage. Avoidance was clearly the main clue to the success of their marriage. Given my own natural propensity to finding that the best programmes on TV

‘How quintessentially English – maiden aunts e-scootering to evensong’

tend to be shown a long time after midnight, I felt vindication coming from beyond the grave. Perhaps I too should have no compunction about my own preference to stay up late and rise late – even when it means a vague sense of unease that my drawn curtains will be observed by the master craftsman who has been repairing our shed for seven years, who arrives each morning at 8am. Avoidance may well be a component in the survival of my sinecure as husband to Mary, who is up and about by 7 each morning. Last month, findings were released from the University of Oulu in Finland, showing that 40 to 50 per cent of people identify as natural night owls. Night owls are least sleepy, with fastest reaction times, at 8pm. My brain kicks into top gear only at around

Avoidance of each other was the main clue to the success of their marriage

midnight, the exact moment hard-hitting journalist Stephen Sackur appears on HARDtalk. The other night I was gripped by a fascinating news report about young Moroccan immigrants who vlog their whole illegal journeys towards the UK, mile by mile, to a fascinated audience of their peers back in Morocco. But night owls are at a disadvantage in conventional, nine-to-five-centric workplaces, where needless to say they perform less well than larks. Moreover, night owls tend to take retirement earlier than larks owing to poorer health. Other studies show we are more likely to suffer depression, mental-health problems, obesity and cancer than our earlier-rising friends. In a remarkable example of convergence of ideas, the son of the late Dr Stuttaford (the former Oldie doctor), a man who is professionally involved in personal-growth solutions, is in a telephone relationship with Mary. Tom Stuttaford Jr has told her he is a believer in respecting what he calls ‘natural work rhythms’. He opined that, especially during the enforced intimacy of lockdown, rather than trying to coax me out of the Land of Nod, Mary should make the most of the time that I am ‘hulking away in bed’, as her mother used to put it, and turn the mental privacy to profitable use in order to get ahead with her own day. The Swiss herbalist Dr Vogel was in no doubt that the natural rhythms of life had been ruined by artificial light and television. Indeed, electricity does seem to have been something of an own goal – without it, we would all be rising with the larks. We don’t need clichés – early to bed, early to rise etc – to show us that early risers are morally superior, especially in England where daylight hours are so few. This is conventional, age-old wisdom reiterated in 1887 in the drastically under-read novel Amaryllis at the Fair by Richard Jefferies: ‘If you wants to get well, old Dr Butler used to say, “You go for a walk in the marning afore the aair have been braathed auver.” Before the air has been breathed over – inspired and re-inspired by human crowds … and while it retains the sweetness of the morning.’ He had a point. It may not be too late for me to turn from a night owl into a lark. Transitioning is all the rage. Let the city- and town-dwellers keep the so-called ‘night-time economy’ ticking over, but there is no need for a country mouse to stay up through the night – even if it does suit Mary. The Oldie Spring 2021 33

Postcards from the Edge

Don’t let the most thrilling train trip in Europe go off the rails

TOBY MORISON

Please save ailing Eurostar, says Mary Kenny

Honestly, I will be genuinely heartbroken if Eurostar – that magical train that plies between London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam – goes bust because of the beastly pandemic. We can see the danger signs and hear the threats that it might. It has lost 95 per cent of its passengers over the last year – because of restrictions on travel. In 2019, Eurostar was carrying 30,000 travellers a day; in the COVID year, that had dwindled to around 1,500. How mournful and deserted St Pancras Station seems, as the lively international arrivals and departures have fallen silent. It used to be a hub of life, mingling and interchange, with all the expectation and promise that travel should imply. I loved that journey – usually starting, for me, at Ashford – ’twixt England and Continental Europe. It evoked almost a pre-war glamour of train travel – classy, streamlined and noiseless, gliding down under the English Channel and then emerging in the Pas-de-Calais and all that lies beyond. Eurostar was fast – two hours 15 minutes from London to Paris, travelling at 185 mph – usually arrived on time and was blissfully comfortable. By far the ‘greenest’ way to travel, it also involved markedly less fuss, queuing and personalsecurity palaver than flight. It was a brilliant feat of engineering, as well as a great example of co-operation between Britain, France, Belgium and Germany, which supplied some of the trains. I was so looking forward to Eurostar extending its reach to enable train travel to the Mediterranean, Germany and beyond. But now the boss of SNCF, Christophe Fanichet, thinks the company could go bust, and the French and British governments can’t agree on who should cough up a rescue package. The collapse of Eurostar can’t be allowed to happen. Boris Johnson, who wants to build a tunnel between Britain and Ireland (with a possible stop-over under the Isle 34 The Oldie Spring 2021

of Man) must surely find a way to ensure this undersea rail connection is saved. Germany is apparently losing its reputation for peerless efficiency. Trains run late, supermarkets are ill managed and the country fell behind in administering the vaccine. ‘How many Germans does it take to vaccinate someone against COVID-19?’ asked the seasoned Berlin correspondent of the Irish Times, Derek Scally. ‘One to administer the jab, another to discuss medical concerns, a third to raise ethical implications, a fourth to flag dataprotection issues, a fifth to send Berlin regular updates by fax and 11 others to stand around voicing non-specific concerns.’ There is a special word for these worrywarts with a ‘can’t-do’ attitude: Bedenkenträger – ‘concern-carriers’. We all want the chance to visit Germany again – to visit anywhere, really. So we want universal vaccination. But it’s somehow charming that the famed Germanic organisational skills – seen even in football – aren’t always infallible. In her TV interview last month, Meghan Markle said that although she didn’t research anything about British royalty before joining the family, she knew that the monarchy was an institution over 1,000 years old.

Yet it’s the Grimaldis of Monaco who claim to be the oldest continuous dynasty in Europe; the British had the Interregnum between 1649 and 1660. The Grimaldis were established in 1297 by Francesco Grimaldi, a Genoese nobleman cunningly disguised as a Franciscan monk when he seized the territory. The current Prince of Monaco, Albert II, claims direct descent, which sometimes went through the female line. There is, apparently, also an English branch of the Grimaldis which alleges it has some entitlement to the Principality. The nice thing about the Grimaldis is that they’ve always been mad about the circus (Princess Stephanie even ran off with an elephant trainer), and Grimaldi the Clown was related to the Monégasques. In the great clown tradition, he had a broken heart – and he took his melancholy to a doctor. The medic said, ‘Cheer up – go and see Grimaldi.’ To which the famous entertainer replied dolefully, ‘I am Grimaldi.’ Princesses have often felt imprisoned within the protocols of palaces. Grace of Monaco, in her time, felt unhappily constrained and Charlene, the present Princess, has sometimes looked distinctly tense under the duress of princessly duty. A Spanish proverb says, ‘ “Take what you like,” says God. “And pay for it.” ’ There’s a cost to every privilege. I’m fond of an Irish phrase, ‘The old dog for the hard road.’ It’s both inspiring and touching. It relates to working dogs in farming life, where the ‘old dog’ would be given the toughest pathway, because he could always be relied upon, through long training and practice, to do his job. The expression would sometimes come to the lips of veterans given a tough task and expected to fulfil it without grumbling. ‘Ah, sure, the auld dog for the hard road.’ There was pride, too, in the old dog’s always rising to the occasion. Without complaining or claiming ‘victimhood’!

Small World

I’m in love with the Mata Hari of Cleethorpes

It happened at the Spar. Full of Balkan mystery, provocatively unmasked, she locked eyes with me over the canned goods jem clarke

STEVE WAY

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five feet zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his ageing, acidic parents. A lifelong loafer, he gives us his unique perspective on small-town life – and that perspective is looking up at everything and down on everyone.

I have many levers prompting me to find regular work. First, there’s a miserable mother trying to inveigle me into pointless DIY projects such as a slope so she can get in through the backdoor more easily. ‘Let’s wait till you’re actually allowed to go out, before you start finding a way back in,’ I say. Her constant rows with Father are pitched at the intensity level of 30-yearolds on the eve of the disintegration of a first marriage. ‘Where the hell did you put it this time, you old bat?’ he rages as he searches – irony noted – for a bloodpressure-reading machine. Other things encouraging me to work include: the closure of all the cinemas and no income. But more than anything, it’s the shame of popping mid-morning

into the Spar and seeing the glamorous, Serbian shop-owner nod at me knowingly as if she can see the stain of supported income on my soul. Because her defiantly unmasked face has been the only whole one I’ve seen for some time, I’ve been quite taken by this middle-aged canned-goods key worker. What makes her so memorable – a mysterious mix of mainland-Europe art-film unknowability and one too many online make-up tutorials? I worry that she wonders what a man like me is doing buying fizzy watermelon drinks in the middle of a working weekday. When I pay, she eyes me suspiciously, with every elongated, sing-songy, Balkanbounced syllable of ‘Thank-youuuveeery-muuuch’. I calm myself by thinking that, for all she knows, I could be a scholarly writer, semi-retired to the seaside for research reasons, rather than a chancy hack with a semi-regular column in a caravanning trade journal. She could mistake my paisley bandana-style face covering for the casual cravat of a true creative. ‘Your card, eez refused. You must put it een the machine,’ she says. Her harsh words break the spell. Suddenly I’m all fumbling fingers as I try

to remember a rarely used PIN based on the birthdates of two Hollywood icons – but in what order? Tapping the machine, I explain, ‘I’ve probably used the card too many times this weekend. It was a mad one! Big weekend!’ Then I suddenly realise nothing has been open – no one in the country has had a big weekend. Pausing, perhaps processing the selfsame thought, she suddenly says out of the blue, in that beautiful accent, words I shall never forget: ‘You’re now an author, right?’ It’s a double whammy. She has obviously been thinking about me, asking about me, researching me… I deflect in full and unconscious, mid-’90s, Hugh Grant-level fluffery: ‘Well, not quite an author, a few magazine articles, no books, no published books, that is, but, yes in many ways, you are correct, indeed, that is, what, I might, be, and indeed am…’ I look up to see her fingernail pointing down once more at the card-reader as she repeats with full, Bosnian-bordershattering clarity, ‘I said, “YOU ARE NOW AUTHOR-RISED.” ’ How those uncaring Mata Hari eyes bore into me, until I’m past the self-serve soft-scoop machine and safely out of the door. She must have concluded I’m some rambling, unemployed nutter, only one missed meal away from a shoplifting spree. By the time I got home, I’d decided to redouble my job-hunting efforts, when a blood-pressure-reading machine flew past my head, and a calm middleEnglander voice said, ‘Sorry, I was aiming at your father.’ Later, I took Father to one side and asked him seriously, ‘Are we … is this … normal?’ ‘He’s normal – you’re a layabout,’ my mother yelled from another room. This particular insult has cropped up once or twice. I am happy to report that the extended family have agreed I’m more of a ‘sit-about’ – not moving in any meaningful sense, but upright at least. The Oldie Spring 2021 37

Profitable Wonders

Sheer miracle of Manx shearwaters

BLICKWINKEL/ALAMY

james le fanu

Serious seabirding is not for the faint-hearted. ‘Only those who have lived in a tent continually battered by northerly gales can comprehend the wearing effect on nerves and temper,’ wrote Frank Fraser Darling of almost a year spent on the desolate rock of Priest Island, off the coast of Wester Ross. Still, his privations were well rewarded. He witnessed, at close quarters, the complex social lives of gulls, fulmars, guillemots, gannets, razorbills and numerous other species. His Bird Flocks and the Breeding Cycle, published in 1938, is full of original observations, most notably about the formalised dance routines of communal courtship – particularly that of the heavy-beaked razorbill, resembling a Highland Reel. ‘They gathered on the sea in single file and then formed a circle, their raised beaks almost touching in the centre,’ he wrote. The circle widened and broke up. A couple paired off, bobbed and came together, waltzing around, holding each other’s beak ‘in a posture of rapturous ecstasy’. This continued for a quarter of an hour, culminating in a finale of excited wing-flapping. ‘Finally they all rose from the water together and flew seawards, just topping the waves.’ Meanwhile, several hundred miles to the south, another self-taught naturalist, Ronald Lockley, on the island of Skokholm off the Pembrokeshire coast, would spend several years working out by degrees the little-known life history of the Manx shearwater. These dark, stiff-winged ocean voyagers arrive in their thousands to breed in early February. They make their nests in burrows – often a disused rabbit hole – where the female lays a single egg. Though concealed underground, Lockley was able to keep track of one pair’s daily routine by the simple expedient of cutting out a replaceable clod of earth directly above their nest. 38 The Oldie Spring 2021

This ready access provided the further opportunity to conduct his pioneering ‘displacement experiments’. These started in a small way. He relocated one of a pair to Devon, leaving her partner to tend their egg, and monitored how long she took to return. Subsequent displacement excursions followed to ever more distant locations, culminating in an epic trip by plane to Venice. Having released her from the island of Giudecca on 9th July, Lockley found her reunited with her partner and (now hatched) chick two weeks later. ‘I stroked her in the moonlight with awe,’ he told a meeting at London’s Royal Institution in 1939 – though he could only speculate as to the route she might have taken. Still, for all the fascinating findings gleaned from these and more recent studies, much about seabirds’ lives remained obscure – until the discovery, just over 20 years ago, of ‘the long sought-after key to a vista of wondrous new knowledge’. That ‘key’ is a miniaturised packet of electronics, weighing less than a broad bean, which records – or relays back to satellites – streams of data, whose ‘wondrous’ insights are described by ornithologist Michael Brooke in his recent book Far from Land. The journey home from Venice of Ronald Lockley’s shearwater is a mere stroll in the park compared with the ocean mastery of 12 of her fellows – as revealed by the geolocators attached to their legs. Flying direct down the west coast of Europe and Africa, crossing the Equator they picked up the trade winds that carried them across the Atlantic to Brazil and on to the rich fishing grounds of Patagonia – 5,000 miles in under a week. Then, a few months later, they flew back, again exploiting the trade winds but in the reverse direction – up through the Caribbean to the eastern seaboard,

Homing instinct: Manx shearwater

before heading across the North Atlantic back to Skokholm. The skills required for this and other similarly spectacular trans-oceanic migrations are, we are informed, learned, not innate. Next, seabirds are paragons of fidelity until parted by death. So how astonishing to learn that Sabine’s gulls, for example, having nested together in the Canadian Arctic, should elect to separate for the winter months. He heads for South Africa, while she ends up off the coast of Peru – only to be reunited in the Arctic, arriving within a few days of each other. That fidelity is manifest too in their taking it in turns to forage for their young. Here again, those geolocators have revealed an unimagined flexibility whereby, for example, kittiwakes time their lengthy fishing expeditions to coincide with the daily tidal cycle when food is most abundant. Those miniaturised electronics are now so refined as to detail how seabirds feed and what for. The cormorant routinely dives 50 yards below the surface of the water in pursuit of its next meal. The albatross consumes two stone of its preferred food, the squid, every week. And there are, of course, many, many more of these extraordinary seabird stories.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Top marks for top pupils Once, when I was in trouble at my (last) school for something I had written in this Venerable Organ, one of the senior management said two things to me. Both underlined my general sense of discomfort with the school and most of what it stood for – at least in its upper echelons. One was ‘I don’t read the newspapers as it’s all nonsense’ and the other was ‘I don’t think people should write about what they know about.’ Well, I might have slightly rephrased the second ‘soundbite’, but the essence is entirely correct. I should not have been writing about schools because perhaps I had some idea of what was actually going on. Now, foot-stamping and frustrated, I feel I need to set a few non-teaching pundits straight. It’s all about something called CAG – Centre Assessed Grades – which is the way students were awarded their GCSEs and A levels last year, and will be again this year. As I wrote at the time, Gavin’s Lovely Algorithm nearly did for the clever, hard-working children from poorer backgrounds – but, thank heaven, he buckled and gave in to common sense. This year, there has been more time to consider how the students will be given their grades and, rather than anyone attempting to create another Lovely

Algorithm, we teachers are once again awarding the grades. And oh, the outpouring of bile on Twitter and in the press and from parents (but not, interestingly, from students). Someone has a favourite; someone doesn’t like my ‘kid’; someone is unfair. Are they adults, these people, or whining children who have hacked into their parents’ accounts? Here is the thing: I have been building portfolios for my Year 11 children for ever, but particularly since Christmas when the third lockdown was announced. I have impressed on them that everything they do now counts. For a while, they were submitting half-hearted work. But when I explained to them that actually it is harder to do well with CAG because we have to have evidence spread over months, not just the one-day exam test, they have really raised their games. Gav and his underlings will have the right to ask for every exam, essay and report the students have ever had. Cardboard folders with essays and marks and comments and tear-stained responses are piling up in teachers’ cupboards all over the country. And ‘favourites’? Even before this all started, any teacher worth his or her salt was particularly careful about students they instinctively either liked or

distrusted. And, of course, we can’t help it – we are human. There are inevitably some children we warm to more than others. If I give a mark much higher or lower than the child has ever had before, I make sure another member of the department has a look. I have one student whose predicted grade is a 5. Over the last few months he has been creeping ever upward, and is now looking at a good 7. He is exactly the sort of student any mediators worth their salt would want a close look at – and they can look all they like, but they will not be able to fault the 7 I plan to award this boy. There is a downside, of course. One of my students submitted an essay really rather better than I was expecting. At first, I preened; then I googled. Pick a phrase that seems just a little sophisticated for the student, type it in and … bingo! I found the entire essay ready and waiting to be copied and pasted. Oh, the cold wrath, scorn and curled lip with which that essay was met. I did my past aspirations as an Ellen Terry proud. It won’t happen again. So please rest assured that if your grandchildren are given high grades, they deserve them. And if they are given low grades, they deserve them too. We know what we are doing. Trust us.

Quite Interesting Things about … Springs Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory is now usually just called Alice, but used to be called Stuart. Giant Springs, Montana, is the US’s largest freshwater spring and out of it flows the world’s shortest river, the Roe, running just 200 feet into the Missouri. In 1949, Hot Springs, New Mexico, changed its name to

Truth or Consequences – the only town in the world to be named after a TV game show. Butch Cassidy was so called because he had once worked as a butcher in Rock Springs, Wyoming. He got through his whole career as an outlaw without killing a single person. Nice Mr Cassidy

Quitobaquito Springs, Arizona, is home to the Quitobaquito pupfish which can live in water twice as salty as the sea and, at 45°C (113°F), nearly twice as hot. Little Spring, Willow Springs, Hidden Springs, Bitter Springs, Sand Springs and Cow Springs are all in Coconino County, Arizona.

in rural Bavaria is to tie small baskets of wild strawberries to the horns of cattle as an offering to elves. For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia

A rite of spring still practised The Oldie Spring 2021 41

sister teresa

Let’s sing our hearts out – in church In classical Greek, zoion (life) means the physical vitality of organic beings. Although this definition is accurate enough, it is dreary, and when it is used to describe a young Labrador puppy, it is not so much an understatement as a glaring under-valuation. I met Maisie last year when she was only ten weeks old. For a very small creature that didn’t even exist a few months before, she was vitality personified and very beautiful. In Luke 6:38, we find, ‘Give, and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, shaken together, and running over, will be poured into your lap.’ Substitute ‘life’ for ‘gifts’ and one gets some idea of the high spirits packed into Maisie. I realised this when I picked her up and removed her just before she ransacked the electrician’s well-ordered toolbox. She wasn’t in the least bit put

out at being thwarted from some lovely fun, but was quivering with enthusiasm at the prospect of the next, immediate and certain pleasure that was to present itself. This was my wrist: the ideal shape and texture on which to exercise her tiny but needle-sharp teeth. A very long time ago, we too had a similar zest for life. We also had innocence, which meant that we found everything and anything a thrill. Now we are old, we have seen and experienced much, and we have cares and worries. Our keenness for what is going to happen next has all but vanished or, sadly, has been replaced by anxiety. This is all part of a natural process, and we have learnt an incalculable amount (or so at least I hope) from our infancy to the present day. We should have become more prudent – wiser. Overenthusiasm in an adult can be

misplaced and very irritating, but heaven prevent us from becoming blasé and weary of the wonderful world in which we live. Easter Sunday has just happened – the day that celebrates existence at its fullest. It is hardly possible to understand the most rudimentary meaning of the Resurrection, but it is life itself. With only onscreen liturgy in 2020, religious ceremonies were miserably inadequate. At the time of writing, I don’t know if they will be any better this year; I certainly hope so. We need to be able to sing about the glory of Jesus’s Resurrection, and we need to be present in a real church to do so, rather than being fobbed off with the virtual. Mercifully, COVID-19 can’t rob us of the wonders of spring; nor can it prevent us, if we are sufficiently daring, from singing our heads off out of doors.

Funeral Service

Bill Windham (1926-2021) Bill Windham, who died of coronavirus in January, was a senior figure in the rowing world, as a double Cambridge Blue, and an Olympic oarsman in the Helsinki Games in 1952. His funeral was at St Peter’s Church, Glasbury-on-Wye. He won many races at Henley, where he became the longest-serving Steward and was President of the Leander Club. He oversaw the admission of women competitors as members of the club. Bill was taught at home by his mother, Marjorie. She set up a small school at home from which he won a scholarship to Bedford School where he learned to row and became Captain of Boats. He won a scholarship to Christ’s College, Cambridge, and rowed for his college at Henley in 1945. Bill was one of the last survivors of the first regatta after the war. In 1947, he was in the light-blue boat that beat Oxford by ten lengths. He rowed for Cambridge again in 1951, when Oxford sank halfway along the course. 42 The Oldie Spring 2021

Rather sportingly, the light blues allowed the dark blues to restart – and they won convincingly again. Following their 1951 Boat Race victory, the Cambridge crew were invited to race in Boston, USA, where they beat Harvard, Boston University and MIT to win the Paul Revere silver bowl. Having gained a double first in mechanical sciences, Windham started a career with Guinness, in Dublin in 1947. It’s thought he caught the eye of the then Guinness Chairman, Lord Iveagh, who had won the Diamond Sculls at Henley. Guinness employed several sporting stars, notably the Olympic long-distance runner Chris Chataway, who became a brewer. Chataway invited his friend Norris McWhirter on board as founding editor of The Guinness Book of Records. Windham was a member of the GB

eight who won bronze medals at the Empire Games in New Zealand and the European Championships in Macon. His final international appearance was at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, when his crew came fourth. ‘Bill’s glittering career at Guinness was brought to an abrupt halt in 1984 by Ernest Saunders, the subsequently disgraced chief executive of that great company, who wanted to be rid of what he saw as the Old Guard,’ wrote Ashe Windham, his son. A former equerry to the Queen Mother, Ashe once saved her from choking when she swallowed a trout bone. He continued, ‘Bill, who was never known to be unkind to anyone, limited himself by referring to his nemesis as “Deadly Ernest”.’ Emma Phillpotts, Bill’s daughter, read God’s Friend (Anon). Her husband, Simon Phillpotts, read a tribute. Bill’s son William read Farewell My Friends by Rabindranath Tagore. JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Stop the biggest racket in hospitals

Wards used to be hushed before chatty nurses and TVs arrived theodore dalrymple When I was about eight years old, I was chasing a boy round the playground whose nickname, for some reason, was RAF. I tripped and broke my leg. I remember being given orange squash as an analgesic until the ambulance arrived. What I most remember about the hospital was the notice outside: ‘HOSPITAL – QUIET.’ Given the noise inside hospitals these days, such a notice would now be pointless. Indeed, one of the things I most fear about being admitted to hospital (other than, of course, being ill) is the incessant and inescapable noise. How much this noise is unavoidable I am not certain, but some of it surely is. When I was still in practice, my room gave out on to an open but narrow passage between hospital buildings. My window on to the passage was of frosted glass and could not be opened. Every day, at about 11am, without fail, past my window was pushed some kind of trolley which had the sonic qualities of a theatrical thunder-making machine. One day, I went out to see what it was, expecting to see a juggernaut of some description. It was a very small, wiremesh trolley with a few bedclothes in it. Years of research must have gone into developing so tiny a contraption that could make so much noise. I wrote to the chief executive but, of course, noise reduction in hospitals – noise being a real torture to very ill patients – was not a government target and therefore was not important. Once, when I was in hospital myself, I noticed that the tea-trolley lady seemed intent on creating as much noise with her metal trolley as possible. She smashed it through the swing doors, shouting, ‘Tea’n’coffeeemilk’n’shoogah!’ Hospital noise let the patients know that that they were not in hospital to relax or have a nice time. Of course, beeping machines and other noises are unavoidable, and

everyone understands that. But nurses at the nursing station talking incessantly about their social life in the small hours of the morning is agonising for those who are in a completely dependent situation and dare not say anything. Whether or not fears of retaliation against patients who complain about staff for making a noise are justified, they exist. And, these days, with the destruction of the sense of hierarchy, there is no one in higher authority worth complaining to – certainly not about televisions on at full volume in wards. Does noise in hospitals do any real harm? It might even encourage people to leave hospital as soon as possible. And, after all, hospital is a dangerous place for ill people to be. But disturbed sleep is associated with relatively poor outcomes, such as delayed healing and a greater propensity to relapse. A Swedish cardiological study found that heart-attack patients who stayed in a

coronary-care unit during periods of much noise had a higher rate of relapse and readmission to the unit than those who stayed in the same unit in quieter times. But, of course, this does not by itself prove a causative relationship between noise and poor outcome. Insofar as poor outcomes lead to emergencies, which in turn lead to noise, the relationship might be the other way round. Alas, it is unlikely that double-blind (or perhaps I should say double-deaf) experiments can ever be performed to establish the case beyond reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, the wisdom of ages suggests that quiet is good, if not essential, for healing. Do we really need irrefutable scientific evidence before we make efforts to control unnecessary and avoidable noise? But the auguries are not good: an increasing proportion of the population confuses noise with liveliness, the way bureaucrats confuse activity with work.

‘He’s started rehearsing his pointless coughing’ The Oldie Spring 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

Captain Pugwash lives on SIR: I was interested to read your piece in the April issue [Old Un’s Notes] concerning the centenary of the birth of John Ryan, creator of the cartoon character Captain Pugwash. Though the series no longer features on television, memories of the not-sogallant captain live on – in the perhaps unlikely setting of Fleetwood Town Football Club. After every goal scored by the home team, the public-address system blasts out the jaunty Captain Pugwash theme music. Surely an audio spectacle designed to shiver the timbers of the opposition… Stephen Simpson, Preston, Lancashire

Rhett Butler syndrome SIR: The Oldie Guide to Growing Old Disgracefully (April issue) was entertaining. I gather that medical opinion is beginning to recognise the existence of the Rhett Butler Syndrome that affects old people: its chief characteristic is an increasing tendency not to give a damn. Yours faithfully, J Alan Smith, Epping, Essex

Where’s my E-Type? SIR: As usual, I read with interest Alan Judd’s motoring column in the April issue of The Oldie, but I was surprised to note that his comments on maintaining battery charge made no mention of battery isolators. My local garage bought and installed

‘When I say I lost my wife, I mean in a poker game’

one on my ancient ‘Gang of Four’ Rover 45 at very modest cost. Since then, I have had no further problems starting the car for the weekly half-mile trip to my local supermarket despite the fact that it is idle for the rest of the time in lockdown. From a pollution point of view, this is surely much better than ‘running the engine for at least 15 minutes once a fortnight’. I note elsewhere in the April issue that the Jaguar E-Type was launched on 15th March 1961. It is my recollection that the car was unveiled on the previous day, 14th March, which happened to be my 21st birthday. Alas no one thought to buy me one as a 21st-birthday present! Stephen Robinson, London SW15

I’m married to Mr Tickle SIR: My partner, John Tickle, was delighted with your April issue. He has now decided he is 50 this year, rather than 83. You gave us both a laugh. Yours faithfully, Joan Richardson (79½), Morecambe, Lancashire

I went cuckoo, too ‘I’ll double what she’s paying, if you say you can’t find me’ 44 The Oldie Spring 2021

SIR: I was struck by how closely Horatio Clare’s experience of going cuckoo (April issue) mirrored mine.

Like his, mine began with a period of high writerly activity. It was all Radio 4’s fault. I had been lampooning the 2005 General Election and a portion of Waiting for Godot, which amused James Naughtie, and written a song in praise of the network (‘Vive John Humphrys’). Two of the three were broadcast. Like Mr Clare, I had also published a book. I listened to Radio 4 all day and all night. From something I (mis)overheard, I came to believe that the Queen, Posh and Becks were going to pool money for the war against Al-Qaeda. I thought world peace would follow. I begged worried friends to listen to the Today programme and contribute to the fund. At last I was disabused – but it still remains one of the more colourful periods of my life! Susan Tyson, Bramhall, Stockport

Superb in bed SIR: Ben Oglesby writes (April issue) of being taught by Gerard Hoffnung, but his memory is a bit astray in his recollection of Hoffnung’s address to the Oxford Union in 1958. I have just listened to the recording. One of the items quoted from letters from Tyrolean landlords (not estate agents) about holiday bookings. The one about the French widow says, ‘There is a French widow [sic] in every bedroom,

affording delightful prospects’ (not fantastic views). Other letters say, ‘I am not too good in bath, but I am superb in bed’ and ‘There is a balcony overlooking a romantic gorge, and we hope you will want to drop in.’ Sadly Hoffnung died in 1959 at the age of 34. Peter Fry, Witney, Oxfordshire

Rev Dave Allen’s sermon SIR: The Rev Doctor Peter Mullen (‘The best sermons ever’, April issue) was mistaken in quoting the Reverend Ian Paisley as saying, ‘Teeth will be provided!’ These words were in fact spoken by Dave Allen as he satirised Mr Paisley. Hilarious and well worth repeating. Andrew J Laing, Yetts o’Muckhart, Clackmannashire

Ms Grumpy… SIR: Am I the only person who thinks the Mr Men are to be deplored rather than celebrated? I read Kath Garner’s ‘How Mr Tickle tickled the world’ (April issue) with dismay, finding not a hint of criticism of the series’ obvious gender stereotyping, suggesting powerful men and small submissive women. It seems we are totally blinded by nostalgia for their 50-year endurance, rather than questioning whether their influence on children might be something negative. The very titles, Mr Men and Little Miss, are inherently sexist and are part of the drip-feed of sexual stereotyping that children receive from an early age. When our children were little, in the 1980s, we did not give them Mr Men books and I don’t remember seeing them in their local state nursery or primary school, where they would have been against the school’s ethos of egalitarianism. So I am deeply disappointed to find our contemporaries still giving these titles to their grandchildren 50 years on and no one apparently questioning this. How can this sit comfortably alongside our supposed desire to give all children an equal sense of their own worth? I find it depressing to think we have made so little progress in this respect in the last 30 or so years. Yours sincerely, Carol Fine, London SE22

‘Well, we did hope we could go on a cruise this year’

Eliot quotes Tennyson

…and Ms Happy SIR: It was lovely to read about the Mr Men. I have good reason to be grateful to Roger Hargreaves. In the 1970s, I was pregnant with my second child and was instructed to take plenty of bed rest. Being the mother of a rising-threeyear-old would have made this more of a problem had I not been able to sit all of each afternoon with him reading our collection of Mr Men stories. Neither he nor I ever tired of them and I still have them carefully stored in the loft, albeit in a very used condition. I also have a healthy second child. Bev Sims, Rownhams, Southampton, Hampshire

Errare humanum est SIR: Isabel Raphael’s article (April issue) took me back to my schooldays. I was at Bury Grammar School (Girls) in the 1950s. The rules were very strict – we HAD to wear the utterly ghastly school hat when travelling to and from school, and woe betide us if a mistress or prefect saw us without one. The adjacent boys’ school had a similar rule about wearing caps. Waiting at the number 19 bus stop one day, on our way home, a boy named Mickey Heap was spotted by his Latin master, Mr James, capless, and was promptly given 100 lines to do by morning: ‘I must wear my cap when waiting for the bus.’ Oh, and they had to be in Latin. Mickey did his best – but when he presented his lines, and they were translated back, they read, ‘I must wear my helmet when waiting for the chariot.’ Kaye McGann, Standlake, Oxfordshire

SIR: In her article ‘What’s in a name?’ (January issue), Rachel Johnson mentions the importance of book titles and their relevance to books’ success. She gives an example of A Handful of Dust borrowed by Evelyn Waugh from The Waste Land by T S Eliot. May I draw your attention to the poetry of Lord Tennyson (1809-92)? ‘And

my heart is a handful of dust’ comes from his poem Maud – she of ‘Come into the garden, Maud’. Tennyson predates Eliot by several years. Diane Reid, Waverton, Chester

Crossing Temple Bar SIR: It was with a lurch of nostalgia that I enjoyed the picture (February issue, page 81) of Temple Bar in exile at Theobalds Park, north of Enfield. In the 1950s, Chris Howell and I, both students at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, crawled all over this sad, neglected Wren monument, and measured it in detail so we could produce the historical measured drawings required by our very traditional Beaux-Arts-style college. In the failing light, we heard the voices of farm workers cycling home, their accents as rural as the Archers’, though it was barely a dozen miles from London. A few years ago, I was pleased to see it cleaned up and re-erected as part of the redesigned Paternoster Square. Very best wishes, Tony Noakes, Perth, Western Australia The Oldie Spring 2021 45

I Once Met

Peter Ustinov

The great actor would have been 100 on 16th April 2021. Dan Zerdin remembers a joyous lunch with him We were making our way up the aisle one morning in 1969, at the London Pavilion on Shatfesbury Avenue, after the press showing of a new film. I was reviewing the film. My BBC colleague Francis suddenly clutched my arm and said, ‘Look – there’s Peter Ustinov. He’s an old friend and I haven’t seen him for ages. I must talk to him.’ Behind the stalls, near the exit, Francis accosted his friend: ‘Peter … Francis … remember?’ Ustinov clearly didn’t, but pretended he did – and it didn’t take long for the two of them to plunge into an animated conversation about mutual friends I’m sure they didn’t actually have. By this time, the house manager was hovering because, apart from us, the auditorium was empty and he wanted to open the doors to paying customers. ‘Lunch,’ said Ustinov (not yet Sir Peter) immediately. ‘Come along, both of you.’ Outside, he hailed a taxi and we drove to the august Connaught Hotel, where a table was immediately found for us in the restaurant.

Once the meal was ordered, we were treated to the full Ustinov. I hesitate to use the word performance because it wasn’t like that. This was the urbane playwright, author, raconteur extraordinaire and all-round movie actor, from the Emperor Nero to Hercule Poirot. This was the radio voice extraordinaire who could hilariously create the sounds of the orchestra, singers, even the closing announcement of a Mozart-opera relay from Salzburg. This was the wit who, called to the services during the war, when asked why a person of his ample build and height had applied to join the tank regiment, had replied that if he had to go into battle, he would rather do it sitting down. This was also the man who talked to us as warmly as if we were indeed old

friends, joking, telling stories and even silencing my colleague, who was no shrinking violet himself. On actors, politicians, films, plays, Europe and the Soviet Union, he was warm, knowledgeable, wise and magnetic. He chuckled appreciatively at my recollection of his play The Love of Four Colonels, which opened with all the characters on stage completely silent for five minutes. At the end of it, we in the audience were falling off our seats with helpless laughter. Eventually – and exceedingly well lunched – the voice of the generous Peter Ustinov still ringing in our ears, Francis and I headed back to Bush House. I made straight for the canteen, a cup of tea and – oh God, the review! The film we had seen that morning seemed a long time ago. Neither it nor my review was very good but I didn’t care. I had met Peter Ustinov. From Nero to Poirot: Peter Ustinov (1921-2004)

Brought up in a Nissen hut

During the Second World War, 329 industrial hostels were built throughout Britain to house over 120,000 workers involved in the war effort. I know a little about one of them, Keresley Industrial Hostel, built on the northern outskirts of Coventry. After the war, what remained of it became part of Copthorne Secondary Modern, my school. The old hostel provided extra classroom space, particularly for metalwork, woodwork and art.

I used to wonder what those rooms had been used for during the war. Long after leaving the school, I discovered that the hostel was specifically built to accommodate Bevin Boys – among them David Day, who in 1993 published an account of his time there, The Bevin Boy. My classrooms had been a ‘welfare block’ for David Day: ‘The walls were painted in bright colours and the layout resembled that of a seaside holiday camp. Among its amenities were a shop, a cinema, a games room, a library, a vast dining hall and a well-upholstered lounge.’ A lot more than I ever imagined. The hostel didn’t just provide my school with

classrooms. It also provided me with a home. The Bevin Boys slept in neighbouring Nissen huts – 12 to a hut. After the war, as they went home, the Nissen huts became empty. When people in war-ravaged Coventry learnt of this, they began moving in. This was in 1946 – the year my parents got married and were in need of a home themselves. My father went to investigate. He dimly remembered the occupation being organised by two city councillors. He was told that, if he wanted a hut, he had to place an item of furniture inside the one he wanted, to claim it. On learning this, he went straight

away to his parents’ home, half a mile away, and asked his mother for the loan of a chair so he could claim a hut. My grandmother told him, ‘Take two – get one for Gladys!’ And that’s exactly what he did. I was born in the January following my parents’ moving in. The Nissen hut was therefore my very first home. But by the time I attended the school, it had gone – along with all the others. By Paul Buttle, Keswick, Cumbria, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie Spring 2021 47

Books Tea and no sympathy A N WILSON The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

GARY WING

By Paula Byrne William Collins £25 Perhaps the most interesting thing about a novelist’s life is what they leave out of their novels. You’d never guess from reading Barbara Pym’s mild 1950s comedies – of which Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958) are the best – that she had experienced a robustly active sexual life since being a student at Oxford in the 1930s, still less that one of her favourite lovers was a Nazi stormtrooper. You’d never guess that this gawky Joyce Grenfell among novelists had polished up her schoolgirl German in order better to appreciate speeches by the Führer, and that her summer holidays in the 1930s were spent in the happy (for her) atmosphere of the Third Reich. The dull, English provincialism in the art and politics of the extreme right makes one realise that she had more in common with her friend – and fan – Philip Larkin than merely the enjoyment of a sort of Ealing Comedies pre-Beatles, pre-immigration Britain. All this is brought out forcefully by this whopper of a biography, some 700 pages long. For reasons that elude your reviewer, Paula Byrne says, ‘It is fitting to imagine her life as a picaresque adventure, with a Fieldingesque narrative.’ Each chapter, of which there are dozens, has an excruciating title such as ‘In Which Things begin to become a little complicated with Rupert’ (an early boyfriend) or ‘In which Our Heroine goes to Germany for the third time and sleeps with her Nazi’.

Also, since Pym (or her sister Hilary, after Barbara’s death) expunged nearly all references to Nazism from the diaries now deposited in the Bodleian Library, Paula Byrne falls back instead, when we are in pre-war Germany, on the memories of the surely very different Unity Mitford. In common with Paula Byrne, and thousands of others, I used to love Pym’s novels – the better ones, at any rate. In common with Larkin and others, I regarded it as outrageous that, in 1963, ‘trendy’ Tom Maschler, at Jonathan Cape, turned down Pym’s novel An Unsuitable Attachment (published, posthumously, in 1982). But have you tried reading it? It’s feeble stuff. A falling-off indeed. I do not think she ever got back into her stride, although Byrne makes a strong case for the virtues of the later novels, even including the bitter, nihilistic, little tale The Sweet Dove Died (1978) about the

painful, unrequited love Pym felt for a gay man. The weird thing is she really had one talent as a novelist, which was making comedy out of the plight of respectable single women, usually churchgoers, stuck in dull jobs in the 1950s. Pym treasured a vignette she had discovered in a newspaper at about the time she wrote A Glass of Blessings (1958), of a female civil servant who had been found behind a filing cabinet preparing Brussels sprouts, to save time on cooking her husband’s dinner when she got home. You’d think that after the war (Pym was in the Wrens), women would have become emancipated fully, and much faster. But there was this strange hiatus, in which they were regarded as ‘excellent women’ but kept firmly down. This is the echt Pym territory. In his 1952 review of the novel of that name, Betjeman wrote, ‘Excellent Women is England and thank goodness it is full of them.’ Hmm. Full, that is,

The Oldie Spring 2021 49

of people who are just as competent and well-educated as the men with whom they work, but who remain church fowl, MIRANDA CARTER doing dull jobs, crouching behind filing Churchill & Son cabinets peeling sprouts. By Josh Ireland You might imagine, given this, that Pym would be screaming, but she never John Murray £20 did scream. The anger was intense but it was like an ingrowing old toenail. She Does the world need another book was angry when her novels went out of about Churchill? fashion and her publisher, Jonathan Publishers will say they sell – there’s a Cape, sacked her. worldwide constituency of But she never seems to have asked Churchillophiles who will buy pretty herself why they sacked her, and why the much anything with his name on the novels had stopped being any good. Like cover. Even so, the hunt is always on for a her friend Philip Larkin, she claimed to new angle. In Churchill & Son, Josh love ‘the trivial round, the common task’. Ireland makes a good stab at finding one, But she was a nihilist. Her novels, though through the story of Winston’s they are comedies, are also, like his poems relationship with his only son, Randolph. – such as Mr Bleaney, about the sad Winston’s relationship with his own lodger living in a miserable rented room distant, awful father, Lord Randolph was – acceptances of the limitation of things. painful and prematurely curtailed; the Life could be bigger than this? I rather elder Randolph died when Winston hate them both now! Occasionally, other was 21. When his son was born in 1911, novelists cross the pages of this doorWinston poured into him all his stopper. ‘Our Heroine’ has tea with disappointed passion, plus his hopes for Elizabeth Bowen, or one of her gay a grand political dynasty. friends makes the acquaintanceship of Winston was obsessively doting, Ivy Compton-Burnett or Mary Renault, endlessly indulgent and keen to smooth or she has dinner with John Bayley and his son’s route to greatness; his Iris Murdoch – and you realise this was daughters always came a distant second. an era when truly magnificent fiction was From early on, Randolph realised he being written in English. could get away with almost anything. He Paula Byrne has done a gigantic work was rude to his nurses and bullied his of homage to a writer who continues to sisters (two, Diana and Mary, came to give pleasure to her fans. The length at loathe him), while his father fed him which the homage is paid, however, is oysters at the dinner table and truly puzzling. A hundred pages pass announced to guests such as Ernest before Pym has even finished her student Cassel and Charlie Chaplin that he was a life. (The leisurely Byrne quotes in full prodigy. He was shipped into Oxford the oath taken by anyone who joins the early – but left after a few terms for a Bodleian Library!) lucrative American lecture tour. The distinctive Pym oddity is how she The Churchill name opened doors and converted the bright youthfulness of her Randolph, says Ireland, was a fluent and undergraduate experience into fuddyarticulate speaker, and always his father’s duddyism. Her lover Henry Harvey greatest cheerleader. (clearly a rotter) is immediately When he returned to London aged 19, converted into Archdeacon Hoccleve in having spent his vast fees, he was given a Some Tame Gazelle (1950), and Pym job in journalism by Lord Beaverbrook. herself, a highly sexed, passionate Hugely self-confident and good-looking, woman, becomes the sexless Belinda Bede, making pastry for the curate. That is the Pym mystery. The comic result was a handful of charming novels, for which we should be grateful. But the reader perhaps notices what the author of this encomium neglects. The impulse that transformed her youthful self into an embittered old spinster (the dated word is apt) was the negation not only of life, but of art. We end the long journey yearning for Carlyle’s ‘Everlasting Yea’! Byrne concludes that Pym is one of ‘the great writers of the human heart’. She isn’t. Like Arnold in Auden’s sonnet, ‘So you want to keep the skull, lose the she thrust her gift in prison and it died. crossbones and make the whole thing pink?’

Total eclipse of the son

50 The Oldie Spring 2021

Randolph was convinced (as was Winston) that he would be an MP by 21 and PM by 24. He was also lazy, a drinker and a gambler, had expensive tastes (his father paid his debts well into his 30s) and propositioned anything in a skirt. He had a reputation for starting violent arguments and never, ever stopped talking. These qualities only got worse with age. By his mid-30s, Randolph was fat, drunk, usually angry, unbearably garrulous and slightly ridiculous. Nancy Mitford called him LBR, ‘Little Baby Randolph’. His most notable act was marrying and divorcing the grande horizontale Pamela Digby, later Harriman. As Ireland says, it was all too easy for Randolph. But Winston, he argues, ‘drained the people around him of every last drop of energy’. He couldn’t help but see Randolph as a mini-me, while Randolph never escaped his shadow and only dimly understood that he needed to. No one doubted that Winston adored Randolph and Randolph idolised his father. During Winston’s wilderness years in the 1930s, they spent huge amounts of time together. But, with age, the relationship darkened. Randolph’s rages with his father became increasingly violent. He accused him of neglect or of taking his ex-wife’s side, leaving Winston devastated and in tears. On one occasion, when his sister Sarah tried to intervene, he hit her in the face and called her a bitch. By the late 1940s, the two men found it difficult to see each other, though they thought of each other with pained longing. Randolph died in 1968, three years after his father, at the age of 58. Drink had turned him into a shuffling wreck. He found redemption of a kind when in 1960 Winston asked him to write his biography. He set up operations at his home in Suffolk (where – Ireland doesn’t mention – the locals called him the Beast of Bergholt and complained he never paid his bills). Among his researchers was Martin Gilbert, who took over the multi-volume enterprise after Randolph died, completing the process by which Winston was transmuted into the mythic figure he is today. Ireland does his best with this essentially sad story. He’s an engaging guide, and the book is very readable – though some of the best lines are in footnotes. If there’s an issue, it’s that, for all his sympathy for Randolph – he was, Ireland says, ‘glorious in his own way,’ with a ‘dazzling skill with words’ – Randolph remains a selfish lightweight.

He emerges most vividly in the irritated and amused anecdotes of his contemporaries. Evelyn Waugh tells perhaps the best and best known. In 1945, the two were sent to Croatia on a mission to Tito and his partisans. Randolph’s drunkenness and inability ever to stop talking quickly drove Waugh mad. Desperate to shut Randolph up so he could finish the proofs of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh bet him £20 he couldn’t read the Bible all the way through in two weeks. It was an abject failure. Waugh wrote, ‘He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud … or merely slapping his side and chortling, “God, isn’t God a shit!” ’

Roth’s wrath MAUREEN FREELY Philip Roth: The Biography By Blake Bailey Jonathan Cape £30 First, let me declare an interest. I’ve been seeing Philip Roth in my nightmares since I was nine. Reading Goodbye, Columbus, I was puzzled as to why the lovers took a diaphragm to bed with them. I went to the dictionary. Imagine my horror when I discovered this couple was having sex with a lung. I had little interest, therefore, in discovering what Portnoy had to complain about some ten years later, when he found himself transformed into a Breast. Though I did read Leaving a Doll’s House, Claire Bloom’s shockhorror account of her ten-year stint as the second Mrs Roth, it held no surprises. It simply confirmed my prejudices, leaving me to wonder how a woman so accomplished could ever have fallen for such a self-absorbed posturer. He never stopped writing like a dream – infuriating one minute, gorgeously astute the next, and almost always disarmingly funny. His athletics on the page never quite made up, though, for the relentless narcissism. His taste in psychodramas grew ever more tiresome – if it wasn’t his ego against his id, it was his id against his superego. If his heroes weren’t mouthpieces, they were proxy Roths in some sort of surreal disguise. They were always shadow-boxing with puritan orthodoxy. They were always testing the limits, if only to see just how far they could go without landing in what Roth liked to call feminist prison. But then one day he looked out of the window and began to think about how the world had changed during his many decades of navel-gazing. In the string of

‘I learned that I’m one of those people you can fool all of the time’

extraordinary novels that followed, he again drew from the streets, travels and campuses of his own past, but this time it was to reckon with the ‘massive historical pain’ that lay hidden behind closed doors. No novel evokes the generational schisms of the Vietnam era as masterfully as American Pastoral. The national obsession with witch hunts has rarely been put into relief as sharp as in I Married a Communist and The Human Stain. In The Plot Against America, Roth turned counterfactual, exploring what might have been, had Charles Lindbergh, the Nazi-sympathising celebrity aviator, become President in 1940. Published during the Bush administration, it invited readers to connect the contemporary dots. A decade and a half later, it casts a much longer shadow over Trump. Though Roth never won the Nobel Prize, by the time of his death he was topping lists of great authors who’d been robbed of it. Even so, he was worried for his posthumous reputation. He never got over the Bloom book, and he certainly did not want her to have the final word. But he knew, after a lifetime of trying, that no one was going to believe him, either. He chose Blake Bailey as his authorised biographer because he liked the thorough, balanced job he’d done in his previous biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates. After granting Bailey full access to his papers, and indeed his life, Roth warned him against any effort at rehabilitation. ‘Just make me interesting,’ he said. This Bailey has done, in a thorough, balanced, and eminently restrained account which struggles, nevertheless, to hide his affection for the man and his impatience with the man’s many detractors. It is hard, for example, to get any handle at all on Roth’s two marriages. Instead, there is the loyal

friend’s shrug of the shoulders: ‘What could poor Philip ever have seen in her?’ Bailey gives equal time to each friend, each relative, each teacher, each publication, each fawning and excoriating critic and each shiksa lover. Each house, each dinner party and birthday surprise, each trip to Europe or the doctor… this 800-page tome gives equal time to all. It’s Roth himself who keeps us reading. He was a dedicated and endlessly amusing letter-writer, in regular correspondence not just with a wide circle of former teachers and devoted friends, but also with his favourite rivals and all but one of his ex-lovers. Goliaths didn’t faze him. They just helped him hone his skills. His lifelong wars of words with the pillars of the Jewish establishment served him well in the last decade of the Cold War, when he took on the censors of the Eastern Bloc. He refused to give up until its greatest silenced writers were household names everywhere. He found time amidst all this to keep a barrage of insults going against anyone who had ever accused him of being a misogynist or a self-hating Jew. He sometimes thought of his ‘generation of men as the first wave of determined D-day invaders, over whose bloody, wounded carcasses the flower children subsequently stepped ashore to advance triumphantly toward that libidinous Paris we had dreamed of liberating as we inched inland on our bellies, firing into the dark.’ It is impossible to come to the end of this book not loving this man just a little, and forgiving him everything. Even the nightmares.

Renaissance man CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance By Ross King Chatto & Windus £25 Ross King normally writes about well-known figures in the history of art – Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Monet. The Canadian brings scholarship to a wide audience by not assuming any previous knowledge and writing about every aspect of the culture of the period, rather than just homing in on the particularities of one subject or person. It’s a style of writing that I think of as particularly Canadian, perfected by The Oldie Spring 2021 51

Robertson Davies, treating scholarship as something to be enjoyed in a very wide-ranging way and not too stuffily. King originally made his reputation by writing Brunelleschi’s Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral in Florence (2000). The Bookseller of Florence returns to the period of that first work of non-fiction. He has chosen as his subject Vespasiano da Bisticci – a well-established bookseller responsible for selling manuscripts from a bookshop in the Via dei Librai, halfway between the cathedral and the Piazza della Signoria, in the period before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. It’s a good choice of subject, because Vespasiano knew everyone, was at the heart of 15th-century Florence and supplied manuscripts to Cosimo de’Medici and his library at the monastery of San Marco, to King Alfonso of Naples and to Federico da Montelfeltro of Urbino. He lived through a period when Florence was very much at the heart of the political, as well as intellectual, universe. All the scholars found their way to his shop and sat in the front room, where Vespasiano was able to give advice and supply manuscripts copied out by the scribes who worked for the notaries nearby, while the back room was used for binding and fitting manuscripts with chains. It makes for a lively story, full of information about the way manuscripts had been preserved in monasteries all over Europe and in libraries in Constantinople and Baghdad. It tells of the admiration of scholars of the time for the writings of Cicero, the preparation of vellum and inks, the characteristics of handwritten scripts. He writes in detail and at length about the invention of the printing press. He is particularly good at giving a sense of the physicality of transcription, the hard work that went into the writing of manuscripts and the labour of illumination. He also has a very good eye for the unexpected, oddball fact, the statistics of the number of manuscripts in circulation and the activities of, for example, Bartolomeo Serragli, the world’s first art dealer. So we learn a gigantic amount about the times in which Vespasiano lived. The only problem is that Ross tell us relatively little about Vespasiano himself, who is lost sight of in the book as a whole. One presumes that he was hardworking, was relatively uneducated and picked up knowledge in the way a bookseller does from his customers as much as from his reading. But there is strangely little discussion or analysis of the thing other than

‘A very mild form of Tourette’s, you say? You cad!’

bookselling that Vespasiano is well known for. That was writing, in retirement in the countryside – after he had sold up his lease on the bookshop and rented out his house on the Via de’ Bardi to a rich widow – Vitae of all the people he had encountered during his long life. The discovery and publication of these Vitae in 1839 was what inspired Jacob Burkhardt to write his Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. They surely deserved more discussion. I enjoyed the book. It tells one a lot about Renaissance Florence and is full of information and perfect for lockdown. It’s a way of entering the world of Renaissance humanism and its fascination with the writings of the past at a time when these were still – but not for much longer – handwritten. But I don’t feel I know a lot more about Vespasiano da Bisticci than I did at the beginning. Charles Saumarez Smith was head of the Royal Academy, National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery

Heels on wheels JANE O’GRADY Revolutions: How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels By Hannah Ross Weidenfeld and Nicolson £16.99 I’ll always keep my niece’s childhood drawing. She, her elder sister, her mother and I are cycling along, accompanied, in the sky above us, by a witch astride a broomstick. My niece could ride only –a tricycle at the time, but I felt she had the right idea – bikes, freedom, women and witchiness. In Revolutions, Hannah Ross sketches the history of the bicycle, from its emergence in the late-19th century. At first confined to the rich and fashionable, it became, thanks to mass production,

both a transport and a leisure-time activity for anyone – though women’s cycling was initially strongly resisted, and even today male cyclists outnumber female. As the American magazine Munsey’s pointed out in 1896, what was ‘merely a new toy’ for men was for women ‘a steed upon which they rode into a new world’. The American suffragist Susan B Anthony said the bicycle did ‘more to emancipate women than anything else in the world’. Even the physical stance that cycling requires was one of rebellion. There could be little question of women riding side-saddle (though that was mooted). They had to straddle their bikes, a position already defying the impediment of skirts and bustles. It was inveighed against as liable to lead to immodesty, promiscuity, infertility, de-sexing, ‘bicycle hump’ and ‘bicycle face’. Saddles were invented that supposedly prevented sexual stimulation (‘You do not straddle the Duplex saddle’), but they did not catch on. The already existing Rational Dress Society which campaigned against corsets had a huge boost. ‘Rationals’ or ‘freedom dress’ included specially hitchable skirts and bifurcated garments, such as ‘the billowy Turkish-style trousers’ popularised by Amelia Bloomer. Female cyclists were shouted at, pelted with stones and sometimes pulled off their saddles. In 1897 an effigy of a woman on a bike dressed in blouse and bloomers was hung from a window in the Cambridge market-place as a protest against women’s being able to gain full degrees at the university (which they wouldn’t be able to do until 1948, half a century later). Some readers may find Ross’s account of the competitive side of cycling rather repetitive. Of course it is marvellous that women competed in cycle races. The first was in 1868. A women’s international six-day race was won by a Brit, in 1895. In 1894, Annie Kopchovsky, a JewishLatvian immigrant, cycled round the world, if her account is to be believed; Juliana Buhring certainly did it in 2012. Women cycled up the Alps and the mountains of Kashmir. But I found it difficult to distinguish between the fairly similar feats achieved by Tillie (‘the Terrible’), Billie (Fleming), Dottie (‘Red Bird’) and the rest. There are, however, fascinating glimpses of Christabel Pankhurst. Her bike badge displayed a winged female figure sounding a trumpet. She made no concessions to her sister Sylvia’s lesser stamina. The Oldie Spring 2021 53

Simone de Beauvoir found cycling round occupied Paris ‘liberating’, but only for herself – unlike the courageous Oversteegen sisters in wartime Holland, who carried firearms or Jewish children in their bike baskets. They laid dynamite on railway lines and bridges before frantically pedalling off. I wish Ross had tackled cycle theft (over the years, I have found my stolen bike five times) and the exponential growth of cycling in London. In the 1970s, there were very few of us. But Revolutions has zest and a joie de vivre that will be contagious even to noncyclists, let alone to the cyclist of over half a century who no longer hears the once dreaded chant of ‘Lu-cky old sad-dle!’

Winging it RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES The Screaming Sky By Charles Foster

ARTOKOLORO/ALAMY

Little Toller Books £15 Charles Foster is a soulmate of William Blake. ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars,’ Blake wrote, ‘and not in generalising demonstrations of the Rational Power.’ Foster, too, begins his thoughtful, eloquent and beguiling book by condemning himself as a wretch for thinking in generic words and abstract ideas when the truth, he says, lies in the particular, minute details, fleshly reality and animal instincts. Taxonomists who want to define and fix a name on everything seem bullying to him. Hasty ideas are folly, Foster says. Hurry is another word for cruelty. There are facts aplenty in The Screaming Sky – some of them astounding. Swifts can live for up to 21 years. They have a high survival rate: perhaps 80 per cent survive from one year to the next. Foster calculates that in a lifetime they may fly as much as 770,000 miles – the equivalent of more than three trips to the moon. They prey on 500 different species. Swifts are fast gliders, whose flight Foster likens to falling perpetually forwards. They shiver rather than flap their wings. Young ones may land when they meet dangerous weather during migrations, but otherwise they leave the skies only to build nests when they are breeding. ‘To orientate and navigate, swifts probably use the stars, the sun, magnetite particles in their brains or their beaks, rivers, mountains, coastlines, pipelines, field boundaries and, like homing salmon, the scent of home. Since they

The Right Hand of God Protecting the Faithful against the Demons by Jean Fouquet c1452-60. From Notre-Dame: The Soul of France by Agnès Poirier, Oneworld Publications £16.99

oscillate between the hemispheres, they must have, at least in outline, a map of the night sky in both hemispheres embedded somewhere in their heads or their bowels.’ Foster writes in luxuriant pictures. When swifts reach Africa from Europe in October, they start to moult. ‘Fibreglass contaminated feathers … are now forced out like milk teeth and woven into the nests of mice.’ In the Congo River basin, ‘an oxpecker, plucking a leech from a hippo’s eyebrow, flaps and puts up a new crop of minute-old flies with glutinous bodies to fuel the swifts on their way back to English evensong’. Elsewhere in Africa, swifts swoop on flies from the dung of herds of galloping zebra: in his words, ‘swirling black columns of insects rise from the bush like the pillars of a Satanic temple’.

In one of many tremendous passages of imagination and tenderness, Foster pictures a German hunter on a Namibian farm, relaxing after shooting a kudu, and knocking his pipe against a whistling thorn as he waits for a pick-up to collect his trophy. Smouldering ash falls on dry earth under the tree. During the night, the breeze from the waving tail of a passing ground squirrel wafts the ash onto grass. A soft wind comes up with the sun and inflames the ash. ‘Before the fire ran Cape hares, jackals, elephant shrews, dik-dik and duiker; and before it slithered cobras and sand snakes; and legions of scorpion, too, their tails raised impotently to sting the fire back.’ In the blue smoke, hundreds of eastern swifts, which had recently The Oldie Spring 2021 55

flown from Mongolia, begin ‘smokebathing’. Nobody knows why. ‘They spun, they somersaulted, they fluffed up their feathers, they shivered with what looked like intense pleasure, they burrowed to the heart of the smoke, so near to the crackling grass that I expected them to rise as balls of flame and seed other fires when they finally fell. This was high-energy luxuriating. I wonder if they held their breath.’ Or, in the Caspian Sea, ‘dead black and mirror-flat’, he sees the flickering image of swifts darker even than the water. These are a subspecies which breeds in the rafters and crannies of an imperial palace in Beijing. In China, they are regarded as the spirits of dead ancestors. ‘Tonight, they will feast in the foothills of Mount Ararat, and then play for a few days with the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, before flying over Damascus, down the Jordan valley, over the Red Sea, and up the Nile.’ I learnt much from The Screaming Sky. Of the swifts that halt each year on their journey south where I live in Ardèche, in south-eastern France, some come from Denmark, others from the Netherlands and none from anywhere else. The Danes and the Dutch fly off from Ardèche on an identical route, perhaps etched into their instincts since the last ice age, to the Pyrenees. But they always leave one day apart. A less pretty thought gleaned from The Screaming Sky, which I cannot budge from my head, is that 20 per cent of all meals in the United States are eaten in a car.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Life à la carte JOANNA KAVENNA My Phantoms By Gwendoline Riley Granta £12.99 Larkin wrote that we all live in days – and that’s quite true. Also true are the words of the great but almost forgotten poet Charlotte Mew: ‘I remember rooms that have had their part/In the steady slowing-down of the heart.’ We live in rooms as well as days, and these days we live also in strange little cyber-rooms. Gwendoline Riley is an excellent writer who often writes about rooms and the daily agonies that occur within them. Her first novel, Cold Water, won a 2002 Betty Trask award. It was about a bar and the poor drunks who go there to self-medicate. More recently, First Love

‘You need hold-ups’

was about how love ‘makes one little room an everywhere’ – but also how if your love affair is going badly, then this ‘everywhere’ is hell. In Riley’s latest novel, My Phantoms, some of the most affecting scenes take place in a restaurant. The narrator, Bridget, describes a middle-class if grim childhood. Her father, Lee, is a merciless bully; her mother, Helen/Hen, is a fragile narcissist. Eventually Bridget leaves home; her father dies. Hen moves to a flat she hates in Manchester. Bridget moves to London, to a flat she loves, with a boyfriend she loves as well. Things are better, and Bridget tries to avoid her mother. However, once a year Hen comes to London for her birthday, and invites Bridget to join her for dinner. And who can refuse their mother on her birthday, even if she is a fragile narcissist? So Bridget goes along each year, ‘full of apprehension or antagonism’. The weather is always abysmal, in the manner of the pathetic fallacy but also in the manner of London in January. Her mother insists on going to the same restaurant each year, the Troubadour. This is an ‘old haunt’ from her student days. This adds a further layer of emotional peril, as Hen tries to recapture her vanished youth. Bridget is ‘angry and guilty’ but she is also a dutiful daughter, so she spends the evenings urgently ‘shovelling in the bright friendliness; the treats. Things that had happened and things that had not.’ One year, Bridget persuades her mother to try a new restaurant, but this ends badly. They are served ‘two large, colourful haystacks of grated vegetables.’ Hen eats in miserable silence, occasionally ‘stopping to wipe her forehead’; Bridget counters with ‘really tremendous good humour and warmth’. In general, she wonders, ‘What was my justification for this charade? That we

were playing pretend together, maybe?’ Whatever she does, Hen is ‘very hurt’. They meet every year, and every year is just as terrible. Helen is mortal, ruined and penitent; a victim and a persecutor. Bridget is desperate to escape the past but the past keeps coming to dinner, and refusing to eat grated vegetables. It’s all so sad and accurate. Later, Hen becomes ill, and Bridget goes to look after her. She finds her mother ‘living in a student block in a student area, behind sooty railway arches, with throbbing music from the club over the way’. Bridget sleeps in the spare room, among ‘magazines, from the nineties, and … old black tights’. More rooms. The weather, once more, is abysmal: ‘Grey skies. Raindrops chasing down the window.’ Who’d have thought a novel about a mother and daughter eating dinner could be so richly absorbing? But these are often the best novels. In our lives (especially recently) nothing happens over and over again, and the most significant events are often the most apparently generic: love and the deaths of those we love, and sitting at dinner smiling nicely even though we want to scream. Why read novels that are about nothing when we have to endure this in our real lives anyway? Well, novels about parallel realities and space travel are great too, but they often end up being about love and death and excruciating dinners as well. In answer to the valid question ‘Why bother?’, Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, ‘Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about … You are not alone.” ’ And what do we care about more than our families, our loving ambivalence and moments of precarious hope? For all these reasons, My Phantoms is completely devastating. The Oldie Spring 2021 57

Media Matters

Auntie’s identity crisis

The BBC won’t change just by moving its studios to the regions stephen glover What is the point of uprooting some 400 BBC employees from London, 200 of whom work for news, and scattering them in the provinces? The answer seems to be that Tim Davie, the Corporation’s relatively new Director-General, is sensitive to accusations that the Beeb is dominated by a metropolitan elite who are out of touch with many ordinary Britons and failed to understand the feelings of the large number of people who voted for Brexit. The Government is strongly of this view. So Radio 3 and Radio 6 Music will be ‘rooted’ in Salford, where the BBC already has a large operation. BBC2’s Newsnight will be presented from different ‘bases’, such as Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and Manchester. So will Radio 4’s PM and Today programmes, the latter for at least a hundred episodes a year. A new, long-running drama series will also be launched from the North. Perhaps there could be heart-rending storylines about journalists forced to move ‘up North’, where they struggle to understand the lingo or appreciate the food. There are constant misunderstandings, and occasional clashes with the ‘natives’. The dream of these unhappy exiles is to return to the capital, from whose sophisticated joys they have been so cruelly torn. The BBC’s decision to expel hundreds of its employees is of course nonsensical. No one suggests that newspapers – most of whose staff live and work in London – are excessively metropolitan, or out of touch with their readers. Critics do not say that the Sun appears to be edited from an ivory tower, or that the Daily Mail has no sense of people’s ordinary lives outside the M25. Although such newspapers are produced in the capital, they do not seem in any way disconnected from Middle Britain. The truth is that the BBC’s detachment from part of its audience has nothing to

do with geography. Finding themselves banished to Bristol or Belfast, whether for a few days or for much longer, its journalists won’t suddenly disown their left-leaning, fashionable views. They will seek out like-minded people, of whom there are many. Metropolitanism is not confined to London. I live in north Oxford, which possibly surpasses any part of the capital in terms of ‘wokeness’. I will therefore be astonished if this show of bringing the BBC closer to the people has the slightest effect. I also wonder whether Mr Davie, and the BBC’s new Chairman, Richard Sharp, really believe that relocating staff will make any difference. It seems to me that they are mostly window-dressing to keep the Government and, in particular, the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, happy. Mr Dowden’s own conviction of the value of the exercise may also be doubted. But he can claim that Auntie is showing willing and is ready to change her ways. It’s not really true. The BBC’s culture will stay the same for as long as the Corporation exists. All that will change is that there will be more unhappy employees forced to move from their London homes. One of the great con tricks of history has been pulled off by the Guardian. It has persuaded its readers that it is poor, and many of them now make regular donations. At the end of last year, there were 548,000 recurring contributors. How much they give is not wholly clear but it runs to many millions of pounds.

Critics do not say that the Sun appears to be edited from an ivory tower

In fact, although perennially lossmaking, the Guardian Media Group is far from poor. Thanks to previous lucrative investments, largely in the motor advertiser Autotrader, it has over a billion pounds in an endowment fund, and £134.1 million in cash reserves. Few, if any, other newspapers are in such an advantageous financial position. Nonetheless, the Guardian still behaves as though strapped for cash. The paper has claimed about £100,000 under the Government’s furlough scheme during the pandemic. This did not prevent it from recently running an irate front-page story about ‘billionaire tax exiles, the British National Party and Gulf states [that] have claimed millions of pounds in taxpayer-funded furlough money’. There was one billionaire the Guardian forgot to include in this list of shame. Itself. In my last column, I attempted an audit of Rupert Murdoch’s achievements and failings, to mark his 90th birthday. Idiotically, I omitted what was probably his greatest success. This was the moving of his printing operations to Wapping in January 1986. It led to the humbling of the rapacious print unions, which had blindly resisted new technology, and to the enrichment of press barons such as Conrad Black, who followed Murdoch’s example once he had made a success of his revolution. For nearly 25 years, until the internet began to undermine print, Fleet Street was more profitable than it had ever been. Newspapers were fatter, offered more supplements and introduced high-quality colour photographs and far superior printing. Many journalists were better paid than their predecessors. Love him or hate him, it wouldn’t have happened without Murdoch. The Oldie Spring 2021 59

History

Cheers! It’s opening time at the pub

ROBERT EVANS/ALAMY

Wellington, the beer-drinkers’ hero, would love the end to lockdown david horspool For some of us, ordinary life has begun again, now that schools have reopened. For others, 12th April is the date they are hoping the Prime Minister won’t rub out. That’s the day pubs will reopen to serve customers (drinkers) outside, to be followed by a full reopening, if all goes well, in May. Pubs may not be the same when they reopen, but then they have never stood still for long. The last time the Government interfered this much with the operation of licensed premises was when Britain had a Prime Minister with a very different attitude to alcohol from the present incumbent’s. David Lloyd George was a lifelong teetotaller, a temperance man who declared that the British in Prince Andrew let the Duke of York pub the First World in Fitzrovia, London, War had three use his image in 2014 enemies, ‘Germany, Austria and drink; and, as far as I can see, the greatest of these deadly foes is drink’. Lloyd George would have been happy to see pubs close entirely. In his maiden speech in 1890, he said, ‘There ought to be a Coercion Act for publicans.’ He concluded with relish that ‘very few publicans would survive the inquisition’ he proposed. By the time he was able to bring his influence to bear, as Minister for Munitions and eventually as Prime Minister, he had accepted that temperance would be hard for the British worker to swallow. 60 The Oldie Spring 2021

He still wanted to nationalise all pubs. That idea proved too expensive, but measures to introduce strict licensing hours lasted, as most of us remember, long into the following decades. The Government also went into the pub business itself. In London, Scotland and Carlisle, 300 pubs were nationalised, along with the breweries that supplied them. On 12th July 1916, less than two weeks after the terrible first day of the Battle of the Somme, the Gretna Tavern was opened in Carlisle under the State Management Scheme. Strangely enough, the experiment proved popular. This was despite the fact that beer was served with the ‘Carlisle collar’ – ie a head – rather than with the ‘long pull’ generous landlords had been accustomed to offer. The publicans at the Gretna and its fellow state-managed houses were civil servants, paid a salary, with no incentive to sell more beer or otherwise to ingratiate themselves with their patrons. Nonetheless, the attempt to make premises lighter and airier, to serve food as well as drink, and to make the pub appeal to women as well as men, all showed that pubs could move with the times. Some of the innovations, such as mandating lower alcohol content for the beer, and banning ‘treating’ (buying rounds), did not survive the war. But the scheme itself did. Remarkably, it lasted until the 1970s, with the last state-run pub being privatised by the Heath government in 1973. The pretext for government involvement in public houses was, of course, war production. But the idea that pubs needed looking into had a much longer history. One of the issues was that they were, literally, rather hard to look into. The smaller public house or beer shop of the Victorian and pre-Victorian age was forbiddingly dark and

consequently assumed to be full of people up to no good. When Gabriel Oak goes into Warren’s Malthouse for the first time in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Hardy describes the fiddle of getting through the door of a building ‘with no window in front’: ‘Oak’s hand skimmed the surface of the door with fingers extended … till he found a leathern strap, which he pulled. This lifted a wooden latch and the door swung open.’ Over the course of the 19th century, pubs increasingly smartened themselves up. In town, they reached their apogee in the mirrored and lit-up ‘gin palaces’ which, despite the name, still served a lot of beer. Thanks to the Duke of Wellington’s Beer Act of 1830, removing all beer duty, pubs boomed: within a year of the act, 31,000 new beer licences were issued and pub-building soared. If the ‘traditional British pub’ has never been a fixed entity, whether as a result of commercial, social or government pressure, the names have often remained. Until recently, the shrillest objections to names or name changes have come from drinkers who have lamented their Red Lion becoming a Slug and Lettuce, their Grosvenor Arms the Snooty Fox. Recently, there has been debate about pubs called the Black Boy or the Black’s Head having their names changed. The idea that these pubs are named after Charles II is difficult to square with their signs – usually not depicting the Merry Monarch but, well, a black boy. Pubs with racist names and signs probably are ‘part of our history’, as some people like to argue (as if being ‘part of history’, which includes all the crimes as well as the achievements of the past, is somehow something to be proud of). But, whether it’s viewed through the bottom of a pint glass or not, change is part of history, too.

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

A guide to grammar schools

TOM PLANT

‘Mr Wolff didn’t marry before his death in London on 8th July, which he said was one of his few regrets. However, he didn’t dwell on it.’ I hadn’t known William Wolff but, after reading only a few paragraphs of his obituary in my local paper, I had formed a strong liking for this man of evident charm, humour and courage. I was not, however, expecting to learn, at least by implication, that he might have married after his death, which would have apparently spared him some posthumous regrets spoken from the grave. What had gone wrong in the writing of those two sentences? Plainly there had been a breach of the laws of biology, but what about those of grammar? If both sentences had subjects and predicates and verbs and nouns and stuff, and the appropriate words all agreed in number and gender and so on, was that enough to make them grammatical? John Stuart Mill would certainly have said no. ‘Grammar is the most elementary part of logic,’ he wrote. ‘The structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic.’ But few Victorians agreed – not even the freethinkers. Indeed, by the 1920s critics were saying exactly the opposite: linguistic laws are not logical, but psychological. Many of the rules found in different languages are so arbitrary, they argued, that they could not be deduced from the universal laws of logic.

Dull adverts Where have all the ideas for good advertisements gone? When I was creating TV commercials, we always searched for ‘the big idea’, to exploit the unique selling proposition of a product or service. Charm, wit and, above all, relevance were key to the success of any campaign. Today’s ‘creatives’ seem to 62 The Oldie Spring 2021

Before long, H W Fowler was laying down rules on the correct use of English, in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926). For Fowler, ‘grammar’ was a general term for the science of language, whose parts included orthography (how words are written), accidence (how they are inflected) and syntax (how they are arranged in sentences). The other parts, including semantics (how words are understood), he dismissed as ‘meaningless … to the average person.’ Other students of language became more interested in describing the way English, or indeed language in general, was spoken in practice. Then came Noam Chomsky, whose Syntactic Structures (1957) made him the most influential linguist of the modern age. Chomsky saw grammar as ‘a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language’, but considered sentence structure to be quite independent of meaning. To support this view, he presented the sentence ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’, a grammatically correct group of words with no apparent meaning. Which brings us back to the sentences about Mr Wolff. Although logically they are nonsense, we know what the writer was trying to say. Often, nowadays, when people’s meaning is clear, the pundits pronounce their syntax to be fine. ‘Me and my wife went for a Chinese last night.’ ‘I was sat next to Graham.’

ignore these principles. As long as you use some whizzbang graphic animation, mimicking a video game, you can get away with anything. Yes, those Russian meerkats have wheedled their way into our consciousness, but the premise of mispronouncing ‘market’ for ‘meerkat’ in the comparethemarket brand is pretty thin, isn’t it? And those car ads in which hybrid models whizz through empty cityscapes, detached from reality, never needing recharging? Life’s not like that. Gone are the days of Frank Muir declaring on behalf of Cadbury’s, in 1976, ‘Everyone’s a Fruit and Nut case.’ Remember the Maureen

‘Another guy was shouting like he was crazy.’ ‘Do you ever meet somebody and just want to knock their block off?’ Such sentences may offend old sticklers, but many pundits will say, ‘Get over it. English grammar has rules, but they’re not fixed by grammarians: they’re based on the way the language is used, so they change.’ Language has indeed always had inconsistent rules, not just over time but according to context – in speech, writing, law, dialects and so on. And though some rules may be innate in the mind, others have to be learnt. Or unlearnt. These days, it’s out with ‘him’ and ‘her’; in with ‘they’. It’s out with ‘coloured’; in with ‘of colour’. And it’s out with ‘breastfeeding’; in with ‘chestfeeding’. It’s a paradox that just as the pundits are telling us to stop worrying about split infinitives and other offences invented by Victorian pedagogues bent on making English grammatically like Latin, interest groups are inventing a host of new crimes. The upshot is sentences such as this one, in the Times of 6th January: ‘Give a child a tree and a spade and they’ll soar.’ That, to me, but presumably not to the author, meant the tree and the spade would soar. In truth, there are many grammars, and many grammarians, who delight in finding new meanings for many words, including ‘grammar’. And most of us remain confused.

Lipman commercials for BT in 1988? Praising her grandson for passing one O-level exam – sociology: ‘Anthony, you got an “ology” – you’re a scientist!’ Famous British film directors cut their teeth making TV commercials, among them Sir Alan Parker and Ridley Scott. Wardour Street in Soho was a

SMALL DELIGHTS Remembering what you were looking for! LORNA DOYLE, YEOVIL, SOMERSET Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

fertile breeding ground for emerging talent in the ad world. Editors, recording studios, production companies and preview theatres rubbed shoulders with Soho’s less salubrious residents. It was truly a golden era, when Heineken refreshed the parts other beers couldn’t reach, and a million housewives every day would pick up a tin of beans and say, ‘Beanz meanz Heinz.’ And when Leonard Rossiter was sharing a flight with Joan Collins, savouring his in-flight Campari, the inevitable always happened and Ms Collins’s drink ended up soaking her blouse. Glorious days. MARTYN HURST

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT CITIZEN KANE Available on BBC iPlayer Citizen Kane was first shown 80 years ago at the Palace Theatre, Broadway, on 1st May 1941. Some critics adored it but, amazingly, it was a flop. Only in the late ’50s, largely thanks to European fans, did it become the Greatest Movie Ever Made. Is it really the greatest? Some films never date – the immortal Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), starring Joan Greenwood (see page 30), is as fresh and funny as ever. And Citizen Kane? It has its longueurs. The actual film is only 119 minutes long – 12 minutes shorter than Mank, the Oscar-nominated film, starring Gary Oldman as Herman J Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who battled with Orson Welles for the Citizen Kane writing credit. But some of the scenes – particularly in the newspaper world – do go on a bit. That was a product of Orson Welles’s unprecedented contract with RKO, allowing him complete artistic control. That contract also meant Welles’s vision wasn’t blurred by committee – unlike modern Hollywood films, TV dramas and adverts that have to jump through a hundred hoops before production, losing originality with each hoop.

‘I think it would be better on the other wall’

Trump in black and white: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) turns 80

Because Welles was the film’s maestro – as producer, director and co-writer – it’s easy to forget what an understated, natural actor he was. His deep, patrician voice is loaded with irony. The script – whoever wrote the bulk of it, Welles or Mankiewicz – is whip-smart and funny. Welles never gives his pay-offs any fanfare or change of tone. He just leaves a long pause before delivering them and lets the superlative writing do the talking. ‘Rosebud’ is of course the best pay-off in cinema history (I couldn’t possibly give it away here). What’s more, Welles was only 25. His supporting cast of non-stars, taken from Welles’s Mercury Theatre, also largely underplay the drama and the laughs. But they’re still in his shadow – including the best of them, Joseph Cotten. None of them benefits, either, from the OTT ageing make-up, which has to be pretty drastic, given the film shifts back and forth between 1871 and 1941. Those legendary flashbacks are so brilliantly stage-managed by Welles that you’re never confused about when the action is taking place. He and his crew pioneered multiple

techniques in the film: the extensive use of newspaper front pages; deep focus; audio tricks learnt in his radio days. But they seem natural. There’s no feeling of clunky, early experimentation. Because Citizen Kane was such a witty take on the truth about tycoons and the media, it’s also eerily prescient. Like Rupert Murdoch, young Charles Foster Kane inherits a small fortune with a small newspaper interest and turns it into a media empire. The parallels with Donald Trump, too, are spooky. Kane trumpets his patriotism: ‘I am, have been and will only be one thing – an American.’ When he stands for Governor of New York, he threatens to lock up his opponent. When he loses, he prints the headline, ‘Fraud at polls!’ Citizen Kane has a few flaws. But it came out only 14 years after The Jazz Singer (1927), the first talkie. To make one of the greatest films – if not the greatest – so early is really saying something.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE What a relief, amid Today’s babel of distorted voices on dodgy phone lines, to hear Justin Webb announcing, ‘And now we’re in for a treat.’ It was, too: Ralph Fiennes, speaking to us directly in his beautifully modulated RP. ‘So here I am,’ said Fiennes, ‘having had 20 years – 20 years largely wasted, the years of l’entre-deux-guerres – trying to learn to use words, and every attempt is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure…’ Did you recognise these lines from T S Eliot’s East Coker? A masterclass in how to read Eliot in easy, conversational tones. Fiennes told Justin that, when he was a child, his parents would play an LP of Eliot himself reading Four Quartets. ‘And, as one gets older, it’s a poem The Oldie Spring 2021 63

‘The sensor on the back makes a noise if you park too close to something’

that speaks to middle age, and later.’ Fiennes is taking his solo reading to provincial theatres, opening in Bath in May. I shall be at the head of the ticket queue. In the Spectator, John Phipps devoted a column to praising the sui generis programme In Our Time. There are now 900 editions available, all starting with Melvyn Bragg’s brisk ‘Hello’, before launching straight into The Bacchae, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or the horse. How to explain the perennial popularity of this austerely academic, no-frills programme? ‘Making intelligent radio,’ Phipps wrote, ‘is as simple as letting intelligent people say intelligent things.’ Bragg (at 80) was highlighted in a Telegraph column by Ben Lawrence, defending Radio 3’s older presenters from being replaced. Then the Observer reviewed two of the newer stations aimed at mature listeners, Scala and Boom. And Philip Norman wrote in the Times about his ‘lockdown discovery’: Angel Vintage radio from the Isle of Wight, geared (like Boom) towards Our Generation, but playing earlier stuff from the 1920s, too. Trawling the globe via Radio Garden, I discovered ‘Oldies 103 FM’, in Boston, Massachusetts, playing Arlo Guthrie and Howlin’ Wolf. You’ll find dozens more oldie stations, from Prague to Montevideo. Golden-era hits seem to be our universal lingua franca. Which includes some regrettable stuff: but it at least spares us heavy metal. The Oldie’s God correspondent, Sister Teresa Keswick, is addicted to Sixties pop. We learnt this in the Easter Private Passions from Quidenham, her Carmelite monastery in Norfolk, where she takes herself off to play Simon & Garfunkel. Sister Teresa – ‘Only the bishop and my dentist call me Sister Teresa,’ she told Michael Berkeley – was once a lawyer; she related how she left her ‘moralelowering’ job at the Old Bailey 40 years ago for the contemplative life, where her day starts at 5.30am, and reading is 64 The Oldie Spring 2021

‘compulsory’. Her lovely music choices included plainsong, and Bach’s B-minor Mass, which is ‘the only thing that comes close to describing the Resurrection’. In the 1960s, I shared a desk at the Evening Standard with the sweet young rock interviewer Ray Connolly. (One day, John Lennon rang him and I grabbed the phone to say, ‘Hello, John!’) I was horrified to hear that, last summer, at 79, Ray was stricken with COVID-19: he was in an ICU for three months in an induced coma. He had a tracheotomy, kidney dialysis, pneumonia and two heart attacks – but, hooray, he came out, and wrote a riveting radio play about it. Devoted, which is on BBC Sounds, touchingly and poignantly recounts (mostly via emails from his wife, Plum, played by Alison Steadman) the hallucinations, delirium and paranoia. At one point, he told a nurse, ‘I’m the President of France, and you’re sacked.’ And now … bad news: another old friend, Gillian Reynolds, who knows more about radio than anyone, has loved it for longer and has even run a radio station, tells me that after May her radio column will disappear from the Sunday Times. They are ‘redeveloping their audio coverage’. A sorry move.

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS I have been on a crime spree. I started with the well-received State of Play, made in 2003 and starring the elfin John Simm, a camp Bill Nighy and future film star James McAvoy, with his devilish grin. Many Baftas came its way; the series is available on Amazon Prime. It’s not only the props that are historical – boxy television sets and

Murder most foul: DCI Tom Brannick (James Nesbitt) in Belfast, Bloodlands

primitive computers; documents shuffled into cardboard folders; fax machines; people smoking in offices and hospital corridors and reading actual newspapers on trains. What struck me were the antiquated attitudes, such that women were cast as subservient secretaries, bringing comfort; the gays were there to be mocked, sneered at; and the plot hinged on the exposure of a Cabinet Minister’s adultery. Sex outside Holy Wedlock used to get everyone in a flap. Who’d have imagined two decades on that a Prime Minister can live openly in Downing Street with his mistress, illegitimate baby and incontinent dog and nobody much gives a toss? Progress, of a kind. After writhing and squirming and loudly expressing his innocence for six episodes – had he killed his pretty ‘researcher’ or had he been framed by the secret services? – David Morrissey, who is always good at looking out of his depth, was indeed revealed as the guilty party. Exactly the same game was played in The Undoing, where Hugh Grant’s charm finally curdled, and he was the one who in the last reel was unmasked as the killer. In a flashback scene after his trial, we saw him smash his mistress’s head against a wall. As when he was Jeremy Thorpe, Grant is starting to excel at being dangerous and repellent. Nicole Kidman, as Grant’s wife, played a psychologist who was so perspicacious she saw none of this coming. What I noticed about Nicole was the puffy smoothness of her cheeks and the pinkness of her nose, as if a glistening dewdrop was about to fall from it. The Undoing was shot in a wintry New York – so, as an Australian, maybe the actress felt the cold. In Bloodlands, with James Nesbitt – he of the absurd George Robey eyebrows – the same plot device was employed yet again: the hero for whom we’d been rooting for hours was the villain suddenly to be booed and hissed. We all thought grieving DCI Tom Brannick was digging up his wife’s skeleton, but the body or bodies found on a remote Irish island had to do with IRA reprisals and executions – the executioner being DCI Brannick, who hid his gun under a lobster pot. All this cross and double-cross – I couldn’t follow any of it, and never worked out whether the names Pat and Jackie referred to men or to women. The longer I watched, the more obtuse the series became. Nor was it explained why a senior officer, DCS Twomey, could afford to live only in a mobile home by a bog.

Ed McLachlan

‘I hope you’ve brought a face mask’

The shocking fact divulged in Unforgotten was that a police officer expects to pack it all in and collect a whopping, public-sector index-linked pension plus tax-free lump sum after 30 years. This explains the crowds of early-50-something ex-coppers with money to burn lolling about on the Costas. Or else they go in for compulsive DIY. Several known to me personally are on their fourth fitted kitchen. Anyway, in the latest Unforgotten, Nicola Walker was very indignant she had to keep going for another three months before she could claim this largesse. As usual, a body from decades back turned up in a chest freezer and a group of disparate suspects, Dean, Fiona, Liz and Ram – police cadets from Hendon, as it happened – had all had a hand in it. The past is not to be shaken off, ran the moral. It’ll rise up and smack you down. Consequences can’t be prevented or evaded. The other lesson I picked up from all these programmes is there’s no such thing as a laughing policeman, not since Kojak sucked his last lollipop. Coppers are invariably sour, disconsolate, angry all the time and stressed, their faces pasty under the strip lights. In Grace, therefore, about Detective

Sergeant Roy Grace, John Simm, previously elfin, was now a sombre garden gnome in need of a lick of paint. The plot had to do with a property developer buried alive in a coffin. He was exhumed, beaten up, had his finger chopped off with secateurs and was later discovered bound and gagged in a freezer – maybe the same freezer as the one Nicola Walker was examining, saving on the need for new props. As regards Oprah with Meghan and Harry, what we mustn’t forget is that Meghan’s an American – and as Evelyn Waugh said when told Edmund Wilson had criticised his novels, ‘Is he an American? I don’t think what they have to say is of much interest, do you?’

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE STRAVINSKY’S LUST FOR LIFE Fifty years have passed since Stravinsky’s death in New York in Easter Week, 1971. The funeral was in Venice, a Russian Orthodox rite staged in the vast Catholic basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, followed by a waterborne procession to the island cemetery of San Michele which would have needed the brush of Carpaccio to do it justice.

It was one of Venice’s grandest funerals, and in terms of historical significance possibly its last. The city had died long before. ‘A vast mausoleum with a turnstile at the door and a functionary to let you in, as per tariff, to see how dead it is,’ said Henry James in 1892. Not that James was entirely sanguine about the future of wider Western civilisation. It was an intuition the ten-year-old son of a court musician in far-off St Petersburg would spend a lifetime investigating. It’s something of a paradox, notes Stephen Walsh in his epic, immensely readable two-volume biography of Stravinsky, that music accused of expressing nothing should have turned out to be an all too exact echo of the terrifying years that had brought it into being. Not that there was anything of the doom-monger about Stravinsky himself. He was an unashamed hedonist, with an ironist’s delight in the follies of his fellow men. His relish for life bordered on the volcanic. ‘But, Igor,’ a friend is reported to have asked, ‘what can a man possibly want who is 86?’ ‘To be 87!’ No music is more likely to cheer me up than his Scherzo à la russe or Circus Polka – a great zoo-goer, Stravinsky was happily spared the sight of Barnum & Bailey’s 50 elephants dressed in pink tutus – with his Pulcinella or Jeu de cartes not far behind, if something more substantial is needed. One reason Stravinsky chose to be buried in Venice is that it was where in 1929 his erstwhile patron, mentor and friend Sergei Diaghilev had died and been interred. The passing of time cannot diminish the achievement of those young St Petersburg aesthetes – master of ceremonies Diaghilev, designers Bakst and Benois, choreographer Michel Fokine and Stravinsky himself – who between 1909 to 1913 created the Paris-based Ballet Russe. What an extraordinary procession it was: The Firebird and Petrushka, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë, Debussy’s Jeux and, finally, The Rite of Spring. Dance was revolutionised, as was scenic design, while orchestral sound was taken to hitherto unknown levels of refinement and sophistication. Ballet Russe took Stravinsky from St Petersburg to Paris, where a world war and the Russian Revolution obliged him to remain until 1939, when the earth opened up once more and he decamped to the United States. The Oldie Spring 2021 65

KEYSTONE PRESS/ALAMY

Death in Venice: Stravinsky’s funeral cortège, April 1971

In spite of everything, Stravinsky’s Russianness never left him; nor did that potent brew of peasant superstition and ritual-based Orthodox faith that underpins much of his greatest music. The years between the wars are generally referred to as his ‘neoclassical’ period. Yet if we take any of the key compositions of that time, from the delectable Pushkin-derived skit Mavra, through Oedipus Rex and the sublime Apollo to the Symphony of Psalms, the classicism is never more than a single strand in the kind of multi-layered musical experience only Stravinsky could conjure up. It’s interesting that The Rite predates the time Carl Jung spent among the tranquil-minded, sun-god-worshipping Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, and his formulation of the idea of the social and psychological importance to humanity of myth, even when there is no evidence for its being objectively true. Both Jung and Stravinsky found themselves living in societies in which individuals – possibly for the first time – felt free to dispense with any form of religious belief as a home for their inner worlds. For both men, however, the old dispensations held. We hear this most powerfully in the three linked psalm settings that make up Symphony of Psalms. ‘Stravinsky the Great Compromiser’ is the phrase Wilfrid Mellers uses in his landmark study Celestial Music? to explain the work’s power. There are primitive depths and, above, a humanising concern with reason and human feeling, which find their resolution in the great C-major triad with which the ‘Laudate Dominum’ ends. ‘Unanswerable or irremediable,’ says Mellers, ‘according to one’s point of view.’ Symphony of Psalms has been much 66 The Oldie Spring 2021

recorded, though only one version appears to me to have about it the power of some ancient Russian icon. It was recorded for Philips in 1962 with Diaghilev’s last protégé, Igor Markevitch, directing a Russian choir that includes the boys’ voices Stravinsky’s 1948 edition specifically requires. The piece would have sounded well at Stravinsky’s Venetian funeral; unsurprisingly, the exiguously beautiful late Requiem Canticles beat it to the post.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON SOUNDTRACKS TO DIE FOR When I was nine, my father took me to a film and then I didn’t sleep for two years. That was down to the shark in Jaws, yes, but I was mainly traumatised by the soundtrack that accompanied the images of the 20-foot fibreglass model and the

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. Jaws (1975)

blood in the water. Even now, I can’t hear that sinister pulse of the tuba, going dun nun … dun nun … DUN NUN with horrifying urgency, without being teleported back to my childhood bedroom in Brussels, when I was too terrified to go to the loo in case a great white reared up from the bowl and bit my bottom. Unforgettable. As it’s awards season, then, and there’s still no live music, I thought we could pause to celebrate the best film music in the best magazine in the world (© Graydon Carter) while giving an overdue hat tip to the Oscarwinning young gun (only 53) who is sweeping all before him in rock and composition. That’s even though he is called Atticus, went to Eton with at least two of my brothers, and was an exact contemporary of David Cameron. Everyone has his or her favourites when it comes to scores. As there are so many, let us exclude music that was not composed for a film (eg Rachmaninov for Brief Encounter). We can include Geoffrey Burgon’s music for Brideshead Revisited, Maurice Jarre’s ‘Lara’s Theme’ for Dr Zhivago (‘Tara’s Theme’ in Gone with the Wind is in most people’s top 100 too). I’d list the delicate sobbing piano of Love Story by Francis Lai, the oeuvres of James Horner, Enrico Morricone, John Barry, Michael Nyman and Rachel Portman, plus all the James Bond themes. The young Johnsons were brought up on Bond as well as Jaws and The Poseidon Adventure – that was pretty much the sum total of our cinematic and musical education. With the Baftas on 11th April, many of you reading this will know the results – I don’t at the time of writing. Still, it’s time to add another star to the walk of fame for the aforementioned Atticus Ross. He won a Golden Globe last month, has been nominated for two Baftas and has already bagged an Oscar, for The Social Network in 2010. Not only is he up with the greats of silver screen and orchestra pit; Ross also gigs with the happening Scottish postrock group Mogwai and is one half of the Nine Inch Nails. I can hear you shouting, ‘But Star Wars! And The Godfather!’ I will give you those, of course. Classics, as so many of our picks are. Films can be made on our phones these days, and scores recorded on laptops. I admit I can’t remember any recent scores, not even those composed by the talented Mr Ross. But if anyone says The Godfather, The Pink Panther or Jaws, the opening bars dance into my head from decades back.

Left: Brown Development No 3 (1964), oil on wood & plastic. Top: Grey Symphony (1975), oil on board. Above: Untitled (1996), oil, spray paint & pencil on board

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU VICTOR PASMORE, LINE & SPACE

THE ESTATE OF VICTOR PASMORE

Marlborough, London 12th April to 4th June Abstract art, other than bland stuff on office reception walls, is somehow unBritish. Some leading 20th-century British painters who tried it drifted back towards the romantic, pastoral tradition – including Sutherland, Hitchens and Lanyon. Those who most appeal to a wide public, among them Terry Frost, Gillian Ayres and Bridget Riley, had strongly individual personalities which somehow humanise the work. And the few purists with international reputations, notably Ben Nicholson, may be revered by the art world but are not particularly popular. There is discreet poetry in Nicholson, but I would still rather have a wonderfully melancholic landscape or still life by his father, William Nicholson, on my wall. Victor Pasmore (1908-98), who has been described as ‘Britain’s pre-eminent

abstract artist’, began as a still-life, figurative and landscape painter, but once he had turned abstract he did not turn back. He was encouraged to paint during his Harrow schooldays; despite the school’s reputation for heartiness, art was taken seriously. The teachers were M Clarke and J M Holmes, otherwise unknown to art history, who encouraged him to read Chevreul’s 1855 work on the harmonics of colours, as well as Leonardo’s notebooks, and introduced him to the theories of Impressionism. His father’s death ruled out university but, while working as a clerk, he took lessons at the Central School of Arts and Crafts with A S Hartrick, the lithographer and friend of Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec.

In 1934, he joined the London Group and participated in the Objective Abstractions exhibition at the Zwemmer Gallery, although his contributions were far from abstract. He then joined up with William Coldstream and Graham Bell to launch the Euston Road School of Drawing and Painting. In 1942, Clive Bell predicted that Pasmore’s ‘art will not stand still’. He was right, but it was only after the Second World War, during which he had been a conscientious objector, that Pasmore abandoned representational painting completely for pure abstraction and constructivist sculpture. He could also be considered an abstract architect. In 1955, he was appointed director of architectural design for Peterlee, the new town in Durham, for which he created the equally loved and loathed Apollo Pavilion – essentially a Brutalist sculpture. This major show had a patchy existence at Hastings Contemporary last year. Now that it can be seen properly at Marlborough, it will be good to find out if it does full justice to a career that Tate Gallery director Alan Bowness labelled ‘a succession of metamorphoses that have at various times dismayed, astonished and delighted his admirers’. The Oldie Spring 2021 67

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER SPRING HAS SPRUNG! Spring! There’s no more energising word in the gardener’s vocabulary. Spring, wrote Maupassant in one of his 300-or-so short stories, is ‘when the awakening earth puts on its garment of green, and the warm, fragrant air fans our faces and fills our lungs and appears even to penetrate to our hearts…’ Spring! ‘The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet/Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit’– the poet Thomas Nashe said in the 16th century. The words, further immortalised by Benjamin Britten in his Spring Symphony of 1949, keep the season’s rapturous potency alive in the music-loving gardener’s ear. It’s impossible to conjure up spring’s breathtaking miracles in the depths of winter – or, indeed, at any other season. So many nuances: diaphanous morning light, extended day length, rising temperatures, warm rain, sounds, scents and the very greenness of green. Bare twiggery transforms itself into curtains of leaves and petals – hatcheries and food for myriad insects new to the wing. These stirrings mingle and intoxicate us with a cocktail for the senses like nothing else. You can garden early – before breakfast, if you’re a lark – and in the evening, too, when the rest of the world has settled in front of the telly. You don’t want to come in until after the last of the blackbirds has piped a tuneful good night. The glory of spring in our garden in Herefordshire (pictured) is trumpeted by thousands of self-seeded aquilegias – creamy white, rose, lavender, maroon and deep indigo blue. Standing two feet tall, they have skilfully infiltrated all our borders. Like party bunting, they jostle with lime-green euphorbias (many of those self-seeded, too) and a host of

early-flowering perennials such as centaurea, diminutive violets and indispensable lilies-of-the-valley, whose own celebratory day – especially in France – is 1st May. At dusk, Welsh poppies (Meconopsis cambrica) light up dim corners with flashes of cadmium yellow, some petals streaked with an orange flame. Iberis (candytuft) swamps the garden in perfume. Yet more fragrance emanates from our avenue of 200 Rhododendron luteum – deciduous azaleas with long-lasting yolky-yellow flowers. I bought them a few inches high for less than a pound each from a wholesaler ten years ago. They have now grown as tall as guardsmen, relishing our moist, acidic, clay soil. Thanks to Nature’s own hand – not mine – their skirts are hemmed with cowslips, multiplying pleasingly year by year. Peonies are full of promise. Arrowstraight rods of burgundy stems, with leaves unfurling in a flush of similar hue, support golf-ball-sized buds that will open in great cups of primary colour. Their long, east-facing bed is shared by murky, midnight-blue and near-black irises and age-old Spanish bluebells, whose bulbs, should we wish to transplant them, are now too deeply buried for easy excavation. Elsewhere, wide stands of three-foot-

Iris sibirica ‘Papillon’ in David’s orchard

tall lupins are lodged between pieces of glossy, evergreen box and yew topiary. There’s no better ‘old-fashioned’ plant. Lupins are enjoying a renaissance as gardeners re-evaluate their majesty and stately, space-filling potential. Supremely, spring in this garden means apple blossom. Our orchard of 30 different varieties – dessert, culinary and cider – conjures up a froth of pink and white blossom just ahead of their ground-level companions: thousands of pale blue Iris sibirica ‘Papillion’ which peak around the third week of May – hitherto Chelsea Week, but not this year, when Chelsea is moving to September. Spring! It means, in the 13th-century Wessex dialect and possibly the oldest of English songs, that ‘Soomer is icoomen in’. As Gershwin and Ethel Merman sang on Broadway in 1931, ‘Who could ask for anything more?’

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD ASPARAGUS PEAS I have just bought my first packet of asparagus pea seeds and have been learning about this curious vegetable. It is not a pea, nor is it related to asparagus, but it has attractive crimson flowers, similar to sweet peas or vetch in appearance, and odd-looking, winged seed pods, said to have the flavour of asparagus. According to the Royal Horticultural Society, the plants ‘really will put the wow factor into the vegetable patch’. However one may react to this hyperbole, asparagus peas may be worth a try, and as sprawling plants they will look equally good as ground cover in a flower border. The seeds should be sown under glass in early spring and planted out in mid-May, or sown directly into the ground when the risk of spring frosts has passed. The growing plants require little attention, and the seed pods should The Oldie Spring 2021 69

start to form from the flowers after about eight weeks. The most important advice relates to the picking of the pods, which should be done regularly and when they are no more than an inch in length. The delicate asparagus taste can be detected only if the pods are eaten – raw or cooked – soon after picking. If they are allowed to grow any larger, they will become stringy and the taste, in the words of one or two comments I have read, is more akin to that of cardboard or carpet underlay. Since asparagus peas are popular in Asian cooking, it may be advisable to dip or cook them in a few spices. However, I look forward to the experiment and may grow asparagus peas alongside a variety of mangetout peas – Shiraz or Carouby de Maussane – with purple flowers; Shiraz has purple pods as well. Asparagus peas were known in the time of Elizabeth I, while mangetouts have a more recent history. I avoided them when they were fashionable in the 1970s, and was not impressed with their flavour. But now the idea of both these pea substitutes is quite appealing. At least the flowers will look pretty.

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD BEST SPEARS OF OUR LIVES Asparagus – also known as sparrow grass when offered for sale by the roadside in the old days – isn’t the only spring shoot appreciated by the inhabitants of these islands. Hop shoots, still a valued crop in Germany and particularly Belgium, were carted into the markets of Victorian London in vast quantities from the hop gardens of Kent. Should you manage to get your hands on a handful, cook as asparagus and eat with melted butter. Other shoots free for the gathering include rosebay willowherb, Japanese knotweed (make sure it hasn’t been sprayed) and bracken fiddleheads (popular in Japan, but carcinogenic if eaten in quantity). Dice and toss into scrambled eggs or a Spanish tortilla, or include in a risotto. The first of the home-grown asparagus arrives in three waves, culinarily speaking. First cropping is slenderstalked, tender and closest to the wild; of the two main crops – green or white – the English preference is for green (earthed up but allowed to reach the light). The Germans like theirs white and blanched (picked before dawn) and the French fancy a little purple tip. 70 The Oldie Spring 2021

rack, brush lightly with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Make the sauce: combine all the ingredients and leave them to marinate. Just before you’re ready to eat, blister the asparagus under (or over) a hot grill, pointing the tender tips away from the high heat. Turn carefully and grill the other side. Mix the sauce separately.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE LET’S GO ALFRESCO Baked asparagus frittata with mint Best suited to slender, green, first-growth sprue. You’ll need a medium-size baking dish or shallow earthenware casserole, though you can cook it in a frying pan on top heat if you prefer. Serves 3-4 A dozen asparagus sprue 6 eggs 2 tablespoons grated cheese 2 teaspoons breadcrumbs 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1 tablespoon torn-up mint leaves Salt and pepper 1-2 tablespoons olive oil Dice the stalks (only the tender part) and mix with the forked-up eggs. Add the rest of the ingredients, trickle your chosen baking dish or casserole with a little oil, pour in the egg mixture and finish with a little more oil. Bake gently at 150°C/300°F/gas 2 for 20 minutes or so, till firm but still a little soft in the middle. Serve warm. Grilled asparagus with sauce Creole Fat, green spears, juicy and firm, are best for grilling. Serve with a punchy little sauce for a blast of Caribbean sunshine. Serves 4 About 750g fat green asparagus A little olive oil Sea salt The sauce 2 tablespoons finely chopped spring onion 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley 1-2 garlic cloves, crushed and chopped 1 red chilli (Scotch bonnet for preference), deseeded and finely chopped 6 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon lime or lemon juice Level teaspoon sea salt Trim the asparagus, slicing off any dry, woody ends and peeling off any hard outside skin. Set the spears on a grill

Moments of genuine euphoria in life are either rare, or forgotten because the vast majority occurred in one’s youth. Release from incarceration must rank pretty high. Whereas few readers will have spent time in Sing Sing, some of you will have experienced that blinding-light moment of being released unexpectedly even for a few hours from the monotony of National Service or boarding school. ‘Unexpectedly’ is the all-important word. All of us know what it’s like to leave the exam room for the last of a series of O levels or A levels. Yet although that moment is tumultuous, its joy is severely shrunk both by its being an anticlimax after weeks of the build-up and by the fact that other mates are being greeted by the love of their young lives who’s waving a SnogathonBehind-the-Bike-Sheds voucher. Ever since Boris announced the reopening of restaurant terraces and pub gardens on 12th April, I have enjoyed the same shudders of unadulterated rhapsody that I last felt at my ascetic Dorset prep school in 1975. That year on a baking summer’s day, the Lord of Misrule, in the improbable shape of the headmaster, suddenly declared at breakfast that there would be no lessons and we were all going to the beach. Why? To celebrate his nephew’s scholarship. Only on our third sticky bun did we discover his destination was not Winchester. It was Bryanston. Yet we were just as delirious at his achievement: that of mastering joined-up writing. And counting to 20. Every time I successfully make a post-12th-April booking – no small feat – the sensation of that summer’s day rushes through my veins. I don’t even resent the early birds who have grabbed the prime sites and times. Sam’s Brasserie, on the river in Hammersmith, announced they would be taking bookings from 0900 hours on Thursday 11th March. Sure enough, I was there at 0901 with my last available diary windows (breakfast on Monday 26th or late dinner on Sunday 25th), but I was pipped to the post. Within 24 hours, Sam

emailed his regulars, apologising for having only 32 chairs outside. It’s a nationwide problem for town mice. Britain just doesn’t do alfresco to EU standards. From Bath to Edinburgh, councils don’t approve. And law-abiding as we Brits are, as proved by our wholesale submittal to lockdown, we don’t push the envelope. Long ago, Italians (please excuse even positive racial generalisations in the Year of Meghan) mastered the art of claiming outdoor space without applying for planning permission. First, they allow the mayor to have a table on the pavement; later that month, they plant a few large shrubs to shelter the judge (and his mistress) from prying eyes. The next season, they erect an awning to protect both dignitaries from the sun, followed by plastic walls against the rain. The following season, either those walls become brick or that terrace (seating up to 60 people) becomes a city fixture, as sacred as the war memorial. Fear not: we Brits shall still find a table outdoors in London before 17th May when we can eat indoors. First, Westminster Council are repeating last year’s Open Streets scheme whereby 60 roads – including 17 in Soho alone – were closed to traffic and over 500 restaurants were granted pavement licences. Secondly, I have drawn up a list on The Oldie’s website of 35 restaurants across the city with terraces and gardens. Check out www.theoldie.co.uk/blog and scroll down the blogs chronologically to mine on 10th March 2021. Don’t get frustrated but be willing to have lunch at midday or mid-afternoon, and dinner at six o’clock – much as you have been doing at home for the past 12 months.

DRINK BILL KNOTT THE GLORIOUS 12TH OF APRIL Pubs, so we are told, have been swamped with garden bookings from 12th April onwards, when pints of foaming ale will once more gush from hand pump to tankard, and we will cavort merrily around picnic tables like Breugel’s peasants. Until it rains, of course, when, snubbed by the snug, we shall have to huddle under sodden parasols or retreat to our cars. At the Plough and Fleece in Horningsea, near Cambridge, in the mid-1970s, it always seemed to be raining. I know this because my brother and I were frequently banished to the back of the family Escort as the rain lashed down and our feckless

parents caroused within. One or other would occasionally emerge with halves of lemonade and a bag of crisps, or – had we been tooting the horn – a clip round the ear. On my 14th birthday, I was finally allowed inside, for dinner in the lounge bar. I have long forgotten what I ate but the sneaky half of bitter shandy, served with a sly wink by a benevolent landlady, was truly memorable. I have never looked back. The landlord at another of my parents’ favourite haunts, the Tickell Arms in Whittlesford, would not have been so obliging. Squire Kim Joseph Hollick De La Taste Tickell, as he styled himself, was eccentric by name and even loopier by nature: children were banned, as – according to a rambling notice on the front door – were CNDers, lefties, jeans-wearers, unescorted or ‘modern’ women, men with earrings and any other undesirables who sprang to mind. His list was longer than Ko-Ko’s in The Mikado; even had I been 18, I would have needed a severe haircut before being served, since the Squire treated hippies with especial opprobrium. Suitably shorn, I first visited the pub in the mid-1980s. The Squire was disappointingly well behaved: soothed, I suspect, by several pewter goblets of Champagne, some stirring choruses from Wagner and the attentions of his inamorato, the lederhosen-clad Siggi, short for Siegfried. I goaded him by asking the way to the toilets – his stock reply was ‘You will see a sign above the door inscribed “Gentlemen”. Ignore it and go straight through’ – but he merely pointed the way and carried on conducting the valkyries. His death, in 1990, prompted many reminiscences from patrons he had either entertained or vilified, and often both. One correspondent in the Times recalled an arrogant student complaining of the cold and asking for another log on the fire. The Squire vaulted the bar, told the student to stand up and ‘proceeded to smash his chair against the wall, break it into bits and put it on the fire’. Another remembered his morning habit of bathing naked in the garden’s trout pond, and then walking naked through the bar ‘with algae dripping from his personage’. Come the Glorious Twelfth, the Tickell Arms and its gardens will be open once more. Patrons are no longer in danger of being chased from the premises by a monocled, mace-wielding Squire, nor will errant parkers have their registration numbers bellowed through a loudhailer, and the only creatures emerging

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case of excellent claret: Château Curton La Perrière 2016. The Falgueyret family has been tending vines in the Jugazan commune of Bordeaux’s Entre-Deux-Mers region for 150 years. Since 2001, Jérôme Falgueyret – armed with a degree in oenology – has been vinifying the family wines, previously sold to the local co-operative. The quality has improved dramatically under Jérôme’s guidance, and the Château now has a string of medals to its name, including a gold medal for the lovely 2016 vintage. This serious, rich claret, a blend of 90 per cent Merlot and 10 per cent Cabernet Sauvignon, boasts bags of black cherry fruit, supple tannins and a long, savoury finish. It is drinking beautifully now, and should continue to please for at least another couple of years.

Normally priced at £13.99 a bottle, a case is on offer to Oldie readers for £119.88, – a saving of £54.99 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

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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 17th May 2021.

naked from the pond will be ducks. They sure don’t build them like Squire Kim Joseph Hollick De La Taste Tickell any more. The Oldie Spring 2021 71

SPORT JIM WHITE CLASH OF THE BRITISH TITANS Nothing is straightforward in the world of heavyweight boxing. It has been announced that, sometime this year, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have agreed to meet to unify all the titles they hold between them. Quite when this will happen has not been confirmed. We can be certain about one thing. Whenever the giant from Morecambe meets the Greek-god-like figure from Watford, it will be the most valuable match-up in British boxing history. Eye-watering sums of money are said to be available. The fact is, though, everything about this fight should repel anyone with a hint of conscience. The relentless braggadocio, the bling, the brutality… The weeks of trash-talking press conferences. The non-stop TV commercials shouting at us to buy our pay-per-view passes. It is all appalling. And that’s before we even mention the location. There is a very real possibility the two British champions will slug it out in Saudi Arabia. Those behind the fight seem willing to sportswash the reputation of one of the world’s most appalling regimes in exchange for an even more inflated payday. Yet when the fight eventually does come round, hypocrisy will win out. Even as I sneer and sark, I am certain to fork out 30 quid to watch it on television. I know it is a disgrace, I know it is a rip-off. I know it is nothing more than the wretched monetisation of primeval violence. But I can’t help myself. Even from a distance, I can feel the knot of excitement in my stomach on the day of the scrap, the sense of anticipation and the thrill of possibility. It is going to be unmissable. This is the thing about heavyweight boxing at its most intense: it delivers a challenge like nothing else. The immediate risk involved in two men of such scale attempting to deprive each other of consciousness is extraordinarily high. To step into the ring against such opposition requires bravery way beyond anything in our own experience. I once sparred with the former champion Frank Bruno and, even though he was deliberately offering the gentlest of opposition, I nearly fainted with fear. And there will be no such quarter given here. One – or both – of these men could find themselves permanently damaged by the encounter; if not immediately, then in later life, when the pummelling of their brains takes its long-term toll. Yet the very hideousness of the consequences makes the challenge all the 72 The Oldie Spring 2021

Watford v Morecambe: Anthony Joshua meets Tyson Fury

more intoxicating. Sure, we spectators have outsourced the jeopardy to the two athletes involved. But it still resonates. To watch them go toe to toe will send a charge of electricity down the spine in a manner no other sporting event can match. Particularly with these two fighters, whose antipathy seems genuine. Fury has consistently belittled Joshua over the past five years. You sense that the resentment caused by relentless condescension will prove explosive. Even to write these words is shameful. But I’m not alone in thinking that when the fight does go ahead, it will be the most significant moment of the sporting year.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD THE END OF THE ROAD ‘Retirement taught me what I had long suspected,’ my friend said. ‘People have jobs to avoid work.’ There’s truth in the old saw, with the added complication that flexible retirement means we also have to decide when the axe should fall. It’s the same with cars – when do you retire them? When they get doddery? When you’re bored and crave novelty? When they’re out of fashion? When they’re losing too much value? When the seat colour no longer matches your smart new outfit? Of course, it’s easier to retire your car than your staff or yourself. We do it more often – the average age of cars on British roads is about nine years (17 in this household) and the average age at scrapping is about 14. No manufacturer ever tells you a car is for life. If you don’t change your car frequently, they’re out of business. Although cars, like ships and planes, aren’t designed to last for life, they can be made to. The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bomber first flew for the US Air Force in 1952; the last was built in 1962. Yet

they’re still flying and are about to get upgrades that will keep them in the air until they’re a century old. Ditto the Douglas DC-3 commercial load-lugger, due its centenary in 2036. Given the flourishing state of the classic-car market, in 2048 we’ll also be wishing a happy 100th to the Morris Minor and the Land Rover, both of which are regularly renovated to almost new. We usually get rid of cars for economic reasons, or so we tell ourselves. Those who can afford it buy a car new, keep it for two or three years or until the warranty expires, and then trade it in for a newer model. They take a hit on depreciation, but not as much as if they would if they kept it a few years longer. Meanwhile, they have (or should have) reliable motoring with no worries about costly maintenance. Most buyers, however, buy used – and many keep what they’ve bought until it’s beyond economic repair. However, it’s often cheaper to repair than to change, since the cost of changing is nearly always greater than you think. You tell yourself you’re getting something better and mostly you are, but not invariably. Another reason for early automotive retirement is that when cars break down, as they must eventually, you lose faith in them. The 2008 financial crisis prolonged the average life of UK cars because fewer people bought new, as is happening now with COVID. Another factor is that computer-controlled, modern cars are generally more reliable than old ones; and their bodies don’t rust as they used to. Thus they should last longer, pushing the average age up. However, when they do go wrong, they often go wrong big-time. New computers, engines and transmissions cost more than the car is worth, pushing the average age down again. Then there’s the seven-year-itch factor – more like three- or four- with cars. There’s nothing wrong with your ten-year-old – properly maintained, it’s probably good for another ten years – but there’s an interest-free loan offered on a four-year-old down the road and you persuade yourself that you need more or less boot space. Anyway, it’s a hybrid and therefore (theoretically) better for the environment than your old gas-guzzler. Makes you feel better. And that – the feel factor – is often what retiring our four-wheeled friends is really all about. It’s easier than retiring each other and because we can, we do. So, if you can afford it and it gives you pleasure, why not? It’s a buyer’s market just now.

‘I love what you’ve done with the basement’

The Oldie Spring 2021 73

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

High hopes for higher internet speeds Those of us who follow the internet business are always looking for the next ‘big thing’. My prophecies in this area are as bad as anyone’s – though I can boast that, 20 years ago, I noted here that Google looked promising and recommended that Oldie-readers try it. That may well have been my last accurate prediction – but I’ve just spotted something the extraordinary billionaire Elon Musk has been up to for a little while, which might well be my next one. Having made his money with PayPal, Musk has invested in Tesla cars and many other things, including SpaceX. This is a space rocket company which has the rather optimistic – not to say

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

Satellite internet access: the lowdown www.starlink.com Starlink’s own website; lots of glamorous videos. Back to basics: Meccano heaven https://alansmeccano.org The other end of technology – this site, by a charming 75-year-old Meccano enthusiast, is a joy. Do read his ‘Meccano life story’. I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

whimsical – ambition of ‘making humanity interplanetary’. However, SpaceX also has a very practical and potentially lucrative division called Starlink. This is currently placing thousands of satellites in our skies, with the aim of providing highspeed internet to anyone in the world, independent of local infrastructure or any other sort of control, government or otherwise. Necessity is usually the mother, or at least the midwife, of invention. At the moment, one of the internet’s biggest unfulfilled needs is not what humans can achieve online; that develops steadily with demand and without help. No, the yawning gap worldwide is simply the physical availability of the internet – especially fast internet. Your computer needs an individual and direct connection to your internet service provider before it can do anything. The faster the data can flow between you both, the better. In most countries, that connection is usually made using fast fibre-optic cables and slower copper wires or, more often, a mixture of both. This has obvious limitations, especially for remote areas, and I have long felt that there must be a better solution. There is. Musk is creating a network of satellites that will cover the globe. Anyone, wherever they are, can pay to connect to them; all you will need is some equipment that costs less than an iPhone. No need for any wires, telephone poles or holes in the road. The scale of his efforts is bewildering. He already has the world’s largest satellite fleet (over 1,000) up there, and

the current target is for about 40,000 satellites to be launched before long and probably 100,000 satellites eventually, covering the whole world. Yes, the whole world. He’s not wasting time. Starlink is manufacturing and launching about 120 satellites per month and hopes to achieve ‘near-global coverage of the populated world in 2021’. The technical achievement is astonishing, too; a mesh of thousands of interconnected satellites all moving at high speed. What’s even better – it actually works. I did wonder about the chances of collisions, but they have anti-collision equipment. When you stop to consider that there are getting on for two billion vehicles in the world, and the satellites aren’t a lot bigger than cars, 100,000 doesn’t sound so many. The service is currently expensive ($100 per month) and limited to bits of the USA. But time will sort that out (Europe is next), mainly because Musk is not alone. Amazon (who else?) is looking at launching something similar. The Government has an interest in OneWeb, which has the same aspirations; BT is already talking to it. This is also fascinating from a political perspective. The idea of an unfettered internet being available to anyone in the world with the right bit of kit is bound to cause unease in countries where they like to control the flow of information. Every so often you need a maverick gazillionaire to shake things up a bit. If Musk sticks to his guns, this could easily be my second accurate prediction of a ‘big thing’.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

A witness-protection scheme for wills The pandemic has encouraged thousands of people to get round to making their wills – but being stuck at home makes it difficult. How can you comply with the law to have the signature on your will witnessed in person when another law forbids you from meeting anyone outside your 74 The Oldie Spring 2021

household or support bubble? The people you live with are the ones most likely to benefit from your will, which rules them out as witnesses and means you have to find someone further afield. If everyone signing the will can meet, witnesses can watch from a distance – even through a window – provided

they can clearly see the testator (the person making the will) sign. That is often not possible so, to make sure people can write valid wills during the current restrictions, several rules have been changed. Solicitors dealing with wills are now classified as key workers and, like other

‘He’s not angry about the food miles – he’s just jealous that it got to travel’

solicitors, are allowed to carry on working and to meet clients in a safe environment. Then the Ministry of Justice granted a temporary concession, lasting until January 2022, allowing wills to be witnessed over a video link such as Zoom or Skype, although it does insist that video witnessing should be done only as a last resort. The witnesses must still be able to see the testator signing and they must all sign the same piece of paper, so the will has to be sent between them. Most people use solicitors to draw up

their will, but an increasing number are using will-writers who are not legal professionals. Anyone can set up in business calling themselves a will-writer, as will-writing is not a regulated activity. Solicitors are regulated and this gives clients the protection of complaints procedures and access to the legal ombudsman. If a bank, trade union or charity draws up your will, they might use a solicitor – you need to check. If the will-writer is regulated by the Financial Services Authority, you can take complaints to the financial ombudsman.

Some unauthorised will-writers join a trade association such as the Society of Will Writers or the Institute of Professional Willwriters, which have codes of conduct and offer dispute resolution. Online wills, which are drafted by a will-writer online and downloaded for you to sign, are being used more and more – and not only because they are cheaper. Many people prefer to write their will at home at their own pace. With increasingly sophisticated software, drawing up an online will is better than doing it yourself, but this option is suitable only for simple wills. The danger of a badly-written will is that mistakes come to light usually only after you have died, correcting it will be expensive and your estate might not go where you want. Anyone over 55 setting up a simple will can do so free of charge through Free Wills Month which takes place in March and October. You contact a solicitor who is participating in the scheme and who is paid a nominal amount by a charity. The charities taking part hope you will leave them a donation in your will, though this is not compulsory. Some charities run a free will service all year.

‘ I wish you’d come to me earlier about your son’s head lice, Mrs Cloke’ The Oldie Spring 2021 75

Getting Dressed

The Queen of Somerset

Restaurateur Catherine Butler on her West Country renaissance brigid keenan It is 20 years since Catherine Butler and her partner Ahmed Sidki set off on a light-hearted jaunt to Somerset to visit a friend, never suspecting that the outing would change their lives. At the time, Butler was a highly successful restaurateur in London, with ten branches of Café Med, the chain she co-owned, across the city, and Sidki had his own gallery selling art and furniture in Holland Park. ‘We knew absolutely nothing about the country – we knew only that it was green and had cows in it!’ she says. It was a fine day. When the couple heard there was an old chapel for sale in nearby Bruton, they decided to take a look. They both love old buildings – Ahmed is an architect and designer. Within half an hour, they had bought it. They had no particular plan but, in the way that these things happen, an offer appeared out of the blue for the restaurant chain in London. So Butler sold up and the couple moved to Somerset, with no thought of opening a restaurant there. Then Butler chickened out: ‘I panicked. I am a totally urban person, I fled back to London and commuted. It was only four years later that I felt able to commit to the country – and a restaurant of my own. And then there were two years of building before we opened At the Chapel in 2008.’ It was an immediate success. Bruton is an ancient and historic town with an extraordinary mix of people in the area – from teachers at the three big schools in the town to farmers and agricultural workers, craftsmen, artists and writers. At the Chapel Jersey top by Theory, trousers by Eileen Fisher, necklace bought in the Atlas mountains, boots by Chloé 76 The Oldie Spring 2021

and its popular bakery – inspired by Butler’s memory of buying bread with her father on Sunday mornings after Mass – became a hub for locals from Carlos Acosta to George Osborne. In the years since, other exciting ventures have joined them: first the Hauser & Wirth contemporary art gallery and, recently, The Newt hotel and gardens. Oldies will understand when I say that the Butler/Bruton story reminds me of another one: Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice (1950). In the book, an enterprising woman opens an ice-cream parlour in her local town in the Australian outback and transforms it into a bustling, busy hotspot. Butler was born into an Irish Catholic family in Liverpool 62 years ago. Her politically minded father, the first in the family to go to university, worked in the docks. Those were turbulent days: the dockers were frequently on strike; there was very little money. Butler’s first hero and inspiration was the formidable left-wing campaigner Bessie Braddock, who was their MP. Butler was at college studying public administration when a French-Dutch schoolmate invited her to spend the summer helping at her father’s restaurant in Corsica. ‘I loved everything about it: cleaning, helping, preparing, cooking, serving – everything. It was all amazing for a girl like me from Liverpool.’ The summer over, she took off for London and became a trainer at the Chicago Rib Shack in Knightsbridge. ‘There could be 200 people queuing on some nights.’ She then worked for Robert Earl, founder of Planet Hollywood. He owned

Never in the shade: Butler in 1986

more than 50 restaurants and employed 1,000 staff. She moved to Café Rouge before her boss suggested they pool their resources and open their own business. Café Med was born. Butler has spent most of her life in black, the traditional colour for restaurant staff – though she plans a switch to navy. She obeys the rules she sets for her own staff: ‘Tops and trousers or skirts must be black (not faded), clean and pressed. No logos. No armpits! Shoes must be black, too, and comfortable. You can be on your feet for up to 12 hours a day in this job.’ Butler has found her favourite medium-heeled boots at Chloé and Yves Saint Laurent. She insists on good fabrics for her black outfits. Donna Karan and Joseph are favourite labels, along with Theory for knitwear. In normal times, she shops once or twice a year at Selfridges, buying everything she needs in one go, including the skincare products by Sisley she likes. She has her hair cut and coloured at Josh Wood in London, keeping it long enough to put up. ‘That’s another strict rule in restaurants: all hair is tied back.’ At the Chapel restaurant and hotel will reopen outside on 12th April and fully on 17th May

Dunnock by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd In 1951, the ornithologist Max Nicholson argued for a change of seven birds’ names. One was ‘dunnock’ for the dun-coloured Prunella modularis. It was a name first recorded in 1475 but had been supplanted by ‘hedge sparrow’. Dunnock was the only one of Nicholson’s suggestions to stick. But the bird’s change of name is nothing compared with its change of reputation. Tim Birkhead (The Wisdom of Birds) writes that even Charles Darwin dismissed female birds’ promiscuity, although he knew it was undeniable. Darwin preferred to see them as paragons of Victorian moral convention in sexual matters – not least because his daughter Etty was correcting proofs of his The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Birkhead writes, ‘For Darwin, male promiscuity was the norm and an important part of his vision of sexual selection’; female promiscuity was decidedly not. He quotes Darwin on birds in Descent: ‘It is shown from various facts, given hereafter, and by the results fairly attributable to sexual selection, that the female, though comparatively passive, generally exerts some choice and accepts one male in preference to the others.’ Darwin’s conclusion led to a century of mistaken belief. The Victorian ornithologist Reverend Francis Orpen Morris notoriously urged his congregation to follow the example of the dunnock: ‘Unobtrusive, quiet and retiring, without being shy, humble and homely in its deportment and habits, sober and unpretending in its dress, while still neat and graceful, the Dunnock exhibits a pattern which many of a higher grade might imitate.’ From casual observation, this is a fair reflection of the dunnock’s behaviour and appearance. As John Clare wrote in Hedge Sparrow: The tame hedge sparrow in its russet dress Is half a robin for its gentle ways W H Hudson (British Birds) wrote that

its ‘favouritism’ with bird-lovers rivalled the ‘robin redbreast, the swallow and the martin’ – this despite its being ‘the least attractive’ of birds, which seems harsh. It is indeed ‘neat’, and its ‘russet dress’ is undeniably elegant. But now we know that dunnocks are polyandrist (females copulating with more than one male) and polygamist (the reverse). The hedge sparrow was famed for the beauty of its sky-blue eggs cushioned in its mossy nest. Previously it was pitied as a prime victim of the cuckoo: The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, That it had its head bit off by its young (Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4)

Sadly, cuckoos have declined in England by 70 per cent since 1995, and half Britain’s hedgerows have gone since the Second World War. The paragon upheld by the Reverend Morris has been mugged by science and exposed as a byword for smutty behaviour. It seems as much a victim of the sexual revolution as it was a beneficiary of Victorian decorum. Those of us brought up to think first of those sky-blue eggs at the mention of dunnocks may deem Darwin right to have preserved Etty’s blissful ignorance at the expense of scientific truth. The Oldie Spring 2021 79

Travel A good man in Africa Denys Finch Hatton, immortalised in Out of Africa, died in a plane crash 90 years ago. He did so much for Kenya, says Sara Wheeler

CHRONICLE/ALAMY

n 1931, the soldier Lord Cranworth described Denys Finch Hatton (1887-1931) as ‘the man with about the most impressive personality I have ever met’. The pair had caroused together at the Café Royal and battled through the waterless wartime bush on the East Africa front. But after his death, aged 44, in a plane crash in Kenya 90 years ago, on 14th May 1931, the elusive DFH escaped into legend. By the time he materialised in the seven-Oscar-winning Out of Africa (1985), Robert Redford played Finch Hatton with an American accent – and a full head of hair. The real man was as bald as a billiard ball. In 2006, I wrote Finch Hatton’s biography. I trailed him through Africa, searching for clues as tiny, comet-tailed geckos invaded the pages of my notebook. Now he stands clear in my imagination. He was the archetypal man of action, a literary buccaneer who cared little for the shibboleths of success found in Who’s Who. He lived through

80 The Oldie Spring 2021

Top: Finch Hatton. Below: the Prince of Wales on a hunting trip, 1919

tumultuous times – from Lord Salisbury to Lady Chatterley – but, in his fusion of the rebellious and traditional, he was a curiously 18th-century figure. His father was the 13th Earl of Winchilsea and 8th Earl of Nottingham. The boy Denys followed the standard trajectory from prep school to Eton, where he was President of Pop, to Oxford, where he represented the university at golf. At six foot three, and a natural athlete to boot, he was already a loose-limbed heartbreaker. Nineteenth-century explorers had brought Africa into European drawing rooms during Denys’s childhood, and after graduating he headed for the continent’s eastern flank. There he dabbled in a range of business ventures, for a short time owning a chain of dukas, the small stores that sprouted everywhere man turned the earth. At the outbreak of the First World War, Finch Hatton joined one of the many non-regular units in the only part of the empire that the enemy invaded: British East Africa. It shared a long

UNIVERSAL PICTURES/ALAMY

Robert Redford and Meryl Streep as Finch Hatton and Blixen in Out of Africa (1985)

border with its German counterpart, and the two armies fought each other – and rhinos – with smoking, 19th-century guns. With a Military Cross on his tunic, Finch Hatton shipped out to Mesopotamia before signing up to train with the Royal Flying Corps in Cairo. The life expectancy of a British pilot on the Western Front at that time was 11 days. He travelled via Nairobi, where he met Karen Blixen (1885-1962) at a Muthaiga Club dinner. ‘I have been fortunate in my old age,’ Tania, as she was known, wrote to her brother, ‘to meet my ideal realised in him.’ When the war was over and British East Africa became the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, Finch Hatton moved in with Blixen. He had formed a land-development company, and toured the region assessing potential investments, always tacking on weeks in which to hunt. In Out of Africa, Blixen’s 1937 book (written under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen) on which the Hollywood movie was based, she wrote of her lover, ‘He never did but what he wanted to do.’ Meanwhile, 21-year-old Beryl Markham was waiting in the thorn bushes and she also began an affair with Finch Hatton. Not yet the famous aviatrix who crossed the Atlantic solo, the sinuous Markham was turning all heads as a racehorse trainer in Nairobi. She and Finch Hatton shared a gift for gracious and unconventional living. ‘And, as for charm, I suspect Denys invented it,’ Markham wrote in her 1942 memoir West with the Night. Finch Hatton was the open road made

flesh. His story exemplifies the age-old dilemma of whether to go or to stay – the choice between four walls and the open road; security and freedom; or, as Tania put it, ‘the lion hunt and bathing the baby’. In his late thirties, he set up as a white hunter. Big game sport was fashionable and the white hunter was a knight errant, one of the most romantic figures in colonial history. Crucially, Finch Hatton had become a serious student of photography. Through his Kodak lens, he saw another Kenya: a pristine and ancient landscape in grave danger from the depredations of immigrants and their toys. Rich tourists were randomly slaughtering game from the open windows of motor cars. Finch Hatton was an innate conservative, and his passion for the African landscape led to a campaigning involvement in conservation. In 1928, Edward, the jockey-size Prince of Wales, selected him as white hunter for his forthcoming tour. The Prince’s benighted assistant private secretary, Captain (later Sir) Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, relied heavily on Finch Hatton: ‘He has organised the whole expedition for me down to the last sheet of Bronco.’ When panicky cables from the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, announced

Rich tourists were randomly slaughtering game from the open windows of motor cars

the king’s illness and the vital need for the prince to return, Lascelles noted in his journal that his royal charge ‘spent the remainder of the evening in the successful seduction of a Mrs Barnes, wife of the local commissioner. He told me so himself the next morning.’ While I was researching my book, an auction house placed a news story in the Times, flagging the forthcoming sale of correspondence from the royal safari. I wrote to the firm, asking if they might kindly pass my request to read this material to the eventual buyer. Months later, a cut-glass voice invited me to the top of the Harrods building. Harrods owner Mohamed Fayed had bought the letters to furnish the Windsors’ villa outside Paris, which he owned. In his stuffy office, I duly read the appalling future Edward VIII complaining to chums at home about missing the ‘divine new tunes’ in London nightclubs. In 1929, Finch Hatton ramped up his environmental campaign. He wrote a long article for the Times extolling the pleasure of shooting game with a camera, citing ‘an orgy of slaughter in Tanganyika’. He had found a purpose at last. Most of his proposals, including the creation of national parks, were adopted, sooner or later. They were part of a legislative process that reached its logical conclusion in Kenya when hunting was banned outright in 1977. This is the real Finch Hatton legacy. Meanwhile, Tania’s farm had been on the brink of financial ruin for years; now it toppled into the abyss. Denys visited her as she packed her books. She knew in her heart that she had lost him, as one always does when one really has. But, at 44, he was full of plans. He was going to start scouting elephant from the air for safari clients. To this end, he bought a custard-yellow Gypsy Moth, and he and his servant Kamau flew down to Voi to reconnoitre the terrain. They stayed one night with friends. The sky was a tender blue on 7th May 1931 when the pair took off again. As the Moth banked to gain altitude, the wind played tunes on the struts. The plane circled twice and turned in the direction of Nairobi. As it was still gaining height, the engine faltered. ‘Denys would have greeted doomsday with a wink,’ Markham wrote, ‘and I think he did.’ Sara Wheeler is the author of Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton (Jonathan Cape) The Oldie Spring 2021 81

Overlooked Britain

Stables fit for the King of the Turf

LUCY LAMBTON

lucinda lambton Sir James Miller won racing’s Triple Crown and spent a fortune on housing his horses in splendid style in Berwickshire ‘There is an air of melancholy interest about the stables at Manderston in Berwickshire,’ reported Country Life in a 1914 article called Small Country Buildings of Today. It was lamenting the early death, at 43 years old, of Sir James Miller, 2nd Bt (1864-1906), who in 1895 had commissioned an assembly of equine buildings for the alarming sum of £25,000 – some £780,000 today. The anonymous correspondent (signing himself ‘X’) was also no doubt grimly aware that, within a few years of these stables’ being built, the age of the horse would be over, with the age of the car taking its place. So, indeed, it proved to be. Sir James Miller was the ‘King of the Turf’ of his day. His horse Sainfoin won the Derby in 1890. In 1903, his Rock Sand won the Triple Crown – the Derby, the St Leger and the 2,000 Guineas. He was also inordinately rich from his father’s fortune made from the hemp and herring trade with Russia. He spent the fortune on creating the best-built and most beautiful house in the country. His architect, John Kinross, already renowned for his attention to detail, was mooted as the perfect man to realise these lofty aims. He was told by Sir James, ‘It does not matter how much it costs.’ At the stables, he produced a neoclassical quadrangle of considerable refinement; sober and restrained, yet somewhat magnificent, with a full-height entrance arch in finest, grey ashlar. In the 18th century, this would have been more economically built in rendered brick. In the late-19th century, no such restraints were considered by either Miller or Kinross at Manderston! You first progress through a pilastered and pedimented archway beneath a heraldic shield and a great brass bell, flanked on either side by carved friezes of the liveliest kind; of a hunt in full cry, with the fox, hounds, horses and a horn-blowing huntsman, all of them charging along beneath great cedar trees. Imposingly fashioned pediments hold sway around the main stable yard, which 82 The Oldie Spring 2021

In the money: Sir James Miller, Vanity Fair’s Men of the Day No 481, 1890. Below: brass heelposts and teak stalls

is paved with radial patterns of stone set into brick. Adding yet more dignity are the finest bronze lions with tie-up rings in their mouths, awaiting visiting horses.

There are rectangular fanlights atop every stable door, while semicircular fanlights enhance the arched entrances. Another great pediment over an arched doorway leads you into the stalls, where your heart is suddenly set a-pounding by their sheer architectural purity. All was – and to this day still is – immaculate, with knobs on; literally so – with a shining, brass ball atop a shining, brass heelpost between every teak stall. Each one of them is still hung with a head collar of the softest white kid, with brass buckles and a white rope. On the floor, woodblocks make another immaculate contribution, laid in a herringbone pattern that is so neat and clean you feel that could eat your breakfast off them. Sadly unseen in the photograph are the long and gleaming brass mangers for the horses. A complex system of ventilation is on proud parade, with panels of flourishing decorative woodwork, while beneath them the names of the horses, in brass filigree frames, are set into marble plaques above each stall. Honouring the name Miller, they all begin with M: Malakoff, Mango, Magic, Monarch, Marsden, Mystery, Matchless, Margot, Milton, Mable, Mercat, Maiden Erlegh, Monty and Milly. The stables at Manderston have been described in Horse and Hound as ‘the finest in the world’. ‘X’ in Country Life gave them lyrical praise: ‘The Master of such a stable might spend many pleasant moments watching the horses enjoy their rest and listening to their slow, solemn munching and the rattle of a chain or the stamp of a hoof, which are such pleasant sounds to the ear of a man who loves horses.’ The tack room too was an elegant triumph; with saddles and bridles in abundance. Here there are lofty, glassfronted rosewood cupboards ranged around a black-and-white chequerboard marble floor. Laments, though, were always hovering on the horizon, with Sir James full of foreboding at the lack of romance

In good form: the 1895 stables at Manderston House, Berwickshire, by John Kinross (1855-1931)

in his new arrangements: ‘Will our grandchildren visit with the same tender regret the deserted garages and try to sniff the odours of petrol?’ At Manderston, they can do just that. For almost immediately after being built, this great Edwardian equine palace was indeed to be declared redundant by the arrival of the motor car. Nothing daunted, Miller set to on a ‘Motor House’, a building every bit as grand as the stables; once again, no expense was spared. It boasts a Venetian window and is

lined throughout with white, glazed enamel tiles with lines of brilliant blue – even in the working pits. There were also marble inlays around all the taps, radiators, knobs and levers. As it roared ahead into the future, no more exhilarating example than Manderston’s can be found to show the obsolescence of the stable. In March 1908, the Building News was still wary of recommending such changes; it declared that a series of garages should be built at the same

time as new stables, noting that ‘the engine house and garage are modern additions, not always required but generally found’. That his equine palace had been an architectural triumph was never in dispute. Kinross must of course have been greatly encouraged by Sir James’s cheering dictum ringing in his ears: ‘Money is of no importance whatsoever.’ After this terrific trial run, he was given a free rein with his designs for Manderston House. The Oldie Spring 2021 83

Taking a Walk

On the Roman road with jets and giants

GARY WING

patrick barkham

At least lockdown has converted that difficult decision-making question – ‘Shall we meet for coffee/lunch/dinner/a pint?’ – into ‘Where shall we meet for a walk?’ When walking is the only non-essential meeting we’re allowed, we must all walk more. But when I see all these pairs of colleagues or friends out strolling, talking intently, I wonder if more walking-andtalking means less noticing. This month’s walk was a delightful meeting with a dear colleague for a stroll round Wandlebury Country Park, just beyond the growing sprawl of Cambridge. We had the kind of intense chat that precludes much observation and yet, on a sunny winter’s day, Wandlebury provided a blizzard of stimuli. It began with an unusually friendly car-park noticeboard, plastered with helpful signs and exhortations to children to build dens and to visitors of all ages to share their wildlife photos, which were laminated and pinned up. There was helpful information about pond restoration and conservation grazing by ancient sheep breeds and Highland cattle. Cheerful, chatty walkers headed into the woods up what looked suspiciously like a small hill. The country park is one 84 The Oldie Spring 2021

of the peaks of the Gog Magogs, the infamously non-vertiginous chalk downs that tower 250 feet above the Cambridgeshire Fens. Gogmagog was the last giant of Albion, thrown off a cliff by the founder of Cornwall. This terrain, where a narrow band of chalk reaches up into East Anglia, has been intensively worked and reworked and turned into stories by centuries of human occupation. Here is history mixed up and spliced together like a collage or sample-filled record, ready to bamboozle and bewitch us today. Hidden in the damp woods, covered by beeches and snowdrops, are the traces of the vast, earthen banks of a hillfort created by the Iceni. To the north, there’s a Roman road. A 17th-century horse trainer, Tregonwell Frampton, stabled horses here for Charles II and James II. In the 18th century, the stables became home to the Godolphin Arabian, a legendary stallion who sired the finest racehorses for nearby Newmarket. More recently, the land here has been imprinted by creative minds from Cambridge. The lumps in the grassy meadow are the remains of Cambridge archaeologist T C Lethbridge’s excavations in search of a sun god and a

moon goddess carved into the chalk. His fellow archaeologists didn’t accept his wishful digging. This century, the writer Robert Macfarlane tramped here in the snow and drank whisky at the beginning of the Old Ways, cycling along the nearby Roman road to find them. We walked past Lethbridge’s lumps to admire a magnificent holm oak, standing alone in the meadow like a mad green man, sprouting green in all directions as if gently haranguing an audience. The path meandered downhill to an elegant beech avenue. At its end, we turned onto the Roman road, which once led, arrowstraight, to Colchester. It still runs finely here, muddy underfoot but superbly proportioned and thickly hedged with hawthorn, blackthorn and field maple. Fieldfares hopped warily in the hedge as we discovered a magnificent, ancient artefact: a venerable car seat (c1987 AD) dumped in a thicket and now superbly reupholstered in luminous green moss. A red kite floated over to inspect us. KA-BOOOM! The serenity was broken by a terrible explosion. Flinching, wondering and looking up, we saw a plane trail high in the wintry blue and eventually deduced it had been a sonic boom. The news later confirmed that a military jet had been authorised to break the sound barrier to escort a plane with defective radar safely down to Stansted. Returning back along the Roman road, we circled the Iceni’s earthen banks, admired the old stables and wandered through a 20th-century orchard. We’d had a deep conversation, but at Wandlebury, at least, the past was so present that it couldn’t help but intrude – in a rather lovely way. Wandlebury Country Park, signposted off the A1307. Postcode CB22 3AE. We followed the path through the woods onto the beech avenue and turned right along the Roman road towards the A11, before turning back and following the path around the Iron Age hillfort to finish

On the Road

Lockdown – the naked truth Liz Hurley tells Louise Flind about swapping LA for Herefordshire, steaming her kaftans – and that chilly picture

Is there anything you can’t leave home without? Sunglasses. I can’t stand being stared at when I’m out and about, and sunglasses make me feel as if I have an Invisibility Shield. I’m aware I look like an idiot to everyone else. Where were you brought up? On the move – my father was in the army. Then Hampshire. What’s your favourite part of England? I love where I am now, in Herefordshire. It’s really rural and beyond the commuter belt. I previously spent ten years in the Cotswolds, which I loved, but it was annoying bumping into people I cross the road to avoid in London. And can you tell us about the photo shoot in the snow, where you weren’t wearing many clothes? Is it right that your mum took the photos? During lockdown, I’ve had to rope in everyone to help me. I set the shots up and did the lighting. All my longsuffering family have to do is point and press. How has lockdown been? I secretly loved the first lockdown, as the weather was so glorious that all I did was manual labour in the garden. I planted, cleared, pruned and mowed from dawn till dusk, which meant I could consume thousands of calories a day without gaining an ounce. This one has been much more dreary and I’ve been sulkily sorting out junk cupboards. Do you travel light? I’m not a mad diva with 28 matching Louis Vuitton suitcases, but I probably travel heavier than most. I like to be covered for anything that may crop up. I’m usually lugging cameras and lights, too. I travel so often that I have it down to a fine art. I lay outfits on

my bed and ruthlessly remove the gorgeous but isolated top that would need its own skirt, bag and shoes. I put all swimwear, underwear, T-shirts and sun creams into separate ziplock bags and shoes into shoe bags. I always take a hand steamer, sewing kit and gaffer tape. Is there something you really miss when you’re away? Even though I find cooking very boring, and crash around the kitchen when I do it, I really miss it around the six-to-eight-week mark of being away. After a while, room service loses its charm. The worst thing about lockdown has been having to cook constantly. Left to my own devices, I’d just eat Ryvita and bananas but, with the house full, I’ve had to feed everyone properly. Do you miss home when you’re away? I feel liberated the moment I leave. I’m very comfortable living out of a suitcase, but I miss my garden and torture people to send me photos of everything. They hate doing it as I immediately put a red ring round any weed I spy and send it straight back. Do you miss travelling for films and acting during lockdown? Last year, 2020, was the first year I didn’t once travel to America, and I really missed it. Next month, I’m due to fly to LA to shoot a pilot for CBS, which has been postponed for nearly a year – so my fingers are firmly crossed. After the first lockdown, I was lucky to make two movies – one in York and one in Latvia – and it was such a relief to get back to work. What’s in the pipeline? After I shoot the pilot for CBS, I will have

a month or two off before shooting a romantic comedy in the UK. For vacations? The Maldives. What do you think of LA? I lived there for ten years. There’s nowhere better to be if you’re working constantly in the movie industry as it’s there on a plate. I came back when I was pregnant as, being a single mother, I wanted to be near my family. Where did you go on your honeymoon with Arun Nayar? We frolicked in Mauritius, where my then husband swam with sharks while I watched turtles hatch on the beach. Do you go on holiday? All my holidays are slightly marred because they double up as shoots for my swimwear company. I usually take a few days off to get a little sun and relax, and then it’s back into hair and make-up and steaming the kaftans. Freeze frame: photo in the snow by Mum

Are you brave with different food abroad? I can’t eat street food anywhere as my stomach is very delicate. The last time I tried was when I was in Pakistan with Imran Khan, to raise funds for his hospital. He persuaded me to eat some kebabs and I projectile-vomited and ended up on a drip. Favourite food? Sausages – I could eat them every day. We used to make our own when we kept Gloucestershire Old Spots. The Oldie Spring 2021 87

Genius crossword 399 el sereno Finding C will help solve this puzzle. It stands for the same thing in every case Across 9 Instrument from radio car in America (7) 10 C makes back massage seem complicated (7) 11 Receiver needing a new number on tap regularly (7) 12 Standard will have nothing for leader offering excess (7) 13 Instrument having mostly difficult name for broadcasting (9) 15 Lift one seen in crowd (5) 16 C thanks hospital after endless comfort (7) 19 Almost identical to Republican line about world (7) 20 A writer hugging small tree (5) 21 Meals on wheels here - C possibly taken in by boring old cove (6,3) 25 C may be blind, perhaps (7) 26 Sort of sleep on cricket ground, resulting in dismissal (7) 28 Preview from artist pinched by tradesman (7) 29 Run faster than a hundred in fantastic surroundings (7)

Down 1 Fertilizer made from grass remains (6) 2 Agent’s in favour of eating poor C (6) 3 C = flipping zero divided by zero (4) 4 Footballers must wear dress for big game trip (6) 5 Cancel seeing sailor turn up in charge (8) 6 Inexperienced people in theatre finding place to grow (10) 7 C works with miser - craftsman at the wheel (8) 8 Red Berets trained to ignore British apostate (8) 14 Seeming old, and prudent about time (10) 16 Spoil C working in mines (8) 17 Heaven may be English crew welcoming ceremonial fire (8) 18 Dance music having hard time about a veto (8) 22 Quarrel coming after fine for litter (6) 23 Warning from C consuming mostly beef (6) 24 Banked on rest day (6) 27 Reported strength provides a small contribution (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the current coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 5th May 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 399 Across 1 Objective; target (4) 4 Top quality (2,4) 7 Tree; residue (3) 9 Slightly open (4) 10 Adversary (8) 11 Speck (3) 12 Skin condition (4) 13 Exemption from punishment (8) 16 Freak success (5,2,3,3) 19 Mixed; various (8) 23 Alcoholic rice drink (4) 24 Anger (3) 25 Ruling; powerful (8) 26 Pin down (4) 27 Twitch (3) 28 Position (troops) (6)

Genius 397 solution 29 Whirlpool (4) Down 2 Instructive experience (6,6) 3 Pantries (7) 4 Hindu loincloth (5) 5 Drink eagerly (3,2) 6 Inert gas (atomic number 54) (5) 8 Obsessed brain (3-5,4) 14 Ground meat (5) 15 Yuk! (3) 17 The girl’s (3) 18 Concentrate; core (7) 20 Express a view (5) 21 Track; lag (5) 22 Simple song (5)

Well done to those solvers who found the 6 cities (on the Silk Road, 4, 15, 27, 6, 18 and 26) and spelt Bukhara right first time round! Apologies for the unintended misdirection in 11 Across. Winner: David Bednall, Clifton, Bristol Runners-up: Sandra Kershaw, Ponteland, Newcastle upon Tyne; Norah Clewes, Chester

Moron 397 solution Across: 1. Duke, 3 Hair (Do you care?), 9. Error, 10. Ring a bell, 11. Inane, 12. Celebrate, 15. Owners, 17. Devour, 19. Unknowing, 21. Ad-lib, 23. Agreement, 24. Eider, 25. Busy, 26. Omen. Down: 1. Director, 2. Kindling, 4. Arenas, 5. Relieve, 6. Aria, 7. Free, 8. Jamb, 13. Coliseum, 14. Frighten, 16. Rhubarb, 18. Skirts, 20. Obey, 21. Apex, 22. Lode. The Oldie Spring 2021 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO When a player is slamming in a major suit, the raise to Five of the agreed Major is more than a general invitation. It says, ‘I have two losers in the unbid suit. Can you control it?’ The responses are as follows: with no first- or second-round control, partner passes the Five Heart/Spade bid; holding a singleton, partner raises to Six Hearts/ Spades; holding the king, partner bids Five Notrumps (in case Six Notrumps, protecting the king, is better than Six Hearts/Spades); holding the precious ace, partner cue bids that ace. This month’s featured deal comes from one of our online ARBC duplicates on Bridge Base Online. Dealer South North-South Vulnerable

West ♠♥ Q 10 9 7 5 ♦8762 ♣10 7 5 3

North ♠ K86 ♥AJ62 ♦ K J 10 9 5 4 ♣-

South ♠ A Q 10 9 7 5 ♥84 ♦♣A K Q J 9

East ♠ J432 ♥K3 ♦AQ3 ♣8 6 4 2

The bidding South West North East 1S Pass 2D Pass 3C Pass 4S Pass 5S(1) Pass 6H(2) Pass 7S end (1) Inviting slam, showing two losers in the unbid suit, hearts. (2) Showing the invaluable ace of hearts – in case partner is interested in a grand slam. Declarer won West’s ten-of-hearts lead with dummy’s ace and led the jack of diamonds. He was hoping to gain a read on the diamond layout, but with nerves of steel, knowing from declarer’s jump to Seven Spades he was void, East played low – smoothly. Declarer naturally ruffed and cashed the ace-king-queen of clubs, discarding dummy’s three remaining hearts. He then ruffed his second heart. At trick six, declarer cashed the king of spades, and saw West discard. At least it was East who held the four missing spades, reflected declarer as he led dummy’s remaining spade to his ten. He cashed the ace-queen of spades, drawing East’s and, the four-nil spade split having somewhat reduced his options, was now reliant on the ten of clubs falling under his knave. It did – the nine of clubs was promoted – and that was grand slam made. ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 265, you were invited to write a poem using 12 rhymes, taken, as it happens, from John Masefield’s poem The Tewkesbury Road (‘Where the shifty-eyed delicate deer troop down to the brook to drink’). Mirth was a hard rhyme to accommodate, as perhaps it was for Masefield. One of you changed it to birth, but that broke the rules. There was much drinking during lockdown. As Peter Davies encapsulated it, ‘I overeat, I overdrink and get up three times in the night.’ Richard Love began, ‘How often do I wonder where/ I left my specs,’ a thought occurring also to Paul Elmhirst and Peter Chambers. I White composed an enjoyable ‘Edgar Allan Poem’ which began ‘Her Ladyship is dead, at my fell hand’. Tim Lloyd narrated a bomber raid over Germany; Martin Elster told a tale about throwing starfish. Commiserations to them and to Dorothy Pope, Richard Shepherd, Jane Bower, Joe Houlihan, Mary Hodges, Robert Schechter, G B White and Liz Summerson, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of that box of delights The Chambers Dictionary going to Bea Perry for her ‘Unequal conversation’. You tell me of your project: when and where; I hesitate, and answer: how and why? My thoughts you just dismiss as wasted air – I might as well ask questions of the sky. Frustration brings me closer to the brink; Unseen, my knuckles clench to bloodless white. Opinions scorned, I pour myself a drink (For me, this guarantees a dreamless night). And will you always, while we share this earth, Wrong-foot me with your glib, selfserving words? If so, our conversation, shorn of mirth, Means no more than the twittering of birds. Bea Perry I couldn’t tell you when it was, I couldn’t tell you where And I’m sure I’ll never know the reason why. I only know we heard it, through some magic in the air, A cacophony of verse that split the sky. I couldn’t say what held us there – what nudged us to that brink That made our brains believe that black was white. It’s trite and oversimplified to blame it on the drink Or on the vague excesses of the night.

But what brought us close together also brought us back to earth And through that strange kaleidoscope of words We laughed as though we didn’t know the reasons for our mirth And launched our dreams like eager new-fledged birds. Con Connell ‘This path must lead to somewhere,’ He said, and she wondered why, Why she had followed him out into the cold night air When only a crescent moon lit up the sky. Walking swiftly, he led her to the brink And together they watched the foaming water white. She wished she hadn’t had so much to drink And wondered how she would get home that night. He laid her body in the soft damp earth, The rushing water whispered unheard words. While he returned to warmth and light and mirth, She remained no more to hear the birds. Jennifer Willis In Hampstead, Keats lay listening, wondering from where A song melodious charmed him. He knew why His soul cleaved to the singer’s joyous air, Calling from beeches and a darkling sky. Mortal, he knew that he was on the brink Of death, his body thin, his youthful visage white. That pain might ease with taking of strong drink, The blushful Hippocrene, more purple than the night. Out from the dark, scents of the flowers of earth Set him to ponder on life’s transience, to find the words To wish for dance and song and sunburned mirth, While sobbed the nightingale, most passionate of birds. G M Southgate COMPETITION No 267 Christopher Smart considered his cat in verse, as did Edward Lear. A poem, please, on a cat’s view of a famous (named) person. Maximum 16 lines. We still can’t accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 267’, by 6th May. The Oldie Spring 2021 91

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OLD POSTCARDS WANTED by private collector. Contact Grenville Collins. Tel: 020 7834 1852. Email: grenville@collins.safeserve.com

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside The one that got away

A month ago, I started thinking obsessively about a relationship I had with a girl over 50 years ago. It lasted a year and I then married a fabulous woman and we had three children. But now I can’t tear myself away from thoughts of those heady days in the sixties – the songs, the clothes and, to be honest, our wonderful relationship. It’s making me feel really down. Obviously I can’t confide in my wife. Do you think I need therapy or counselling? Name and address supplied Absolutely not. If you’re having a sudden major breakdown, perhaps, but a month of gloom isn’t long enough to merit your seeing a therapist, unless you’re just interested in finding out what makes you tick. It sounds to me as if you’ve never suffered nostalgia or depression before – something that, to be honest, most of us suffer for shorter or longer periods all through our lives. No, you’re suffering, as so many of us are, from the inevitable depression and self-doubt brought about by a year in captivity. It’s extremely unlikely not to affect you – and your dreams of days of freedom and autonomy are being channelled into regret and nostalgia. Once normal life resumes, these agonising pulls down memory lane will fade, I’m sure. Don’t underestimate what power this loss of liberty is having on your mental state.

I want to die

After a year of increased forgetfulness of names, places, people I know and where I put things, I’ve had a CT scan and have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I’m 85,

otherwise healthy and extremely lucky still to be enjoying a fulfilling life with a very loving wife and family. But I know, from close experience of watching others with this disease, that there will come a time when there will be nothing left for me to enjoy, while the family will be burdened with care of all kinds, and meanwhile wasting, on me, money that I want them to inherit. That’s when, with the family’s consent, I would like to be able to make my own decision to end my life in a comfortable, organised way, against the outdated and absurd law that calls that a crime, and forces us to die unpleasantly, or kill ourselves even more unpleasantly. Switzerland and Holland won’t do; and somewhere at the back of my forgetful mind is the feeling that you, or another such kindly writer, once mentioned a couple of books that might have the answer I’m going to want, without putting you in danger of aiding and abetting a crime. Is that possible, please? Name and address supplied Unfortunately, the biggest pro-assisted-dying organisation in this country recommends it only in very narrow circumstances. You have to be diagnosed with a terminal illness and have only six months to live. By the time you’d sorted out the paperwork, you’d probably be dead anyway. Buy Dr Colin Brewer’s recent book, O, Let Me Not Get Alzheimer’s, Sweet Heaven! Why many people prefer death or active deliverance to living with dementia (Skyscraper Publications), which gives a lot of information about both Swiss and home-grown options and the likely course of this horrible illness. More dramatic is the constantly updated Peaceful Pill Handbook – published by Exit International US. They also run

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98 The Oldie Spring 2021

occasional death workshops around the world. One of the strange things about having the information about how to kill oneself is that it often makes people feel far less like putting it into practice. The more information you have, the more power it gives you and, often, the more it helps you to resolve to live a bit longer.

To jab or not to jab?

I’m having the COVID vaccine next week but, although on one level I am delighted and know it’ll make my life a lot easier, whenever I think about getting it, I feel sick and unhappy. Just the thought of having it results in a panic attack. I’m not normally this squeamish – I sail through having jabs for holidays without a second thought but, for some reason, this terrifies me. Philip, by email It’s taken me years to realise that we don’t consist of just one predictable and logical ‘me’. There’s another character inside that has a say: one’s body. Sometimes they’re at war. When people say, ‘Listen to your body,’ they’ve got a point. You may want to exercise every day – but your body doesn’t. Or you may want to die and your body doesn’t. Your body may be horrified and terrified at the idea of being injected with an unknown substance which some people feel hasn’t been tested fully enough. Your body may be right or it may be wrong. Speaking personally, I’ve had the jab. At 77, I don’t care much about possible side-effects or fertility. So the jab generally makes life easier.

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

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Review of Books Round-up of the reviews

Paul Bailey on the artistry of Dorothy Gallagher Emily Bearn suggests books for children William Cook praises the neglected John Wyndham Biography & Memoir History Fiction Entertainment Art Paperbacks Spring 2021 | www.theoldie.co.uk

In the time of Covid Review of Books Issue 55 Spring 2021 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Reverend Richard Coles The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons from Monastic Life by Sarah Sands The Buildings of Green Park by Andrew Jones Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir by Marina Warner The End of the Road by Jack Cooke Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell by John Preston The Happy Traitor: Spies Lies and Exile in Russia by Simon Kuper

On page 23 of this supplement, William Cook wonders what the author John Wyndham might have made of Covid. Cook writes that the outbreak of the pandemic had much in common with his apocalyptic novels. I imagine that Covid may well be responsible for an outbreak of virus-related novels in the near future. Not to mention diaries: I admit that I have kept a daily one (certainly not for publication because it is extraordinarily boring and repetitive). The best political diarists of the 20th century – Chips Channon, Harold Nicolson (a new edition of his diaries is expected), Alan Clark – were never at the very heart of power, but were sharp observers of the main players; they also understood that dullness was the worst crime of all. And the best in the 21st century? The historian Simon Heffer, himself no slouch in the diary department (his new unexpurgated, over 1,000-page edition of Chips Channon’s diary was reviewed in last month’s Oldie), believes that Sasha Swire’s diaries (review, The Oldie, November 2020) will become an essential point of reference for those wanting to understand the David Cameron age. So I wonder who will be the best political chronicler of the Covid years? Not the man at the centre, Boris Johnson, but maybe someone lurking and watching in Downing Street or in the House of Commons. Close to the PM, but not too close… Away from Covid, there is much to enjoy inside this supplement. Marilynne Robinson’s long-awaited fourth novel in the Gilead series is reviewed, along with Lauren Oyler’s ‘brilliant comic novel’. Margaret MacMillan’s history of war, though short, is described as ‘colourful and tightly woven as a Persian carpet’. In the biography section Keats, Dickens, David Attenborough and Mary Wollstonecraft feature. And if you want something completely different have a read of the reviews on three entertainers: Cary Grant, John Cooper Clarke and Cliff Richard… Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith by Richard Bradford

19 MEMOIR

Paul Bailey on Dorothy Gallagher

20 MISCELLANEOUS 22 ART

Frostquake: Juliet Nicolson A Coup in Turkey: A Tale of Democracy, Despotism and Vengeance in a Divided Land by Jeremy Seal Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

COVER ILLUSTRATION: BOB WILSON

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

10 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR 23 FORGOTTEN AUTHORS

William Cook on John Wyndham

25 FICTION 27 CHILDREN’S BOOKS 30 PAPERBACKS 17 ENTERTAINMENT 18 NUMBERS

30 OBITUARY Alison Lurie The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 3

History

WAR

HOW CONFLICT SHAPED US

MARGARET MACMILLAN Profile, 328pp, £20

Ranging from the Stone Age to modern industrial warfare, and encompassing the impact of war on art and literature, War ‘is not a long book, only 272 pages of text [in the US edition],’ wrote Dexter Filkins in the New York Times, ‘but it’s as colourful and tightly woven as a Persian carpet, showing us not just the many ways that men and women make war, but how war makes women and men. In another scholar’s hands, War might come across as a work of dry political theory, but as anyone who has read Paris 1919 [Peacemakers in the UK] – her vivid account of the Versailles Conference at the end of World War I – can attest, MacMillan writes with enormous ease, and practically every page of this book is interesting, even entertaining.’ Washington Post reviewer Tanjil Rashid found the book ‘light on political theory but rich in factual detail; entirely devoid of polemic, yet full of sober analysis. Humans are described as they are, not as they ought to be... This is the approach of a traditional diplomatic historian, steeped in the realism predominant in her field. War and progress are inextricably linked for MacMillan, which puts her reluctantly at odds with a popular strain of progressive 4 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021

thought that holds that war is gradually being eradicated from the world.’ In his Sunday Times review, Dominic Sandbrook declared that the ‘most provocative chapter concerns the experience of fighting... She quotes an Australian sniper in the First World War who felt “hot pride that in fair warfare I had taken the life of a strong man”, and a British pilot in the Second, who could not sleep because he was buzzing with the “sweet and very intoxicating” feeling after killing two adversaries. And perhaps this, above all, explains why war will always be with us. We do it because we enjoy it.’

BLOOD AND IRON

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE 1871-1918

KATJA HOYER The History Press, 256pp, £14.99

Bismarck’s Germany was a federal conglomeration of 39 states ‘whose only binding experience was conflict against external enemies’ and he sought to perpetuate this fragile sense of unity by attacking internal enemies. ‘Breakneck and lurid, subtle and momentous, the story of the

This is a ‘brilliant account that marks the arrival of a major new talent’

German empire is the sort of subject that could overwhelm a seasoned television don with 1,200 pages to play with, let alone a debut writer with 239,’ wrote Oliver Moody in his review for the Times. Yet ‘Katja Hoyer, a German-born historian living in Sussex, more or less pulls it off, rattling stylishly through the long century from the humbling of Napoleon to the abdication of Wilhelm II in a book so short you could wolf it down in six or seven hours, were you so minded.’ Saul David in the Daily Telegraph found it to be ‘fluently written and convincingly argued’, a ‘brilliant account... that marks the arrival of a major new talent’. However, James Hawes, in the Spectator, objected to Hoyer’s whitewashing of Bismarck, who becomes ‘the mere agent of this allegedly irresistible national mood, a tactical genius and a responsible European diplomat after 1871, rather than the “demonic” figure our ambassador, Lord Odo Russell, considered him... This wasn’t unification at the bidding of some vague national will, as Hoyer implies, but conquest by a polity uniquely and deliberately organised for all-out war.’ While Hoyer’s book ‘is an entertaining enough read, if you seek true insight into the PrussianGerman empire, Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom [2007] remains the place to go’.

THIS SOVEREIGN ISLE BRITAIN IN AND OUT OF EUROPE

ROBERT TOMBS Allen Lane, 203pp, £16.99

For Guardian reviewer Fintan O’Toole, this is ‘much less a work of analysis than it is an expression of faith. It recites, albeit in mellow tones, the familiar Apostle’s Creed of Brexit: the referendum was won by the votes of “the excluded, the unemployed and simply the less well off” (no mention of the very wealthy southerners who voted for it); the EU is doomed; the Irish border question was probably got up by the French; there is no economic downside; the “Anglosphere” and the Commonwealth will replace the European connection. Even recited so suavely, these doctrines are no more convincing to the unbeliever. Given Tombs’s genuine intellectual

History standing, this is probably as good as it gets.’ Roger Boyes, in the Times, recognised that Tombs is a ‘historian of France with a keen sense of how the Anglo-French rivalry coloured our view of Europe. Five of the eight bloodiest wars in world history, he says, were fought against the French... Yet ultimately Britain remained a strong peripheral power, a medium-size state that wanted to prosper through free trade.’ He sees Brexit as ‘an escape from confinement, a rational response rather than a populist reflex’, and his ‘journey from a Yes vote in 1975 to a No vote in 2016 is instructive, and not just because it is told with panache. It’s the way he punctures some of the longstanding Remainer narratives.’ Tombs has ‘made a strong and rational case for the Leave vote and may actually persuade some readers that Brexit was not an act of conspiratorial folly’.

In the Times, Brexiteer historian Robert Tombs agreed that it is ‘well written and enjoyable to read, as one would expect from a seasoned journalist, the chief political commentator for the Financial Times’. But ‘disappointingly from a Financial Times journalist, there is not even the sketchiest analysis of changes in economics or trade’, while ‘in more than 400 pages, 12 lines are devoted to discussing the problems of the euro – another subject of fundamental importance’. ProEuropean ‘dogma is reiterated throughout, and like all dogma requires no proof’. Hence, this book ‘will comfort the faithful, but I doubt it will make many converts’. Simon Heffer, in the Daily Telegraph was even more scathing. ‘Not for want of length,’ he declared, Britain Alone is ‘almost devoid of insight, originality or acuity... The claim on the book’s dust wrapper that it is “magisterial and profoundly perceptive” invites scrutiny under the Trade Descriptions Act: it is a chronic whinge and a book such as one gives for Christmas to someone one deeply dislikes.’

CONQUISTADORS A NEW HISTORY

FERNANDO CERVANTES Allen Lane, 491pp, £30 Brexit or Remain? The argument goes on

BRITAIN ALONE

THE PATH FROM SUEZ TO BREXIT

PHILIP STEPHENS

ROBERT MANDEL

Faber, 464pp, £25

Euro-enthusiast Jonathan Lis, in his review for Prospect, found this to be ‘a magnificent, exhilarating book, laying bare the contradictions, misunderstandings and delusions that led Britain first to build a bridge across the Channel and then bulldoze it... What could have been a meandering history becomes, in Stephens’s hands, a gripping saga of blunders, triumphs and missed opportunities. With sharp pacing and lean, subtle prose, he makes his stance clear while letting us piece together the conclusions. Ultimately, the story is a tragedy – a nexus of paranoia and exceptionalism.’

‘Hailed by the Romantics as courageous explorers, the Spanish conquerors are increasingly seen as violent and rapacious exploiters,’ wrote Daniel Rey in the Spectator. ‘That, says Fernando Cervantes, oversimplifies the complexities of the early modern period.’ By ‘providing a rich portrait of a period that is almost unimaginable today (one in which horses elicited preternatural fear, and Columbus and Cortés both thought they’d reached China), Cervantes does make the conquistadors slightly more sympathetic.’ But despite his ‘persuasive reassessment, it remains difficult to look beyond their massacres and greed’. Sunday Times reviewer Dominic Sandbrook applauded the book for being ‘carefully researched and vividly written’, and for ‘blasting hole after hole in the 21st-century view of the conquistadors as little more than 16th-century Nazis. In his account they are often tortured by self-doubt, holding anguished debates about

‘The depth of research in this book is astonishing’ their treatment of the indigenous peoples.’ Also, their success as conquerors ‘depended on finding local allies, who were often using the newcomers just as much as the newcomers were using them’. Over in the pages of the Times, Gerard DeGroot largely concurred: Cervantes ‘skilfully constructs a complex story, packed with disturbing nuance, which obliterates that simplistic narrative of brutal conquistadors subduing innocent indigenes. The depth of research in this book is astonishing, but even more impressive is the analytical skill.’ And ‘most importantly’, the author ‘knows how to tell a good story’. Yet ‘while this rehabilitation of the conquistadors is undoubtedly impressive, some readers might be dismayed by the cold rationality of its conclusions’.

GLADIUS

LIVING, FIGHTING AND DYING IN THE ROMAN ARMY

GUY DE LA BEDOYERE Little, Brown, 528pp, £25

Anyone who has visited Hadrian’s Wall will know that the Roman army did far more than fight, though it was, of course, a ruthless killing machine with no time for pacifists. ‘They did almost everything, as well as fight. They gathered taxes. They manned Rome’s fire brigade. They built Hadrian’s Wall, aqueducts, bridges … they could throw up a well-fortified marching camp in a

Scene from a mosaic in the Villa Borghese, AD 320 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 5

History matter of hours,’ Christopher Hart noted in the Sunday Times. To do all this, a ‘legionary had to carry a pack including an axe, saw, basket, shovel and rope, weighing about 20kg, on top of his sword, shield, javelins, rations and the rest’. Gladius, Alec Russell wrote in the Financial Times, is a ‘riveting’ account of the single greatest factor behind the remarkable longevity of Roman power: the army. He noted that the author ‘expertly keeps himself in the shadows aware that the details and story need little authorial intervention’, adding that ‘it is the welter of individuals’ stories that makes Gladius such a triumph’. The source for these glimpses into the lives of the soldiers, their wives and children, is the hundreds of wooden leaf tablets preserved in the waterlogged soil at Vindolanda. ‘Their discovery, starting in 1973, has transformed our understanding of the lives, appetites and careers of ordinary legionaries, and highlighted the potential fluidity of a career in what has traditionally and understandably been depicted as the ultimate disciplinarian’s machine.’ ‘Gladius makes for a richly researched, detailed and plausible portrait, warts and all, bang up to date with the latest archaeological finds,’ Hart concluded, ‘and a highly enjoyable read throughout.’

THE GLAMOUR BOYS

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE REBELS WHO FOUGHT FOR BRITAIN TO DEFEAT HITLER

CHRIS BRYANT Bloomsbury, 424pp, £25

In the 1930s the fear and loathing many of the British upper classes felt for Communism blinded them, until it was almost too late, to the nature of the Nazi beast. But there were some notable exceptions in Parliament, who are the subject of Chris Bryant’s lively, anecdotal group portrait. Suggestively disparaged as ‘the glamour boys’ by Neville Chamberlain’s sinister, toad-like consigliere, Sir Joseph Ball, many of these well-groomed – and wellconnected – insurgents either swung both ways, like Bob Boothby, or were incorrigible ‘pansies’, like Victor Cazalet, whose ‘double-breasted beige waistcoat’ was a giveaway. What motivated these equivocal 6 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021

Victor Cazalet: gay and resourceful

characters? Well, says Bryant, himself a prominent gay MP, they had skin in the game. Threatened by Britain’s draconian laws against homosexual practices, they instinctively identified with the Jews and other victims of Nazi oppression, who included the boys they’d slept with in Weimar Berlin, that ‘buggers paradise’ according to WH Auden. In the Guardian, Simon Callow endorsed Bryant’s bold claim that without the Glamour Boys, ‘we would never have fought, let alone won, the Second World War’. But the Sunday Telegraph’s Matthew Dennison raised an eyebrow at ‘so blunt an assessment’. While applauding their ‘grit, determination, bravery and resourcefulness’, he doubted whether Bryant’s subjects, four of whom died on active service, ‘would have made such a claim for themselves’. The Times’s Robbie Millen thought Bryant was at his best ‘when he camps it up a little’ by taking us to gay haunts like the basement bar at the Ritz, known as the ‘Pink Sink’, which during the phoney war was full of exquisite officers exclaiming ‘My dear! My dear! My DEAR!’

IN THE REIGN OF KING JOHN

chronicle and a coffee-table book,’ Gareth Russell wrote in the Times, the focus being on the final reign of his reign, 1214-15 — the year when Magna Carta was forced on him by the barons. ‘There is something timely as well as reassuring about this narrative of presenting 1215 as “a year of world changing importance but also of what it was for most people: just another year”,’ Russell continued. ‘High politics, while intelligently and entertainingly discussed here, function as a frame for a travelogue through Plantagenet England... The attention to the details of everyday life is extraordinary.’ John, Russell concluded, ‘for all his energy, failures, ambition, towering rages and pitiful death [surfeit of peaches], is put into the shade by the fascinating country he misruled’. ‘It’s a fun book,’ Sandra Callard enthused in the Yorkshire Magazine. ‘We can all admire a writer’s meticulous research or his knowledge of his subject, and Jones has all that in spades, but his writing also offers an attractive fusion of great scholarship being very simply executed, with appealing jots of humorous tongue-in-cheek observances that bring Plantagenet England to life.’ An appendix King John penny contains a 16-page translation of the text of Magna Carta, the best known clause being: ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.’ A fantastic read, as well as a beautiful book to handle.

WAR IN THE SHADOWS

RESISTANCE, DECEPTION AND BETRAYAL IN OCCUPIED FRANCE

PATRICK MARNHAM

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF PLANTAGENET ENGLAND

Oneworld, 400pp, £20

DAN JONES

Some 20 years ago, soon after publishing The Death of Jean Moulin, about the French Resistance hero, Patrick Marnham received an anonymous letter that set this hare running. The letter suggested that there was more to the story of Moulin’s death than met the eye. ‘It is an artful beginning worthy of Sherlock Holmes,’ wrote Roger Boyes

Head of Zeus, 360pp, £25

Most people know little of King John, apart from the fact he was ‘bad’ and lost his treasure in the Wash, but Dan Jones has developed a novel way of presenting history. ‘It is beautifully illustrated, somewhere between a

History in the Times. ‘The letter writer, clearly English, elderly and with connections to the intelligence service, was a tease. Was it mere coincidence, he suggested, that Moulin was arrested by the Gestapo on the same day – June 21, 1943 – that Prosper, another Resistance network, the largest Special Operations Executive (SOE) collection of agents in France, was crushed by the Germans?’ This book is ‘full of underhand trickery’. The ultimate question the author asks is ‘did the British betray the French Resistance as part of a smoke-and-mirrors deception? Some Resistance veterans certainly thought so after the war, and Marnham, who has produced in every sense of the word an intriguing book, plays with the idea. He smells conspiracy where perhaps there is none. In the end he leaves it up to the reader to join the dots.’ Marnham is ‘painstakingly forensic in his search for the jewel’, wrote Allan Mallinson in the Spectator, ‘and his pen is no less thrilling than that of Le Carré or Forsyth: “Bodington [a member of SOE’s F-section] terminated his trip to Paris at the first opportunity, leaving on the third night of the August moon…” This is a masterly analysis, impeccably presented.’

THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES

FASCISM, FREEDOM AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

GILES TREMLETT Bloomsbury, 720pp, £30

The poet Louis MacNeice called the International Brigades ‘a rag-tag army’, an accurate description for the thousands of foreign volunteers who fought for the democratic Spanish Republic against Franco’s Fascist

‘Giles Tremlett has created an electrifying narrative’ insurgents. Tragically, their simple Socialist faith was betrayed by Stalin, who ordered his henchmen to rid the Republic’s forces of ‘heretics’ like the Anarchists rather than win the war against Franco. George Orwell, serving with a Trotskyist militia, was lucky to survive these purges. Many of his comrades didn’t. ‘This is an epic tale’, said the Times’s Isambard Wilkinson, ‘and Giles Tremlett nails it with the decisiveness of a political commissar’s bullet to the back of a deserter’s head …. He has created an electrifying narrative that brings to life the idealism, suffering, chaos and paranoia of the most truly international army since the Crusades.’ In the Guardian, Paul Mason said a new history of the Brigades was long overdue. He thought Tremlett, a journalist based in Spain, was ‘at his best when telling the unvarnished stories of the individuals drawn to the republican cause, like the photographer Robert Capa, who arrives at the front only to be forced to change his trousers, “because my guts aren’t as brave as my camera”.’ In the Telegraph, Jonathan Meades congratulated Tremlett on ‘his tremendous feat of digging’. Then issued this warning: ‘Even the most pitiful prentice politician covertly admires dictators because they are successful in accruing power for power’s sake … We must send them on their way before they become fully self-crowned tyrants.’

LONDON AND THE 17TH CENTURY

THE MAKING OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST CITY

MARGARETTE LINCOLN Yale, 372pp, £25

Democracy versus Fascism

Margarette Lincoln, whose previous books have been about seafaring, has chosen the right moment for this new departure and, as John Carey wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘it is thrilling from the first page’. Nigel Jones in the Spectator

agreed that ‘the current pandemic lends this sparkling study of London in its most decisive century a grim topicality’, for the 17th century was one of civil war, regicide, plague, fire, but also of expansive growth, making London one of the world’s greatest cities. ‘Lincoln’s colourful canvas is both chronicle and an ever-shifting panorama — a vivid portrayal of a metropolis in the grip of alarming, bewildering and constant change,’ he added. Ben Wilson in the Times noted that Lincoln ‘not only takes us through the maze of this magnificently chaotic city, but skilfully interweaves the political

The Great Fire of London

convulsions that dogged it through the century. Dangerous, diseased and jerry-built as London was, it thrived as international trade proliferated, almost impervious to the turmoil of civil strife, foreign wars, revolution, and plague.’ ‘Refreshingly, Lincoln’s witnesses include not only the famous diarists Pepys and Evelyn, but less celebrated reporters,’ Jones noted; and ‘Hardly any aspect of the city’s teeming scenes escapes her.… The sheer volume of dazzling dates sometimes seems overwhelming.’ ‘Her book speaks to the resilience of cities: they can withstand all kinds of disasters; opulence grows in the mire,’ Wilson wrote assuringly. ‘If you want to know how it felt to be in the city when it previously faced and overcame such epochal events,’ Jones concluded, then this is the book for you.’ The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 7

Empire profound response – this searching introspection and a quest for new horizons, combined with a readiness to sit with the contradictions of it all’. Another fan was Stephen Bush in the New Statesman: ‘Although Empireland is the product of wide reading rather than original research, it is a fantastic introduction for anyone who wants to learn more about the British empire. Sanghera shares his knowledge without pretension or affectation. He also has a peerless eye for a killer fact and a great story.’ Disraeli making Queen Victoria Empress of India: ‘New crowns for old ones’ read this cartoon caption of 1876

EMPIRELAND

HOW IMPERIALISM HAS SHAPED MODERN BRITAIN

SATHNAM SANGHERA Viking, 320pp, £18.99

A journalist for the Times, Sanghera is a Sikh with Punjabi ancestors and Empireland is the product of Sanghera’s mission to decolonise himself. Gerard DeGroot, the reviewer in Sanghera’s own paper, called it ‘a noble, often poignant effort at self-education’. Finding it to be ‘gracefully written’, he declared that ‘its real beauty lies in its complete absence of dogmatism. It’s so refreshing to encounter an author who isn’t bloody certain about everything... In assessing the empire, Sanghera is again admirably equivocal. He rejects reductive “balance sheet” approaches in which colonial crimes such as torture, concentration camps and shooting natives from cannons are weighed against the elimination of slavery, footbinding and female genital mutilation. There were, he accepts, positives and negatives. Each existed; each needs to be remembered.’ As Guardian reviewer Ashish Ghadiali put it, Sanghera wants Britons ‘to reclaim intimacy with the multiracial nature of a common history’. Although he sets out to offer a balanced assessment, as he ‘grapples with details of atrocities, what takes hold, to his own surprise as much as ours, is a sense of moral outrage that in turn disrupts the way he sees himself, his past attitudes, the sense of his place in the world’. Ghadiali was impressed by the author’s ‘simple but

THE INTEREST

HOW THE ESTABLISHMENT RESISTED THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY

MICHAEL TAYLOR Bodley Head, 400pp, £20

Taylor tells ‘the story of how widespread and deeply rooted... [pro-slavery] attitudes were, how powerfully calls for abolition were resisted and why the British parliament nonetheless voted at last in 1833 to end slavery in its West Indian and African territories’, wrote Fara Dabhoiwala in the Guardian. ‘In 20 brisk, gripping chapters, Taylor charts the course from the foundation of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823 to the final passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. Part of what makes this a compulsively readable book is his skill in cross-cutting between three groups of protagonists. ‘On one track, we follow the abolitionist campaigners on their lengthy, uphill battle... A second strand illuminates the fears and bigotries of white British West Indians... The main focus of the book, however, is on the colonists’ powerful domestic allies, the so-called West India Interest – the countless merchants, civil servants, judges, writers, publicists, landowners, clergymen and politicians who believed that even the gradual abolition of slavery was extremist, treasonous folly, and fought tooth and nail to preserve it.’ Writing in the Critic, University of Exeter historian Bruce Coleman found that Taylor’s ‘largely narrative style works against serious focus and analysis’. In his effort to emphasise black agency through the slave rebellions, Taylor ‘dislikes the idea of religious conscience playing any

significant part in this story, ignoring those parts of his narrative that showed how much it did, both in Britain and in the East Indies’. He also found Taylor’s evident wokery unbearable. This is ‘an exercise in self-flagellation, even national self-hatred, and, in an embarrassing passage, Taylor doesn’t spare himself; “I am not immune from the criticism. I must do more. I must do better.”’

THE NEW AGE OF EMPIRE

HOW RACISM AND COLONIALISM STILL RULE THE WORLD

KEHINDE ANDREWS Allen Lane, 288pp, £20

The West was built on ‘a hierarchy of White supremacy’ and the Enlightenment and scientific theory were both intended to reinforce this White supremacy. Not only that, argues Andrews, but the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF are all racist institutions. His solution? To unite ‘Africa and the African diaspora’ to ‘create a true revolution’. Mixed-race commentator Calvin Robinson, reviewing the book for the Daily Mail, described it as ‘a fantastical journey through a parallel universe; or at least that’s what it reads like, for Andrews, who is Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, not only sees the world through a lens of racism, but outwardly looks for it in everything.’ Robinson found Andrews’s ‘underlying Marxism... unpalatable, especially when he rallies against the “growing middle class in the underdeveloped world who have some of the same opportunities as those in the West to spend money buying unneeded commodities”. The gall of these people, making better lives for themselves and buying things, how very dare they? They ought to know their place, otherwise people like Andrews will have no more victims to write about.’ As another mixed-race commentator, the New Statesman’s political editor Stephen Bush, noted, ‘it’s never made precisely clear... what the vision for people like me is in this united diaspora: do we get to return to Africa, or not? Is there a place for my white partner in the pan-African promised land? Do I ever get to see my mother and grandmother again?’ The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 9

Biography & Memoir

Sir Edward Grey: a private man

STATESMAN OF EUROPE A LIFE OF SIR EDWARD GREY

TG OTTE Allen Lane, 858pp, £35

This huge book is the first full-length biography in 60 years of the Liberal Foreign Secretary now best known for his mournful remark in August 1914: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Of Whiggish landowning stock, Edward Grey preferred birdwatching and fly-fishing to people or politics but he stood for Parliament anyway and became an MP aged 23 in 1885. In opposition he supported ‘muscular liberalism’, embracing the causes of Home Rule and Women’s Suffrage. But he was increasingly absorbed by foreign affairs and was appointed Foreign Secretary by Asquith after the landslide election of 1906. Grey spent the next eight years trying to manage the problems presented by German unification, Russian resurgence and Ottoman decline. Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times described Otte as presenting ‘a powerful case for the defence… [Grey’s] only mistakes were to underestimate the appetite for

Edward Grey preferred bird-watching and fly-fishing to people or politics 10 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021

conflict in Vienna and St Petersburg, and to overestimate Germany’s ability to restrain its ally AustriaHungary.’ Paul Lay in the Times admired Otte’s meticulous and moving tracking of the well-known path to August 1914 and remarked the biography’s relevance to present concerns: ‘Britain’s place in the world; its relationship with Europe; competence and corruption among the political class; the limits of political power; constitutional reform; gender equality; even Grey’s concern with the natural environment.’ David Lough in the Literary Review noted that Grey’s intimate life appears to go into remission after the death, in 1906, of a much-loved first wife who hated sex. ‘Otte gets to the moment when suddenly, after the war and aged 60, he married Pamela Glenconner, one of the most attractive women of the time. She comes and goes within ten pages. Despite Otte’s best efforts, the private Grey remains a dark horse.’

BATTLE OF BROTHERS WILLIAM, HARRY AND THE INSIDE STORY OF A FAMILY IN TUMULT

ROBERT LACEY Wm Collins, 386pp, £20

It is difficult not to be familiar with the troubled childhoods of the Dukes of Cambridge and Sussex. They grew up with warring parents, instability and emotional manipulation, much of it played out in front of the media’s hungry gaze. Individually they constitute the heir and the spare. Together, as brothers, they had to navigate their family’s many public traumas. British historian, biographer and consultant for The

The heir is always covered in glory, while the spare takes the rap Crown, Robert Lacey delves into the relationship between Prince Charles’s two sons. Erin Vanderhoof, writing in Vanity Fair, was most interested by Lacey’s examination of how the press shaped the lives of the boys as everything unfolded. ‘Treating the press as a significant force – and some of the leading royal correspondents as characters – means that Lacey brings a new eye to some of the biggest tabloid controversies and mysteries of the last quarter century.’ Rosamund Urwin in the Sunday Times was intrigued by something else; ‘the public perception of William and Harry isn’t fair.’ The two boys have been wrongly mis-cast; the heir is always covered in glory, while the spare takes the rap. She was sometimes critical of Lacey’s style; ‘royal biographers are prone to some bad habits: heavy reliance on newspaper accounts, few named sources and too much flowery prose’, and here, ‘the writing is breathy — “whisper it!” he commands the reader at one point — and he’s too indulgent on the adjectives: reporters are “tireless”; nannies “beloved”. Melanie Reid in the Times, found Lacey’s tone often ‘pompous’. She concluded, painfully, that the truth is ‘the princes’ story is a sad one. But royal flimflam lends gaiety to our lives.’

THE LOST HOMESTEAD

MY MOTHER, PARTITION AND THE PUNJAB

MARINA WHEELER Hodder & Stoughton, 336pp, £25

The two Princes: spare and heir

In 1962 the journalist Charles Wheeler married Dip, a 28-year-old Sikh woman. Dip came from a prosperous and philanthropic family from Sargodha near Lahore. When, at Partition, it fell to Pakistan, the family, like millions of others, lost everything in their traumatic escape to India. The Wheelers left Delhi shortly after they were married. Marina Wheeler QC is their daughter

Biography & Memoir

Marina Wheeler with her mother Dip

and this is her first non-legal book. Dip could rarely be persuaded to speak about the past, saying she wanted to spare her children a ‘confused identity’. At a difficult period of her own life, having undergone both cervical cancer and divorce from the Prime Minister (never mentioned by name), Marina Wheeler embarked on a quest to understand and explain her maternal heredity. The ‘Lost Homestead’ is her grandfather’s house and land in Sargodha. She never finds it, but she makes it stand for the tragic loss of a world more innocent and attractive than the militant nationalisms that were to succeed it. Nikhil Krishnan in the Daily Telegraph thought the ‘early chapters are a little clunky, suggesting a writer adjusting to an unfamiliar form’, but found the later sections when Wheeler travels to India and Pakistan ‘more elegant’. In the Times Tanjil Rashid remarked that South Asians in Britain ‘typically aren’t told about’ the catastrophic events of Partition: ‘families pass over it in silence or denial’. Wheeler ‘resists the idea that “ancient hatreds” drove the split’, and her family story ‘made the abstractions of history suddenly more real’. Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan in the Financial Times thought the book achieved its aim to explore ‘memory and identity, what we have, what we lose and what we rebuild’.

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES A MEMOIR

BARBARA AMIEL Constable, 608pp, £25

The journalist Barbara Amiel, later Lady Black, was a Jewish girl from Watford. Her parents divorced when

she was eight. Her unsatisfactory mother remarried, then took her to Canada. She never saw her father, a bent solicitor, again. He killed himself when she was 16. She learnt to fend for herself from an early age and worked her way up to become the editor of the Toronto Sun. She was already on her third husband when she returned to England in 1986 to work for the Times, Sunday Times and later the Daily Telegraph where she met its proprietor Conrad Black. They married in 1992. Their headily extravagant rise and subsequent disgrace are the principal subject of Friends and Enemies: A Memoir. Sarah Sands in the Spectator commented, ‘It is described as a memoir, but is more of an operatic reckoning… She is beautiful but self-destructive, and literally cuts off her nose to spite her face.’ Still, she thinks the book and its author have many winning qualities. It is ‘a Succession-style tale of media power, hubris and one of the great corporate court cases, followed by incarceration for Conrad Black’. Sands admired Amiel’s ‘resilience and, until hell freezes over, loyalty to Black’ and the way ‘she rains down curses on their enemies’. Her triumph is as ‘a kind of Medusa figure whose stare is best avoided’. Camilla Long in the Sunday Times agreed that ‘not a single score remains unsettled’ in this ‘divinely bonkers book — a crazed page-turner as written from the inside by Marie Antoinette’. Quentin Letts in the Times wrote that there was ‘something magnetic and magnificent about this sustained, occasionally deranged lament’.

THE DEAD ARE ARISING THE LIFE OF MALCOLM X

LES PAYNE AND TAMARA PAYNE Viking, 640pp, £30

Malcolm X ‘was jailed for burglary at the age of 20’, explained Daniel Bates in the Daily Mail. ‘But life inside changed him... [he] found Islam, re-educated himself... He was introduced to the Nation of Islam through his brothers who knew its leader Elijah Muhammad. The black nationalist group believed white people are the “devil” and black people are inherently superior.’

Colin Grant of the Observer explained, ‘The Paynes have assiduously sought primary sources. Drawing on thousands of hours of first-hand interviews, eye-witness accounts and personal documents, they assemble a picture of Malcolm X’s evolution “from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary” who, through his words, terrified not just white America but, eventually, the Black Muslim leadership. ‘Unprecedented testimonies show how, in publicly denouncing [Elijah] Muhammad, Malcolm incensed former allies who plotted his murder with the “advance knowledge” of the FBI.’

Malcolm X: from criminal to moralist

Malcolm X ‘never dropped his opposition to mixed marriages’ Trevor Phillips in the Sunday Times wrote: ‘The centrepiece of the book is a tension-filled account of the 1961 meeting between Malcolm and the Ku Klux Klan, who had correctly surmised that Elijah Muhammad saw Martin Luther King’s integrationism as a greater threat to Black Muslims than white nationalism. Malcolm agreed to the encounter on the leader’s orders.’ Malcolm X ‘never dropped his opposition to mixed marriages. His difference with the KKK was one of degree; neither believed whites and blacks could truly coexist.’ Phillips asked, ‘What would Malcolm X have made of Black Lives Matter?’ Although the book shows how he latterly tempered his animosity towards whites, Phillips thought he ‘would have kept his The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 11

Biography & Memoir distance, put off by the movement’s lack of discipline, and sceptical about its multiracial character’.

KEATS

A BRIEF LIFE IN NINE POEMS AND ONE EPITAPH

LUCASTA MILLER Jonathan Cape, 358pp, £17.99

layer over Keats, the product of decades of entranced readers.’ Hensher reflected that had he survived to 80, Keats might have outlived Dickens: ‘It’s not inconceivable that, like Walter Scott’s before him, his career as a poet would have given way to a long and rich one as a novelist of unusual range, expressive power and intense curiosity. Just a thought.’

THE ARTFUL DICKENS

THE TRICKS AND PLOYS OF THE GREAT NOVELIST

JOHN MULLAN

John Keats by William Hilton

Lucasta Miller’s study of Keats celebrates the poet in the bicentenary of his death at the age of 25. Praising a ‘wittily perceptive’ and ‘enlightening’ book in the Financial Times, Miranda Seymour welcomed Miller’s banishing ‘the sentimental image to which Shelley’s Adonais — published just a few months after Keats’s death by a poet who scarcely knew him — contributed much with its self-serving lament for an ethereal spirit destroyed by a hostile press.’ ‘There are umpteen biographies already and mountains of criticism,’ remarked John Carey in the Sunday Times. ‘Besides, for many people [Keats] is their favourite poet, and they are likely to resent a third party barging in between them and a much loved poem’ but ‘for newcomers to Keats, Miller’s is the best short introduction I have come across’. James Marriott in the Times was not sure about ‘Miller’s endeavour to discover a ruder, sexier, blokier Keats. According to Miller, Keats’s medieval fantasy The Eve of St Agnes “certainly looks like aggressive masculine posturing”. Does it?’ But in the Spectator, Philip Hensher thought she had brought something new to our understanding of the poet. ‘Lucasta Miller’s task, which she carries out very successfully, is to strip away what we think when we think about Keats. She presents him to us as he would have struck his first readers. There is such a glutinous

revels in it, inventing characters who mix clichés up, such as Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend: ‘He’d be sharper than a serpent’s tooth, if he wasn’t as dull as ditch water.’ Frances Wilson in the Guardian hailed the book as ‘both an exposure of the trickster’s methods and a celebration of close reading’. Laura Freeman in the Times was alone in striking a mildly querulous note, complaining of ‘a tendency to Dickensian excess. Two or three illustrative quotes become four, five, six, seven… Please, sir, I want some less.’

A LIFE ON OUR PLANET

Bloomsbury, 432pp, £16.99

MY WITNESS STATEMENT AND A VISION FOR THE FUTURE

John Mullan is a dependably entertaining scholar and critic dedicated to shedding light on how the writers he admires achieve their effects. What Matters in Jane Austen? examined the intricate machinery of Austen’s novels under the guise of solving a few puzzles. The Artful Dickens has more of an argument than its predecessor, pushing back against all those who damn Dickens with faint praise. Mullan quotes Iris Murdoch as typical of this approach: ‘Gosh, he is good — though so careless,’ and he sets out to show just how careful Dickens was. We learn that the manuscripts teem with revisions, which continued in proof form when the monthly numbers came back from the printers. Each of the 20 chapters explores a field where Dickens’s innovations have either not been recognised or have been criticised as somehow sloppy. Did he, as Trollope complained, use words ‘created by himself in defiance of the rules’? Absolutely, writes Mullan, and offers abundant examples of his subject’s vivid and poetic inventions. Other chapters are given to Dickens’s use of smell – he was the first novelist to make this sense a narrative device, and another explores why all the books contain references to drowning. John Carey in the Sunday Times singled out a brilliant section on cliché which shows how Dickens

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH WITH JONNIE HUGHES

Dickens was the first novelist to make smell a narrative device

Ebury Press, 272pp, £20

David Attenborough: inspirational

Adorning the cover of David Attenborough’s manifesto for change, there is a photograph of Sir David himself, appropriately enough for a man described by Kerri ní Dochartaigh in the Irish Times as ‘the most inspirational human being on Earth’. In the Financial Times, Henry Mance also paid tribute. ‘It’s possible that no human being, alive or dead, has seen so much of the natural world. In A Life on Our Planet, the 94-year-old natural historian and broadcaster seeks to sum up just how much has been damaged — and just how much trouble we are in.’ The book is part autobiography and part polemic, from Attenborough’s fossil-hunting childhood in Leicester to his decades as the great pioneer of nature and wildlife documentaries. Attenborough has come to his environmental message late in life, The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 13

Biography & Memoir wrote Mance: ‘He was looking in the wrong direction – at the natural world’s wonders, not its disappearance.’ Reviewing the book in the Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard reflected: ‘This man — the one we wish the Queen had married, the national treasure, the embodiment of all the BBC and Britain should be, the secular saint — is on his last lap. This shortish book is his troubled valedictory. It is also a “witness statement” warning of the end of the world that made him.’ For Appleyard, the book offers a ‘hellfire sermon’ on an environmental crisis. ‘The big difference is that his emphasis is not just on global warming; he gives equal weight to species extinction.’ The book begins in Pripyat, the Ukrainian town abandoned 30 years ago after the Chernobyl disaster. Appleyard sees signs of hope for the future there. ‘The town has been spectacularly rewilded, not by us, but by nature. It is covered in thick vegetation and there are populations of foxes, elk, deer, wild boar, bison, brown bear and raccoon dogs. Not, of course, humans.’

PSYCHIATRIST IN THE CHAIR

THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY OF ANTHONY CLARE

BRENDAN KELLY AND MUIRIS HOUSTON Merrion Press, 304pp, £19.99)

Dr Anthony Clare was, in his 1980s heyday, the most famous psychiatrist in the country. In his BBC radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair he conducted revealing and perceptive interviews with famous figures, in a lilting Irish voice that invited confidence without ever probing. The authors of his biography describe him as ‘unfailingly courteous and supportive with his guests, listening for the most part, rather than interrogating. He was also endlessly curious, often robust and, at times, remarkably and controversially persistent.’ One of his interviewees was Jimmy Savile about whom he later said there was ‘something chilling’. Yet, as radio reviewing veteran Gillian Reynolds pointed out in the Spectator: ‘Those who best remember Anthony Clare for his broadcasting are firmly reminded by 14 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021

Anthony Clare: ultimately a voyager

this biography that we didn’t know the half of him.’ Clare died suddenly in 2007 at the age of only 64. On the RTE website broadcaster Eileen Dunne called him a ‘dynamo, energetic, witty, charming and ultimately a voyager’. It wasn’t the whole story, however, and in a feature in the Times, his biographers told reporter Colin Coyle that Clare was a depressive, ‘dogged by the nagging sense that he could have done more, written more and achieved more in his life’. He also returned at the end of his life to Catholicism. ‘In spite of all of his rational thought and logical reasoning, Clare — like many others — found that his loss of faith left him with an emptiness that he struggled to fill.’

RED COMET

THE SHORT LIFE AND BLAZING ART OF SYLVIA PLATH

HEATHER CLARK Jonathan Cape, 1,152pp, £30

Could there be anything further to say about Sylvia Plath? You might think not but Freya Johnston in Prospect considered this latest biography justified by much new material, including ‘all her surviving correspondence and Harriet Rosenstein’s dozens of interviews

with contemporaries’ preparatory to her own never-completed Life. Andrew Wilson in the Evening Standard added that Clark was able to ‘quote extensively from Plath’s work, a luxury denied in the past by her estate’. This is, he pointed out, because it is an authorised biography – and it suffers from the trade-off, in danger of becoming, ‘for all its merits, that dreaded thing: a hagiography’. Lyndall Gordon in the Telegraph welcomed the fact that Clark was ‘careful to set down the facts without the rancour of earlier feminists’, while Paul Alexander in the Washington Post cautioned that ‘a tendency to downplay Hughes’s violence will likely attract critics’. For the Sunday Times’s Claire Lowdon, the pile-up of new information was not entirely welcome, describing some parts as ‘exhaustive and utterly exhausting for mortal readers’. Wilson, himself the author of a Plath biography, was impressed by Clark’s unearthing of ‘[her] lost second novel Falcon Yard, which “hints at the erotics of violence” between Sylvia and Ted’. Lowdon felt Clark’s objectivity made her ‘at times a little too meticulously granular’, while also feeling that ‘her hands-off approach [was] appropriate for the story’s messy, tragic end’. ‘It is a life in the fullest and best sense of that word,’ concluded Freya Johnston – and as such, a subject now best left. Lowdon too urged a moratorium, citing in vivid terms the ‘poor protagonists trapped in the aspic of our obsession, their legs still waving feebly after all these years’. They deserve our admiration, gratitude and pity, she wrote, ‘and perhaps, at last, some peace’.

MAD AT THE WORLD

A LIFE OF JOHN STEINBECK

WILLIAM SOUDER WW Norton, 446 pp, £25

Sylvia Plath: let her rest in peace

Which American Nobel Laureate said this? ‘I have always lived violently, drunk hugely and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.’ The answer is not Ernest Hemingway, but John Steinbeck (1902-1968). Tall, rugged, adventurous and promiscuous, Steinbeck had Hemingway’s appetite for life, but not his swagger. Asked if he thought he deserved the Nobel Prize, he replied, ‘Frankly, no.’

Biography & Memoir Critics took him at his word. Even before he died, Steinbeck’s reputation had begun to sink. And it’s a measure of how far below the radar he has slipped that reviewers have had to remind us that he wrote much else besides The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men and East of Eden, all probably better known today as films. Indelibly marked by the Depression,

John Steinbeck: appetite for life

Steinbeck sympathised with underdogs, in particular those migrant workers from the Midwest Dust Bowl who fetched up in flyblown Californian squatters’ camps. He was angered by an economic system that encouraged exploitation, greed and brutality. The Spectator’s Scott Bayfield felt that while Souder’s biography, the first for 25 years, ‘was a good place to start reading about Steinbeck’, it failed to do full justice to ‘a very complicated, emotional writer’. The Times’s Claire Cowden agreed. Souder’s book, while ‘highly readable … feels too slim for such a lot of life, such a lot of work’. But the Washington Post’s Alexander Kafka disagreed. He thought this ‘smart, soulful, panoramic biography … has brought a deeply human Steinbeck forth in all his flawed, melancholy, brilliant complication.’

TWO-WAY MIRROR

THE LIFE OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

FIONA SAMPSON Profile, 322pp, £20

When Wordsworth died in 1850 Elizabeth Barrett Browning was considered as a possible successor to the laureateship, and that was six years before the publication of

Aurora Leigh, her long blank verse novel about a poet’s becoming which became a best-seller. At the time of her death in 1861 EBB (as she signed herself ) was much more admired than her husband Robert, but her star fell in the decades which followed. Then the success of the 1931 play The Barretts of Wimpole Street made EBB better-known for her invalidism and her tyrant father than her blank verse. Robert Douglas Fairhurst in the Spectator hailed Sampson’s biography as ‘a bold attempt to understand EBB before her reputation started to ebb’, while disliking the author’s occasional attempts ‘to turn her into a more contemporary figure… with references to “virtue-signalling” and “snowflakes” that are themselves likely to sound outdated before too long’. Laura Freeman in the Times found Sampson ‘an astute, thoughtful and wide-ranging guide’ but disliked her use of the historic present as in ‘“Elizabeth is in bed again”, “Elizabeth is starting to write again”. What ought to give a sense of urgency instead sounds forced and breathless.’ She also felt the essayistic frames about the nature of biography with which Sampson began each section were a nuisance – ‘Better to hear Elizabeth’s own voice: restless, ambitious, unsatisfied.’ Frances Wilson in the Daily Mail agreed that the frames were ‘a tad selfindulgent… most readers will skip them in order to get on with the story itself, which is beautifully told’.

WOLLSTONECRAFT

PHILOSOPHY, PASSION & POLITICS

SYLVANA TOMASELLI Princeton, 216pp, £25

Wollstonecraft is not a biography so much as an attempt to make sense of the apparent contradictions between the life, philosophy and scattered thought of the writer often referred to as the ‘mother of feminism’. The work is treated thematically rather than chronologically, with chapter headings such as ‘What She Liked and Loved’ and ‘What Went Wrong?’, ‘The World It Was’ echoing the titles of 18th-century novels. Judith Hawley in the Literary Review found the approach was ‘sometimes bitty’

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie

‘This is a portrait that is both fresh and compelling’ but she was broadly approving of Tomaselli’s argument that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman should be ‘de-throned’ in favour of lesser-known works. Her approach encouraged ‘readers to break down barriers, just as Wollstonecraft herself did’. Barbara Taylor in the Guardian admired Tomaselli for her dexterous moving between Wollstonecraft’s feelings and reasonings to produce ‘a portrait that is both fresh and compelling’. But she argued against the junking of the trailblazing feminist in favour of the bold Enlightenment philosopher, protesting that although the term feminist was anachronistic the oppression of women was Wollstonecraft’s ‘overriding concern’. Also she thought Tomaselli was misguided in her determination to reconcile the paradoxes in Wollstonecraft’s work, since this obscured the creative energy that Wollstonecraft brought to the issues she wrote about, ‘shifting tack as she learned more, thought harder. She was not an academic but a revolutionary: what did mere consistency mean to her?’ Ruth Scurr in the Spectator applauded Tomaselli’s ‘characteristic open-mindedness’ in her discussion of Wollstonecraft’s attempted suicide after being deserted by her lover Gilbert Imlay. ‘It was, one could say, out of character, or possibly not, depending on one’s stance on suicide.’ The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 15

Entertainment CARY GRANT

A BRILLIANT DISGUISE

SCOTT EYMAN Simon & Schuster, 576pp, £25

Calling it ‘the most entertaining and enlightening star biography in years’, Douglass K Daniel, in the Chicago Tribune, noted that Eyman ‘surrounds his deep dig into Grant’s personal life with fan-pleasing details of movie productions, vignettes of the wonderful characters who joined Grant in making movies, and a sense of the business side of Hollywood that too often eludes writers caught up in the magic and madness. The result is a captivating look at a captivating star.’

I WANNA BE YOURS JOHN COOPER CLARKE Picador, 480pp, £20 Cary Grant: suave and sophisticated

Born to working-class parents in Bristol, Archibald Leach effected one of the greatest transformations of the 20th century in becoming Cary Grant, the suave and sophisticated performer who remained at the pinnacle of Hollywood stardom for three decades until his retirement in 1966. He was ‘a hoax so sublime his creator struggled to escape him’, wrote Tanya Gold in her Spectator review. ‘He was a metaphor, too, for the transformative magic of cinema, for its lies; and for the artifice and social mobility of the 20th century itself.’ His mother, who had doted on him after losing another child, was committed to a mental asylum when he was a small boy. Years later, Grant took LSD under psychiatric supervision in order to open up about his psychic scars. Louis Bayard, who reviewed the book for the Washington Post, enjoyed the way Eyman ‘rightly homes in on his inner chiaroscuro, that never-resolving oscillation between dark and light – or, if you like, between Archie Leach and the man he became. Refracted through a camera lens, that struggle cohered into something like magic; in real life, it dissolved into its two combatants... Eyman, treading as carefully as a bomb-disposal team, declares, “There is plausible evidence to place him inside any sexual box you want – gay, bi, straight, or any combination that might be expected from a solitary street kid with a street kid’s sense of expedience.” Mealy-mouthed? Or just the resigned sigh of a biographer who can no more get a handle on his subject than his subject could?’

For Anthony Quinn in the Observer, this was ‘a wild ride of a memoir, told in a sardonic Salford drawl that’s always ready with a quip or a comeback’, while Fiona Sturges claimed in the Guardian that you’d ‘struggle to find a more entertaining account of Sixties and Seventies popular culture’. Patricia Clarke in the NME felt it didn’t just ‘fizz with wit’, it cemented Clarke’s ‘status as one of the most distinctive voices in pop cultural history’. ‘There are laughs on almost every page,’ agreed Neil McCormick in the Telegraph, making it easily the ‘most amusing autobiography of a literary aesthete you are ever likely to read’. This was a book of two halves, the first covering his early years in Salford and his teenage immersion in ‘Mad magazine, comic books, pulp fiction, clothes, music, adverts, hair styles, modern art, football and showbusiness’, wrote Quinn, adding that the level of detail made you wonder: is he going to tell us everything? The second half details

John Cooper Clarke: a national treasure

his ‘long descent into heroin addiction’ (McCormick), which devoured 15 years of his life, though even this he plays for laughs. Love saves him when he meets his future wife, and he is now, we learned, something of a national treasure, with his work on the GCSE syllabus and an appearance on Desert Island Discs. ‘His poems, performed in a nasal, hectoring monotone, remain fresh and urgent,’ wrote Joe Stretch in the TLS. ‘At 71 he remains hugely entertaining live,’ thought McCormick, and ‘with prose of this calibre’ he dearly hoped there might be more books to come.

THE DREAMER

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

CLIFF RICHARD Ebury, 416pp, £20

‘For some time now, the exclamation mark has been going out of fashion,’ noted Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday. ‘So it’s good to see Cliff Richard refusing to stint...You can measure out his life in exclamation marks. There are at least two or three on every page.’ Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times said the book ‘aims for a breezy account of the 80-year-old’s life, yet many of these pages feel gritted and clenched, the testimony of someone who... can’t quite shake a deep suspicion that he’s been hard done by’. ‘Cliff can be surprisingly prickly,’ agreed Brown. For example, ‘at every mention of the Beatles, he grows somewhat snarky, particularly at their success in America’. The televised 2014 police raid on Cliff’s home looms large in the book. ‘He was never arrested and investigations were dropped,’ said Segal. ‘Yet it is an interlude that clouds The Dreamer, real-world menace impinging on a carefully curated life… It’s a book studded with passive-aggressive “just kidding” exclamation marks... At times you almost check for Steve Coogan in the ghostwriting wings.’ But the Telegraph’s Neil McCormick thought it was ‘easy to make fun of Sir Cliff. [He] remains too rooted in a pre-rock mindset of family-friendly light entertainment to ever develop the artistic gravitas he seems to crave. He can come across as prickly and oversensitive – but, who wouldn’t, when subjected to so much sneery condescension?’ The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 17

Numbers THE OFFICIAL HISTORY OF BRITAIN OUR STORY IN NUMBERS AS TOLD BY THE OFFICE FOR NATIONAL STATISTICS

BORIS STARLING WITH DAVID BRADBURY HarperCollins, 304pp, £20

Here’s a book on the history of the UK told not through kings and queens and battles, but through the findings of two centuries of national censuses. ‘The charm of the whole enterprise,’ thought Simon Ings writing in the Telegraph, ‘is undeniable.’ First there’s the ‘gimcrack’ partnership of authors. ‘There is something irresistibly Dad’s Army about the image of David Bradbury, an old hand at the Office of National Statistics, comparing dad jokes with his co-writer, the novelist Boris Starling, creator of DCI Red Metcalfe in Messiah, as played on television by Ken Stott.’ Of course the census categories themselves tell part of the story. ‘Within these pages you will discover, among other titbits, the difference between critters and spraggers, whitsters and oliver men. Such were the occupations introduced into the Standard Classification of 1881. (Recent additions include “YouTuber” and “dog sitter”.)’ The data isn’t perfect, of course – ten-year snapshots, Ings notes, does not provide the ‘granularity’ available from other sources – but ‘Chapter by chapter, the authors lead us (wisely, if not too well) from Birth, through School, into Work and thence down the maw Death, reflecting all the while on what a difference 200 years have made to the character of each life stage.’ James McConnachie, in the Times, shared Ings’s enthusiasm for the book’s quirkiness. ‘At points – enjoyable points – the book could easily serve as a quizzers’ manual,’ he said. ‘Who was the first pedestrian to be killed by a car? Bridget Driscoll, in 1896, at an automobile demonstration at the Crystal Palace fair. Which is the second most 18 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021

common UK language after English? Polish. The authors even throw in a few quizmasters’ jokes: how do you approach a Welsh cheese? Caerphilly.’ He concluded, with a melancholy flourish: ‘The book also looks forward to the next national census… In a world of real-time big data, it may well be the last. And that, in itself, will be a noteworthy change.’

MATH WITHOUT NUMBERS MILO BECKMAN Allen Lane, 205pp, £20

Milo Beckman, a maths prodigy who went to Harvard at 15, offers a calculation-free guide ‘through the sort of fascinating mathematics we didn’t get taught at school’, according to Manjit Kumar in the Times. Beckman shows how many of our intuitions – what a shape might be, or what might be more than infinity – are either wrong, or under-considered: ‘mathematicians tend to overthink things that the rest of us take for granted’. And here he explains this thinking with imaginative and intuitive examples that won’t require the reader to reach for a calculator. ‘For instance, how many shapes are there? “Lots” simply won’t cut the mathematical mustard for Beckman [...] Starting with the simplest shape, a line, Beckman introduces the concept of mathematical proof as he elegantly proves, in less than half a page, that there is an infinite number of shapes using only words and a simple drawing.’ Likewise, Beckman explains the concept of infinity – or different infinities – by imagining a hotel with an infinite number of rooms along a corridor; and doesn’t forget to include ‘light relief from some mind-blowing maths’ by including ‘fun factoids such as six circles fit around any circle of the same size; that one cannot cross every bridge in Old Konigsberg without crossing a bridge twice.’ Ranging into the extreme abstraction of high-level algebra, Beckman shows us how ‘Some things are just provably unprovable’ – the

sort of result, says Kumar, that led even Einstein to marvel: ‘The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.’ Kirkus shared Kumar’s admiration for the project, saying that in this ‘pleasant, amusing look at mathematics’ Beckman maintains that ‘everything –“plants, love, music, everything” – can be understood in terms of math and proceeds to explain how mathematicians try.’

NUMBERS DON’T LIE

71 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE WORLD

VACLAV SMIL Viking, 366pp, £16.99

Vaclav Smil is one of Bill Gates’s favourite authors, and in this eclectic, stimulating collection of essays he applies a statistician’s brain and a debunking temperament to a wide range of received wisdoms. Which was the decade that saw the greatest leap in human progress? Richard Preston asked reviewing the book in the Times. The surprising answer is the 1880s: that decade gave us electricity generators, production motor cars, the ‘hydroelectric power station, the first electric street railway, Coca-Cola, the ballpoint pen, the electric lift, the steel-framed skyscraper, deodorants and the vending machine’. Even the so-called digital revolution just plays variations on old inventions: microprocessors and radio waves. Smil’s mission, said Preston, is to put all sorts of scientific and economic claims in their proper historical and international context. This ‘combative’, ‘scattergun’ collection ‘analyses innovation, globalisation, environmental questions and historical curiosities’ – and its most interesting running theme is that we’re lying to ourselves about how long it will take to ditch fossil fuels. ‘For all Smil’s devotion to the facts, his harrumphing can sound thoroughly subjective at times,’ Preston cautioned. ‘Nevertheless his fascination with numbers is infectious.’ And the BBC’s Science Focus thought it was a book for ‘anyone confused by statistics or dubious of data in a world where numbers seem to mean everything and nothing.’

Memoir PAUL BAILEY on the outstanding artistry of the writer Dorothy Gallagher I have been in love with Dorothy Gallagher’s writing since 2002, when I first read her unusual autobiography How I Came into My Inheritance and Other True Stories. The book, as its title suggests, is a collection of reminiscences set down in story form, which means it is free from the usual constraints of the conventional memoir. Gallagher’s true stories reflect, and respect, the messiness of everyday life, its inconsequentiality. They are set, mostly, in New York City, where she was born and raised. Her parents, Bella and Isidore, were Jewish immigrants from European countries in which pogroms and poverty had become distressingly commonplace. Isidore fled from Lomazy, a ‘dismal small town’ in Russian-occupied Poland, by stowing away on a ship bound for America. He was caught whilst still at sea. Gallagher’s grandfather was persuaded to cover the cost of his son’s passage and Isidore repaid the money to him in a registered envelope postmarked Galveston, Texas, and dated some time in 1914. In Galveston, which was ‘hot as hell’, Isidore found a job driving a horse and a wagon filled with bananas which he sold to farmers in outlying farms. He was on the road for weeks on end, sleeping in the wagon and eating little else but bananas. He left Texas and travelled across the States in search of employment before settling in the Bronx. He met his Ukrainian bride on American soil. They married in 1920. Bella is a radiant presence in all three of her daughter’s memoirs. (The second, which contains appropriate photographs, is called Strangers in the House. It came out in 2006.) While Isidore was busy earning a living in the building trade, Bella kept house and attended evening classes. The couple were united in their admiration of the Soviet Union under both Lenin and Stalin, but hesitant about describing themselves as Communists – one of the dirtiest words in America back then as it is right now. They preferred the term ‘progressives’. They remained so, even after Bella’s sister Rachile and her husband Victor had returned from the Ukraine in 1933, completely

disillusioned by what they had witnessed there. The newly-weds had visited that earthly paradise only two years earlier and had decided to make it their home. But it was in those intervening months that Stalin began the first of his many purges. The ‘progressives’ listened to the voluble Rachile as she warned them of the horrors to come but paid no heed to her. She was hysterical by nature.

These three exceptional books are often shockingly, hilariously funny And now, 14 years on, comes Stories I Forgot to Tell You, which reads almost like a coda to its predecessors. It isn’t as lively or eventful as them, but there is a reason for this. Gallagher’s third and final husband, Ben Sonnenberg, with whom she lived for 30 years, died in 2010. When they first contemplated marrying, he told her that he has been diagnosed as having a mild form of multiple sclerosis. The disease didn’t stay that way. She charts its awful progress in Strangers in the House and the stoicism with which Ben endured it. There are, as always in her work, scenes of grisly humour. In 1991,

when the illness was beginning to assume total control of Ben’s body, the Sonnenbergs hired the services of a woman Gallagher refers to only as B. For three years, B seemed to be the perfect secretary-cum-carer, until Dorothy noticed that Ben’s bank account was dwindling steadily. Cash disappeared from his wallet. Ben, who had grown fond of B to the extent of helping her with a documentary film project, retained his faith in her. When B was eventually caught out, as late as 1999, it was discovered that she had robbed her now desperately sick and trusting employer of $40,000 above her agreed salary. The wonderful thing about these three exceptional books is that they are often shockingly, hilariously funny, as befits a woman who takes her unlovely second husband’s Irish surname as her nom-de-plume. Thanks to her mother, she has immersed herself in the great works of Russian and European fiction, so that it isn’t surprising that her portraits of aunts, uncles and cousins recall Gogol or Chekhov or, in the case of the aged Isidore, the Dickens who created Grandfather Smallweed in Bleak House. The fact that these vivid characters are presented in an anecdotal fashion is testament to the seriousness of her artistry. The reader smiles, or laughs, and then begins to wonder why they are so amused. Stories I Forgot to Tell You tells of the life she has led since Ben Sonnenberg’s death. She finishes writing a biography of Lillian Hellman and moves to a small apartment. Then, one day, she is sitting in front of the computer and, on the instant, begins writing a story for the husband who was the great love of her complicated life. One story leads to another. Some are about the past while others, most poignantly, are set in the present – about the pigeons mating on her balcony, for instance. She deals with the pain of bereavement with a bracing lack of sentimentality. Dorothy Gallagher, whose exiled family suffered untold but unforgotten misery, could never pen a misery memoir. I think I can hear her cackling at the very idea of it. Stories I Forgot to Tell You by Dorothy Gallagher (NYRB, £13.99) The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 19

Miscellaneous A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN GEORGE SAUNDERS Bloomsbury, 432pp, £16.99

George Saunders is an American novelist and short story writer who won the Booker in 2017 with Lincoln in the Bardo. He has followed this with a teacherly discussion of seven Russian short stories published more than a century ago, which appear alongside his essays about how they are made. Richard Godwin in the Times pointed out that it is ‘a quirk of the literary economy that even highly acclaimed, award-winning writers earn more stable incomes teaching others how to write than they do from writing themselves’.

‘I sometimes joke that we’re reading back to see what we can steal’ These essays are adapted from a course in Russian short fiction which Saunders has been giving for 20 years to students of creative writing at Syracuse University. ‘I sometimes joke (and yet not) that we’re reading back to see what we can steal,’ Saunders writes, before laying down a few rules. ‘Always be escalating,’ is one, illustrated by a line-by-line reading of Chekhov’s In the Cart. The stories under discussion include two by Tolstoy, one each by Turgenev and Gogol as well as more Chekhov. In the Guardian Tessa Hadley, also a teacher as well as a writer, pointed out that the essays ‘aren’t anything like academic analysis. The questions that get asked in a reading-for-writers class are inflected differently from literary criticism – “Why did the writer do this?” rather than “How must we read this?”’ She praises the book as heralding the opposite of the death of the author: Saunders ‘tracks the author’s intentions – and missed intentions, and intuitions, and instinctive recoil from what’s banal or obvious – so closely and intimately, at every step, through every sentence.’ Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman particularly admired Saunders on the reality of editing. ‘This is wise counsel, dealing with the huge number of tiny corrections that add 20 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021

up to replacing almost everything. If you are planning finally to write your novel over lockdown, this isn’t a bad place to start. At least you’ll read seven works of genius.’

THE BISCUIT

THE HISTORY OF A VERY BRITISH INDULGENCE

LIZZIE COLLINGHAM Bodley Head, 320pp, £18.99

In the Guardian, Lizzie Collingham listed some little-known biscuit facts. These included that the fig roll was invented by medieval Muslims who first sweetened twice-baked bread with sugar and figs, and that 17thcentury gingerbread men were effigies of Guy Fawkes. In the Sunday Times, Lucy Knight’s review of Collingham’s book was amusingly headlined ‘Jam packed study of a national institution that begun 3000 years ago’ – but the book is a serious study of the origins of an elevenses staple. ‘The Biscuit offers plenty of fascinating nuggets,’ wrote Knight. ‘The term “Scousers”, for example,

comes from “scouse”, a biscuit-based soup commonly eaten by Liverpudlian dockers, while “slush fund” originally referred to the extra cash ships’ cooks made by selling the fat, or “slush”, produced when making said scouse.’ Knight thought the book was ‘food history through an extremely narrow lens, perhaps offering more information about biscuits than many people would care to have’. In the Spectator, however, Prue Leith was gripped: ‘What you get is well-researched, detailed information, but written as a clear and interesting story. I hate to think of how much truly boring information about the biscuit she must have ploughed through to hone it down to a fascinating tale of myth, medicine, economics, and survival of armies and navies.’

It turns out, noted Leith, that dunking, for example, was once the height of fashion. ‘It seems to stem from the business of soaking hard biscuit to make it palatable. One of the earliest sweet biscuits was the lady’s finger. It is the perfect shape for dunking into the small glasses of the time. So are the Italian biscotti and the French langue du chat. Dunking may be considered a working-class delight today but dipping your “sippet” into your cordial or tea was once an elegant way to behave.’

DIRT

ADVENTURES IN FRENCH COOKING

BILL BUFORD Jonathan Cape, 413pp, £18.99

Reviewers of Bill Buford’s account of five years living and cooking in Lyons clearly found the author’s excessive prose style infectious. Salivating imagery proliferated. According to Rachel Cooke in the Observer: ‘The things that I like about this book – sometimes, I love them almost as much as I love a fat, chewy slice of saucisson sec – are also the things that make it flawed.’ Cook adored Buford’s enthusiasm but wondered ‘could he not, sometimes, rein himself in just a little?’ In the Guardian, Jonathan Meades, whose style never tends to the pared-back, was not entirely convinced by Buford’s ‘artfully artless chronicle’ with its stories of ‘kitchen sociopaths’. What happened, he reflected, to the ‘sassy’ publisher of Granta and the New Yorker? ‘A patsy, a chaotic, gaffe-prone nearloser who just about muddles through: that is how he casts himself and it’s the role he elects to perform much of the time.’ Roger Lewis in the Times was pleased to find that Buford shared his own ‘Francophobia’. ‘He finds Lyons “slightly putrid”, generally “damp and decaying”, and the centre of town is given over to porn stores, drug dealers, benches with drunks, “graffiti on most surfaces, dog shit everywhere”.’ In the Telegraph, Orlando Bird noted that ‘a notoriously exacting editor, Buford can be surprisingly lenient with his own prose (“Parpillon was a robust thirtysomething, with dark hair… a goatee,

Miscellaneous closely cropped hair”)’. Bird was among several reviewers to wonder how Buford funded the experience. Not surely from working as an apprentice to a baker and as a junior chef in the legendary La Mère Brazier. As Dwight Garner put it in the New York Times, the lack of ‘even vague disclosure’ leaves an ‘odd crater’ in a ‘profound and intuitive work of immersive journalism’.

pronounced Gray’s offering ‘magnificent’ and particularly relished his advice that humans should learn from cats that ‘it is better to be indifferent to others than to feel you have to love them. “Few ideals”, suggests Gray, sounding like a particularly grumpy tortoiseshell who has been kept waiting for his Felix, “have been more harmful than that of universal love.”’

DOG’S BEST FRIEND

BEING BETJEMAN(N)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF AN UNBREAKABLE BOND

JONATHAN SMITH

SIMON GARFIELD

Galileo, 224pp, £9.99

Jonathan Smith is a playwright and novelist who in the course of his work has imagined being Albert Speer, Winston Churchill, Auguste Rodin and Alfred Munnings among others. But being Betjeman was ‘a much deeper thing than merely taking him off or ventriloquising’. When he first wrote a piece in the poet’s voice he felt he was, ‘in quite a disturbing way, inhabiting his skin’. He had a breakdown while being Betjeman, and then he developed Parkinson’s, the disease of Betjeman’s old age. Smith proceeded to write Mr Betjeman’s Class and Mr Betjeman Regrets, two much-admired radio plays. Benjamin Whitrow played the older Betjeman shortly before his death, when Robert Bathurst took over the role. Now Smith has written a beguiling hybrid of a book, which mixes dramatised scenes from Betjeman’s life – rows, mainly, with his father, his wife and his son – with discussions of poems, some thirdperson narrative about Betjeman and some first person passages about Smith’s admiration for the poet, for which he was much mocked at Cambridge in the 1960s. Nigel Andrews in the Literary Review praised Smith for bringing alive both the light and the dark in the poet’s make-up, and for recognising that he ‘took a kind of pleasure, even pride, in his transgressions and shortcomings’. It was a book ‘every Betjeman lover – and, come to that, every Betjeman mocker – should read’. Benjamin Riley in the New Criterion described it as ‘a diverting, and highly personal, account’ while John Sandoe’s, the booksellers, liked it so much that they have produced a limited hardback edition.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 310pp, £16.99

FELINE PHILOSOPHY

CATS AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

JOHN GRAY Allen Lane, 121pp, £20

Feline Philosophy is an elegant treatise from a distinguished contrarian which argues that cats have no awareness of their own mortality and are therefore free to be themselves in a world of material pleasure. If something doesn’t suit them, they don’t stick around. Humans, by contrast, are miserable because of our compulsion to find meaning in something larger than ourselves as we try to distract ourselves from the fear of extinction. Gray proceeds by way of Stoics and Epicureans, vignettes of individual philosophers – Schopenhauer, Montaigne, Pascal, Descartes, the last named threw a cat out of a window in a spirit of philosophical inquiry – and anecdotes about cats in history and literature. Colette and Patricia Highsmith both feature. Critics were agreed in enjoying the wit and style of Gray’s essay, although Jane O’Grady in the Telegraph didn’t buy his argument that because cats don’t empathise they could not count as cruel – ‘why assume that cats don’t relish mice’s suffering?’ Sam Leith in Unherd regretted that the author ‘doesn’t develop what seems to me an interesting point — which is that the adult cat’s meow is an inter-species communication. They don’t meow at each other: only at us.’ Kathryn Hughes in the Literary Review

Simon Garfield’s devotion to an elderly epileptic black retriever called Ludo shines through this breezy exploration of the bond between man and dog which has existed for 10,000 years. Dog’s Best Friend despatches several canine myths. We learn, for instance, that barking is not talking, but the recourse of dogs in situations which reward barking. Change the circumstances and the dog shuts up. Also that the expression we call hangdog is a response to owner cues – uncruel experiments have ascertained that dogs which don’t eat the forbidden treat have the same guilty look as those which do. The author is also generous with startling facts: who knew that in 1939, in the first four days of the war, an estimated 400,000 — possibly up to 750,000 — domestic dogs and cats were put down by their owners on government advice that animals could not be taken to air raid shelters? Melanie Reid in the Times mentioned her uncle’s dog, name of Lunatic, before honing in on Garfield’s research into changing fashions in dog-naming. Fido and Spot are toast – these days dogs are more likely to have the same sort of names as we give our children. Helen Brown in the Telegraph praised the book as ‘charming and erudite’ as well as ‘slightly shambolic’. Jackie Annesley in the Sunday Times thought that Garfield ‘is clearly aware that his latest book is something of a dog’s dinner’. Melanie Reid suspected the author of ‘pulling his punches, understandably, at those who are both his target and his readers. Unforgivably, he even spares those who call their dogs “fur babies”.’ The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 21

Art that, perhaps aware of the pitfalls of factual overkill, ‘rather engagingly reveals that she was advised to “lighten up” in her approach; but if all this detail sometimes threatens to swamp the narrative line, it establishes an air of authority ultimately impossible to resist.’

THE BRUTISH MUSEUMS GOYA

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

JANIS TOMLINSON Princeton University Press, 448pp, £30

‘My work is very simple,’ claimed Francisco Goya, ‘my art reveals idealism and truth.’ As Michael Prodger observed in the Sunday Times, it’s ‘a shifty statement, given there is very little that is simple about his pictures’. Janis Tomlinson is a world authority on the life and work of Goya – and her biography was hailed by reviewers for its meticulous research into his life, the social and historical context from which the artist’s extraordinary work emerges. According to Robin Simon in the Literary Review, Goya was ‘a mass of contradictions. He was a liberal, initially sympathetic to the French Revolution, who liked nothing better than to go hunting with successive absolutist monarchs of Spain. He was deputy director of the Royal Academy in Madrid, yet believed that traditional academic training was useless, insisting that “there are no rules in Painting”.’ He was also, wrote Simon, ‘by disposition anticlerical, though he happily executed countless religious images designed to satisfy Spanish Catholic worshippers’. Tomlinson’s attempts to pin down Goya’s paradoxes drew comparisons with Robert Hughes’s vividly personal 2003 biography and although she ‘prefers to let the facts speak for themselves’, Maxwell Carter in the Wall Street Journal thought ‘one sometimes feels it isn’t enough’. Tomlinson is ‘an expert, even-handed guide and there is no question we are in the surest hands. For style and charm, however, one longs for Hughes on Fernando VII (“that tyrannous weasel”), and on Anton Raphael Mengs (“one of the supreme bores of European civilisation”)’ And Honor Clerk in the Spectator noted 22 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021

THE BENIN BRONZES, COLONIAL VIOLENCE AND CULTURAL RESTITUTION

DAN HICKS Pluto Press, 298pp, £20

Dan Hicks makes a powerful argument for the repatriation of beautiful bronze and ivory artefacts stolen from the Nigerian kingdom of Benin by the Royal Navy in 1897. Hicks has first-hand experience of many Benin bronzes because he is a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, which has 150 of them. In 1938, two coral crowns were returned to the Oba (king) of Benin but tens of thousands are still languishing in museum storage or unknown private collections. Hicks told the Art Newspaper: ‘I wanted to interrogate the stories we tell ourselves, and those we don’t tell ourselves, about Britain’s role in the so-called Scramble for Africa.’ The Guardian’s Charlotte Lydia Riley praised a ‘beautifully written, carefully argued book’, pointing out that ‘museums are battlegrounds’ and the debate over repatriation urgently overdue in the age of calls to decolonise public culture. The argument that non-European museums haven’t the resources to care for their own treasures is overturned by Hicks who notes that, in Benin, artworks have been carefully looked after for decades. Shockingly, only 1 per cent of the African objects in UK museums are on display.

16th century figure of a horn-blower, bought by Pitt-Rivers Museum in 1899, and now in the Metropolitan Museum

On the Al Jazeera website, Aditya Iyer observed that the Oba’s treasures represent a ‘royal, sacred landscape’ desecrated by invaders. And Richard Morrison in the Times welcomed news that an Edo museum is to be built in Benin, designed by the British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye. It intends to house the world’s largest collection of Benin bronzes, retrieved, it is hoped, from all over the world.

THE DEATH OF FRANCIS BACON MAX PORTER Faber, 80pp, £6.99

Max Porter, acclaimed novelist, has captured the final days of the 82-year-old artist Francis Bacon, dying in Madrid in 1992. Porter described the book as an ‘attempt to write as painting, not about it’, and in the Spectator, Laura Freeman loved it. ‘He dares to experiment and that means both the flare of mercury and the burnt crucible. Some sections enthral, others alienate. Like its subject, it is tricky, wicked and wonderfully weird.’ Reviewers struggled to categorise a work defying categorisation. The Scotsman’s Stuart Kelly was enthralled. ‘It’s not a novel, although it has an arc, a clearly defined central character, development and revelation. It is also situated in a specific and true time and space – covering the last days of Bacon’s life in the hospital of the Handmaids of Maria in Madrid, tended to by one Sister Mercedes, which is irony enough given his pitiless and determinedly horrible versions of the crucifixion.’ In the Guardian Tim Adams found it ‘written in an allusive and sometimes vividly poetic shorthand, it tries to capture in language some of the texture of Bacon’s tormented canvases, as well as the chaos of his love life’. Johanna Thomas-Corr in the New Statesman and Adams both however advised research before jumping in. ‘It sometimes forgets,’ wrote Adams, ‘that there might be a reader listening in.’ And Thomas-Corr wondered about the baffling cast of characters: ‘for a book like this to have a visceral punch, it needs to be self-reliant, not crying out for its own exhibition notes’.

Forgotten authors WILLIAM COOK considers whether Covid could prompt a revival of interest in the work of science-fiction writer John Wyndham John Wyndham defined his sophisticated brand of science fiction as ‘I wonder what might happen if…?’ I wonder what he would have made of Covid? The outbreak of the pandemic certainly had much in common with his apocalyptic novels – especially early on, when no one had a clue what was happening. When I was a schoolboy, in the 1970s, Wyndham was the only author we studied whom I also read for pleasure – yet few people seem to read him nowadays. I wonder why? The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos still raise a flicker of recognition (though it’s increasingly rare to meet anyone who’s actually read them) but his other novels are more or less forgotten. Yet when I was struck down by Covid (on the mend now, thank goodness) he provided the perfect escape, into a netherworld more awful, yet more interesting, than our own. Who knows? Maybe the virus will prompt a revival for this erudite and thoughtful author, who deserves to stand alongside Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury as one of the finest science-fiction writers of the postwar era. John Wyndham Parkes Lucan Beynon Harris was born in Warwickshire in 1903, the son of a philanderous barrister. His parents split up when he was eight, following a prominent and embarrassing divorce case. Thereafter he lived with his mother in a succession of spa hotels, and attended a succession of boarding schools, most notably Blundell’s and Bedales. After trying his hand at a variety of jobs, including farming, commercial art and advertising, he turned to writing short stories for American sci-fi magazines, under various pen names. During the war he served in the Royal Corps of Signals, landing in Normandy soon after D-Day. He finally published his first novel in 1951. Wyndham was already in his late forties when The Day of the Triffids was published, pretty ancient for a first-time novelist, but his long apprenticeship as a pulp-fiction writer stood him in good stead. A dystopian fantasy with a fascinating and terrifying theme (a spectacular comet shower blinds all but a handful of

people, who must subsequently fight for survival against a mutant strain of carnivorous plants), it became a bestseller, spawning a succession of broadcast adaptations. At last, after 25 years as a jobbing hack, Wyndham had arrived.

Wyndham’s ‘The Lost Machine’ featured in the 1932 issue of Amazing Stories

His second novel, The Kraken Wakes (about a global battle against strange sea creatures), was also well received, but it’s his third novel, The Chrysalids, which was his masterpiece. Unlike most of his stories, which concern alien intrusions into the modern world, The Chrysalids is about a world which has regressed to the Dark Ages. This primitive society is plagued by hideous mutations, culled by ruthless witch hunts. Gradually you realise we’re living in the distant future, in the aftermath of a nuclear war that

has eradicated virtually all of mankind, and virtually all knowledge of human history. His fourth book, The Midwich Cuckoos, was almost as good – a spooky tale about a brood of children with supernatural powers – but after that the quality (and quantity) of his work deteriorated dramatically. Trouble with Lichen (about a cure for aging), Chocky (about a boy with an imaginary friend who turns out to be an alien) and Web (about a mysterious island, inhabited by a deadly breed of spiders) all start strongly, but soon run out of steam. Having written four novels in six years, it took him 12 years to write the next four, and none of them bears comparison with the four that came before. By the time he died, of a heart attack, aged 65, it appears the well had already run dry. Wyndham was a reserved and rather private man – perfectly friendly, but difficult to get to know. For most of his adult life he lived in the Penn Club in London, in adjoining rooms with his lifelong love, Grace Wilson, an English teacher. When she retired they married and moved to Hampshire, close to Bedales, where Wyndham had been so happy. They had no children. Most of Wyndham’s heroes seem rather like their author – confident and affable, but with little indication of any hinterland. Ironically, the one time his characters really come to life is in The Chrysalids, which is told through the eyes of a child. ‘The best definition of the sciencefiction story that I know,’ wrote Wyndham, quoting the writer Edmund Crispin, ‘is one which presupposes a technology, or an effect of technology, or a disturbance in the natural order, such as humanity, up to the time of writing, has not in actual fact experienced.’ All of Wyndham’s novels obey this dictum, but The Chrysalids is more than that. It’s about how it feels to be a child, stranded in an adult world, and it brings to mind that eight-year-old boy, caught in a court battle between his warring parents. Most of Wyndham’s writing is curiously impersonal, but in The Chrysalids, his one work of genius, I have a feeling he was writing about himself. The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 23

Fiction

An examination of the issues of race

JACK MARILYNNE ROBINSON Virago, 320pp, £18.99

Jack completes Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead quartet, written over four decades. She is widely described as American literature’s spiritual leader. Her novels examine thorny issues of race, miscegenation, religion, sin, and move towards defining what it is to be human. Herself a Calvinist, Robinson’s great themes have always been Providence, Pre-destination and the hard task of choice. This is a love story, told through the eyes of the titular Jack. He is the much loved and much grieved-over, prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister. A drunkard, a petty thief and jail-bird, his profound love for Della Miles, a school teacher and the daughter of a Black Methodist minister, becomes Robinson’s strong argument for Jack’s redemption. Set in St Louis just after the second world war, their fraught but beautiful love story slowly entangles within the impossible constraints of segregation. Sarah Perry wrote in the Guardian that, ‘it is difficult to imagine any other contemporary writer who could achieve so improbable a conflation of doctrine and feeling’. But Dwight Garner struggled with this quartet. In the New York Times he described the experience as ‘largely to enter a remote, airless, life-denying, vaguely pretentious and mostly humorless

It is an immensely satisfying and bittersweet end to an astonishing series

universe, where it is always Sunday morning and never Saturday night’. Paul Gleason in National Book Review wouldn’t agree: ‘few read Marilynne Robinson’s novels for plot or social commentary. She belongs to the American tradition of visionary Protestantism.’ All took away with them Robinson’s aphorism that, in a world steeped in sin, when the Lord shows you a little grace he won’t mind if you enjoy it. Stuart Kelly, in the Scotsman, is a fan: ‘It is an immensely satisfying and bittersweet end to an astonishing series.’ What Robinson does is ‘something quite miraculous’. He admired her style of writing: ‘The tone is pitch perfect’ and is ‘gloriously formal and braided with Biblical and literary allusions’. Kelly saw in the story the contemporary and overwhelming truth that ‘Black lives mattered before Black Lives Matter.’

MOTHER FOR DINNER SHALOM AUSLANDER Picador, 272pp, £16.99

Richard Godwin in the Times reflected that all Shalom Auslander’s books end up being about mothers. Mother for Dinner is the third that features a ‘narcissistic, death-fixated, fanatically religious matriarch who makes her children’s lives hell’. Auslander, reflected Godwin, ‘is like Monet, painting the same haystacks over and over again. He does one thing, but boy does he do it well.’ In Mother for Dinner, Seventh Selzer, a publisher’s reader in New York, is, wrote Sam Leith in the Guardian, ‘weary of the cynically pious turn in his industry towards foregrounding marginal voices’. For Seventh ‘has a hyphenated-identity of his own: he’s Can-Am, or Cannibal American’. And now he must visit the deathbed of his monstrous mother Mudd who is fattening herself up for the funerary Can-Am ritual to which her children must submit: eating her. Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman was rapturous: ‘a timely reminder that literature can still be daring, provocative and controversial, and I read it while gagging with both laughter and nausea.’ And Leith spotted a prevailing Auslander theme – ‘the intolerable weight of history, of its deadening solemnity, and the individual’s rage to throw it off’. He concluded: ‘His resolution is of such

This is a timely reminder that literature can still be daring, provocative and controversial life-affirming sweetness that you could almost call it sentimental.’ As Kelly put it: ‘This is a work of genius. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but the faint-hearted most of all should have to read it.’

MR CADMUS PETER ACKROYD Canongate, 192pp, £12

Peter Ackroyd’s most recent novel, beautifully produced in a small format, conceals a twisted, gothic tale of eccentric cousins, a distrustful vicar, an overbearing GP, and a few surviving soldiers who had served together in the same regiment in Italy in the second world war. It is set in the fictional village of Little Camborne, a bucolic portrait of an English village, into which enter a foreigner, Mr Cadmus, and his show-stealing parrot. Like a cat among pigeons the exotic new arrival sets off a series of events which bring the main characters ineluctably to their fate. ‘But what starts as a witty, satirical tale littered with dry humour and well-placed clues turns from the absurd to the obscure by the end,’ said Aisling McGuire in Scotland’s Wee Review. ‘It is like reading two entirely different stories – one well-written and enticingly clever … and one written at random and with little time to take the story to a logical conclusion.’ Its ‘illogical, bewildering

A gothic tale with a distrustful vicar The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 25

Fiction ending’ proved problematic for most critics. Houman Barekat commented on the story’s denouement. Writing in the Times, he called this novel a ‘playful black comedy’ and its ‘affectionate send-up of parochial English primness makes for agreeable light reading’, but the ‘outlandish turn’ towards the ending, displayed a ‘somewhat abrupt key change — from comic noir to gaudy mysticism’, spoiling an otherwise ‘well-crafted tale’. Nicholas Clee, writing in the TLS agreed. He called this piece a ‘dark jeu d’esprit’, but which he suspected was the ‘product of hasty construction’. Andrew Hill in the FT was conflicted too. ‘Mr Cadmus starts, promisingly’ and Ackroyd’s ‘depiction of the small-minded bitchiness of the villagers occasionally hits the mark’, but ‘fiction at this length — more novella than novel — calls for spring-tight plotting. Instead, Mr Cadmus gradually comes completely unwound.’

FAKE ACCOUNTS LAUREN OYLER 4th Estate, 267pp, £12.99

Lauren Oyler is an American critic best-known in this country for being rude about the novels of literary darling Sally Rooney. Reviewing Fake Accounts in the New York Times, Kevin Powers paid tribute to Oyler’s ‘perceptiveness and bracing disregard for the niceties of literary politicking’. So how does Oyler’s first novel stand up to critical scrutiny? Set in 2016, in early-Trump times, the narrator, spying on her boyfriend’s phone, finds he has a secret life as an online conspiracy theorist. Following his sudden death she decides to create a range of new online identities to try out on dating websites. Powers wrote: ‘It’s a brilliant comic novel about the ways in which the internet muddles all of our interior rivers while at the same time polluting the seas of the outer world, and about

A ‘wryly funny satire on the banal sociopathy of online life’ 26 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021

how these processes might be one and the same thing.’ In the Sunday Times, Houman Barekat enjoyed ‘a sharply observed and wryly funny satire on the banal sociopathy of online life’. Only James Marriott of the Times was unconvinced. ‘Oyler’s true subject is not internet conspiracy, but our cultural preoccupation with “authenticity”, especially the fashionable kind of literary authenticity that is prone to loading mundane reality with massive subjective emotional burdens.’ The kind in fact to be found in the novels of Sally Rooney – which Marriott concluded may, in the end, be braver.

TEN DAYS AUSTIN DUFFY Granta, 272pp, £12.99

As well as writing books, Irish novelist Austin Duffy is an oncologist in a Dublin hospital. To mark the publication of his second novel, he told the Irish Independent that he snatched 20 minutes of writing time during his daily commute on the Dart. It was a rare interview for, as Andrew Holgate in the Times noted: ‘Duffy is the sort of novelist it is easy to miss … he doesn’t fit publishing’s present preoccupations. He has no author website and seems to give no interviews.’ Duffy’s first novel, This Living and Mortal Thing, was about a cancer doctor who retreats from the frontline to a research lab. Ten Days is, explained Holgate, ‘a sad bittersweet tale’, about Wolf, a middle-aged man whose estranged wife Miriam has recently died. With his daughter Ruth, with whom he has a strained relationship, he travels from London to New York to carry out one of Miriam’s final wishes: that her ashes be scattered on the Hudson River. Holgate loved it: ‘the moral propulsion behind this sad, bittersweet tale, and its sheer cleverness, had me reading into the early hours.’ This is ‘a quietly wonderful novel, full of resonance yet unforgiving in its gaze’. Sinead Crowley on the RTE website was also moved: ‘This is neither an easy nor a comforting read but it is thoughtful, gentle and beautifully crafted.’

THE SILENCE DON DELILLO Picador, 126pp £14.99

At 117 pages, DeLillo’s 18th novel is more a short story. Many of his earlier themes recur, said Anne Enright in the Guardian, ‘in a pared-down form, illuminating the previous work with an intense, narrow beam’. This is an apocalyptic tale, with, as its central thesis, Albert Einstein’s chilling assertion that ‘I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’ It is 2022 and five people gather in a New York apartment to watch the Superbowl when all digital connections are suddenly wiped out. So, wrote James Purdon in the Literary Review, ‘they settle down to a night of desultory existential conversation’, with one providing a philosophising moral commentary. ‘It’s as if DeLillo has decided to bring Samuel Beckett into the Facebook age,’ wrote Alex Preston in the Guardian, while Enright agreed that ‘Nobody speaks the way the characters in this novel do — nor are we asked to believe they would.’ Joshua Cohen in the New York Times considered that, ‘About to turn 84 years old, DeLillo wants to clarify a universal calamity: mortality. Deprived of technology, humans resign themselves to death, the end of the world, the end of time.’ ‘The story ends with no resolution,’ wrote Preston, and it was this, thought Purdon, that made it a short story rather than a novel, given that genre’s propensity to be ‘more tolerant of anticlimax’. ‘DeLillo mostly held me rapt,’ wrote Dwight Garner in the New York Times, though he considered it a ‘minor frictionless’ work. ‘In terms of his career, it is not waterfall but spray. Posterity will be kind to him, but it will take relatively little note of this production.’ Maybe small is not so beautiful, after all.

THE LIVING SEA OF WAKING DREAMS RICHARD FLANAGAN Chatto & Windus, £16.99 pp282

Richard Flanagan’s latest got a rave review from Beejay Silcox in the Guardian: ‘It combines the moral

Fiction righteousness of a fable, the wounded grief of a eulogy, and the fury of someone who still reads the news.’ The Telegraph’s Sam Leith more or less agreed: ‘It’s a threnody to a world in which our connections to nature, beauty and the human values of a less mediated past are being steadily chewed up by the march of monetised technology.’ Other reviewers proceeded with caution. The main plot concerns a family at the deathbed of their mother against the background of ecological destruction. Allan Massie

Novel for our troubled times: an impending environmental disaster

in the Scotsman thought it ‘certainly ambitious, powerful in its descriptions of drought, bush fires, impending environmental disaster; to this extent certainly a novel for our troubled times.’ Jon Day in the Financial Times had doubts. ‘There are really two novels here. The first is a carefully observed account of an everyday family tragedy. Siblings Anna, Tommy and Terzo are waiting for their mother Francie to die. Anna is an architect, Tommy a failed artist turned fisherman, Terzo an investment banker. Another brother, Ronnie, killed himself when he was a teenager, and his death haunts the family.’ The magic-realist sub-plot involving bits dropping off a woman’s body came in for some criticism. Massie thought it ‘irritating and silly’ and in the Spectator, Amanda Craig agreed. ‘When Anna finally realises that “they had not been expelled from Eden ... they had expelled Eden from themselves”, even the most sympathetic reader may find themselves thinking: I couldn’t care less.’

Children’s books Fiction EMILY BEARN on books for all ages The pandemic has been a difficult subject for picture books to tackle. But One Hundred Steps, in which the late Captain Sir Tom Moore recalls his extraordinary journey around his Bedfordshire garden (Puffin, 32pp, £12.99), is a title from which every child should glean some valuable lessons. ‘When a dangerous disease swept around the world, Tom knew that he had to do something,’ Captain Tom writes simply – reminding us that ‘one step has the power to inspire one hundred more!’ And in a book likely to strike a chord with every grandparent, The Forgettery by Rachel Ip (Egmont, 32pp, £6.99) tells the story of how Amelia and her forgetful granny learn about the transformative power of memories. (‘Amelia’s Granny was forgetful. Sometimes she forgot little things. Like where she’d put the marmalade … Sometimes she forgot important things.’) In contrast No! Said Rabbit by Marjoke Henrichs (Scallywag Press, 32pp, £12.99) is the anarchic tale of a rabbit who does not like being told what to do. ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ cries Rabbit, until finally his mother makes him an offer he can’t refuse. And Jon Agee’s beloved The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau (Scallywag, 40pp, £12.99) is back in print, telling the story of an artist who stuns the art world when his portrait of a duck starts quacking. ‘They called him a genius. It was the first time in history a painting had quacked.’ But Clousseau finds that artistic fame can quickly turn sour. The subjects of poverty and social injustice have become increasingly prevalent in picture books, and The Invisible by Tom Percival (Simon & Schuster, 32pp, £6.99) is a winning example. Telling the story of a child whose family loses its home, Percival’s gentle narrative and lyrical illustrations enable him to broach challenging themes. ‘It was very beautiful, and Isabel always noticed beautiful things. But there was no escaping the fact that it was also cold. Very cold.’ The pandemic has also seen an increased

From ‘The Invisible’, above, and ‘No! Said Rabbit’, below

focus on mental health, with a flood of titles such as Happy Confident Me and Letting Go! jostling for shelf space. For those preferring a narrative approach, The Elephant – a first novel by the picture book author Peter Carnavas (Pushkin, 176pp, £6.99) – explores themes of grief and depression through the touching story of a grey elephant which brings sadness in its wake. (‘When Olive walked into the kitchen, she found an elephant sitting beside her father … They both wore the same weary expression.’) For fantasy lovers, Harklights (Usborne, 304pp, £7.99) is an enchanting debut novel by Tim Tilley, which follows the plight of an orphaned boy living in a match factory, whose adventures begin when a bird drops a magical acorn at his feet. And Can You Whistle Johanna by the late Swedish author Ulf Stark (Gecko, 92pp, £7.99) is the much loved story of a boy called Berra, who wonders why he does not have a grandfather – and sets out to find one. With stunning illustrations by Anna Hoglund, this 20thanniversary edition underlines the book’s enduring appeal. And finally it would not be spring without a slew of titles about saving the planet. Where better to start than with When We Went Wild (Ivy Kids, 32pp, £7.99) by Isabella Tree, author of the bestselling Wilding. Here she tells the story of two farmers who slowly persuade their sceptical neighbours as to the virtues of letting nature run amok: ‘“What were we thinking of?” they said. “Let’s all go wild!”’ The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021 27

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Paperbacks ‘It is one of the clichés of parenthood that the behaviour which comes most easily (a reproving tone of voice, say, or an attitude to your child’s tears) reflects what your parents did with you,’ began the Guardian’s Aida Edemariam in her review of Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That you Did) – Penguin Life, 272pp, £9.99. ‘This is the book Perry [a psychotherapist and wife of the artist Grayson] wishes she could have read and she hopes that it will help people who love their children to like them a bit too,’ explained Cathy Rentzenbrink in the Times. She continued: ‘This is a kind and forgiving book that advocates kind and forgiving behaviour, to ourselves and our partners.’ But in the Irish Times, Dr Paul D’Alton, himself a clinical psychologist, wanted to ‘like this book’ but found the ‘potential unintended consequences’ of her narrow focus and the ‘sometimes simplistic approach to complex psychological issues’ made it ‘hard to like’. Exciting Times (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288pp, £8.99) is the first novel of Naoise Dolan, who was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award in 2020. She was born in Dublin, has lived in Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore and England – and, inevitably, has been compared with Sally Rooney. Exciting Times ‘has been one of the only novels

that’s brought me any pleasure in these testing times’, wrote Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Times. ‘It’s about the romantic entanglements of three twentysomethings living in Hong Kong: girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl meets girl, boy comes back to find two girls. That it hinges on two now-forbidden concepts — travel and physical intimacy with strangers — makes for pleasurable escapism.’ It ‘is a funny novel (both haha and weird)’, said Leslie Pariseau in the LA Times, ‘resisting the pull of melodrama in favour of a sharp point of view and an intense concern with language’. And in the Evening Standard, Phoebe Luckhurst thought that the novel was an ‘assured’ debut.

opposite directions? “How much of one’s ancestral identity must one give up to live in the modern world?” Freeman asks. The question is pertinent once again, as matters of populism, nationalism and racism come to the fore. House of Glass is interspersed with Freeman’s own thoughts on matters of assimilation and social mobility. Past and present exist in a state of constant interaction, and this finely honed and engaging account draws the threads between then and now.’

House of Glass (4th Estate, 464pp, £9.99) ‘is the story of the journalist Hadley Freeman’s grandmother Sala Glahs [pictured] and her brothers Jehuda, Jakob and Sender. It is the product of 20 years of research, and it amounts, by sheer cumulation of detail, to a near-perfect study of Jewish identity – of Jewish being – in the 20th century. If there is a better book about the anguish of Jewish survival I have yet to read it,’ enthused Tanya Gold in the Telegraph, calling it a ‘masterpiece’. For Philippe Sands in the Guardian, ‘To survive and to prosper may be a matter of chance and strategy. Does one go with the flow, and what if different flows pull in

‘What a treat,’ began Alison Flood’s review of Mark Billingham’s Cry Baby (Sphere, 560pp, £8.99) in the Guardian. ‘This is a prequel to Billingham’s excellent and longrunning crime series, showing his protagonist Tom Thorne as a young detective sergeant in 1996, haunted by a horrific crime he couldn’t prevent, and desperate to find a seven-year-old boy who has just gone missing.’ ‘Throughout this bleak tale, Billingham plays with the humour inherent in hindsight,’ explained the Times. Mark Sanderson’s verdict? ‘The tense, double-edged ending shows Billingham has become one of Britain’s best crime writers.’

Obituary Alison Lurie, the author and academic, has died aged 94. She was in the ‘front rank of 20th-century American writers, though her exacting and satirical view of human nature was, if anything, more admired in Britain than in America’, according to the Telegraph obituarist. ‘Her restrained prose, talent for pricking pomposity and alertness for social nuance placed her in the tradition of English ironists from Jane Austen to Edith Wharton and Anthony Powell, whom she acknowledged as an inspiration and influence. But while earlier novelists had written in periods of relative social stability, Alison Lurie wrote about American society from the 1960s, a period of rapid social change and shifting moral values.’ Lurie was born in Chicago in 1926, moved to New York when she was four, 30 The Oldie Review of Books Spring 2021

Alison Lurie 3rd September 1926– 3rd December 2020 later studying history and literature at Radcliffe College in Cambridge Massachusetts. In 1948, she married Jonathan Bishop, an academic; after spells at Harvard, Amherst and UCLA, they eventually settled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; they had three sons. Her first novel, Love and Friendship, was published in 1962 and named after the story by Austen. As Sarah A Smith in the Guardian confirmed, ‘Its picture of chauvinistic faculty members and the claustrophobia of small-town academic life was an early indication of Lurie’s tendency to use facets of her own experience in her fiction.’ However, ‘she

always denied that her books were autobiographical,’ said the Telegraph, ‘though she clearly drew on her own experiences of people, places and, as it turned out, of unhappiness in marriage.’ ‘Perhaps her best-known book, which won the 1985 Pulitzer prize for fiction, was Foreign Affairs (1984),’ said the Times. ‘It concerned a sabbatical trip to London of two American academics… who each become entangled in a torrid romance.’ Lurie was ‘praised by critics for her crystalline prose, her dry, delicious wit, and her microscopic powers of observation’, confirmed Margalit Fox in the New York Times. Lurie divorced Bishop in 1984, and married the novelist and academic Edward Hower, who survives her, along with two sons.